Well, we're a week from closing. Again. I feel better today, not because anything of significance has happened, but because I'm too tired to be angry. I talked to my mom on the phone for about forty-five minutes yesterday evening, and after getting worked up to the point where I was using words I don't think I've ever used in front of my mother before (much less when speaking to her) she made what were actually some good suggestions.

She suggested that, if we don't move next weekend like we're supposed to, then we get all of our out-of-town friends together and bring them over to my parents' house. They've got two spare beds and a lot more space than Matt and I have in our apartment, and she thought that if we couldn't move when we were supposed to, then we wouldn't want to be around all of our half-packed stuff anyway. She suggested that we just all come over and have ourselves a party and try to forget about the house. Then she suggested that Matt and I needed to take a break and go for a walk or something - didn't we live near a Ben and Jerry's?

So after filling all of the boxes my dad had donated to the cause, we did just that - we walked to the Ben and Jerry's and had ice cream cones. (Matt had a double scoop of Phish Food, and I had Chubby Hubby on top of White Russian, both in waffle cones.) And then we walked home. Slowly. Trying not to think about the possibility that we could be living with these packed bags and boxes for another whole month.

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There was another fantastic thunderstorm last night, with lightning going off so often that I could've used it as a reading lamp. This time the cat was already inside, so Matt stayed in bed and snuggled with me. This time it wasn't the thunder that scared me (there was only one especially startling thunderclap) but the sound of the wind in the trees behind our apartment. My mutant worrybrain was convinced that those trees were going to topple over and fall right through our window and kill me. And when I'd convinced myself that the space between the trees and the apartment building was probably wide enough to prevent that, it decided that the louder whistles were the precursors to tornados. (We do get occasional twisters here in the East. They don't last very long because there are too many windbreaks, but for the brief time that they form, they can do an astonishing amount of damage. I've never seen a tornado with my own eyes, but I've seen trees twisted like dishrags and the aluminum room from an industrial shed crumpled like tinfoil.) With every whistling gust, I had to restrain myself from sitting up to peek out the window.

Luckily, the really violent part of the storm only lasted about twenty minutes or so, and then I was able to go back to sleep.

Then I had this dream that I looked out the window, and the storm had dropped so much water so quickly that the water had risen up to within an inch or so of the bottom of our window. I'm looking out the window at this lake we're suddenly in, and I realized that Matt had just gone to take a shower, and I knew that somehow, that was contributing to the water outside, and I was yelling for him to turn the shower off and praying that there wouldn't be another storm, but the horizon was looking kindof dark...

No, that's all right, I got the message. No need to send me interpretations.