Yesterday, I got home around 4:15. I checked the mailbox, but the mail hadn't come yet. I took my briefcase and purse inside, then went back out to water the plants on the porch. I thought about sitting out on the porch for a while, because the weather was astonishingly beautiful, but our porch faces directly west, and I don't like having the sun in my face. So I went back inside and plopped down on the couch with my book.
As Matt will tell you, when I get really deeply into a book, it takes a lot to get my attention. But I'm not really getting deeply into this book. It bounces around in time too much, and takes too much brainpower to comprehend what's going on. So every time the chapter changes (and they're short chapters), I get rudely booted out of whatever mental zone I'd been in. So I heard it when the garbage truck came around.
I didn't know for certain that it was the garbage truck - there's still a lot of construction on our street, so big trucks drive past pretty frequently, and I've learned to ignore them. I didn't really think much of it. And I glanced up when I saw a movement out of the corner of my eye that turned out to be Matt pulling into our driveway.
Matt always checks the mail when he gets home, so I went back to the book, hoping to finish the paragraph I was on before he came in. I finished the paragraph. Then I finished the rest of the chapter - another page or so. I put my bookmark in the book and looked up to see Matt coming up the steps of the porch. He came through the door and waved the mail at me.
"Did you see our new decoration?" He sounded mad. I hadn't seen anything unusual when I checked the mail myself, but he frequently notices things the kids do that I just ignore - I assumed they'd tied some string around the post or something like that.
"No, everything looked fine when I got home."
He glowered at me. "Come and see!" He led me outside. Before I even got off the porch, I saw what he was talking about. The mailbox was tilted at an odd angle, and the piece of wood that braces it was on the ground, along with the mailbox flag and door. "The garbage truck ran into it," Matt said. "Mike saw it." Mike's our next-door neighbor. I can see him now, tooling around in his garage. I walk out to the mailbox and see that the brass house numbers we'd tacked to the post are bent and broken. "He says the guy came up to the door."
I shake my head. "No one rang the doorbell." I'm quite confidant that I would have heard the doorbell, even in one of my deepest reading fugues.
Matt frowns at me. "Mike says," he repeats, "that the guy came to the door."
I start to get a little irritable about this. I know I've offended Matt by being too deep into books to pay close attention to him on more than one occasion, but I wouldn't miss the doorbell or ignore a knock on the door when I was sitting right there in the living room. (For that matter, I'm fairly certain I'd have noticed someone walking up the porch steps.) Rather than fight with him about it - because he's not always rational when he's upset about something - I let it drop, and when he goes into the kitchen to call the county and ask them how to be reimbursed for the cost of a new mailbox, I go back to reading my book.
So that's our story - the garbage truck ran into our mailbox and totaled it. We're telling the county that the guy knocked and "apparently no one was home" because it's easier than telling them that he only came halfway up the driveway until our neighbor couldn't see him anymore and then turned around and went back to his truck. I sure hope the county doesn't waffle or dither or anything about replacing our mailbox and post, because otherwise Matt's going to be grumpy for weeks.
I had a dream last night that I didn't know at first was a dream. I was living in an apartment building again, and I was in the hall talking to a neighbor, and turned around and saw Björn, my high school boyfriend. I haven't seen him since a day or so after we broke up, and I haven't actually thought about him in months, but I was surprised and happy to see him.
We laughed and hugged each other and then he said, "Have you met my wife?" and I turned and saw Mila, my best friend from high school, with whom I'm still in sporadic contact. That was an even bigger surprise, but as I hugged her in greeting, I remembered that she'd mentioned it to me about a year ago and I'd forgotten.
We went into their apartment, which was right next door to ours, and Matt was already there, with some of the other neighbors. It turned out that we were going to do some rituals for some reason. There was a big fat spiral-bound notebook, the kind Matt uses for gaming, with notes about who was going to perform which ritual. Mine involved splitting a piece of fruit in half and then counting the seeds that spilled out - but it turned out that the fruit was a pomegranate, and we all started arguing about whether I should count the seeds that still had meat on them, or the seeds that had been de-juiced, so to speak.
Elizabeth Reid argued for the de-juiced seeds, with some logic that was pretty clear in the dream but which has faded now, and some other people I didn't know argued for the seeds with juice, and I considered the meaning of the ritual (which has also already faded) and decided on the regular seeds.
I also remember being vaguely worried that Björn wouldn't really want to do the ritual he'd been assigned for some reason, but Matt told me he didn't think it would be a problem, and he was right.
I don't understands 'em; I just dreams 'em.
Word of the Day: occlusion - an obstruction or blockage; the act of obstructing or closing off
Nancy McDonald - who had been the realtor in charge of selling us our house until she quit that job to go work directly for the builder - called us the other day. Apparently, the person who used to be in charge of post-closing repairs had quit, and she was helping the new person contact everyone and make appointments so he could fix things. She wanted to know what had yet to be done in our house, and to help set up an appointment between us and the new guy on Friday.
Most of the big problems have been taken care of, because we hollered until they were done. Most of what's left should be fairly trivial - about two-thirds of our windows need screens, and the light in the computer room doens't have a bowl covering the bulbs. All they have to do is buy the necessary pieces and put them in. An hour, tops, if the lines at the hardware store are long.
But there are two remaining items that could turn out to be big. The first is that the stove vent hood leaks when the rain blows from the north. Water seeps in around the corners and runs down behind the stove and makes the paint bubble and break. Ideally, they'll reseal the vent, then pull the stove out from the wall and fix the water damage. I suspect what they'll do is just reseal the vent.
The other is that, when we moved in, the house wouldn't pass inspection because there was a window too close to the back door, and the glass in the window wasn't safety-glass. Theoretically, if the door slammed open, the window could break into tiny shards that could be a safety hazard. Technically, because of the depth of the window-sill, no part of the door could actually touch the glass of the window. But at the time, we just wanted to move in, and so we let them cover the window with a piece of plexi-glass screwed and glued into place. It was supposed to be just a temporary measure until they'd ordered a safety-glass window and installed it.
In fact, they'd delivered a safety-glass window to us a month or so after we moved in. But it sat in our garage for months, and when the contractor finally came around to install it, he refused, saying that it was the wrong kind of window. So we still have this unsightly and irritating occlusion over our window, and we want it fixed!
I have simple desires, really I do, but one of those desires is - on beautiful spring days like today - to be able to open all the windows in the house and feel a breath of fresh air breeze through the corners.
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