What is up, yo

David went home on Saturday. Sean and I had to get up at the ungodly hour of 8 am and drive him back to Hartsfield-Jackson, which actually wasn't too big a deal. Drop-offs and pick-ups at the airport are pretty easy. You follow the signs, and there's convenient parking and a quick "no waiting" area where you can do your business and drive off. We chose the latter and were back on the road in minutes (seconds?). The main issue with the drive was...the drive. I must confess that a good deal of nappage occurred. (Hopefully Sean didn't fall asleep while he was driving.)

The rest of the weekend has been nice and fairly relaxing. I won't get into what Sean and I did twice on Saturday, much to our combined delight, except to say that there is physical evidence, and his mother noticed.

:>

I either have a cold, or I am allergic to something. Sean says it's ragweed season here in beautiful Augusta, Georgia, and that may very well be what it is. All I know is that I'm stopped up, I have on-again/off-again headaches, I blow my nose every hour at least, and there's intermittent coughing. It's not abysmally phlegmatic, fortunately, but that may change.

This week I am putting in full time hours to do freelance/contract/what-have-you work for my former boss, Robert. I also threw together an email design for him last week. Freelance jobs are nice because you can pretty much call all the shots yourself. This project is basically data entry, and I'm actually going in to the office to do it, so it'll be a little different, but not in a bad way. Or so I imagine.

I also have a phone interview this afternoon at 4 pm with a large company that has a base in Evans. The work involves writing, photography, and creating technical drawings. The mean salary for a person of my experience doing this work in Augusta, according to salary.com, is the same as Sean's salary. Yee! I don't think the job would be boring, at least not for awhile, and I definitely think it's challenging enough to keep me busy. The things I would have to watch out for are: 1) being productive; 2) proving that I'm being productive. I didn't spend enough time doing #2 in my last job. (Wow, that sounds like a constipation problem. Either that or it sounds like I wish I had pooped all over my last job. Hmm, I won't deny it!)

Strangely, hundreds of strangers have not swooped in and purchased everything off our Things We Lost in the Fire Amazon Wish List. Within the first week, 9 items were purchased, and since then that number has not changed. Either I shot myself in the foot by saying "Don't buy us stuff, we have no place to put it!" (which is technically true, but we can store things in the neighbor's spare rooms), or everyone who was going to help out has already done so.

Believe me, I'm not trying to be ungrateful here...we have had a lot of money and gift cards and clothes and other items given to us that we would certainly not otherwise have had, and that have helped us to live relatively normally for the past several homeless weeks. I thank everyone who has helped.

But I don't know, I guess I am just really missing all my stuff :> I have had three dreams so far about going back into the apartment and finding certain things unharmed. This morning I very unhappily remembered that my first porcelain unicorn, the only one from my collection that I decided to keep forever, is now lost. It was about an inch and a half long, pure white with light brown details and black eyes, and its horn was glued back on from where it'd broken off when I was around 5. My Uncle Steve gave it to me; he's the one who started (and fostered) my love of unicorns. He gave me plenty of other unicorn items over the years, including stickers, but that little porcelain unicorn was always my favorite.

There's another item I've been thinking wistfully about, and that's a white mixing bowl that I always used to make brownies. It came from my mother's ancient stand mixer. I swear that thing was made in the 50s. When my mom finally got her Kitchenaid, she got rid of the old mixer but kept the bowl...and when I moved out, the Kitchenaid and the old mixer bowl came with me, because I loved them and could use them (and because by that point my mother had invested in her Bosch industrial strength grinder/mixer thing and had no use for the Kitchenaid). Now the mixer and the old bowl are gone. And while I can replace the mixer, that bowl was pretty much one of a kind, given its age. (I take some solace in the fact that there was another white bowl, with red spots, that Mom promised me when I was a kid. I never did take it with me, so maybe it's still in her attic. It's not the right shape or anything, but it is filled with childhood memories, which is more the point.)

Denied these priceless treasures (there are more, of course, but I don't have the time to get into them now), my mind has been turning to things I can replace. Why can't I, for example, have my Kyo Kara Maoh DVDs back now? Or my other movies? Or my Japanese textbooks? And that's what's brought me to the fire list, and my ungrateful wondering: where are all the donations?

:>

Woo, that's all the mental midgetry I have time for this morning. Catch all y'alls later.