jaysaint Getting it all down on paper…

I’ve grabbed a few precious moments of me time. Dreadful cliche aside, I’m wallowing in my alone-ness, hiding in our bedroom. Damon is in the living room with Alden, no doubt watching something objectionable on TV. Mom and Jerry are at the Dolly Parton Dixie Stampede. Not kidding. I actually had a little snit that we didn’t have tickets to go too, until I established that Dolly won’t actually be there. It’s apparently like the Mideaval Times restaurants, but with cowboys.

Being down south has reminded me that some people live in homes that feature more square footage than your average cell in solitary. Many of them even come with grass. You own. It’s your grass. Amazing. The never-ending repairs (Don’t ask me about them unless you want to watch my face melt.) and the additional 12 pounds of human have made our apartment seem unbearable. Does anyone have a super-cool job in Atlanta that I can have? Oh, and I need it to pay me lots of money. Not too likely, I think. I’ve built myself into a career tailored mostly for New York or LA. I wasn’t fully considering my grass ownership potential.

Things are going reasonably well on the parental front. This is a three-week visit and that is a lot of togetherness. Mom has actually knocked me out of the way a few times in her eagerness to get at Alden. Which is fine, really. I’ve had very few twinges of possessive distress considering the energy she’s sending in our direction. My attachment to Alden makes me sympathetic to hers.

Seriously, I think this half hour is the first time I’ve been alone in a room for longer than I can hold my breath. I wonder if I can get Damon to slide a pizza under the door and walk away.

This gorgeous sweater is the handiwork of the talented lemon_says and is much, much appreciated.

More sweater baby combo behind the cut

Damon and I are both getting our son’s name wrong. The even more bizarre part is that both of us, independently, have started occasionally calling him by RocketBoy’s name. This morning Damon ran into a neighbor who asked to be reminded of Alden’s name and Damon needed three tries to get it right.

We are at least still getting the diapers on the correct end of the baby.

Damon’s mom got in early yesterday morning. Poor thing took the bus to New York, all the way from Kentucky. It’s about a 24 hour trip. Damon went to get her at the bus station at 4am, but we didn’t actually visit together until dinner time.

We’re still squatting in our own apartment, so we gave Eileene her own place at the temporary housing. She was thrilled, as I would have been, to not be stuck on the couch in the living room.

So she crashed out there for a few hours and Damon went to get her and bring her here later in the afternoon. I made veggie sloppy joe (as requested) and Brussels sprouts. It was all simple and pretty delicious. I was so content to be back to tinkering around in my kitchen. I did some seriously joyful carrot grating.

Unfortunately, she seemed to have picked up some chest congestion during her trip. She kept saying her throat was irritated by the perfume of the passenger behind her. But with every raspy cough or wheezy breath I got more anxious about having her all up in Alden’s business. Fortunately, she was feeling equally cautious. She did hold him for a little while, but mostly left him to us and kept her face far from his. I know, I know, hands are germier than faces. But that’s what I have to work with right now. Today she was still feeling poorly, so she didn’t come over. Damon headed over to her about half an hour ago to bring soup and have dinner together. Baby and I are staying far away from any possible contagion. We’ll re-evaluate tomorrow.

Today I signed us up for Zipcar. So now we’ll have wheels for a few trips each month. That will make life so much nicer. I can’t wait to make our first IKEA run.

And here, just for its own sake, is a picture of my son looking dorky:

We have snuck back into our apartment.

It’s been almost six weeks since we moved out due to the mold incursion. We’ve been placed in perfectly acceptable temporary housing. But it was becoming less acceptable every day. Finally the Want To Go Home urge became too big to ignore.

A few weeks ago we passed the environmental inspection. So we are no longer the proud owners of a Superfund site. But now that everything has been cleared the insurance companies have gone back to fighting over who will pay for what on the rebuild. And our apartment has been sitting untouched for two weeks tomorrow.

Yesterday we came up to our neighborhood for Halloween, and I simply let myself into our place and refused to leave. We’re still here. There’s no shower or sink in the bathroom. Everything is covered in plastic. Five rooms’ worth of stuff is crammed into three. But I slept in my own bed last night. Not only is my plan now to continue to refuse to leave until the workers actually show up, but Damon went to the temporary place this morning and got Zoe and brought her home to me.

So now we know how long I can tolerate being shut out of my home — six weeks.

More news will be coming soon. Damon’s mom is on the bus right now, she’ll be visiting us from Kentucky for one week. And yesterday I bought us Amtrak tickets for three weeks in Florida. It’s a 24-hour train trip. I got us a “roomette.” It’s pretty heavy on the “ette” factor, but I think we’ll have fun. I hope.