How you know you drank too much: you wake up with an iTunes shopping cart full of Tina Turner, Chicago, and Richard Marx. Fortunately, I was just sober enough to decide that I should not actually press the “buy now” button until I could re-evaluate my music choices in the cold light of day. Although I may buy the Tina anyway. Who doesn’t need a little Tina in their lives?

What I really need in my life is some Egg McMuffins and a Coke — prime hangover food. Ow. I’m actually feeling nearly human right now, but I woke up about four a.m. with the mother of all hangovers, and I can still feel its headachey afterglow.

So. 2006. At some point around 1 a.m. I made a few drunken New Year’s resolutions, which still seem fairly sensible:

1) Buy a house.

2) Don’t kill myself.

3) Don’t get married or have a baby.

Pretty good goals, and relatively manageable, too. Perhaps I should add “don’t drunk-dial my mother,” but that’s probably just common sense anyway.

On the bus ride to work today, I was seated next to a little boy sitting on his father’s lap. He was very upset because apparently he usually rides the bus in the morning with his Mommy, and his Mommy knows a very good story about a dinosaur who gets on the bus. The father seemed rather lost — he clearly did not realize that he was expected to tell a dinosaur story, and did not have one prepared. He spent several minutes trying to talk the little boy out of the story. Wasn’t there some other story he would rather hear? Would he like to play with a toy instead? Look out the window, a puppy!

Nothing doing. This kid clearly had a morning dinosaur-story ritual and was not to be kept from it, come hell or high water.

Finally the father gave in and started the story, rather hesitantly. Once upon a time there was a dinosaur… “A green dinosaur!” Yes, a green dinosaur. “With blue spots!”

It was at that moment that you could actually see the father give up. There was no way he was getting out of telling this story exactly the way it was meant to be told, even if he had to stop and be corrected every few words.

And so the rest of my commute went, as the boy slowly dragged his dinosaur story out of his father.

Once there was a green dinosaur, with blue spots, who wanted to go to school. He tried to get on the first bus that came to the bus stop, but they wouldn’t let him on — there’s no room for you on this bus!, said the driver. So when the second bus came, the dinosaur scrunched down low (and here the little boy scrunched down in his father’s lap) and hid behind a man who was getting on the bus. He snuck on, but once he was on, there was nowhere to put his tail! Dinosaurs have very long tails, you know, especially the ones with blue spots.

His tail went all the way down the middle aisle of the bus and pushed people to the side, so they had to hang on to the hand loops tight or else they would step on his big, blue-spotted tail. But he was on the bus, so the driver couldn’t kick him off. He paid his two dollars, and started on his way to school…

…and at that point, we hit my bus stop and I had to get off. I was sorely tempted to stay on for a few more stops and be late for work, just to hear how the dinosaur story ended. I’m dying to know — did he ever get to school? Did he have more adventures on the bus? Did he meet a nice girl dinosaur, or a nice boy dinosaur for that matter?

I’m tempted to try taking that bus to work tomorrow, even though it’s later than the one I usually take, just to see if I can run into that little boy again and find out how the tale of the blue-spotted green dinosaur ends.

I don’t think I have the patience required to buy a house. Yesterday afternoon we went back to the house we like best with our contractor, so we could get some estimates on the cost and time of the repairs and remodels that would be required to make it perfect. (Or at least to get rid of the stove that was possibly built by cavemen.) Now we are waiting for his email with the numbers so we can figure out whether this is really a place that could work for us.

We just parted ways at 4 pm yesterday, and I didn’t really expect him to go home and spend his Friday night crunching numbers for us, but still, I am dying with the wait here. I want numbers! I want them now! I am driving myself crazy being anxious. If the numbers are ridiculously out of our price range then I want to know that as soon as possible so I can mourn my adorable little house and then move on, and if they’re not, I want to know so I can start picking out curtains. Until then, I am just jittering around the house driving myself crazy and probably driving Len crazy too although he is too nice to tell me to stop jittering.

Possibly he doesn’t realize that I am being an over-anxious freak, because he measured every square inch of the potential studio space yesterday and is now busy trying to construct a 3D model in some sort of cheap-AutoCAD-ripoff software to figure out whether it will really be the perfect studio space it seems to be.

The software problem doesn’t seem to be going well, so I feel that we should go buy thousands of Legos and then build a studio model to scale entirely from Legos.

I think it’s possible that this whole process is driving me stark raving mad.

Which is really sad, because if I am like this now, what will I be like when we actually make an offer on a house and I am waiting to hear back? I may need to take up heavy drinking to distract myself. Or possibly cupcake baking — ever since Melissa launched Cupcake Planet I have been craving cupcakes, and I don’t know where to get good cupcakes in Pittsburgh, so I might have to make some myself.

So, yeah. Here I am. Saturday morning, 8 a.m., wide awake. Can’t sleep. Have used all my turns for the day on Kingdom of Loathing. Am going slowly insane. Send help! Or at least cupcakes.

Grr. There was a journal entry, and then I crashed my browser, and now I can’t remember what it was about.

I do remember the part where I babbled about how the other day I accidentally used a glittery bath thing that I didn’t realize was going to be glittery, and now it is two days later and I am still finding glitter on the backs of my hands and in my hair. But I’m pretty sure there were other things too. Alas, I cannot for the life of me remember what they were.

So I guess that’s the story of my life right now: glitter, mulling over house stuff, not much else.

There is one other thing, a terribly melodramatic and Behind-The-Music-style band breakup going on in my basement this week. But entertaining though I am finding it, I have yet to decide to what extent it’s reasonable to write about Len’s recording stuff in my own journal, so I should probably leave it at that, except to say that I keep expecting someone to develop a coke habit or get into a plane crash or something. What I really think is that Len should start his own recording studio weblog, or write a book or something, because it turns out that having a recording studio in the basement provides neverending sources of entertainment.

Lately I am having the worst urge to go to Amsterdam. I blame an internet acquaintance who just recently got back from a trip there, which is making me remember fondly the whirlwind weekend trip Len and I took a few years ago. It was a random spur-of-the-moment “Hey, there’s a good e-saver! Let’s go to Amsterdam this weekend!” thing, and it so happens that this is the time of year when the Amsterdam e-savers crop up again. It also so happens that I really cannot afford either the vacation time or the hotel costs of a trip to Europe right now, with a (hopefully) impending house purchase and all, so I absolutely cannot give in to this whim.

But I am thinking about that trip quite a bit lately, and it was so lovely. I have very fond memories of just wandering the streets for hours, all those gorgeous little winding side-streets lined with canals and tiny cars and beautiful old houses and excellent little restaurants tucked away in random corners of the city. There was a lovely big open square with street performers, where we sat and had coffee and listened to a fellow with a guitar wandering around serenading passersby with David Bowie songs, and it was funny and perfect. (Plus, if I am remembering my geography correctly, there was a bookstore devoted largely to film books right around the corner, where I bought so many books I could barely fit them all in my suitcase on the trip home and the whole thing weighed a ton.) And speaking of books, I know Len would like to go back to the squatter-run anarchist-bookstore-slash-internet-cafe, where the internet access is free but they only run Linux, and upstairs you can hang out and browse the books while listening to the proprietor trying to explain gently to wayward tourists that every other bookstore in the city probably has the newest John Grisham novel, but they only carry revolutionary literature.

Or maybe I just want to go back because there was really good hazelnut ice cream (which has forever changed the way I pronounce “hazelnut” — I am now only capable of pronouncing it the way the Dutch ice cream guy did) and because it may be the only place in the world where there is a special houseboat devoted to caring for and adopting out stray cats. A city where the stray cats get their own houseboat is the kind of city I can get behind.

Pittsburgh, on the other hand, has no cat boat and was just made the list of the top 20 American cities that are most mean to homeless people. Sometimes I suspect I have chosen my adopted hometown impropertly.

There is no earthly way that a trip to Amsterdam would work right now. But one of these days I am going to get back there if it kills me, and hopefully for more than a weekend. It’s such a lovely city and I feel as if we only just barely scratched the surface. (Plus, I am curious to know whether all the prostitutes have glow-in-the-dark bikinis or whether that was just the one whose window faced right opposite our hotel room window.)

I really need for cats I love to stop getting sick. We’re still struggling to get Schroediger’s autoimmune problem under control — we thought we had it down, but then when it came time to step down his medicine, it came back, and re-upping the dosage hasn’t cleared it up yet. It’s ongoing and frustrating and expensive and sad.

And now my beloved cantankerous gorgeous childhood cat has a tumor on his leg. My mother is describing it as a “gigantic” tumor, but I’m choosing to believe that she’s exaggerating, because I can’t handle the thought of him being really sick. He goes to the vet tomorrow, and I am very sad and worried waiting to find out the verdict. I’m now extra glad that my mother and I had a hypothetical “what do we do if Sunny gets really sick” conversation six weeks or so ago, when we weren’t right in the thick of a health problem. I know we came to the right decision then - he’s sixteen years old and has had a long, good life as undisputed ruler of the household, and putting him through painful medical procedures at this point would be absolutely the wrong thing to do. But it’s a little harder to say that right now than it was a few weeks ago when it was purely hypothetical.

He’s pretty rickety these days, so every time I see him I know it might be the last. When I left in December I gave him extra kisses and head-scratches and told him he was the world’s best cat. He mostly ignored me, as he usually does since he never really got over my leaving for college, but he gave me a few licks on the nose and a rusty little purr. I hope it wasn’t goodbye. I wasn’t exaggerating; there are a lot of wonderful pets in the world and four of them live with me and are greatly loved, but Sunny was my very first kitten and my constant companion while I was growing up. There’ll never be another cat I love the way I love him. I hope he’s going to be okay.

I tend to take far too many pictures of my cats, whenever I see them doing something cute which is just about always, and then I feel dumb because they are cats, and therefore don’t change much from day to day, so it feels kind of dumb to have dozens of pictures of each of them. But right now I would pretty much kill for a kittenhood picture of my childhood cat Sunny, and suddenly I don’t feel so badly about all the pictures I take of my cats.

Mom took Sunny to the vet today. He has systemic lymphoma, and two months to live. Maybe three, if steroid injections can slow the progress a little bit. I thought I was ready for this, but I have been crying on and off for three hours now thinking about the tiny orange kitten we brought home from the animal shelter when I was eleven years old, a few ounces of fluff and stripes and bad temper. Somehow, strange as it sounds for a cat, his fur smells like cinnamon. I’ve never known another cat who smelled like spices. Unless I make a special trip to Jersey in the next few weeks, I will probably never get to pet his orange cinnamon-smelling fur again, and my heart is breaking knowing that.

I just want to see a picture of him when he was a kitten, and I can’t find any. I’ve asked my mother to send me some, but she is too sad to go through the photo albums right now, so I don’t know when that will happen.

From now on I am going to go right ahead and take pictures of my cats whenever the mood strikes, and stop feeling dumb about it, because I know someday I am going to want every last one of those pictures.

(Edited a day later to add that my sister was kind enough to send me the only kitten photo she has of Sunny, and his gigantic kitten ears.)

This day feels like it will never end, and yet somehow it also feels as if I have not gotten anything done. It’s a very frustrating pair of feelings to have at 8:37 on a Wednesday night.

This afternoon we had an appointment with our agent to put together the paperwork to make an offer on a house we’d like to buy, if we can talk the price down a bit. Neither of us knew how long it would take, and we were prepared for it to take a while, but it wound up taking even longer than that. I feel as if we spent half the day there, although it wasn’t quite that bad. There was a ton of paperwork, and a lot of things that we weren’t aware of to discuss in advance, and it was all really quite overwhelming. But we wound up with a tidy stack of signed papers and now it’s out of our hands, at least until there’s a counteroff.

Then half the evening was spent taking poor Schroedinger to the vet. He has to have his blood monitored regularly while he’s taking chemo drugs, plus he’s having an outbreak of skin trouble and I wanted to consult the vet. He is just about the sweetest-tempered cat in the world, but even his patience for constant vet trips apparently has its limit, as he was quite fussy and squeaky and tense the whole time. Poor little guy — I wish there were some way to explain to him what this is all about. My vet says we’ve pretty much exhausted her knowledge of treatments for this disease, and the knowledge of the vets she’s been consulting with, so she’s referring us to a local veterinary dermatology specialist. I gather there’s a wait list since there’s only one in the area, so who knows when we’ll get to see him, and in the meanwhile poor Schro is just going to have to be miserable with meds that only partially work. I’m pretty frustrated with the whole thing, and so is my vet. And so, I suspect, is he.

So those two things took up practically the whole day, and now it is almost bedtime and I am pretty cranky about it. On the plus side, there is a fancy chocolate store across the street from the realtor’s office, so I popped in there to stock up on Vosges, Scharffen Berger, and Aero bars. I am trying to work on having fewer sweets in my life, with the trade-off being that I’m allowing myself to have better quality chocolate when I do have it. So I am munching on some Scharffen Berger extra-dark chocolate, and soon I will watch Lost, and all in all that’s not such a bad way to end an evening.

I would like to be writing. I really would. But when I write this list, I think it will become clear why I am not.

Things I Have To Do In The Next Two Weeks:

- Help coordinate house, radon, termite, appraisal, and god only knows how many other inspections for the new house, since we are under contract as of today.

- Deal with whatever fallout comes from said inspections in terms of negotiating fixes or deciding whether to walk away

- Submit formal application for a mortgage

- Take Schroedinger to a veterinary dermatology specialist; also talk to my vet about what to do in the meanwhile, since his bloodwork came back today indicating that he is having a bad response to his medication and the specialist can’t see him for two weeks.

- Deal with the impending death of my much-adored childhood cat, who is progressing more rapidly than we thought.

- Study for a final exam for the first time in half a decade.

- Take said final exam

- Finish my first freelance copy-editing job.

- Figure out how invoicing works for said job and attempt to get paid.

- Work my ass off to make up for the several dumb mistakes I have made at work lately in my stress, sadness, excitedness, and anxiety over all the above things.

In other words, I am terrified, thrilled, heartbroken, anxious, and stressed out, about many different things. I have more things to do than hours in the day to do them. I want to be writing all of this down precisely because I want to remember how it all felt, but I barely have time to breathe right now, much less write.

Maybe once I get one or two of those things off the list, the rest will seem manageable. If not — I’ll be back in two weeks. Hopefully with tales of successful house inspections, healthy cats, and job successes.