Some days I just want to give up my entire life, throw a few books and a change of socks into a backpack, change my name, and start a whole new life somewhere. I’d never do it because I have people and cats who I love and would never run out on, but some days it’s tempting.

I expect that, though. I figure that’s probably how life works for everyone — you’re just bound to have some days when you get sick of your own damn life.

What does not usually happen, and what is killing me this week, is a whole string of those days right in a row. Usually they’re broken up with the occasionally really great day, or even just some ho-hum days. I don’t usually just have day after day where at the end of the day I think “at least tomorrow will have to be better,” and then tomorrow is worse.

My job is killing me slowly in a half-dozen different ways. My beloved childhood cat is now seven weeks into the two months the vet gave him to live, and while he is apparently doing extremely well, there’s still a clock ticking in the back of my mind and my heart still breaks a little more every time I think about it. We have to get homeowner’s insurance before we close on the house, but so far no one wants to insure us because our house price is too low — like, why did no one tell me this could be a problem? My house is too cheap to insure? The hell? I have a list of names to call, but the first guy is not calling me back and I haven’t had time to continue on down the list because my cat is dying and my other cat won’t eat anything but baby food and I fear she will get malnourished, and my job is crushing my soul.

If I knew how to get a fake identity, I would dye my hair pink, change my name to Tatiana, and move to Paris right now to spend the rest of my life baking baguettes and refining my knowledge of French curse words.

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I keep wanting to come here and say “I’m almost done obsessing about the house! Really! We close in two weeks and then it’ll be done!” Only it won’t be done at all, because there’s that whole kitchen-remodeling project and the studio-building project and I have a garden to plan and furniture to buy and my god it’s just never going to end.

However, I think maybe we’re at the fun part right now. Yesterday I took off work early and we went to the kitchen supply store with Contractor Ed and picked out cabinets, and made a start at picking out countertops. There were some touch-and-go moments about maple vs. cherry cabinets, but mostly it was just exciting and fun. (Well, except for the part with the estimate. But that could have been worse. And they are going to be so pretty!) I think if I were Contractor Ed, I would probably hate me because of all the dithering over stain color and woodgrain and whatnot, but fortunately if Ed is full of seething hate he is very good at hiding it. And I suppose no matter how dithery I am, I can always comfort myself with the knowledge that surely he’s seen even worse.

So, this is my life right now. Cabinets and countertops (but not appliances yet, which is good because Len is going to have to work hard to restrain me from buying shiny stainless appliances with every bell and whistle I can find), and homeowner’s insurance and painting estimates and freaking out because in two weeks I am going to own a house. Which is just crazy. We are doing a lot of turning to each other at random moments and announcing “Holy shit, we are buying a house. What the hell is wrong with us?” However, I am told this is fairly normal.

But just to prove my life is not all about houses right now, a few other things I am obsessing over lately:

• Tracking the progress of Snakes on a Plane, via Snakes on a Blog, and trying to figure out who on earth I am going to talk into going to see this with me, since it is clearly going to be the best bad movie since my all-time favorite Colossus: the Forbin Project.
• Checking Schroedinger’s ears obsessively for new pemphigus breakouts, because I just cannot believe that after all those months of agony trying to get him diagnosed and treated, all it took was finding the right medication and now he is 100% healthy. But that does indeed seem to be the case
• Telling everyone in Pittsburgh about the Charlie Godart TV Show, my new favorite crappy local cable access show. It is just unbelievably funny and awful, in a way that I think probably only people who’ve lived in Pittsburgh too long can understand. Even the commercials are brilliantly awful. It’s the best Pittsburgh TV since the Yinzer Dating Show went off the air.
• Eating all the Thin Mints in the world. Thank god for Girl Scout cookie season.
• Selling off old books and comic books, except that I keep getting distracted into re-reading things instead of listing them on Amazon. Which is okay sometimes because it’s been years since I re-read the complete run of Preacher, and I am loving it.
• Making fun of Scientology at every possible moment, because Xenu jokes just never get old.
• Hating just about everything our damn government does. Hate, hate, hate.
• Trying to figure out why someone decided to make a made-for-TV sequel to The Cutting Edge. Why, in the name of all that is holy, would anyone think this could possibly be a good idea?
• Making up fake metal songs about whatever is going on around me.  My current favorite was the one we made up on the way to Ikea, which involved lots of screaming “LINGONBERRIES!” at the top of our lungs.

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As I mentioned last night, I am trying desperately to whittle down my book stash. I know it will only expand again, but I would really like to at least temporarily reduce my book collection. I have books that were unread last time I moved, and I am determined to either read them before I move again, or decide once and for all that I will never read them. I also have books that I keep because I loved them years ago and want to reread them someday, but in some cases they are worn to bits and falling apart, and it seems to make more sense to get rid of them and buy new copies someday when I want to read them again.

So I am slowly going through my shelves, packing some things for the move, selling some things on Amazon, putting others aside to donate somewhere since I can’t get more than a few dollars for them on Amazon. Doing a lot of re-reading, or at least re-skimming, to decide which books are as good as I remember and worth keeping, and which I will really never want to read again. Very very slowly, the number of books is dwindling.

I’ve discovered something surprising, though - apparently I was a teenage hoodlum. I have many books that I apparently stole from (or maybe borrowed legimitately but never returned to) my elementary school and high school libraries. I have no recollection of being a library-book-stealer, but it seems I must have been. I’ve found a good dozen such books so far and there are shelves and shelves yet to go through. I half-pondered boxing them up and shipping them back to the schools, but so far I have managed to avoid having them know my address, and it’s probably best to stay that way if I wish to avoid reunion invitations. (Besides, the high school’s copy of A Clockwork Orange is in really rough shape. I’m not sure if I read it to death or if it was nearly a goner at the time I walked off with it, but it’s clearly time to let it go to whatever afterlife books have when their time on earth is up.)

Other than poor doomed Orange, I am sticking all the decades-overdue library books on my donation shelf and passing them along to the Salvation Army or whoever I can talk into coming to take them off my hands. Hopefully that will fix up my bad book-stealing karma.

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So, here’s the wacky thing about life. Our house closing was pushed back a week because the appraiser suddenly decided that one of the repairs was a bigger deal than we had originally been told, and so all this extra documentation was required, and we just couldn’t get it all taken care of before Thursday. So we pushed it back a week to allow some breathing room, and now the repair’s done and there’s plenty of time to get it documented before next Thursday, and all is well and good. But even though I know it’s just a week and in the grand scheme of things it’s no big deal, I was so disappointed I nearly cried. I had so been looking forward to having our house be ours yesterday, so I could go over there this weekend and measure things and start planning a garden and just generally enjoying the ours-ness of it all. I’m still pretty disappointed.

On the other hand, if I had been at the new house tonight, I would not have been at our current place for the fifteen minutes tonight when the rain let up, the sky turned a beautiful dusky purple, and this happened:

So, sometimes the things I’m disappointed about turn out to have a bit of a silver lining after all. I wish I could remember that before I make an idiot out of myself moping around the house all evening.

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