Sleep Deprivation, or "When Coffee Fails To Ignite The Afterburner Of The Mind"

So hi! You ever find yourself pouring an afternoon cup of coffee and thinking "I wonder if they made this decaf?" thinking that the power of suggestion might be enough to haul your tired carcass over the 6:00 PM threshold? Well this time, they didn't. I feel like a dead frog with 100,000 volts rocketing up one arm, through my head, and out the other arm. Alternately I feel like my head is filled with helium, and if I don't periodically rock it back and forth it's going to float up off of my shoulders.

You may be asking "what is she high on?" the answer: sleep deprivation. I'm somewhere between the "a little groggy" and "stark raving mad" side effects of one night after another (do this 16 times) of not enough sleep. Oh, interspersed with intense physical labor. (Quick shout out to all the wonderful, generous, people who helped us paint and then move. Seriously, we could not have done it without you.)

Sleep debt. To add to my school debt and now my house debt and blossoming credit card debt. Yippee.

Hey - on the bright side, our recently vacated apartment is now clean, and most of the accumulated possessions of two approximately 30-somethings have been transferred out of the garage and into an over-stuffed condo.

Along with an 11-pound, fluffy orange, slightly shell shocked kitty. Luna came "home" for the first time last night. And promptly disappeared beneath the couch (once she found her way through the boxes to get there).

This morning, instead of waking up to the sharp and precisely placed kitty feet on my bladder, I had to actually turn off the alarm. And then go look for kitty, who also missed her "rolling around looking cute for the good-morning-scratch" appointment. She was still under the couch, glowering. JB thinks she was under the couch glowering all night.

I didn't think I'd miss the kitty-pressure-on-all-sensitive-areas-of-the-body method of waking up, but I'm looking forward to her getting back to her good-natured if a-little-too-early morning antics.

Also, I think the coffee is wearing off. I'll write more later about the tingling nerve in my back. I'm trying to decide what to name it. It should probably have a name since it seems bound and determined to hang out with me all the time. Ta.

Adventures In Home Ownership Part 1: Welcome To The Jungle

This week has been a bit of a whirlwind. We have finally got keys, and the former owners have moved out. So JB and I went over there on Tuesday night to start the prep for painting / new carpet. After finding a note from the power company (in the dark), hunting through the garage for our main breaker and turning it on, we could see - for the first time - our condo not crowded with other people's stuff.

Instead, it was layered with other people's dirt. Granted, they had moved out in the middle of Los Angeles' most massive rainstorm in - well, they said "record breaking" so I'm going to assume it hasn't rained like that in LA recorded history. Regardless, it was a little alarming to walk in and be overwhelmed with the sight of the previously decent-even-if-we-wanted-to-replace-it-because-they-had-dogs carpet looking like it had been used as a wrestling mat for a couple of muddy bears.

Not to be daunted by a little debris, James and I dropped our stuff down in the middle of the carpet and wandered around literally for 45 minutes trying to decide where to begin. When we had decided, I went to pick up my bag and discovered that when I had dropped it in the middle of the carpet, I had dropped it smack dab in the middle of an Ant Gold Rush. Someone had dropped some kind of food item on the middle of our carpet and the Ants (probably driven in by our record breaking rain) had discovered it. Then told all their Ant friends. Who, in turn, had been camouflaged by the previously-mentioned debris-cloaked carpet. I will admit I had a moment of "BUGS! BUGS!" panic, but JB pointed out both the food and the rain and we have decided to believe this is just one of those fluke things, and we will not be plagued with Ants for our entire stay in The Condo.

Still unwilling to let our spirits flag, we began washing the walls with a TSP alternative you don't have to rinse. Wow. I don't generally think about how dirty walls can get. I mean, they looked okay. Suffice it to say, when we had finished scrubbing the walls 3 hours later (minus 15 minutes of panic after I got TSP in my eye and had to hold it under running water as per the instructions on the bottle) we were exhausted, the walls looked cleaner, and the TSP water was almost black.

We called it quits for the night and went home, broke out the Riesling we'd been saving for the getting-into-the-condo occasion, and fell asleep almost immediately. At which point my carpal-tunnel-wrist, which was if not aggravated then irritated by the TSPing, decided to wake me up 3 times over the course of the night.

So really it was all in all a very exciting first 24 hours of home ownership. Stay tuned for Adventures In Home Ownership Part 2: What do you mean you never noticed that before?