Sweet Jesus why didn't anyone tell me Gatorade is addictive? All these years I thought it tasted like the swill it was when it first came out. But now? I tried some during the move, and I've turned into Pepe Le Pew with a plastic bottle. Sweet, sweet Gatorade, you are my love - where have you been hiding all these years? Come with me - we will make beautiful music together. Ohhhh, Gatorade mine...

The moving van arrives in 4 hours. You'd think at least that little factoid would prompt me to finish packing, right?

Nah.

I'm not sure what's making me giggle more. That judging by the number of barnyard porn referrrals in my site logs its safe to say that Google has indexed my recent 'spam' entry. Or that someone really sat in front of their computer - at 9:36 AM no less - and searched Google for "Girls and animals getting freaky."

Note to that Google surfer - you really ought to hold off on the porn until after coffee. At least.

It's crazy. It's madness. It travels at speeds that man simply cannot understand.

It's a technical update!

First - domain switched servers last week. I think everything is in working order. But I reserve the right for everything to break down in a horrible jumble of madness, chaos, and dogs and cats living together. In which case... well... I'll ask Andy to fix it.

Second! I'm moving out of the little house with the big yard this weekend, and one of the consequences of this move is the shelving of my Road Runner account. So if by some chance you were using an email address @austin.rr.com to contact me, knock it off and pester me here at digression.com instead. Leave a message at the sound of the beep and I'll set up a hotmail (the horrors!) account to return your call.

And without further public service announcements, I'm off to practice procrastinating while pretending to be packing...

Among the spam in my mailbox this morning was a nifty little piece of porn spam giving me "FREE ACCESS - to Girls and Animals getting Freaky!" in which they thoughtfully included a Membership FAQ. As proof that you should always read the FAQ, question #2 contained the answer to what had been my burning question:

Q. Can I give my account to my friends and family?
A. Yes!

Woohoo! Hey Mom - guess what I've got to share!?

And with this update, I have doomed myself to future google referrals for barnyard porn. Sigh. The things I do for you people...

On the first Wednesday of every month at 9 AM sharp, the sound of air raid sirens would pierce my Iowa childhood. There is no other sound in the world like the eerie, warbling wail of an air raid siren. And no matter how many times my mother told me that it was a test, and pointed out that it happened every month at the same exact moment, I still knew that this time it was real. This time the bombs were airborne and it was too late to run.

Now years later, here in lovely Austin, Texas, I live within two blocks of a lovely little freeway we like to call 'MoPac'. Nevermind that it is actually called... what the hell is it called?... ... ... Loop 1! (And dear God, it just took a trip to MapQuest and a 3-way AIM conversation to figure out what the real name is... One of the joys of Austin for tourists and transplants - we don't call anything by the correct name.)

So where was I? Oh yes - I live two blocks from MoPac - so named because the Missouri/Pacific railroad line runs down the middle of the freeway. Trains run down the track every night at around 10:00 PM and 1:00 AM, and in the days before they put central air in my house - when I slept with the windows open all the time - I was lulled to sleep each night by the sound of the 1 AM train rumbling through town. But now I keep the windows closed and the cool air inside. And while I love walking inside to a cool house in the evenings, I miss the sound of the birds and passing cars and the Missouri/Pacific line.

Yet it isn't the quiet that strikes me so much. I can't hear the clacking of the trains anymore. But the brief distance, the rocky central Texas ground, and the off-center walls of my 50-year-old house work together to rumble every night as the trains go by. And even though each night as I pause to feel the ground shaking and hear the low, soft rumble - even though I know it is engine, boxcars, and caboose rolling north towards Dallas - the child who heard air raid sirens and feared for the bombs pokes her head from my memories. Only this time it isn't the bombs that are coming.

A year has passed. But still I feel the rumbling and I wait for the sound of a crashing jet plane.

Note to the person in front of me at the drive-up ATM:

Tying the cute little baby shoes to the trailer hitch on your F10 Pickup doesn't make you look like a devoted parent.

In fact, it gives the impression that you just ran over a baby and got the shoes all tangled up in your hitch...

On an unrelated note, I have to say that the first paragraph of this article just serves to remind me how ultra, amazingly classy and mature our little First Spawnlings are...

Dear Foley's -

Let's talk about the future of the department store in America. I mean, you guys have been dropping like flies since I was 15 years old. You can't compete with the specialty stores, the big discount stores.. Look - to be honest if I knew where else I could buy Clinque makeup and still get my bag of freebie stuff, I'd have no use for you, or Dillard's, or really any big department store.

I take that back. You're also handy for finding non-crowded parking at the mall - because no one wants to trudge through you to get to the real stores.

But you were going to provide me with a reason. See, I'm trying to fix up my credit. (And note to the kids - do not mess up your credit, because it's a bitch and a half to fix it, lemmetellya.) So it was recommended to me that I get a department store credit card to build up my credit. Not that I use these cards ever, but because they are "easy to get" and because lately I've gone from being rejected because my credit is ass to being rejected because I don't have any revolving credit accounts.

So I came to you, Foley's. I came to get a card. But apparently I'm just not good enough for your standards. Whatever the hell they are. Because despite the fact that I am carrying no debt whatsoever - not a smidge - and after a lot of phone calls and a lot of money, I have an above average credit rating -- despite this, apparently I don't meet the fine Foley's standards. Sigh.

Because I'm sure there are just tons of people out there clamoring to get their Foley's cards. Right?

I'm sorry, Foley's. I didn't hear you. Lots of people in line for your credit cards, right?

Yeah. That's what I thought.

Sucky part is that now I have to figure out somewhere else to buy my makeup.

-Susan

Yay! We have apartment! It's a lovely little hidden-away place within 6 blocks of where I currently live. I'm so thrilled to get it, as I was dreading moving out of my neighborhood. The apartment is the converted master bedroom suite in a rambling house, complete with 4 walk-in closets, a double-head walk-in shower in a bathroom the size of my current bedroom, a gated yard and a private stone patio surrounded by bamboo trees and a towering herb garden. After looking for two weeks and becoming more and more dejected, I walked in and felt a sense of "oh this is IT". The owners (who live in the rest of the house) have a lovely golden retriever for me to play with, and there are plenty of windows for Chet and Dante to nap in. I'm actually excited to move!

In other news, I finally met the furry gentleman who has been living in my attic off and on lately. I was fixing dinner last night and saw a flash of gray outside the back door. I flipped on the exterior light and found myself regarded by the masked eyes of an old raccoon. While he seemed to find me mildly interesting, he wasn't particularly disturbed by my presence, so I chatted at him for a few minutes until he decided to head off into the backyard. I was just happy to find him outside, as I've been worried that he'd get locked in the garage or attic after I moved out and would die in the heat. While there are plenty of things I'll miss about my house, I won't miss the clopping about he does in the attic at 2 AM.

And just like that I found the potentially perfect apartment. I'll find out if I get it sometime tomorrow. Keep those fingers crossed!

The little "For Rent" sign went up in front of my house today. I have to admit, I feel a definite pang of sadness when I look at the sign out there. I really do adore this little house, but the rising rent cost has forced me out. Unfortunately, being a little 1950's Austin cottage, it just isn't big enough for two people who aren't very close, so a roommate was out of the question. So I'm packing my bags, in between increasingly frantic treks to find the 'perfect' apartment. I've got a couple more places to see this weekend, but it looks like I may end up in a smallish complex near where I work. I'm dreading the prospect of an aparment complex, but at the same time chanting to myself that after a year, I'll have saved enough for a downpayment on a house.

I trekked outside a little while ago to check the flier attached to the "For Rent" sign and got a good laugh. The landlords are asking $1275 a month for the place. After chasing apartments and duplexes around the central Austin area for the last few weeks, I can say that the price is really amusing. There are two other houses for rent on the same street at the moment. Both are 3/2's, where my house is a 2/1. One of the other houses has had a "for rent" sign up for 3 months. The other about two months. They're going for $1100 and $1000 respectively. Granted, I have a biased opinion, but in the current market, it would have made sense to drop my rent and keep me here, wouldn't you think?