Friday, June 27, 2008

So, CJ lives with me now, which is very good so far. And we are thinking about getting a joint account for bill-paying. But I am kind of enjoying the $75 in interest I earn with my special rewards checking account... interest I only get if I've made 12 ATM transactions over the month. Several of those are made at grocery stores, where CJ and I would probably be using the joint account. Plus, of course, a lot of the money currently sitting in my personal account would go to the joint, which would be fine if all accounts fit the "12 transactions a month" rule. I imagine I'd be buying packs of gum at CVS just to hit the quota at the end of the month... Maybe a joint account isn't the way to go at all.
So, I ask you, other people living in sin (or even legally together): How do you pay the bills together?

Thursday, June 26, 2008

Shizzle, it's been a week since I posted. So, the wedding. I did not end up wearing my dress for the car ride, but I did end up putting it on in the car while CJ drove, once we got close to the destination. It worked out fine. A stranger even came up to me at the reception and said "you have on the best dress here!" I got this dress as a hand-me-down from my sister, so I can't really take the credit. The wedding itself was fine. It and the after-party were in the middle of nowhere, Rhode Island and southeastern Connecticut. Seriously, for such small states, there's sure a lot of nothing inside 'em.
Blogger thinks I spelled "Rhode" wrong. Fuck you, Blogger.
I've been going back to bar trivia again, after a many-months-long hiatus. I'm playing with H and L and without our "ringer" J, who had been useful in filling some of our knowledge holes. CJ has also come for a couple of games. We haven't really gotten close to winning, but that's ok. We bask in the glow of the answers we do get right, and avoid thinking of the money we are not winning.
Anyway, I am too tired to write more. The cats are back to loudly playing at the first hint of dawn (that would be 4:30, by the way) and yet I still stay up past midnight. Dumb. The cats have not met, yet. We may try mingling them this weekend...

Wednesday, June 18, 2008

So I have a new roommate. Yes, CJ moved in on Sunday, and I haven't kicked him out yet, and he hasn't left in a cloud of anger and disgust yet either. It's good. I firmly believe that we can fit all of his stuff in my house, even if it must be crammed in, Tetris-like. My home is spacious but sorely lacking in closets (and there's no basement, attic, or garage; I couldn't buy a shed even if I wanted one, as it's against the rules here). But I am confident it will work out. I have a smaller ladder-accessible loft that I use very rarely, and that will become our storage area. I would like to figure out a way to block my view of the boxes, but that can happen in time.

Right now the biggest challenge is our cats. Voo, CJ's black male cat, moved into the first floor on Monday (my cats get the upstairs, since they're used to . So far, my (female) cats have sniffed and hissed at Voo through the screen, and sort of batted at him through the tarp. Nobody has freaked out yet, but there have been some growly-type meows. Voo was nervous in his new home at first, but now he's being his old affectionate (to humans) self. Oh yeah, he also meowed ALL NIGHT LONG last night. For no reason at all. He's used to sleeping alone, as CJ (cruelly) has always banished him from the bedroom at night; and my cats were on our bed all night, so I really don't know what Voo's deal was. I asked him, but he had no answer. We are continuing to keep them apart until they get bored with each other. CJ is all into this Feliway idea -- it's this stuff that sends out kitty pheromones that make them think that everything smells like themselves, or something, which makes them feel all is right with the world, and it pretty much sounds like kitty Ecstacy. A Feliway purchase is in our future.

I have a wedding on Saturday that's about 2 hours and 15 minutes from here (in Rhode Island). Should I wear my fancy dress in the car the whole time, or stop at a McDonalds right before we get there and change? I'd rather not arrive all wrinkled, but, well, I'd rather not bring my nice dress into a McDonald's bathroom. What would you do, reader?

P.S. I found my planner! It was in my laptop bag. You would know this already if you followed my Twitter.

Wednesday, June 11, 2008

Life is busy. CJ is moving in this Sunday, officially (i.e. that's when he's renting the truck), though he prematurely sold his mattress on craigslist last week and so is sleeping here every night. Work is busy, like always, though now we've passed Memorial Day it means we have Summer Fridays, which condenses the work. Which I prefer, anyway. And my neighborhood's tag sale is this Saturday, 8 to noon. Come on by! There are only two tag sales a year here - the other's in September - so they're usually pretty meaty.

And then the weekend after, I have a wedding to go to in Rhode Island and Connecticut (seriously: the ceremony is in RI, and the reception is in CT), for which we got a room to stay the night on Saturday. The weekend after that is open, but the weekend after that one is the fourth of July, and I'll be dog and house-sitting up in beautiful Chesterfield, for my ex-aunt. My sister and her family are coming up for the long weekend and I might even have a little barbecue. I seem to have some sort of mental block for throwing a party; I don't know if I'm too worried that people won't have fun, or won't show up, or if I'm just lazy - probably a mixture of the three. Which is ridiculous. My friends are nice. It's really not much work to go buy some beer and snacks. Come on, lady.

There will not be a good opportunity for having guests at home for at least a few weeks, though. We're separating the two floors of my house with a $20 screen door and a couple of heavy-duty tarps, and it's not going to be pretty. See, CJ has a cat, a solo male (fixed) cat who has shown in the past to not take kindly to other cats. So we are going to try to sequester him on the first floor, and my two kitties on the second, so they can see and smell each other but not truly interact until they stop howling and hissing at each other. Which should happen in a couple of weeks. We hope. Seriously, pray for us.

I have lost my Little Otsu planner, and I am bereft without it. I had written all of my summer Fridays into it, and all of my other future events, so now I have no record of when my hair appointment is and stuff. I have looked everywhere. Every once in a while I'll think something like "Ooh, I know! It's in my other purse!" then I go and look and it's not there. Maybe it's hiding. Or stolen, though it's half-filled-in and not worth much. Consider this post a message to the universe that I want it back. Or, if I wanted to follow The Secret, I could just visualize the planner back in my hands, and that would bring it back to me - like when Luke used The Force to get the lightsaber into his hand when he was hanging upside-down in the ice cave on Hoth. You know.

Monday, June 02, 2008

CJ's family was in town this past Friday and Saturday. Note to self: Do not take the guys from San Diego out on a nature hike during peak mosquito season. They aren't used to the buzzing and the swarming and the biting and the general horror. We are numb to it, of course, but they don't really have annoying insects in southern California. The people there are soft and pampered, like babies. They did say that it was very pretty, though.
Being around CJ's parents means going out to eat a lot on their dime. It was enjoyable, I must admit. They are similar to my bro-in-law's parents in many ways, and since they are all Jewish, I now have the (probably-mistaken) impression that all Jewish families are helmed by people who are incredibly generous and declarative. (They can also give guilt trips at a professional level of skill.) It's like visiting a foreign country.
My parents, however, avoid making nauseating, cringe-making hints about CJ and I getting married and having babies. And if we have babies, how we should move closer to them so they can spend time with the babies. And how they'll buy us fancy Danish furniture and give us a house if we move there and have babies. They are kind of kidding, but in that way that's obvious they are not kidding at all. I tend to deflect the conversation by making snarky jokes, since they like and appreciate a good cutting remark. So they like me a lot, which is nice.
Not nice? My robin's nest is empty. Empty! It still had two eggs in it on Sunday, but this morning, empty. It shocked me and made me very sad. There are enough robins in the world, but this one was my robin. I looked up robin egg predators online; both squirrels and crows are happy to take an egg from a nest without leaving a trace behind. We have plenty of crows and squirrels here too, but none of them are my crow or squirrel. Thus I now hate all squirrels and crows. (The previous is an allegory about how the personal is political, or all politics is local, or something.)