The Forty Dollar Hum

I had parked in front of our new apartment with a carload of boxes, about to haul them upstairs. Then I decided to mess around with the shelving in the garage, trying to take some shelves out so big boxes will fit. And there's that hum sound on the street. This is a sound that means one thing to me now. Forty dollars. I've gotten three parking tickets in the last month for not moving my car on street cleaning day. Forty bucks each.

So without even completing the thought, I fly out the front door, there's the little parking buggy writing out a ticket for the guy parked in front of my car, there's the neighbor, running out to his van behind me, and here's a second parking buggy pulling up behind my car. So I Bo Duke it into the car, tear away and go around the corner before anyone can put a ticket on me.

When I get back the street sweeping truck passes the house, cops are gone and the neighbor and I both park again in front of our houses - "Did they get you?" he says. "I don't see a ticket," I say, and he says "hope they don't get us by mail." That would be evil. So now I open the garage and hide the car inside, like some mafia guy with a truckload of bootleg.

Moving will keep you on your toes, then knock you back on your #@%.

Keys and champagne

Our broker suggested that we have a little shindig yesterday, the day of the closing. We loaded the lawn chairs and some toilet paper into the Prius, drove five blocks to our new place, and had some champagne, cheese and crackers with our broker/neighbor/friend Charmaine and her hubby, Robert. Justin and Anna stopped by later and we all hung out in the kitchen eating little petit fours. The door started knocking and the downstairs neighbors showed up with more champagne, so now there's eight of us kicking it in our tiny kitchen.

The neighbors are cool (whew!!) They were excited that we weren't total wingnuts I think, because the girl hugged Ellen when they left.

So today we'll move a few boxes over there and start to adjust to the new place. It still hasn't hit us that we'll be living there for a long time to come. When our little party ended lastnight, I started packing stuff up, telling Ellen we needed to "take them home." She stared at me and laughed - "Honey, this is home."

Robin Williams working on new material

We saw Robin Williams at Bimbos 365 club lastnight. He went for a solid two hours and it was almost all new stuff. It was hysterical. Since it's a working show, there were times when he tried a new joke and no one laughed, and you kind of feel bad for him, but then if you fake laugh he won't know how bad the joke really is. He would comment on how quiet we, or how that joke flopped, and he'll start to get his momentum back. Sometimes he just starts talking in a funny voice to see if it will kick off a joke. Towards the end he told the crowd that he was playing Vegas this weekend and needed to test things out on us. His material is really fast, densely packed, and he keeps the energy up the whole time. We loved it.

Today I'm taking apart some Ikea furniture and some old filing and paperwork. I take small piano practice breaks. So imagine cardboard boxes stacked five feet high in the middle of a room and from somewhere behind them the plunking sounds of "the Battle Hymn of the Republic". That's a stress break.

Opossums love scrambled eggs

Apparently, when you are rehabilitating a lost opossum, you should feed it scrambled eggs. They love eggs. I should try sticking my head down into my garage's utility sink and give it a sniff - could it smell like scrambled eggs? Is that what attracted a small opossum to climb down into the sink last night and scare the bejezus out of me while I was doing laundry?

He turned out to be a real cutie. Sort of semi-playing-dead while we stood over the sink talking about him. He laid his head down on the ground, sort of like, "okay, I'm dead now, go away please noisy, pasty, hairless tree monsters." I can't help but wonder what we sound like to a trembling opossum in a garage. Does our loud blabbering sound like birds chirping? Soothing and inspiring? Or is it like when you hear monkeys babbling on TV? Just non sensical squawking?

Anyway, he held perfectly still as we lowered a little wastebasket over him, slipped cardboard underneath, and carried him out to the street. Ellen was amazed at how calm he was, and is now determined to find some baby opossums and try holding them in her hand. She says opossums have now surpassed raccoons in the cuteness category.

It's Wednesday the 21st of May, our 14th wedding anniversary! We are going to a club tonight to see Robin Williams working on new material. We've seen one of these shows before, a couple years ago, and he does nearly three hours of non-stop new material. You're exhausted from laughing when it's done - he is amazingly raw and funny in person.

We get the keys to our new apartment on Friday afternoon. We'll spend the holiday weekend moving little boxes over, setting up a few lawn chairs in the living room until the movers come on the 31st, and hanging out in our backyard. We've never had a backyard before, and I'm at a loss for what to do with it. Not really a gardener, unless spraying things with the hose counts as something. In my hands, gardening shears turn into a ravenous T Rex, and there are some gaping dead holes in our shrubs left after the attack. I don't get assigned that job anymore.