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GJ’s son Doug wants her to get a home inspection and an appraisal before she makes an offer on the house. I want those things to be done after so we can get the process moving and her not be out the money if she and the seller can’t agree on a price. Either way, we want to move fast and Doug wants to go slow.

We’re having a Halloween partay Saturday. We have the candy; I have my wig and my “glass slippers.” Gotta get my dress from the ‘rents house tonight and hope it still fits. Will buy the chili fixins’ tomorrow. Hope there’s still time to carve a pumpkin. The house is a disaster. The yard really needs to be blown free of leaves before the treaters come ’round. I slipped on them walking down the driveway this morning, and it was daylight and I wasn’t in costume or carrying a bag of candy.

And I have to go by Compass Bank in person to close the Even So account. I thought this was done over a year ago; not so much. Grr.

Last year, my dad sold Kris my mom’s van that I so loathed. This week, we sold it to Brad and Cindy. I cannot escape that van.

The wedding was beautiful, and I was surprisingly at peace. Patsy’s dress was very nice, and Kris did her hair, so it was, of course, awesome. I suppressed the urge to make any comments while the priest was talking, even though his take on the foot washing in the Gospel of John provided ample fetish jokes. (I did not supress myself from pointing out to Kris distressedly that even with six proofings, we missed that “affirmations” was missing an “i” on page 2 of the program. Hence, my actual affirming was a little distracted.)

Jimmy gets a gold star for coming with Jaimie and Liz to the wedding, because he missed the Alabama/Tennessee game to do so. Some other folk who were less supportive receive a checkmark by their red light,* but I won’t name names.

GJ is thisclose to making an offer on the house. This puts Kris and I in a perpetual state of excitement, or rather excited-ness. We would love to be moving her by Thanksgiving, and so our minds keep focusing on all sorts of things to do to the house to make it GJ-ready. But it’s not real yet; she hasn’t actually bought the house. So we are adrift in our excitement.

* I guess that’s what they do with the kids these days: give them checks by a red light for misbehaving and checks by the green light for being good. I learned this at Ivy’s 5th birthday party last night. I got to be the teacher’s pet and didn’t get any bad checkmarks. Oh, and Nathan’s mom makes the most awesome deviled eggs.

Man, you miss one episode of One Tree Hill and Peyton’s doing a line of coke and everybody has a new love interest. What is the world coming to?

Tomorrow is Jaimie’s birthday. She turns 27. I cannot believe this, partly because it means I will turn 27 in April. (Then I will have 2 fillings, and I will have 2 fillings…)

I’ve pitched the idea to GJ of buying a house half a block from me and Kris. She didn’t shoot it down immediately. Of course, she is also exceedingly polite at times. We’ll see.

No Eisley for us; Brad had a fever. Is okay, cause we’re old folks anyway and really just wanted to stay home and watch our recording of Joan of Arcadia.

Did I mention we finally picked out curtains for our living room (a.k.a. “the wicker room” the “front room” or the “fancy room”)? We have these cool rice paper shades from Target, but the windows of the duplex are old and so not one of those pre-fab sizes available. So even if the shades are down, there’s still an inch strip on either side where you can see in/out. Hence the desire for curtains.

I know I’ve mentioned how I killed Kris’ design mojo (reference: our dookie brown fireplace). That’s still in effect, as he had a good (in theory) idea for red curtains. How colorful (in such a brown room), how lush. How exceedingly dark it made the room when we actually procured red curtains.

So we took them back, and Martha Stewart (Free Martha!) came to our rescue with her tab-top sheer waterfall-stripe curtains in taupe. However, we needed six, and with the combined power of the East Gadsden and Rainbow City K-marts, we only came away with two.

We got one more in Trussville last weekend.

And another one in Albertville on Saturday.

And finally, the last two in Centre yesterday.

We have pilgrimaged to K-marts all across Northeast Alabama, and what have we learned? That maybe we could try spray painting the fireplace to match the curtains.

{Subliminal reminder: Les’ show is fabulous; go see it.}

Signs, signs, everywhere� the signs.

When I worked at Arrow Graphics, Charley had me make a “Lizard Crossing” sign as a joke for his wife. Two fit on a page, so I kept the other one in my box of collage ideas. A couple months ago, I ran across it and decided to tape it to my door (down near the floor, naturally) at work. Gotta be all “eccentric artist” somehow, right? I have another sign taped to my computer that says “Don’t be a squid.” Lorna gave me that one.

There’s a sign taped in one of the ladies stalls at The Times that reads: If you must tee tee on the seatie, be a sweetie and wipe the seatie.

I am tempted to add a new sign, a replica of the one Lily Taylor’s character had in Six Feet Under: If it’s yellow, let it mellow. If it’s brown, flush it down.

We have a ton of signs at home, on account of Kris having a phase where he stole street signs. I don’t mean the little ones. I mean the huge, 4′ by 4′ ones. So there’s not really any room for them in the home. Except for a small one outside the bathroom that reads “Smoking Area in Hall.” And another one that we didn’t actually steal, so much as not put back up when a storm blew it down. But that one’s a secret. Shhh!