On the Move

Today was quite a busy day. Robert got us up at the relatively civilized hour of 6:45, though the fact that I consider that a decent hour to wake up at sort of makes me sad. Where are the long lazy Saturday mornings of my youth? Gone, gone until he learns to operate cartoons by himself, I suppose. We all got dressed and headed out to the university to see a friend of ours give a talk about the research she's been doing. She really wanted to meet Robert, but she moved away before he was born, so it's been tough. Robert was really quite good during the lectures, and he charmed everyone he met, so that was nice. There was also delicious pizza for lunch, an extra bonus! It's nice to be able to take Robert to some places, even if listening to a lecture with a baby on your lap is like listening to a lecture with a randomized-timer bomb of spit up, poop, and screams, just waiting to go off. It makes things so exciting!

On the way to the lecture, we dropped by CVS to snag a bargain on some diapers. I had five dollars worth of stacking coupons, plus a two dollar coupon rewards offer, bringing the grand total of the diapers down to less than two dollars. I used coupon rewards to pay, so basically only the fifty cents of sales tax came out of my pocket. It's the only way to shop. =D On the way back we dropped by Meijer and picked up frozen ground turkey on sale and some more bananas. We also splurged on a bit of store brand ice cream, the better to watch the ice cream episode of Man Vs. Food. I love that show, but some episodes are just not good to eat when you're hungry.

Census is a little better, I think. I was pretty het up about it yesterday, but today I got to fob off the case that was really irritating me, and I managed to get in all my hours I need for the week. Another paycheck comes in three days, how exciting! Doing this work has made me get all philosophical about houses, being as how I spend a lot of time observing them and walking up to them these days. It's funny the expectations that you have, just walking up to someone's house. You expect a house to be a certain way, and when it isn't that way, or when your expectations are suddenly subverted, that can be disorienting.

For example, I was out the other day in a normal middle-class neighborhood and I went up to one of my houses. It was just a normal looking house, chairs on the porch, no cars in the driveway. I walked up onto the porch and looked at the door, and suddenly it was all wrong. The door was standing open, which is not so unusual, but it had no doorknob. There was just a hole where the doorknob mechanism should be, and a hanging-open door, and no one around at all. Suddenly, the entire complexion of the house changed for me. It wasn't what I'd thought it was anymore. It wasn't somebody's house, it was an empty shell that could have pretty much anything inside it. Even though there was virtually no danger in a nice neighborhood on a sunny afternoon, a little part of me just wanted to get the heck off that porch right then and not look back. It was kind of strange. Maybe I've watched too many scary movies, or maybe it's just an ostention of the same principle that horror movies trade on, that the familiar twisted just enough to be strange can be a lot scarier than the totally alien.

Anyway, that's the sort of philosophical musing that carried me through my two mile round trip walk today, maybe there's more of heat exhaustion than philosophy in it, but that's okay. In other news, the pool is going to open soon, and I'm really excited. I've been looking for a pool float for Robert, and I really like this one.  It's just as cute as can be, and not too expensive. Next time I get a paycheck, I think I may order that. An inflatable float and some swim diapers, and Robert will be ready for summer pool fun! I've already got the high-powered sunscreen!