2002-08-28 - 1:34 p.m.

On the internal soundtrack: "Steppin' Out", Joe Jackson? Ugh, I hate it.

So, after Montreal, we went to Florida to visit with Poindexter's parents, sister, and nieces. I played enough Fantan, Go Fish, Crazy Apes, and Monopoly Junior to last me for at least a year, but I'll probably be subjected to it again at Christmas time. If any of you folks know of games that are equally fun for 5- and 7-year-olds AND adults, please pass 'em along. I need 'em.

I did enjoy swimming in the pool with them. They're old enough now to dive for pennies and swim through legs and stuff like that. I even managed to get a little sun, so I am slightly less pale now. Not by much, though.

My nieces live in a one-level home, and their Grammy's house is also one level. Our house in Virginia was a huge novelty for them because it had stairs. The first thing they did when they first came to visit two years ago was climb up and down the stairs, repeatedly.

We seem to have established a tradition of a two-week visit in April, and we missed it this year, when we were living in a box in April. So I told Christie that we had bought a house, and that we were looking forward to having them come to visit. First question out of her mouth was, "Does it have stairs?" Apparently it's still a novelty. :)

They are not really babies anymore. They're really growing up, which is amazing to see. I love watching their personalities develop. Kelly is something of a sponge, absorbing information and digesting it, and then surprising you with serious questions about something you said hours earlier. Christie is an immediate question-asker: What are you doing? Why are you doing it? Whey are you doing it that way? Will you be doing it in the future?

Closing for the house is on Friday. Eek, eek. After two months of dealing with geezer shit and being ready to lose the house at a moment's notice, it's finally beginning to sink in. And I'm VERY EXCITED!!!

For one thing, I'll be done with the goddamn dishwashing. The dishwasher in the house doesn't look too old, and it's allegedly a "pot scrubber", so the only things I'll be washing by hand are delicate items. Having the dishwasher (as well as the bigger kitchen) also means we'll be doing a lot more cooking. I've missed Poindexter's food, especially the vegetables. Restaurants just do NOT make vegetables the way I like them.

I was inwardly grumping over the stairs a bit. They are open-riser (Brady Bunch) stairs, and I love the open-riser part, but they are sort of clunky and very '70s in design. Plus it's too difficult to take them apart for refinishing, as I'd hoped. We finally figured that we could paint every other step (so we can still use the odd steps in the meantime), let it dry, and then do the other steps. We're going to paint them black, and I think it will tide us over until we can have some better stairs made (faaaaaar in the future, most likely). We may still have to replace the handrail, but that's not a huge deal.

Another thing I'm looking forward to is having a separate office, as opposed to "a corner of the studio". I'll have room for my file cabinet (currently I'm using boxes under the computer table), and a separate place that I can LEAVE at the end of the day.

My mom is already mentally planning what we can do with the back deck, gardening-wise. At the very least I'll put some pansies in the troughs attached to the deck rail, for fall. I'm excited about being able to have plants again. And since they'll all be in pots, I won't have to deal with that crappy stony clay I struggled with in Virginia.

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