e finally moved into
our new house on Monday. Amazingly, it’s still standing.
Monday night was the worst windstorm I’ve ever seen (having never lived
through a hurricane). Gusts were up to 50 miles per hour. And
of course, our bed was up against the wall of the house that was being
hit the hardest.
There we are, at 3:00 in the morning, trying to decide if we should
all hunker down in the basement just in case a tornado whipped up (and
at times, it sounded like that was a possibility). Even better, we
were both exhausted from a day of unpacking, but couldn’t sleep for all
the noise (and the lingering fear that we would wake up with an unwanted
skylight over our heads). But through it all, the baby, who once
woke up when I placed a pile of laundry next to him on the bed, was sound
asleep. I guess that was good, because we were both already crazy
enough.
But our house survived. The hose that was around the side of the
house somehow ended up on the front lawn, and our “SOLD” sign almost uprooted,
but other than that, we were lucky – at least one house around us lost
some shingles from the roof, and I heard there was more substantial damage
in other areas.
Last night was much calmer, except that I’m now seeing cardboard boxes
and packing paper in my sleep. Everything that was in our apartment
got packed and shipped 2000 miles, and now we have to sort it all out again.
And I mean everything. There was a wad of plastic grocery bags that
I had shoved in our closet back in our apartment – and I extracted it from
a box marked “HALL CLOSET/CLOTHES, CLEANING” last night. We’ve gone
from two bedrooms to four, and from one story to basically three, but we’re
already having a hard time figuring out where to put it all.
I have my priorities straight, though – I did unpack my stereo (although
I haven’t hooked it up yet – that’s a one-night job all by itself).
And last night, I put up our Christmas tree. I have to admit, it’s
kind of fun unpacking everything – I’ve come across stuff I had forgotten
that we even owned (and no, I’m not talking about plastic grocery bags
here). I found an Elton John/Billy Joel concert T-shirt that I could
have sworn was stolen out of a laundry room dryer two apartments ago.
nd, oh, yes, there’s
that election thing. It looks like George W. Bush will be our next
president after all – apparently three to four counts of the votes were
enough.
I know a lot of people have a poor opinion of Bush, but I think he’s
going to do a great job. He has a reputation of being a people-person,
of being willing to meet opponents halfway. Unfortunately, he also
seems to have a reputation of being, well, not so bright. I don’t
know how fair of a statement that is, since it’s been circulated by people
who don’t actually know him personally, but even if it’s true, I don’t
find it a problem. Let me put it this way: it’s easier to take a
not-so-intelligent person, surround him with intelligent people (which
Bush is already doing, by signing up Dick Cheney and Colin Powell) and
have him make intelligent decisions, than it is to take an unscrupulous
person, surround him with scrupulous people and have him make scrupulous
decisions (“scrupulous” is one of those words where, if you write it too
many times, it starts to look wrong. Ever notice that? I did
the same thing a week or two ago with the word “analyze”. Just stare
at it for a while – it just doesn’t look right.)
So yes, I’m kind of giddy that we won’t be faced with Clinton, Part
II (speaking of unscrupulous).
Well, at least not in the Executive Branch, we won’t….
