Woke up, and it was beautiful outside!!! At last, a non-scorcher! I love a good, hot day, but until DZ and I get our passes for the Circle Woods pool, a 90-degree day is basically one where it's miserable to step outside your door before 7pm. :P

Dan told me to take time for a break sometime today, instead of staying glued to the computer, sorting photos, or stuck in a closet somewhere, rearranging shelves.

So I took my beach towel outback and read Winnie-The-Pooh.

"Christopher -- ow! -- Robin?"

"Yes?"

I have just been thinking, and I have come to a very important decision. These are the wrong sort of bees."

"Are they?"

"Quite the wrong sort. So I should think they would make the wrong sort of honey, shouldn't you?"

"Would they?"

"Yes. So I think I shall come down."

lol But 'nuff of Pooh, time to go do photo-sort-y and thank-you-note-y things...

...with coffee!

Had an adventurous day.

Around 9am, I went to get the mail, and turned the bolt on the doorknob to what I thought was was the UNlocked position. But a quick turn of the knob once the door was already shut, proved I was paying nearly enough attention.

So there I was, standing on the front porch in my guitar pajama shorts and a tank top, holding a key that only unlocks the post box, locked out of the house.

Stephanie's voice echoed in my head: "It's okay, we're not panicking-- Chloe? We're not panicking."

We have a spare key outback, I thought. And tore around the corner of our block of houses to the back fence. I'd be lying if I said the scene from Mr. and Mrs. Smith, where Brad Pitt is tearing through the bushes in a suit and scaring the next door neighbor didn't scroll through my head at this point.

Of course, I thought, en route, I think it unlocks the back door, which has one of those rods that drops into the track...which is, of course, down right now.

Hoping I was remembering wrong, I scrambled through the back fence and proceeded to check the spot I remembered the spare being the one time I used it. Discouraged by the fact that I found a nail with nothing hanging from it, I went ahead and checked everywhere else in our little backyard.

Between praying and checking under bricks, I tried to think of a logical recourse if no key presented itself: I would need to call Dan at work. On my phone which was inside, sitting on the shoe shelf (laughing at me, no doubt...stupid Motorola...this is the misdirected anger part of the panic process. :P )

That's okay, there's a friendly Korean couple next door who would probably let me borrow a phone if I asked. Oh yeah. I don't have Dan's work number memorized. Well, his mom has it, I could call her. ...except I don't have her number memorized either. Curse you, speed dial!!! Nothing for it but to call my home for Mom Z's number, and then call her for Dan's number.

That will be a fun conversation to have in front of the friendly Korean couple next door. In my pajamas.

Maybe I could just spend the day outside.

...that will be a funny story to share with the guy from Cox when he comes to switch our internet from Verizon in an hour.

Praise God from whom all blessings flow, the screen on the living room window popped right out when tugged on, and thank the Lord Jesus, we forgot to lock the window. I turned the recycling bin over, climbed through the window, under the blinds, and tumbled, giddy with successful bullet-dodging, onto the sofa.

I didn't move for a good twenty minutes. I didn't leave the house for twice that, afraid it would spontaneously lock behind me and change its locks.

I didn't mention any of this to Honore, the pleasant guy from Cox, when he showed up an hour later. His proper name is Honor, but he added the E and pronounces it the French way (honor-RAY) because he liked Paris so much when he lived there for a few years.

He was born in the Congo, but he says he's lived so many difference places, that when he goes home all his friends say he has a weird accent. He sounded African to me, but he said there's some French, Italian and Floridian (I kid you not) that didn't used to be there. He said one time he went home after some time in the south with a little bit of Redneck and it completely freaked his family out. lol

The internet is back, I've braved the not-in-the-house-ness of going for another run, it's time to do something fun.

Wedding photo sorting, strawberry lemonade, and Girlmore Gils.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 

p.s. DZ came home with lilies. <3

Started unpacking my stuff (don't judge; dressers are just for people who don't like suitcases as much as I do. :P ) and pretty'd up the dressertop:

It's beachy. It makes me smile. ;)

When DZ got home, we sorted out the last of the cabinets and the refrigerator. The fridge, it turns out, is full of nothankyou food which housemates have left behind; we've been enjoying a new game called: Can We Still Eat This? It goes like this:

"Can frozen fish go bad?"

"What's the expiration date?"

"Doesn't say."

"I'll Google it..."

"Well there's a coupon on the box that expired February 2010."

"...toss it."

True story. lol

Another side-effect of having housemates, everybody buys their own of everything. So Dan and I have two shopping lists: What to buy, and what NOT to buy. This list so far includes:

• cooking spray (4 cans)
• peanut butter (3 jars)
• cling wrap (5 boxes)
• Italian seasoning (3 identical shakers)
• laundry detergent (8 jugs...kidyounot)

Works for us-- it's a whole list of stuff we don't have to buy for quite awhile. ;)

Oh, another do-not-buy item:

plastic cutlery. lol

First day all byyyy myself.

hehe.

It was super quiet, and weird. Weird's my new word. Poor Dan, he asks how I'm doing or how my afternoon was, and I'm like, "It was weird."

To quote Megamind, "Look okay, see I don't know where to go with that." lol

But I kept myself more-or-less busy; spent most of the morning tidying up (dude, unpacking a million boxes = a million empty boxes. did you know that??), and went for a run (the new Owl City's have been a Godsend, in the full sense of the word, for encouraging me to get out and run. <3 )

Then, a little while later, I had a loverly, lengthy phone conversation with Hannah-- which was exactly what I needed. YAY PEOPLE!! Puppy, the neighborhood cat, does his best to be social, but believe it or not, it's just not the same. :P

It also reminded me I need to call home more often. I miss my peeps. <3

UNPACKING DAY!!!

Well, first DZ and I did some Sunday morning devotions and singing, just us and The Indefatigable (yes, that's Dan's piano's epic, epic name. A late-night DC walk and some recent Hornblower played a big part in that decision. lol)

After that, spent hours just moving boxes from one floor to the other and sorting all our wedding gifts to the right rooms. Then we decided to tackle the kitchen.

The main complication was finding stuff left behind by previous housemates of Dan's and deciding what to keep, what to donate, and what to throw away in a plastic bag so it wouldn't stink up the kitchen. LOL Just kidding. Well, except for the George Forman grills. Yes, there was more than one. :P

My favorite part: Putting all the Fiestaware into a cabinet in the exact right color combination! Dan and I figure I will eventually stop bothering to put them in the most chromatically pleasing order, but I haven't yet. lol

DZ and I also listed our superfluous, not-as-pretty-as-the-white-one refrigerator on Craigslist. Neither of us have ever CL'd anything, so it's been a fun experience. For those of you who also have not used the List of Craig, here's how it goes:

• take picture of item
• post it, price, and a laconic description (in our case: refrigerator, GE, off-white, works) on CL.com
• after about an hour, you should receive roughly 8 emails:
• 5 say: "is it still available? cause- want has!")
• 3 say: "will you take ___ price instead?"
• reply to all that yes yes, will sell, very much, just want the thing gone. first one to the house gets fridge!
• nobunny comes.
• get 5 more emails.
• rinse repeat.

lol Needless to say, we still haven't gotten rid of the fridge, but we're in no particular rush, and DZ says he doesn't mind getting rid of it for free if it comes to that. Plus, you can't really complain-- Craigslist is free and easy to use, and handy as heck for finding things too. Actually, DZ found Kokomo (my Rav4) on Craigslist, so very much can't complain. ;)

That said, "I got a crisp Benjamin Franklin for anyone willing to disappear a fridge, no questions asked..."

Drove from Oak Island to Fairfax. Always makes me sad to go-- OKI is my favorite place in the world --but I’ll be seeing it again in September. <3!!

DZ and my beachouse, "Looney Dunes" <3

my way-rad boyfriend. he can drive and talk on the phone simultaneously. oh yeah.

 

me, Tropicana (my darling dslr) and the OKI bracelet DZ bought me at Eagles. <3

my dashboard is a footrest. I'm sorry, Katy-chan, I can't help it. :P

Virginia was very welcoming and set up a sign in my honor. though they forgot that my favorite bird is not, in fact, the cardinal. ("I don't like them, they wet their nests!"...hehe Monte Python...) apparently, the whole state is open for business, which is pretty cool. entrepreneurs, take note.

we got to Fairfax around 6pm, and even though I've been in this house a hundred times, DZ carried me inside. ;) which I thought was pretty fly. knackered from the drive home, and starving from an early lunch, we set out to Dominoes. did I mention I love this guy?

watched "That Damn Donna Reed", which solidified Dan's pity for Dean and manly approval of Luke, ate a sausage and black olive pizza and drank leftover Bachlorette party Smirnoff. (thanks K girls!!!)

went to bed. slept till 9. <3