Life has been so strange lately!

I need to buy a notebook to record my thoughts these days. Because my life is so topsy-turvey and irregular, I'm noticing things and thinking about things from the wrong side of the railroad tracks now.

It is a very different type of neighborhood than what we are accustomed to. My house--and it is mine--is in the heart of a crowded, noisy neighborhood. I left here sixteen years ago. I can remember the happier days when I lived here before. The more settled days. Strangely, yesterday I needed a fork and without thinking about it, I reached for the drawer that had been my utinsil drawer when I lived here all those years ago. I told Ike that the mind is a miraculous organ than never ceases to amaze me. How could I possibly have so easily slipped back in time like that--to just automatically reach for something where it ought to be. The drawer is out for repair right now and there is just a hole there.

I have very few possessions here and I'm not settling in like a person would normally settle in. I have a few pieces of furniture that we dumped here when my father's house sold--the icky things nobody wanted that were too good to give away. I have this nice new carpet, light blue, that blends so nicely with gray walls, freshly painted, with stark white woodwork and this huge thirty year old yellowed and stained sectional couch. It seems my father's old English cottage style house house hid how aged it had become! And there is an old, old radio, 1940's at least, in a well made wooden cabinet that has seen better days. It makes a small table that is overpowered by a huge lamp that I think came from India. It is the most awkward real antique brass lamp. I can't imagine why. It is fat at the bottom and then tall and thin. And the shade is purely hidious--but nothing ready made is big enough for the lamp. Other than guitar equipment and a computer, that's all that is in my living and dining room.

Yesterday I finally broke down and bought a dish drain tray and a trash can. I was in the process of preparing to paint the kitchen cabinets when I made my unplanned move into the house. So, I adopted some old toy tubs of Ike's to use rather than fill the cabinets with stuff I'd have to take out when I paint. But time has been so restricted that I still haven't managed to begin to paint after nearly three weeks. So basically we are living out of boxes and suitcases as though any day we'll bug back to our own home.

I can't seem to get a decent meal together. For one, as renters never take care of things, the oven was so filthy that when I tried to fire it the first day or so that we were here, it stunk. I turned it off and we went out to eat while the house aired. I am not kidding you when I tell you that I scrubbed and soaked the burners for an entire week. So early on we ate out a lot. Oven cleaner was difficult to find the first week. I noticed that Wal Mart has it now that I finally managed to scrounge some up at an old southside grocery store. I sprayed the oven the other day and I haven't managed to get up the nerve to begin the nasty job of wiping it out. Tonight I tried to make chicken fajitas, but I'd forgotten that we don't have a jar of picante sauce--or any other kind of sauce, for that matter. And no spices! Although the fajitas tasted good, they weren't even remotely Mexican.

Well, a person gets tired of camping out all the time and living temprorily on what appears to be a more and more permanent basis. The time horizon for moving back home doesn't appear to be shrinking. Two suitcases and two tubs of kitchen goods is all I really have in the world now.

I miss my things!

I'm tired of watching the neighbors watch me. I know that my life has interested them immensely these past twenty-three years and they are afraid to ask me what the heck I'm doing back in the neighborhood. So they are both curious and distant. This end of the street is dominated by one family that owns two homes directly across the street. I never got along with the patriarch of the family. He used to stand in his garage and smoke and watch whatever I was doing through his small oval windows. They should be happy. I take good care of my grass. But they think I'm stupid to water it when the droughts come. On a good note, his grandson was visiting the other day and hailed me from the other side of the street. So we hollered back and forth, catching up on the decade or so since I last saw him. He must have been eight or so when I bought this house. If you ask me, he's the best one of the bunch.