Flotsam

I am moved. Sort of. More or less. Our books are still mostly in piles on the floor, giving our apartment a charming “literary hovel” feel. The cats have turned this into a game, and amuse themselves by attempting to move from room to room without touching the floor. Of course, the situation is complicated by the fact that the local library had a book fair last weekend, at which all books were priced UNDER ONE DOLLAR. I think you all have the requisite math skills to figure the sum of Alexa + Bookfair, so I will not go into the gory details. Suffice it to say we need more bookshelves. And possibly a crane of some kind to assist us in our next move.

Which, if you believe the Nearly, will be in a matter of months. His job recently ended, and he has not yet found another.
So he is at home. All. Day. Long.
The Nearly does not do well with inactivity, and so I am having a lot of conversations like this:
MY WORK PHONE: Brring! Brrriiing!
ME: This is Alexa…
NEARLY: The goddamn downstairs neighbors have their cocksuckingmotherfucking car in the driveway. This is ridiculous. I hate them.
ME: Maybe you could ask them to move their car?
NEARLY: Fine. (Hangs up)

{20 minutes later}

MY WORK PHONE: Brring! Brrriiing!
ME: This is Alexa…
NEARLY: We can’t live here with a kid.
ME: Excuse me?
NEARLY: It’s filthy. You should see the space between the tub and the sink.
ME: Well, it’s an old house, and we just moved in. We can clean it.
NEARLY: No, we can’t.
ME (being sarcastic): Great, I guess I’ll start looking for a new place.
NEARLY (failing to notice sarcasm): You don’t have to look right now.

He is also concerned about the fireplace being dirty. Sooty, you might even say.
Obviously this is unsuitable for a house with infants, as everyone knows that there is nothing babies like better than lolling about in fireplaces. At least when they aren’t scrabbling in the dust under the radiator—located INSIDE A LATCHING CABINET. Because they are so dexterous, babies. And mobile. And unsupervised.

I want to reach through the phone and shake the Nearly, but instead I spend my lunch hour searching the want ads for jobs and sending out his resume. We do not even have internet yet at home, thanks to the asshats professionals at our phone company (we’ll call them Pylgrimage), so there is really very little the Nearly can do save clean and brood.

Speaking of cleaning (and brooding, I suppose), the Nearly removed an old air conditioner and found a nest of baby birds. The window unit was there when we moved in, and was spectacularly ineffective, cooling only the eight inches immediately in front of its vent. Also, it made a noise like this: WhirrrrrKACHUNKawhirrrkachunkawhirrrkachunka. Only louder. And with more vibrating of the walls. So, the Nearly removed it and learned two things—1) that this particular air conditioner is the size of an Oldsmobile, and 2) that the CHIRPCHIRPCHIRP we hear in the mornings is coming from our windowsill.
Once the air conditioner was out, we were faced with a problem: We couldn’t close the window, and risk smooshing one of the three babies, but neither could we leave it open, because the cats were yowling and pawing through recipe books: Sparrow Souffle, Birds of a Feather Stuck Together With Egg Batter and Wrapped In Bacon, etc. So we constructed an elaborate fortress of cardboard for the window, and the Nearly grieviously injured himself in an attempt to get the (leaking) air conditioner downstairs to the basement.

Here is where I would put pictures if we had unearthed the digital camera:

BABY BIRDS—>

AIR CONDITIONER—>

See how cute the birds are? With their wee yellow beaks? And their tiny, tiny pin feathers?
And isn’t that the biggest appliance you have ever SEEN?