Had to take off work today to deal with a couple of things at home. The parents have returned from their two-month sojourn to the north country, and have settled into the house. Which had the immediate, regrettable, and easily foretold effect of unsettling me. You know how it is, you get into a pattern - waking up, going to work, coming home, going to bed. Note well, if you will, how that sequence does not entail any of the following:

Washing the outside of the windows on the second floor ("You can hang out the window and I'll hold your legs!")

Going out at 10PM to pick up Häagen-Dazs bars

Sitting down to watch Jeeves and Wooster on A&E ("So the family can be together for a little bit")

But I can't complain, I suppose. Well, not more than I already have. The alternative (living on the street until I get a place) is worse... for now - they've only been home three days yet, one night of which I crashed someplace in the city. And it's not to say there aren't perks. In fact, a great one is that all of this will make me appreciate my own place infinitely more when I finally get into it.


I also wanted to mention that I've reached a liveable compromise with the spiders. The other day, I was putting my fan in the window so I can get some circulation in the room (too hot just for the windows to be open, not hot enough for A/C. Which, btw, is another of those perks I mentioned earlier). On the grill of the fan, there was an enormous spider (think Shelob), and she and I had a talk. I threatened to flick it out of the window, and it counter-threatened to have its minions cocoon me in my sleep and drag me to the boiler room where they would consume me at their leisure. So we split the difference: I flicked it out of the window ('flicked' probably isn't the right word, but I don't know that there is a succinct enough construction to get across the idea: "whacked with a roll of paper towels while wearing a pair of electricians gloves rated for protection to 10 kilovolts"), and now to avoid its goons I'm sleeping in different rooms everynight wearing a fake moustache (so they won't recognize me).

And that's just about that. I figure it'll take a few weeks for them to figure out that the Groucho Marx look-alike is actually me. By then I'm long gone (our higher power willing).