08.09.04 - 5:26 p.m.

I love my house.

Two days: I love living there. It doesn't matter that we lost a part of my bedframe and now the mattress and box spring are sitting on the floor, it doesn't matter that the mattress and box spring on the floor are essentially the only furniture on the entire second floor, except for the new metal shelves (pretty!) in the bathroom, which I put together last night, twice, because the first time I put them together I put the shelves on upside down. I have my dresser - my grandmother's dresser, actually - but I'll need to re-draft some helpers to move it, because it is one heavy mo-fo, and right now we can't open the top drawer.

It doesn't matter that we BROKE my computer monitor and that, Saturday, after a hard day's work, I drove out to my parents' house for dinner before David left for band camp and mom left for her conference and a visit to my crazy Aunt Susie the long way around, because it was a gorgeous day and I was bone tired, too tired to go walk around the park, too tired and sore, but awake enough to take route 60 rather than the interstate, and follow route 60 as it winds around through and then behind the towns between here and there, which are all oriented to the interstate. It was a gorgeous day: utterly golden, heartbreakingly blue, with air so bright and burning sharp and clear it seemed crystalline, long sweeping light, deep shadows outlined against the ground with the precision of a realist's finest brush strokes, the impossible rich green of the woods sweeping the sides of the road.

Instead of overshooting and doubling back at St. Albans, I took the road across the ridge into the valley, which was likely not smart. The road is narrow and curvy, and I'm not familiar with it, so I drive pretty slowly, which never pleases the rednecks in pick-up trucks behind me. Dangerous situations result. But I love that road, if only for the first half-mile, where the road rises up over the ridge line and opens up to the sky. There you are, for three whole seconds, bare to the sky, surrounded by radio antenna and cell phone towers, one of the huge X-wing-fighter style high-tension power line supports, these small open fields surrounded by downgoing woods, and a hand-lettered sign "Radio Antenna Space for Lease" on a wooden shed. There's a house or two up there. One is right by the road, a nice ranch house in the shadow of huge electrical lines. What if that was your job? Living in a house on a ridge, watching over all the towers and antennas, half-security guard, half-landlord, half-tech? I think that that would be almost as lonely as being a firetower watcher person, staring off into the distance for some spark of blaze against the horizon, and significantly less romantic.

That night, I came home late and stopped at the store, bought things - including a monitor - which I needed. As I was walking out of the store, one of my bags fell onto the parking lot. I thought nothing of it, picked it up, and discovered that the half-gallon of milk had been punctured, and that milk was leaking all over everything. I should have taken it back and asked for another, but the new Wal-Mart is so incredibly huge, and the milk is all the way at the back of the store, and I was so damn tired that I decided it would be easier to leave, go home, unload, unpack, set up, and then go out and go to Kroger's and buy milk there.

So: the house, the house. My mind is moving several speeds ahead of my body, plan after plan after plan. I need to: buy the missing part for the bedframe. The suggestion is/was that they might have it at Love's. I need...

...damn. I need to go and do some of the things I've been thinking about doing all day!