When it rains it pours

Welcome to Tuesday, where we are hanging out at www.benjaminmoore.com where you can pick out paint samples and at www.potterybarn.com which isn't the greatest idea for someone whose house payments are going to ensure she gets her daily quota of ramen for the next year and also here and here and especially here because it's easier for those on ramen diets. We did the final walk through this morning with Brian the Builder (who passed himself off as a lowly painter guy when we first walked into the house and were summarily aghast at the Minty Olive Green cabinets. Quoth Brian: "If you're a serious buyer, we can probably paint them white. But I'd have to know, like, TODAY." Wise move, Brian, wise move.) Brian? Super duper extra duper proud of his townhomes and we are, of course, pleased to hear it. The house is all finished except for itsy bitsy minor stuff, but we still don't get the keys until Monday. I think we have to give the builders a semi full of dollars first. Is that how it works?

In the meantime I have amassed a gardenful of flowers and bushes and vegetable starts to be planted in my new yard. YARD! I have four garbage bags full of clothes to give away. I have three gigantic plastic storage boxes full of winter stuff to stow under the bed. We have a small mountain of boxes in the living room waiting to be filled with books and DVDs and the entire discography of Sting. I've left furniture catalogs scattered about the apartment with comfy red couches circled with bright yellow highlighter in much the same way some girls send their boyfriends links to their Tiffany's wishlist or leave the newspaper jewelry ads pointedly lying around.

In case it is not blindingly obvious, I am definitely ready to move.

Oh, but a NEW HOUSE isn't the only fab development happening in the Maggie Space-Time Continuum. Oh no. Someone, and by that I mean the devastatingly handsome and debonair man who lives with me, scored himself a Fancy Shmantzy Brand Spankin' New Place of Employment this past week. All together now: WHEE!!! (Congratulatory gifts of expensive champagne, flowers and complimentary automobiles may be sent to The New House, Seattle, WA.)  After eighty bazillion consecutive weekends of perusing the Sunday ads, revamping resumes, "networking" with "IT professionals", hating the Dot Com Boom with the fire of ten thousand suns and praying for a time machine to go back and graduate when the Dot Com Boom was actually for real, the best looking, smartest and most deserving guy in Computer Geekdom finally got a little attention. In fact, if I may get all proud and puffy, My Husband managed to get his current company and the new company to Jello wrestle over him leading up to the Great Computer Guy Bidding War of 2005 which you may have read about in the papers. In the end, the new position with infinitely more possibilities won out over the same old position with a fancier title and more money. Now I have to admit, it was hard to look that big pile of money in the face and say "No! You're not worth the slow and arduous soul sucking I must endure to have you!", but we DID and we are BETTER for it. Yay!

Suddenly, it seems, everything is happening at once. And there is a certain someone, and by that I mean the potato-chip-lovin' Simpsons-watchin' person I live with, who isn't real big on Everything Happening At Once. But, like I said last night, these are all good things and things we've been wanting to happen for a long time. So what if they all decided that mid-May 2005 was a good time to finally show up.

But let's get back to the really important matters. What color to paint my bedroom? Oh holy cats, there goes Tuesday...