9:55 p.m. - 11 July 2001
Moving and birthdays
Yeah, yeah, I've been neglectful and all that. But by the time we get home from work, make at least one or two trips to the house and then eat supper, I'm too tired to do anything but completely veg in front of the TV. At least most of the hard part of moving is done: all 487 boxes of books have made it over there.
Actually, at this point, we're starting to get into the "what do we need to survive for two more weeks in the apartment" area of packing. Virtually all of the non-essentials have either already made it over to the house or are packed and stacked up in the living room. Many of the dishes are already neatly arranged in their new cabinets; most of the chairs have made their way into one of the lesser-used rooms of the house so that they're out of the way; Lee's wargames and maps and such are stacked in what used to be the nursery but is currently the wargame room. I just have to clean up and pack up my massive desk, a task made much easier by the fact that it only has four drawers and one of those is mostly empty.
It looks like August is going to be a busy month for us: my parents are coming up here the first weekend, possibly with my sister and niece in tow; the second weekend one of my best friends from college is coming to visit before she moves across the country; and the third weekend Lee and I will be heading to SC for a baptism. And of course there's the wedding in November in the western part of NC. All this after we go to Boston this month and finish moving and close on the house. Our lives are never dull.
If I seem like a broken record these days, talking about nothing but the house and the move, well, I'm sorry. Unfortunately, it's the thing that is on my mind the most. It's even managed to eclipse my birthday on Friday. Mostly. Tomorrow night I'll be making my traditional birthday dessert: Maine blueberry pudding. It's basically a bread pudding with a blueberry sauce, and I've had it every year for as long as I can remember. I know there were a couple years when the blueberries for the pudding were picked the same day -- a bonus to having a July birthday.
It's actually sort of odd that I always have blueberry pudding on my birthday, since I'm such a chocoholic every other day of the year. I think some of it has to do with the fact that no one really wants to heat up the whole house in the middle of July for a birthday cake. My youngest sister is really the only one in my immediate family who always had a traditional birthday cake (always chocolate), and since her birthday is December 1, it's not so bad. Mom always has lemon meringue pie (baked by me if I'm home, bought if I'm not), my other sister always has strawberry shortcake, and Dad decides on something different every year.
And really, except for maybe Dad, each of us picks something that someone else doesn't like: Dad and my youngest sister don't like lemon meringue pie, I don't like strawberries, my youngest sister doesn't like blueberries, and while Mom will eat chocolate, it's not really her favorite. I guess my other sister eats everyone's birthday dessert, but she's incredibly picky about other food-related things. For example, for years she didn't eat spaghetti sauce. She still doesn't eat gravy. She wanted everything plain, and she hated to have her food touching. She's better about now, but she still eats hot dogs and hamburgers plain if she can help it. When asked why, she replies: "I'm Catholic. We don't believe in condiments."
