home

i'm not a superstitious person, but it did seem odd that every time i told anyone, especially the blogging world, about the status of our house hunt and bids, we lost that house. so i've kept quiet. . .just in case. but i think we're far enough along now that i can share: this is going to be our new house!

we've placed our offer, haggled and settled on a very good price. we're writing checks to secure the option and given "good faith money" (or something like that) which shows that we're really going to buy the house. we've papers in from our mortgage guy, but we don't undestand a word of it so i don't know where we are with that, exactly, but there shouldn't be any problems there. we're setting up appraisers and inspectors.

the couple have already bought another house and wanted to close on this house early september. perfect! our landlords here are going to allow us to stay through september so we won't be homeless.

now, on to the good part. i love this house. it's the only house on the block not shaded by some old majestic tree in the front yard, so i get to plant my first tree.

this is the living room that you walk into from the front door.
not an excellent picture of the kitchen, but it's decent sized and set up for function and cleanliness. the sink is way cool with a built in water purifier. that little drawer in front of the sink is a fake, sort of. it tilts out and has a space to hold all those ugly sponges and soaps. *sigh* sometimes it's the little things.

the master bedroom is painted my favorite color. we'll have to paint the two other bedrooms that are currently pink and blue to suit the children that lived in them. i wonder if they'll notice that penn attacked their toys while they were gone.

i get an office! this is actually a nice set of built ins off of the living room.

the greatest thing of all: a backyard. i can't explain to you how much penn and i are going to enjoy a back yard. and so will all of you when we throw our first house warming party in a real house!

we're hoping that jungle gym off to the right stays too. there's also two bathrooms and a big two car garage with lots of cabinet storage space and a basketball hoop!

i'm so excited. and i swear if telling the blogging world takes my house away someone's going to hear it.

first thought: ambecrombie

just shot another amazing couple for their engagement portrait. i swear they could both be models. they get the award for nicest couple ever for a number of reasons.

when she first called me to book a wedding for next year, i told her no. i told her i wasn't sure if we were going to be here next year and didn't want to have to cancel on her. i advised her to call me closer to the wedding date if they hadn't found anyone yet.

then the calls came pouring in for weddings. . . .next year. i told benji and he said to go ahead and book them. when i called this bride she seemed so ecstatic that i agreed to do it as they didn't like any of the other photographers they had interviewed.

second reason they get an award: we were meeting at the bath house at white rock lake at 3:00. since mapquest sucks i ended up on the wrong side of the lake. for all you who knew me when i was young and lacking any idea of punctuality, forget all that. i. am. not. late.

except for this time where i spent twenty minutes on my cell phone with the engaged couple while we chased one another around the lake pointing out landmarks and confirming that we had no idea where the other one was at.

fyi: there are a flock of wild parokeets at white rock!

we got started thirty minutes late and it didn't seem to phase them one bit. neither did the scorching hot sun that turned us all into sweat balls. more accurately it turned he and i into sweat balls. the bride, magically, doesn't seem to sweat. a convienient superpower to have living in dallas, texas.

not only did they bear the heat and sweat for me, but they jumped off of picnic tables, walked on their hands, danced on the pier, did synchronized back hand springs (which they adorably called "flip flops") and the monkey walk.

for the short period in which we shot we got some really cute photographs that they seem very happy with. her bridal portrait is coming up and i have something sort of elaborate in the works involving some art direction and potentially a fan.

7:00p.m.

mother and child sit down to nice dinner. baby forks up spoon of mothers new concoction of spinache rice. phone rings. baby mutters "teh-fone!" sending rice flying over table. baby mutters "mess" and attempts to clean up the table by sweeping the half-chewed food onto the floor. baby expresses repeated confused face as to why mother isn't pleased with him cleaning his mess. mother answers phone.

me: hello?

phone: silence

me: hello?

phone: click. hi, am i speaking to the lady of the house?

me: yes. the lady is in the middle of dinner.

phone: oh. when would be a good time to call back?

me: depends on who's calling.

phone: this is darryl from something-energy-network.

me: is this a sales call?

phone: no, this isn't a sales call, this is a savings call.

me: ahhhh. you should get a raise for that line. sorry, we're not interested.

house shelter

the house hunt continuies. still don't know where we're at with it, really. houses are now like puppies in neighborhood cages. windows opening up to me like sad eyes asking that i come home to them. i keep telling them, "i just don't know." to some of them, "you seem great, really, but the floor seems a little crooked. . .i'm not sure." and we close the door behind us, locking it up, and i go to bed with visions of internet photos swirling among paint choices and shutters in my head.

when we walk into a house i try to picture what it would be like to live there. i have three scenerios that pop uncontrollably in my head.

1. what would it feel like to walk down this hallway with a load of laundry?
2. what does penn look like in the back yard?
3. how will it feel with a house full of family for penn's upcoming 2nd birthday?

this is all i can come up with. perhaps i'm more domestic than i thought.

i'm starting to get suspicious. every house i whisper to the blog seems to find itself under contract the next day. so i'll say nothing for now, except that there is hopeful hunting tomorrow.

call 555-NERD for a good time

mary and i earned our geek cards last night as we played scrabble until three in the morning for the second night in a row and finished it up with a rousing read of the dictonary.

words on the board that aren't really words:

• ferel
• dob
• qua
• guise

mary swears "qua" is in her dictionary.

do you know what a shuttlecock is? it's that plastic "birdie" that you hit in badminton. now, why would anyone make up the word "birdie" when you could say "shuttlecock" all day long?!

"hey brad, how hard can you hit your shuttlecock?"

"you missed the shuttlecock!"

"my shuttlecock is getting really worn. i've got to get a new shuttlecock."

"shuttlecock shuttlecock shuttlecock."

lots more fun than "birdie."

know what "shrive" means? to hear a confession and give absolution.

reason this makes me a nerd: my first thought was, "that'd be big points if i could get that on a triple word score, or get a triple letter score on that v."

when mary asked me if i knew what an "aphelion" was i told her it was the main character in battlestar galactica. "close!" she said. it's the point on the orbit of a celestial body that is farthest from the sun." we sort of lost our minds at this points. it gets ugly. i'll spare you the details.

and she beat me at scrabble!

sometime last week i noticed some fruit fly's in our kitchen.

"this peach?" i asked them. "you want this only slightly overripe peach?"

after disposing of the slightly overripe peach i thought my annoying troubles were over. but in the next three days those fruit fly's multiplied. they multiplied into a little herd that liked the corner of my kitchen around the fruit bowl. everytime i'd reach for something over there, they'd burst into a little cloud and i would turn into rambo mommy, armed with a spray bottle of lavender cleaning spray.

i drove everyone nuts with the chasing, spraying and telling off of fruit flys. fruit fly research taught me that they will breed in fruit, or even in sponges and especially in drains and if you eat too many of the larvae you will get diarrhea. so i threw the sponge away and scoured the drain and wondered if my gas was due to fruit fly babies in my intestines.

next day: fruit flys.

mary comes over and helps me keep up the pace with the bottle of cleaning spray letting out little gasps, "oh my god!"

"they seem to like this basket too," i tell mary. i pick it up and discover something sticky on the bottom. so, i took all the mail and bills out of the basket and put the basket outside. "i just wish i could figure out where they're breeding."

and then i see it. some lone banana that fell into the mail basket who knows how long ago and rotted away into fruit fly heaven. i ran to mary and pleaded that she "do something!" about the banana that i could not even fully look at. the small glimpse i got while running away told me it was a crawly fruit fly mass held together only by rotten banana goo.

then i scratched my butt and mary will probably never let me forget that after i panicked and begged her to throw the rotten banana fruit fly resort away, i scratched my ass.

but she did, god love her. and i was left to clean up fruit fly mess at 5 o'clock in the morning proving without a shadow of a doubt that we talk too much.

now the fly's that have survived the massacre are confused. i discovered that lavender cleaning spray will not kill fruit fly's.

but windex will.

bored

today's house hunt found us nothing. you've got to be tired of hearing about this. so am i. i think it's perfectly normal to be so distracted in finding a home.

You Are 35% Normal (Occasionally Normal)

You sure do march to your own beat... But you're so weird, people wonder if it's a beat at all You think on a totally different wavelength And it's often a chore to get people to understand you

How Normal Are You?

but we already knew this though, didn't we.

I'm welcoming an upcoming shoot this month, and a full load of work next month to keep my head busy.

we're searching in a new neighborhood tomorrow; "the l streets." the tiniest tinest fraction of us still hopes the deal currently on our dream house falls through.

in other news, i think penn has adopted our agent as part of the family. when i leave him with her to transplant his carseat from the nice leather ride that is hers, to the cheetoh covered interior that is mine, he doesn't flinch a bit. and then when i strap him in he holds his arms out to her on the other side of the window wanting her to pick him up until she's out of sight. then he starts in with, "su? su?" (her name is susan.) adorable/heart breaking. susan gave me some chocolate mint that i put in my car. does a good job beating the cheetoh smell down.

i'm bored.

damn damn damn

damn damn damn damn

we lost the house. they bid more than the 209,900 listing price.

so we're back looking again.

farewell dream house.

damnit.

yeah gut

last night i said we needed to put our bid in then, even though it took 'till 10 o'clock or so to do it. benji wanted to wait, but conflicting schedules persuaded us to get it over with.

well thank god.

got a call today. someone else put an offer in for the house! the sellers would be presented with the bids in one hour, and we had that amount of time to decide to go forth with our original "negotiating offer" (priced low) and keep our fingers crossed, or go into it with our best offer.

my gut said we needed to increase our offer for sure to stay in the running. i suggested the cap we had set. but i wasn't sure they would take that as it's still lower than what the house is listed at. benji decided to go in higher than we intended to spend. i don't even know if they'll take that offer, because it's still less than what they're asking for.

but i think/know we'll be in the running with it. the sucky thing is you can't know what the other people have bid. we've only got one chance now. between us or "them."

please. . .please . . .please . . .please . . .

sign the deal

benji got to check out the ginormous house today and said, "let's write a deal" after looking only at the backyard, living room and his studio area.

we went through the paperwork with our superagent who has gone above and beyond in giving us her time and advice and pushing this through as quickly as possible. we've paid off all the credit cards. now, it's all in the hands of the broker, for the most part.

if the seller takes our offer we're going to do a great big happy dance.

ya'll ready for a painting party?

house #2, #3 & #4

house #2 grandma's house
excellent m-street location. (which only means something to dallasites.) gaurenteed profit when we decide to sell it due to excellent excellent location. house would probably be a tear down for anyone else so they could build some new fancy house. actually has pink flamingo's in the back yard and would require lots of work in re-doing the landscaping to fit my tastes. would have to take up all the carpet to expose the pretty hardwood's underneath. would have to paint the inside 'cause i don't do yellow. only has two bedrooms putting benji's studio in the sunroom type area. shared driveway. overall: good investment against not so good house

house #2 that other one
this was a house we didn't get overly excited about because we were so set on house #1 which is "under contract" now. but, it's now moved to the top of the list. i like it, really. the space is set up nice, with a nice yard, huge garage, cute living and kitchen areas and all hardwoods. we'd have to paint two of the bedrooms because children previously slept there among pinkness and blueness and letters stenciled on the wall. only real downfall is that one garage wall looks slightly bowed if you look at it just right and although it's a fantastic neighborhood, i remember it being maybe slightly farther out then we wanted. like, by a mile if that. no biggie. overall: needs re-evaluation.

house #3 the ginormous one
at first, i didn't like the house. why? 'cause it's ginormous. three living areas, dining, kitchen and breakfast area, three bedrooms and three bathrooms. what the hell would i do with all that space? 2,197 square feet on a pretty 70 x 108 lot. but it's really nice. built in 1960, it's the newest one we've looked at. all hardwoods, big deck and the only thing i'd want to do to it is again with the re-landscaping (c'mon, plants are personal) get rid of the wall paper in one of the bathrooms and the kitchen and probably paint the bedrooms and bathrooms a different color. they're yellow, but it's not as offensive. it actually looks pretty fresh. overall: digging on it.

so, in coming home and calling my dad, then talking to jonelle, then mary . . . .i'm starting to feel the ginormous one. i like space and i like emptiness. and i like great big utility rooms with closets and built in shelves.

two more weeks.

home sweet not

time to get a new dream. with our mortgage approval only 24 hours away, our agent, susan, calls to say that it went "under contract" today. meaning, someone's on their way to claiming it. i thought you could enter into a nice bidding war. fight for it and all. but it looks like we're starting another search tomorrow.

there were two others we found from the last search and one of them is also "under contract" now.

so. dissapointed.

i know, i know. it wasn't the "dream home." but for me, it almost was. there wasn't a thing i'd want to change. this is rare people. every other house has at least three or more things that just scream "ugly." it's loud. in my head, anyway. and the location was going to allow an arrangement with friends of children attending the nearby elementary school to come over every school day and play with penn. penn who adores them and will follow them to the ends of the earth, so long as when he calls "mama" they can run him over to prove i'm still alive and well talking to real live adults in the kitchen.

so, send all that good energy to 12:30 tomorrow as penn and i once again, tour dallas in search of home sweet home.

butter boy

one of the most charming stories that has been repeated to me about my childhood tells of the time i met crisco. my mom and dad were taking a nap and i found the big can of crisco under the cabinet and gave myself and the house a good coating. dad said all he could do was laugh.

we only buy real butter. margerine is slightly gross for many reasons that aren't important right now. but, this months budget is tight, so i opted for the 1.00 gallon of margerine instead of our 5.00 butter. we joked about margerine all night and about how maybe i should have just gotten the real butter.

yesterday morning penn woke up before us and went to play while we slept. 45 minutes later he crawls into bed. benji raises his head and says, "he got into the butter."

i jerked up. sure enough. my child was covered in margerine.

i started laughing. it was the funniest thing i'd ever seen. benji poked his head up again and said, "don't laugh, you'll just encourage him." "no," i said, "remember my crisco story?"

"mmmm," he said, "take pictures." penn woke up earlier than usual this day, so i couldn't see yet, exactly, and didn't really survey all the damage when i took these photos. but this will give you a good idea.


country crock light everywhere.


he seemed proud and indifferent, moisterizing his hands and hair with buttery goodness while sleepy eyed laughing mom got him on camera.


he filled up all possible crevices in the house and in his toys. i'm still finding butter splatters in weird places.


best of all, he took his diaper off, while i was using up the two full rolls of paper towels, two boxes of diaper wipes, one roll of toilet paper and a hand towel, and climbed onto the coffee table to then pee on top of the butter mess.

it was lovely.

we even had company over that morning. i spent the day shampooing carpet, couches, babies and . . . .the cats. poor butter covered cats.

no doubt about it now. he's definetly mine.

no shortage of cuteness

top 10 reasons why catfish (see fluffy grey whiskered animal wearing either his "i'm-too-sexy" face or his "is-he-18-yet?" face) is the best cat in the world.

10. soft silver fur compells you to touch him at all possible times.
9. soft silver fur will sell for pretty penny should we ever go broke.
8. despite mass body weight, sounds more like a mouse than a cat
7. always eats food lying down.
6. refuses to drink out of water bowl. prefers toilet.
5. can barely jump up on the couch due to 20 pound belly. this is real-live comic relief.
4. allows himself to be chased and tackled by baby constantly.
3. allows baby to use him as personal stacking toy, covering him with animals, blocks, trucks, food, etc.
2. is very protective of baby when he cries, circling me and meowing, to make him feel better.

and the number one reason catfish is the best cat in the world: forgives baby every night and lets him complete a full day of torture all over again.

it ain't easy.

here's the situation: they're turning our apartments into fancy shmancy condos. we have to be out by september 1st. we haven't found a house yet. benji has been out of town and is working around the clock when he's in town so he's not available to look at homes. i'm sort of doing the legwork, weeding out things that smell like mold or are next to crack dens, etc.

i've contacted a mortgage broker and we're going to talk to him sunday. our application is already in and we know we can get approved for 200,000, however a house at that cost is going to put our monthly payments higher than we'd like. (we want to stay at 900 and under if possible, keeping our cost of living the same.) it's all speculation at this point, though.

saturday, hopefully, we're going to do another round of house looking with our dream agent and we'll be more financially armed with the information we'll obtain on sunday. i've called our apt./condo owners who say they'll probably let us stay here another two weeks if we have proof we're closing on a home.

otherwise, benji says we'll do a 6 month lease on an apartment while we're looking.

personally, i think we can do it. i think we can find and buy a house in a month, and if it takes even six weeks, i think we could put everything in storage and camp out at a friends house for a week or stay in an extended stay hotel type place.

i've got everyone on a rush with money, baby and time as a leverage. i know i'm guilty of doing it, but right now i'm a little sick of people telling what's impossible. NOTHING IS IMPOSSIBLE. nothing. so work with me people.

i love the one house i saw way too much. mary and i have discussed the house and it's proximity . . .walking distance . . .to one another, like highschool students who think they're going to grow up and mary brothers and live on the same block where our kids will grow up to be best friends.

i love this house because it's ready to move in. it's clean and nice and well painted. nothing needs to be changed. well . . .. there is that blue carpet in one room, but at least it's new.

i have bbq's and housewarming parties planned out in my head. i even had a dream about it last night.

but benji hasn't seen it yet, and the mortgage guy says it will cost us more per month than we want.

my fingers are crossed three times over. i am not excited about living in another apartment for 6 months. 6 months of limbo. i am not excited about staying here one more day. my carpet is nice and stained from baby spillage and fingerpaint, but i see no reason to spend money shampooing and scrubbing carpet that will be ripped out in no time anyway.

it ain't easy. and still, dude, i'm so grateful.

house #1

only one actual step into this trip, but i could totally move into one of the houses we looked at today. only one of the six, but a winner is a winner. truly a good and excited feeling rushes over me as i say this. my imagination jumps the boat; dreaming of landscaping, replacing carpet in one room and running through the yard.

our realestate agent, susan nelson, is an absolute gem, personally and professionally. and her daughter, kinome at sweet 200 in dallas, cuts a mean hair.

my eyes, they say close. the worklist to the left of me disagrees.

me=

. . .new spoon, bought yesterday in a bunch, 6 for a dollar, half of a roll of chocolate chip cookie dough, pictures and organizational business things sitting in a pile collecting dust while i house hunt instead of work, thinking mary's one of the nicest people in dallas. . .

viewing pleasure

the intentions behind this blog were to excersise my writing skills on a daily basis. like, back in the good 'ole days, when words were the equivilent to air. and happiness. i wanted to get out those abstract philosophical ramblings. perhaps a short story or two. whatever came to mind.

but my thoughts were revolving around motherhood, photography and how i was supposed to regain my crown of cool domestic goddess.

and the blog evolved into that.

now i think, i'm just all pure baby. everything finds a way to dedicate itself to the 20 month old mass that now talks.

so why not add to that?

if you enjoy the direction my blog has taken, you're gonna love this.

dear tacky

to all you people with borders and wall paper and floral curtains and anything mauve or teal and canary yellow kitchens and pink tiled bathrooms and p-a-n-e-l-i-n-g and blue carpet:

you're all making this whole house hunt really hard.

stop it already. borders and paneling and neon aqua glossy painted walls with floral pattern fluffy top curtains are just not cool. we can't buy that. but thanks for taking a .5 pixel picture of your bathroom and posting it on the internet in some odd way that it stretches horizontally thereby increasing the toilet bowl to a good three feet. at least.

mary and i had a good three in the a.m. laugh over it. prolonged viewing of paneling via the new mac g5. 2.5 dual causes a euphoric and giggly sensation not unlike shwag and twinkies.

*sigh* not having much luck with realestate agents. the ones i've contacted have not called me and others out of the blue smelled the desperation of fevered internet searches for a house powered by a benji phrase that keeps ringing in my head, "really, i'd like to be out of here in three weeks" and hunted me down. all of these agents sound as if they're sitting in the basement of a trailer, if such a thing could be a reality, smoking their second carton of the day and dreaming of the day when they'll splurge and add a nice heart border to their paneling.

in all seriousness, i'm looking for a house in dallas. if you can help, holla.

somewhere over the rainbow

penn loves makeup. i don't have a lot of makeup, but what i do have, he finds fascinating and useful.

i find it cute. and messy. but very little about my baby isn't messy. he's encountered a lot of cuteness these days. much of which is on my old cell phone, because after many hours on the phone and two physical hours in the store, i was told my phone was broken and given a new one. i was given a new one, the salesman says, "because i can see here from your record all the trouble you've had this year with phones." yessir. this is phone number 5 this year and i gave up on your damned replacement phones through insurance and paid for a new phone outright.

when they transferred the data, i told them that my numbers had come through, but there were no pictures. "oh. well. the pictures stay with the phone." groan. you've got to be kidding. salesman mike at the cingular store on oak lawn said the only way i could get them would be through e-mail, and the e-mail on this phone doesn't work.

i inform him that he could hook up a usb cord to the phone to get the pictures off.

mike says (in that voice that says, "shit, she knows about that."), "oh sure, you're welcome to purchase the usb cord for $25.00 and the software."

i plead with him, the pictures of my baby's first parade in canada are in that phone. a picture of the tree that fell in a storm and crushed a car across the street are in that phone. a picture i was going to show to our apartment managers of our filthy pool are in that phone. cute exists in gatrillions of megapixels in that phone and you're telling me i can have them if i give you more money for something that should have worked in the first damned place?!

nothing. i walk out. angry. with no pictures.

this is penn in trouble. for hitting. he hits when he's angry because something didn't go his way. because mommy doesn't do something fast enough for him. or because mommy says no. the stool he is sitting on was made for my mother by her grandfather. or great grandfather? i forget. i sat on it as a child and am delighted to pass it on to my own son. i hate that i turned it into a seat of discipline, but when the whole stool thing came about, it was just sort of there and convinient.

i'd like to put a certain number of companies on that stool right now. then again, i might need a bench, 'cause mr. penn is spending a little too much time on it these days.

this is all going to be over, right? right?

simplicitea

all done. now, i haven't used any of these products . . .yet. . .but i will say the packaging is beautiful. i'm a sucker for packaging. not to mention in the one hour they sat in my car they made ole honda smell amazing. photos to appear at simplicitea.com and thetea.com soon.

tuesday/wednesday

put the baby to bed. drag out the big heavy black lights and the big heavy white backdrop. note one light missing and one bulb blown. poke self in head with reflector umberella. carefully lay out expensive tea product. shoot. shoot. shoot. talk to mary on speakerphone while shooting. for small moment feel very high-tech glamerous surrounded by equipment under hot lights despite expected semi-loathing of product photography. download. digitally make superwhite the almost superwhite background. abnormal program termination doesn't annoy me because it's three in the morning. sleep.

omigod, dialup sucks

benji's quote of the day: "sorry i can't stay guys. i've got to take my son to his first adult movie."

that movie being "march of the penguins."

when mary and i went to see "hustle and flow" we saw a trailer for "march of the penguins." i went home gushing about it and pulled up the trailer online. here penn fell in love with penguins and asks to see it again and again.

finally, after several weeks of watching this trailer at the baby's request online and him rattling off about penguins, benji announced that we were going to take him to see it.

going to the movies is a huge and spectactular event for benji that dates to way back when. it involves going to a gas station beforehand and loading up on candy and buying a big gulp of coke at the theatre and then sitting practically in the front row. (i loathe the front row of a theatre. i can't believe they even have seats that close.)

so for penn's first movie we took daddy's car (big treat for the baby) and went to a gas station for nerds, twix, and an m-azing bar (as seen on "the apprentice.")

i wanted to snatch all that candy back. i wanted to drop dead on the floor right there when penn asked for drink and benji handed him coke.

but i didn't. this was benji's night. and when benji had to tell penn "shhhh" i wondered and worried at how the caffine and sugar intake was going to affect how "shhh" penn was going to be.

penn did remarkably well. he announced loudly "penguin!" and "egg!" and "fish!" and "bird!" (the penguins are "birds" while on land, but as soon as they hit the water he calls them "fish") and "moon!" (he thought the projector light was the moon) and made some people laugh as he ran up the aisle once, but overall he was content. he did announce close to the end "home!" because he wanted to go home. but when the credits rolled he said, "again?"

go see the penguin movie. go see it. you won't regret it. it's playing at two screens at the magnolia in dallas and our theatre was packed. there's romance, struggle, life, death and humor. at one point a penguin slips and falls and i cracked up so hard i had to swallow the laughter that wanted to bubble out far after everyone else was bubbling.

while your there check out blake askew's photos hanging in the bar. totally up my alley. and mounted on plywood! how the hell? i so want to copy that. errr, borrow and elaborate on his idea.

retarded

on our way to drop off some donations to our local shelter, we passed a gigantic cingular store. another store who now reeks of corporate policy red tape crap since merging with at&t. when i use their online "store locator" to find my nearest friendly orange man i'm told to go way the heck across town. never has it told me that this gigantic store existed mere blocks from my house.

so we stopped in to explain that no one has been able to see my beautiful camera pics because the internet won't work. 45 minutes later, with a tired and impatient penn, the customer service rep announces it works. since it was an hour past lunch, i took penn to "fries." that's what penn calls it. the rest of the modern world calls this american icon, "mcdonalds." i know. gross.

so penn ate fries and chased birds on the playground while i attempted to send his papa a picture. still not sure that it worked. it certainly didn't send the e-mail.

my bank can suck it.

it's been a retarded seven days. i'm not normally one to let retardeness last for so long so i'm struggling to find the ability to "forgetaboutit."

meanwhile . . . .the booking contenuies!

minus cool points

i was reading "the corrections," by jonathan franzen (good stuff) out on the balcony and smoking a ciggarette. i was in the midst of a good part, that being all of it. my butt had comfortably sunk into the aging blue camping chair. my feet were propped against the peeling paint on the railing and the whole thing exacted itself in such a way that, like spontaneous prose, it could never be recreated.

rather than ruin a perfect moment, i flicked my ciggarette butt over the edge and into the parking lot instead of getting up to put it in the ashtray. but not before i thought, "what a hypocrit. i probably just lost all my good karma points."

segway:

my bank has unjustly taken a large sum of money from my account in fees, despite information provided through online banking and the atm. according to "them" atm's and online banking reports aren't accurate. it's all my fault for not keeping a written record of my transactions. so then why the hell am i using online banking? atm's? 'cause i want to see incorrect data? they're not sure.

four letters back and forth to customer service and a discussion with one teller have proven fruitless, however i'm going to talk to a manager tomorrow. ridiculous, i tell you. earned a couple hours of back-of-the-mind worry from me.

next up, to the grocery because i accidently left the cat litter on the bottom of the cart. i threw away my receipt. rudely enough, i was told that even though octavio remembers checking me out and other dude remembers having to put the cat litter on the bottom of the cart for me so i could put the baby in the seat, i can't have my cat litter. buh-bye.

good news is, right before i threw that ciggarette butt off the balcony, thereby potentially causing the rain to fall on my friday parade, i interviewed and booked two more big shoots.

other prospects? we met with a realestate agent today and will start looking at houses in person saturday. so. excited.