The Phone Wars.

sorry for the long delay between posts, folks. this unpacking thing is a nightmare, mostly because i really just am positively DONE with things that have to do with moving. and yet they persist in not being done with me. the boxes look at me with attitude, and the apartment yawns with space waiting to be filled with our crap.

add 98 degree heat to this, and some very bad allergy attacks, and you start to get an idea of what it's been like so far.

actually, we've done alright. the big issues have been that the moving company lost the legs to my desk, and as it's now only suitable for children under 5 and adults with dwarfism, setting up my office has been put on hold while i find time to replace it. and the phone company has been acting like they don't know how to hook up a land line, which wouldn't have been a problem if the cell phones worked in here, which they don't (imagine the pure frustration of being on hold with the phone company for about 20 minutes, only to have your cell phone drop the call). yesterday the phone co. asked me to go to the phone box outside the house and see if it was getting a signal (which, last i looked, was their job, not mine). so this morning, in my pjs, i wandered from one end of the house to another outside, finally locating the phone box in questions behind a bush. i crept back there with a phone and a screwdriver, opened it up, and saw that someone had unplugged the phone lines. i plugged them back in and voila! phone service! on my own! i have many talents. you may now add phone service repair to my resume.

also, a trip to the DMV, with a wait on line for over an hour and absolutely nothing to show for it, was Eva's personal hell. that plus waiting on line at Hopkins for 2 hours for an ID badge.

we have moments, Eva and i, when we believe that Baltimore is just a bureaucracy. lines in person, waiting on hold, things that make no sense and don't work. you get the picture.

some things that have been swell, though, are eva's new car (a sweet little subaru), central air (hooray!) and thunderstorms, which are very frequent here this time of year. i've also been pretty busy with work, and have found what seems to be a good yoga studio. not bad, in all. here's what our first big thunderstorm in town looked and sounded like from our porch: