It's been a while. I never seem to know what to post, since after listening to my father's interminable depressive grumblings, I don't feel like showing my own off. Some things have happened, though, so I can legitimately say stuff.

First, I finally packed my cat and some underwear up and moved. Azul and I are settled in our new home, which feels both very nice and a little overwhelming. Ideas of things to do are constantly chasing each other around my mind, and I don't even remember some of the big ones, like shoveling off the deck. Zuli's very happy. He's decided to beg, whether for food or attention, from anyone sitting at the dining room table. It's awfully cute. My parents spoil him ridiculously. I wish he'd stop nibbling on the fake Christmas tree, though. He keeps swallowing "needles" and getting a stomachache.

Second, I was supposed to retake the GRE today and completely fucking forgot about it.

Third, my brother isn't speaking to me.

Fourth, I met with an advisor in the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences office on Thursday, and he confirmed that I'm in a tart academic pickle. He recommends that I don't return to class until next fall. Besides further contributing to the rot and neglect of my little gray cells, that costs me my health insurance. I need to convince him that I can come back for two classes and kick ass. How? Fuck if I know.

Fifth, I'm getting very weird about some things, and uncharacteristically angry about others, and I cannot make up my mind whether it's just stress and will pass or if I'm at the beginning of a nervous breakdown. Kate says it's probably just stress. My counselor says it's probably just stress, but to keep an eye on it. So to speak. So I'm trying to pay attention, but not freak myself out, which is awfully difficult, since one of the exact things that's wrong with me is that I go off the deep end about anything medical.

Is there anything else? I've been crocheting. I made a garland for my small fake Christmas tree. Or most of a garland. I got terribly bored toward the end and decided that it didn't really need to go all the way around the bottom. I made myself a headband and a small potholder. Mainly, though, I work on the motifs for what I'm going to call the Afghan Of Insomnia. I have Kate wanting to crochet now, too, except that her cats won't sit nicely on her lap and leave the yarn alone like mine does.

Oh, yes. Since my brother's mad at me, he decided that I'm not to take Yoda. So Azul and I will be here by ourselves until I figure out how to afford adopting one (or maybe two) of the many, many cats who need homes.

I haven't been reading much. No, I've been enjoying the On Demand a little too much. I did finally finish Anatomy of a Murder, though. I came down with a pretty nasty sinus infection last week, and I'm still recovering. I got a collection of Chekhov's plays at the thrift store, and I find myself wanting to read it. Somehow I never can remember that when I have the energy for it, though, and don't need filler reading, like, uh, coffee house mysteries.

Nothing makes you feel shitty quite the way spending an entire day on the fold-down couch in the living room of a small hotel suite in Chicago and doing nothing but watching television and eating crappy food (because you can't leave the room to smoke, since your brother took the only key to therapy with him) makes you feel shitty. You can add the kind of shitty you feel after a very freaky dream that feels like it lasted for 12 hours, too. I think I'd like to stop dreaming about airports, now. I don't mind dreaming about movies, though dreaming you're an idiot interviewer is something other than pleasant. And then Nancy Spungeon showed up, and how could that ever be a good thing, you know? Nancy isn't my fault, though; she showed up because of the autopsy documentary I watched.

I drove my father into Chicago on Friday so he could meet with his VA voc rehab counselor. Among all the other things that didn't go quite right, like my father being in so much of a rush that he forgot to take his morning morphine, and my father insisting that I drive the speed limit on the tollway, meaning that people were passing me at the rate of several a minute and making me very nervous, and my father turning on the goddamn Christian radio station—among all of that normal crap to deal with on a Driving Dad day, my mother's van went and got itself a problem.

What problem? I don't know. First my window wouldn't go up. Then the left turn signal wouldn't turn off. Then the right turn signal wouldn't come on. Finally, I pulled into a drop-off circle in front of one of the city colleges, turned the van off, and couldn't turn it back on. After more than an hour, and at least a dozen calls on my nearly dead phone, I got hold of a towing company. The jumpstart didn't work. The van would start while on the charger, but the battery didn't charge. Or something.

So, my father and I squeezed into the cab of the tow truck with the driver, and he brought us and the van all the way back to DeKalb. He was a nice guy. One of his daughters is a big Obama fan and wants to be a lawyer. It was fun to listen to him; he's so proud of her.

I'm so tired that I can't remember why I wanted to post about this.

I don't think I could be happier about Obama winning than I am. I teared up at least a dozen times last night. My brother called after the speech in Grant Park ended, still sniffling from his own bout of relieved and happy crying.

Of course, my father didn't fail to be a psycho and turn the television off in disgust after hearing the projection of Obama's win, saying, "This is bullshit! The nigger won!" Oh, yes. Really. He said that. I didn't react—well, not other than freezing and going full-body queasy. If I were better at thinking on my feet, perhaps I'd've found something to say that would have expressed the appropriate sentiment and yet not started one of our furious screaming matches, but I'm not good at thinking on my feet, so I said nothing. Besides, my father's nuts. He's always in a foul mood lately, always at one emotional extreme or another, paranoid, apocalyptically negative and pessimistic, always looking for something or someone to bitch about or lash out at. I don't think he gave a shit about who got elected; he just wanted an excuse to say something as hateful and outrageous as possible.

My mother and I are going to meet at my house tomorrow after she gets done with work and I get done with my appointment with the nurse practitioner at Ben Gordon. She wants to spray the edges of all the rooms with carpet cleaner and vacuum them; I need to get all the dishes that are over there washed and rake the front yard.

My schedule's off, because I crashed for almost six hours after getting back from Hines with my father this afternoon, but I should still be able to get up in time to get over to the county legislative center to vote—I love early voting—and to get to the grocery store and pick up a few things. I need more Halloween candy, for one, and my father needs vanilla.

I've been paying more attention to what I eat this week, mostly because I ran out of the probiotic that helps with the lactose intolerance, and, as a result, I've realized that I get cravings for something sweet several times a day and consume a boatload of sugar. Far too much sugar. I should've realized something was up when I started drinking orange juice and root beer, when I don't especially like either.

So I have to keep paying attention to what I eat, which isn't fun, and I have to stop mindlessly giving in to the cravings for sugar, which is even less fun. Based on past experience, though, the cravings will be gone after a couple of weeks and it'll get a lot easier. Therefore, when I sped through the grocery store before it closed tonight, I picked up rolls, sandwich meat, cheese, pears, and baby carrots. I almost got soy milk, was actually heading back toward the case for it, when I realized that there was no point in having soy milk to put on cereal when I shouldn't eat cereal in the first place.

I rediscovered all the UCTV stuff on YouTube today. Wow, it's like someone put new batteries in my brain.

I'm not moved yet. I haven't even taken over the first load of books. I spent a while, a couple of weeks, really, far too long, unable to decide whether to go ahead and move and take care of things like removing carpeting and doing painting later, or to wait to move and make the major changes first. It was only two or three days ago that I finally decided that I should just move in, get settled, and worry about the floors and walls and unattractive downstairs bathroom sink later.

So I could've started taking the books over this week. (I still can, I guess. It's only Thursday night.) I might actually have done it, if I hadn't run out of allergy medicine several days ago, or if I'd decided to go pick up more promptly, instead of letting myself sit here being a sneezy, snotty, itchy zombie. I'm also giving the CPAP machine, with the same old mask, another try, since I never got around to calling them to bring me a different kind. I'll get used to the mask and the machine eventually, and then it will help, but in the meantime it takes me hours and hours to fall asleep with the mask on, and I wake up after only an hour or two. It could be worse; I rarely have anything to do, so I can catch up sleep whenever I want or am able to, but, man, for a little while there my body had fallen into a nice schedule, waking me up at about the same time each morning, usually after at least seven hours of minimally interrupted sleep, and I felt a little bit more... lively. Now I'm all messed up again.

There are times when I think that getting myself into better—more stress-tolerant, more energetic—shape is going to be a long and messy process, but entirely possible, and not even really all that difficult. And then, of course, there are times I think it's impossible, that either my body is simply not cut out to handle, well, anything, or that I'm hopeless, lacking in willpower, fortitude, ambition, anything, everything. I dunno; I think the most frightening thing right now about moving is going back to a world where I have control. Don't get me wrong—that's also a huge benefit and attraction. I become very, very passive in response to stress and stressors, which is totally unhealthy.

Moving has begun. My mother decided that I needed to take over a couple of lamps and timers, and, naturally, she couldn't leave it at that, so she grabbed my hamper—I have no idea where it was—and a small garbage can, a couple of dishtowels I bought for my apartment long ago, and about 50 pounds of silverware, not including my own proper set. We took my cute little coffee table that Harley chewed on as a puppy over, too, so she could set a small lamp she found on something besides the floor. So it's now too late to do things, like, oh, take out all the carpet, fix up the old hardwood floors, put in a railing on the open side of the stairs, paint, et cetera, et cetera, before I move in. Oh well. It's a house. I should be there plenty long enough to fix everything up the way I want it, eventually.

Otherwise, everything's pretty much the same. I didn't exercise for a while, and it really set me back, so I've made sure to spend time on my bike the last two days. It's so fucking relaxing that I'd stay on the bike for hours, if my ass didn't fall asleep. I read, I sleep, I spend time just lying on my bed so Azul will snuggle with me. I watch my Netflix rentals, and once in a while I catch some TV with my father. I stopped checking in at Facebook every day, 'cause between my elderly computer and our slowish internet connection, I spent more time fidgeting impatiently than having fun. I play a few games on Neopets every day, but that's only workable late at night or early in the morning.

I talk to Kate and my brother pretty regularly. Kate's coming down for the weekend. I may or may not be house- and dogsitting for Pieter and Sherry, who may or may not be going to Wisconsin for the weekend. I haven't been up to see Kate and Tommy's place yet, but hopefully I'll get a chance to go up there in the next month or so. I told Kate to let me know when she was settled. It might be a little while yet, 'cause I know she wants to have money to do stuff if I go up there, and she just started her new job Monday. At least I know that if I ever head up to Green Bay on short notice, my father will very happily babysit Zuli. He really loves Azul. The feeling is not, I'm sorry to say, mutual; Grandpa's done too much yelling, and now Azul is scared of him. You should hear the fuss he makes when Grandpa picks him up. It makes me feel guilty: I'm sitting or standing there, trying to soothe my cat with, "Oh, baby. It's okay! Mama's here!" and Azul just keeps mewling: "Damn it, Mom, I know you're there! HELP me!"

What school in its right mind wants to invite someone with the wildly inconsistent scores of a 730 verbal (top 1%) and 3.5 writing (bottom 25%) to apply to a Ph.D. program? See? I wasn't kidding about bombing the writing sections. I looked at the breakdown of my scores for the math section online and, Christ, I thought it was just crap like finding standard deviations that I screwed up on. It's more like I got every other question wrong.

There was a little drama this week with the house, but it appears to be all taken care of now. Closing is scheduled for Monday at 10 a.m.

GRE scores came today. I got a better score on the writing section than I deserved, but it still stinks. I'm gonna have to retake the exam.

The listing realtor wants to close on the house Monday. The 6th. So I gotta go to my bank this afternoon and see if I can get some stuff settled.

I got back from running errands a little while ago. I finally got to the Ellwood House gift shop to get some postcards, but I was disappointed. There were no exterior shots, and I didn't especially like any of the interior shots. The lighting in most of them is strange. The one of the dining room isn't bad, though, so I got a bunch of those, and I got a bunch of the ones that have a sort of vintage/antique barbed wire ad thing going, 'cause they say "DeKalb, Ill."

Then I went to Target, where nothing exciting happened except that I tried on what I thought would be a cute dress—I've been keeping an eye out for something to wear to a wedding—and discovered, when I tried it on, that it made me look like an Italian grandmother on her way to a funeral. Ugh. Mildly depressing. On the other hand, I did find some cute, comfortable slip-on shoes to replace the little brown maryjanes I picked up at Payless and have worn to snot.

Hmmm. Anything else? Not much. I talked to Kate for a little while before I left for the stores. She's spending today and tomorrow trying to get a start on finding a job up there in Green Bay. There wasn't much in the paper. We talked a little bit about the Wall Street implosion, but neither of us has been able to bring ourselves to read or otherwise find out anything about it in detail.

NIU's law school is having an open house/workshop sort of deal tomorrow night at 5:30, so I'm gonna go if I've got a car. I finally have an appointment with my counselor, on Friday, and on Monday my brother has a doctor's appointment, so I'll be heading to Rockford on Sunday. I think Sherry and I are going to go to some stores and look at dresses together. That reminds me, I'd better get directions from Pieter's to the doctor's office before I forget.