Territory

So we made our semi-annual pilgrimage back to Syracuse (or, as my husband calls it, Syra-ma-cuse) last week. Naturally, we packed as much fun and friends as we possibly could into the space of two and a half days -- even spent one night visiting our old favorite haunts, drinking and dancing and cavorting shamelessly -- good god, the cavorting...

Other, tamer pursuits were pursued as well... we visited with Matt's parents, which was nice (I love them), saw Matt's uncle and aunt from San Francisco, which was eerie (Uncle is a vivid image of Matt, 30 years from now), attended his (our) niece's third birthday party (she's adorable, natch), which was exhausting.

Then, when we returned home in our zippy little rental car, we discovered that my Dad had gone over and above the call of the cat-sitting he had agreed to do... the front porch light was replaced (a brand new light fixture, updated wiring -- we're not just talking a replaced light bulb here), and he had taken all our trash and lawn refuse to the dump (our dump sticker expired last week, and we needed that hundred bucks for other things), and he had cleaned out the fridge (ohmigod), and he had cleaned out the kitty litter box (wow). Yay Dad!

What is odd, and very very ungrateful of me, is that all this cleaning and trash-removing (and the lack of our all-too-human presences for a few days) has made our house smell, um, like someone else's. Someone nice. Someone clean. Someone with a steady job, and regularly scheduled laundry-related activities.

So tonight I am lounging -- lounging intently, lounging prodigiously, lounging with a vengeance. I am making sure to spend equal amounts of time in each room, exuding. I am cooking red beans and rice with cajun spices for dinner, baking cranberry scones for breakfast, and simmering a triple-batch of chicken stock for later. I am spilling red wine on the hardwood floors, eating cheese and crackers, and encouraging the cats to shed.

That new front porch light, though, that's pretty neat. That can stay.