You Might Be Able To Hear A Pin Drop

The house is eerily quiet now. My mom, a.k.a. our final holiday guest, boarded a plane and flew back to my true love. I did not have to shed tears on my drive home. I did not have to open the closet in the guest room and hug the coat that she left (which is a darn good thing because this time she did not leave said coat). I did not have to wander around my house for a day and a half wondering if I could survive without her. So I guess I've made progress.

Last Wednesday my son's grandparents, Uncle Jon and Aunt Heather descended upon my house bearing luggage and enough gifts to make an orphanage smile. My parents moved in to the guest room. Heather was blessed with an air mattress in the playroom, you know, in case she got a midnight hankering for some Little People. (That sentence is wrong on so many levels.) And Jon, well, he was given the best bed of all, the couch. Merriment was had. For one amazing week it was as though nothing had changed at all this past year, except, of course, the weather.

Now they have gone and my little puppy* has been deposited into bed and it is quiet. It's no more silent than it was in Ramona when we put the boy to bed but it just feels different being so far from home. I mean, if a Lori talks incessantly in the middle of a Utah, but no one in her family is around to hear it, does she make a sound? These are the great ponderances of life. I can hear my clock tick and I can hear the laptop clack which means I can definitely hear myself think and y'all that's just not necessarily a good thing. Also it should be noted that awesomeness oozes when native Californians use the word y'all in the Beehive state, which has no affiliation with the south whatsoever.

Tomorrow I plan to begin The Great Cleaning Crusade. Anyone wanna place any bets on whether or not that will happen? I'll make it easy for you. Instead of cleaning I will probably begin counting the hours until my trip to San Diego. 28 days. I'm going to try not to think about the fact that I could do an entire rehab program in that amount of time. Do they have rehabilitation centers for people with state addictions? "Hi, my name is Lori and I'm a California addict. I've been clean for 37 days but I plan to take a hit the moment I graduate from this program." Hmmm.

*My son has decided that he is, indeed, a puppy. He barks constantly and he does so in the highest pitch possible. He'd make a soprano proud, that boy.