Last night we went out to dinner with some friends of ours, and their two little girls.

Their oldest is two and a half years old. We learned a lot about her last night:

• She lies about her weight.
• She may or may not have actually attempted to kill her little sister by pushing her down the stairs.
• She is very good about making sure all of her stuffed animals have clean diapers on.
• Although she is potty trained, if you put her in “time out”, she will poop her pants to prove that she is in charge.

When I moved out to Seattle in May 2000, I only brought with me what would fit in my Honda Civic. Which isn’t very much. Basically I brought my clothes, bathroom/bedroom items, a few kitchen items and things that I deemed really special to me.

To be fair, I must mention that my older brother moved out a month later and brought with him a moving van full of all of his junk. Inside his moving van he agreed to include my cedar chest (my first real furniture purchase as an adult) and my vacuum (but only if my parents would help him pay for his moving van. Yes, that’s the way he does things!)

The King was living on Capital Hill in a studio apartment (that became our home for two years after we were married). I stayed with his parents for a few weeks while I found an apartment for me to stay in. We were getting married in August, so I just needed a temporary place for the few months up until the wedding.

Since I was staying with The King’s parents, all my stuff was stored in their basement “rec room”. This included my big winter coat, my bedding, and a box full of Elmo.

I had been collecting Elmo paraphernalia for years. I had always dreamed of having a nursery full to the brink of Elmo’s. I have big Elmo’s, and little Elmo’s, and glass Elmo’s. Elmo books and Elmo games. Even Elmo curtains.

The King also have a few boxes of his stuff there. Boxes of things from when he lived in Berlin, and magazines with house ideas. Probably even things left over from high school (like maybe his sweet leather jacket with the buckles and shoulder pads).

Do I even have to tell you that all of this stuff has been in their basement since I moved here? We never took any of it in our house. Mostly because we knew we wouldn’t live there long and also because The King didn’t want it there.

His Mom has been bugging us (rightly so) for years to get our junk out of their basement. They have big dreams of cleaning the rec room up and actually using the pool table to play pool and not just for a place for The King’s art supplies and canvases to sit on. Plus, the bar in the rec room doesn’t look so cool with a giant Elmo sitting on it.

We have Sunday dinner at their house every weekend. Last night The King emerged from the rec room with a bag of items for the Goodwill. I couldn’t really see what was in the bag. I started to look through it and The King advised me to not even look. He told me that if I hadn’t needed the things in five years, I wouldn’t need them now. He told his Mom that every Sunday he would be going through a few of our things and getting rid of a little each week.

I saw some fake brown fur poking out of the bag. I’m pretty sure that it’s my winter coat. I didn’t see any red fur.

I hope Elmo is safe for a few more weeks.

I just got into work and dowloaded the belly pic from this morning. I’m getting bigger and really starting to feel it. I have 11 more weeks to go and who knows how many inches and pounds. E-gads.

I promise to have a real post later today.

I hate hair. Not the hair that’s on your head. That hair I tend to love. It’s all the other hair in this world that I hate. Especially hair that is no longer attached.

I think it hates me to.

The King also dislikes hair. He and I have both said that if we could be dropped, feet first, into a vat of wax and have all of our hair removed, we would be happier people. Hair just gets in the way of life.

I have always have longish hair. It’s also usually dark (except for those few times I put a little too much blond in it, and the few years I was a red head). This means that when a hair is no longer attached to my head, it is easy to see sitting on the floor, or stuck on the couch, or tangled in the bath mat. Plus, it seems like my hair falls out at an alarming rate. So it’s always lying on the floor and not on my head, where it should be.

The sight of a piece of hair makes me gag. Seriously gag. You know when the tub drain gets clog and you have to physically remove the hair that is clogging it? Oh my gosh, I hate doing that. Even though it’s my hair-it makes me sick.

I hate using a public bathroom and finding a piece of pubic hair just sitting there on the toilet seat, minding it’s own business. Didn’t the previous user notice they were leaving something behind and try to clean up a little? I won’t use a toilet with a hair anywhere in sight. (Unless, of course, I’m in Europe, pregnant, and really desperate to pee.)

The day we moved into our new apartment we noticed a hair left behind on the toilet. Gross. It FOR SURE wasn’t one of ours. The rest of the apartment was spotless, so we have never really figured out where it came from. To be completely honest, I’ve never gotten over that. We’ve lived there a couple of months and I’m still not comfortable in the bathroom. It’s tainted.

When I was in college, my roommates decided to shave some dork’s head when I wasn’t home. I hated this guy. He was cocky, without reason to be. You know the type. After they shaved all of his hair off, they asked him to clean it up off MY bathroom floor (yes, I had my own bathroom and they had used it). He swept all the hair up and then proceeded to flush it down the toilet. Everyone knows this won’t work. Nope, it just clogged up the toilet, which then started to overflow into the hall. It was overflowing toilet water mixed with disgusting hair.

Then he just left.

Yep-just left and went back to his dorm. My roommates didn’t clean it up either. I came home to a hallway full of wet hair. (I am having a hard time even typing about this, it grosses me out so much!) I had to clean it up all by myself. I can’t really remember specifics, but I’m pretty sure that I was swearing and yelling at the top of my lugs. All the while trying not to throw up. Which I still eventually did end up doing.

I guess what I’m saying is that if you come and stay at my house, be sure to clean up the bathroom floor when you’re done in there. And don’t you dare cut your hair in my house, at all.

On Monday night The King and I decided to go out for a nice dinner since we had been apart for a few days. It was pissing down rain (as my Dad likes to say), so we were hurrying from the car to the restaurant. I had my cute new hat on and The King had an umbrella. We had to walk down a very steep hill, and I didn’t want to slip in my heels.

Then we got stuck at a cross walk waiting for it to change. I turned to The King and asked, “what do you do while you’re waiting for the light to change?” He looked at me very perplexed and said, “you’re looking at it. I just stand here and wait.”.

Then he got curious and said, “why, what do you do?”

I got a sheepish look on my face and replied, “I count the seconds until it changes. I feel like it makes the time go by faster.”

He just smiled at me. Probably thinking to himself, “I’ve married a crazy lady!”

I have noticed since I admitted this out loud that I am very suspicious when I’m sitting there counting in my head that the whole world knows I do this and that they think I’m crazy.

I still think it makes the time go by faster.

Something that I’ve been thinking a lot about since coming back from visiting my family, is the difference between where they live and where I live.

They live in a pretty small town. A town that, until recently, had one stop light, two bars, two grocery stores, one feed store, and about 10 convenient stores/gas stations. Why so many convenient stores, you may ask? Because that’s where everyone hangs out.

When I go back to visit, the first few days are usually spent talking about who’s been married, or divorced, or had a baby since last time I was there. My Dad is a teacher at a near by high school, so he has connections to gossip that way. My Mom is a nurse in the nursery of the local hospital. So she is also very connected. Plus I have a younger brother and sister who still live pretty locally and have tabs on a lot of different people.

I usually roll my eyes while they are giving me the low-down on everything. But you know that secretly I love hearing everything they are spilling. The King hates this part of the trips to visit. He says he hates it because gossiping is wrong. I think he just doesn’t like it because he doesn’t have any idea who we are talking about.

The thing he really hates is when I get filled in on what my ex-husband has been up to. My family and friends are (somewhat) respectful and try to not talk about it while The King is around, but he still knows that they are telling me. Since my ex’s family live down the street from my folks (and I think he may even be living with them, but I wouldn’t know since I have had no contact with him in over 6 years) they can’t help but know what is going on. I heard about when he moved to Alaska. I heard about when he got married to my little brother’s prom date, then I heard when that was determined to be a rumor and he really wasn’t married. I heard when he moved back from Alaska and starting working at the same hospital as my Mom, but was totally snubbing her. I also heard about the girl he was dating that had left her husband to become a lesbian, but must not be a lesbian because she was dating my ex. Oh yes, I’ve heard it all.

I also tend to run into someone from his family when I’m there (but never him). I am not kidding when I say that the last two time I’ve been there I’ve seen his Mom (at that horrible place that sounds like Pal-Gart) in the exact same aisle. Of course, she totally snubbed me. I like to think she didn’t recognize me since I’ve had my braces off and look so much better. But the honest to goodness truth is, I was snubbed. I even ran into his little sister one night at the video store where she proceeded to tell me all about her wedding. She didn’t ask me one thing about me. Not one thing. Just informed me about her wedding and the guy she married.

Remember how I said that this trip was different from trips in the past? I figured out why.

It’s because I didn’t hear one thing about the ex. I didn’t hear anything about his family (who all live in a 5 mile radius of my family). I am not even sure that we ever drove by his house. I went out to the stores, but I didn’t run into any of them. Not his little brother, who I dated, or his two cousins, who I also dated (see, it’s a really small town. I had to literally move out of state to find someone decent to marry). Not even his Uncle, who I used to ride horses for.

The best part is that I didn’t even realize this until I was back home in Seattle and The King asked me, sarcastically, what my ex has been up to. He was as shocked as I was when I replied that I had no idea.

If I haven’t mentioned it before, I’ll mention it now. I love The City. I am such a City Girl. I always want to live where I can ride the bus to work, and shop at all hours of the night and day. I want to hear the sounds of airplanes and cars at night. And see the lights of the city through my bedroom window.

Most of all, I don’t want to have to be bothered with what other people are doing.

Especially not him.