10:06 SUNDAY NIGHT

It's 10:06 Sunday night and I'm sitting in the very clean living room smelling chocolate chip cookies that just came out of the oven. Astrid is lying on the couch next to me and Joedy and Lula are in bed; we had a late night, for a Sunday, because we started housecleaning at 3:30 and got carried away with it, tying up the big ficus next to the living room window whose branches are growing this way and that, getting the last of the moldy laundry, left over from the flood, off the garage floor, and generally doing a deep-down thorough scrubbing.

This morning we went to look at some houses we saw on Craigslist, both in Casitas Springs, which is about 15 minutes from downtown Ventura. The houses looked nice in the photos and they were much cheaper than our current place, with more space, etc, but in all honesty I was only half-heartedly interested because the idea of moving, again, to another random rental that we're not going to be in long-term just makes me feel...depressed. A few weeks ago Joedy said to me: "Hey, what would you think of living in Vermont?" There was a job in Burlington he thought he'd apply for, and of course the next day we were all over the Vermont Craigslist, looking at 18th-century farmhouses on 23 acres with lake and mountain views. It wasn't a good idea for Joedy to tell me he would actually maybe be ok with living in Vermont, because guess what? It's all I can think about now. I know I was all pro-Portland, Oregon, a few entries ago, but dude, I would be even way. more. happier. to go live in Vermont.

Maybe it's because I'm pregnant, and getting all nostalgic for my childhood, but there's a strong pull these days for the kind of weather and nature you get in New England: crocuses and tulips and daffodils in the spring; snow and ice, all glittery and fresh, in the winter; phlox lazily nodding in the late-summer sun; the smell and crunch of leaves underfoot in the fall. Thinking about these things, and about giving our kids an experience of the nature that I grew up with in Rhode Island, makes me really, really happy. Ventura feels increasingly wrong to me, maybe because we're close enough to the freeway to hear it day and night, maybe because I feel so isolated from family and friends, maybe because there are so many people and cars and ugly buildings, but also, weirdly, because of the nature: palm trees and winter-blooming jasmine are still great, and I'm sure if we moved to Vermont we'd think longingly of them in late February, but right now year-round summeriness and the attendant flora just isn't doing it for me.

On another note, I think I've more or less gotten this blog where I want it to be.* Besides some annoying shifting-of-elements problems (the header and post section move out of place when I look at the blog from other computers), I'm pretty content with the design and therefore am ready to move on, by golly, and it's about motherfruitcaking time. I've put mobiling and children's-booking on hold the past 2 months and four years, respectively, and now that I have a venue for writing that I like and feel good about, I want to get back into those other creative pursuits. It will be good to be able to stop thinking obsessively about the blog, and I can't wait to work on my other projects. For a long time I've been wanting to work simultaneously on "grown-up writing," children's books, and mobiles, and finally I think I'll be doing that.

Of course, in three weeks we'll have a two-day-old child to care for, so other projects might fall by the wayside a little, but we'll see...

*The cruel irony of life made sure that, on the day I declared "all is well with my blog," it got COMPLETELY screwed up. Motherfruitcaker!! Go to HTMHell, Blog God! Ach himmel, back to square one...