After one month and six (6) visits from delivery/installation crews, we finally got the dryer hooked up ... only to find that the cocksucking 220-volt outlet apparently isn't working. Four out of five outlets in the bedroom are also dead, and I don't think I can hit up the seller for any of the repair expenses, since these outlets passed inspection; something must have gone wrong since then. One of the major reasons I wanted to move into a newly renovated house was to avoid the sort of infuriating and scary electrical problems we had in our old one.

The only thing worse than having a house is not having a house. I think Oscar Wilde said that.

Anyway, Daddy doesn't do laundromats, and Chris has enough work washing his own kitchen-soiled clothes without washing my stuff too, so I am plumbing the dregs of my wardrobe, buying new clothes I don't really need, and sometimes even wearing dirty things that don't seem to stink too badly. What a glamorous life I lead.

Ah well, at least the new furniture came, and looks beautiful in our living room. I can hardly believe we're actually going to have a central place to hang out. The living room in our old house was a cold and inhospitable space with a badly sloping floor, so we spent most of our time in the bedroom. If we had company, we had to sit around the breakfast room table, which wasn't particularly comfortable. Now we have a lovely leather sofa and two recliners. It almost makes me wish I believed in declawing. We chose the most durable fabrics we could find, but eventually, inevitably, they will wreck everything.

Tomorrow is the St. Bernard Irish/Italian/Isleño parade, but I have already committed to help bake cookies for a St. Joseph's altar. This is my favorite parade with the possible exception of Rex and I can hardly believe I'm going to miss it, but due to having gotten the house, I cannot refuse anything anyone asks me to do for St. Joseph this year. Though the timing is bad, I've never actually helped bake the cookies before, so it should be interesting.

As a reward for reading all this boring house stuff lately, I give you the following passage from The Knife Man, a biography of eighteenth-century anatomist/surgeon John Hunter. There's not much that can make me go "ew" anymore, but this did.

Anatomy was invariably a sensory experience. As well as being subjected to the all-pervading odor of decay, the crackle of the dried membranes, and the need for intense visual inspection, students were urged to feel the textures of the different parts and even to taste the body fluids. Without sophisticated methods of scientific analysis, at a time when microscopes were primitive and visually unreliable, anatomists were forced to depend on their innate senses. Hunter frequently employed his sense of taste in dissection, and he encouraged his pupils to do likewise, as he recorded matter-of-factly: "The gastric juice is a fluid somewhat transparent, and a little saltish or brackish to the taste." And he would even observe, "The semen would appear, both from the smell and taste, to be a mawkish kind of substance; but when held some time in the mouth, it produces a warmth similar to spices, which lasts some time."

It does rather, doesn't it? But rotting corpse jizz ... I ask you.