it rains a lot here, and other truths

it rains every single day. sometimes all day. we've been here for 10 days. we unloaded our stuff from the u-haul at midnight at midnight in the rain and it's been raining since. sucks for me because i walk everywhere.

we don't have a washer and dryer yet. we went out yesterday and bought new underwear instead of going to the laundromat. i hate laundromats. i always thought i would like them, until i had to use them. not at all like our little laundry center in the dorms at college. that was nice. when we were walking into the store after work yesterday, i caught a glimpse of myself and my husband in a store mirror and thought for the first time in my life: i look so grown up.

i love the library. i love being able to walk to it. i love looking at books with old pictures. i just read about hollywood in the 1910s-20s. i can't believe how little humanity has changed since then, and how lot it has. i also can't believe how plain (even unattractive sometimes) the movie stars were. or how un-skinny.

i am deathly afraid of roaches. it gets in the way of normal life, especially in the south. the year we lived in massachusetts was the most carefree of my life in terms of being scared of bugs. in texas, it's back with a vengance. however, i've only seen 3 roaches in 10 days - a big one outside crawling up the wall, a medium one in the street crawling along, and a tiny one in our bathroom when i kicked a box to see if there were any roaches in it. jack wants a platform bed, and my reason against it is that with a platform bed the bugs will crawl across us instead of under us. who can argue with that logic.

i had a dream last night about katrina (i think). we were still young - my mom, sister, brother and me - but looking through a mess of our childhood rooms and deciding what to take with us. my sister didn't want anything, so i packed up her sentimental jewelry and took down all of the pictures from her bulletin boards - there were a lot of us in dancing school. throughout there was a sense of dangerous urgency to our actions. that's it.

i was sick to my stomache every day from high school to college. i don't know if it was stress (i was a very stressed kid) or mental or something else. i would carry pepto bismal in my purse and take it before going anywhere. like a placebo or preventive or something, sometimes every few hours if i was on a date or somewhere important. i'm scared it's back.

although we are in texas, it feels like mexico. the flowers and plants are the same, the tiles and architecture and, well, the mexicans. i love mexico and always wanted to live there, so it works for me.