I’m sitting squished in between a stack of very large and precariously piled boxes. Not everything is packed, but enough is boxed up that I feel good about how tomorrow will go. In that department anyway. I have one friend coming to help me unpack, but only two guys coming to help haul our junk to the new house. That stresses me out a bit. The trouble is that Chris works swing shift and so we have to move during the day and not a whole lot of people are around at ten am. So they say. According to How Things Are Run a third of this base should be on swings, so there should be an entire third of the base available to help out, but not many people are stepping up. My only real concern is trying to get the piano onto the truck. In my opinion that is a four or five man job, not a three men and wussy me job. So this could be interesting.

I have a few more boxes I need to fill before tomorrow but I can’t convince both kids to sleep at the same time and the house in such disarray there really isn’t any safe place to set Maggie down. I have feeling it will have to wait until bedtime, which, since Jonas just opted to take his siesta at four in stead of one, will probably be pretty late. I think I’m going to let him have another ten minutes then wake him up.

Man, I’m bored! I hate being stuck in between times. I just want to get going and move things now. We are so anxious to get moved in that we are already watering the very dry, neglected lawn. My car is packed full of kitchen stuff just waiting for me to wake up and take the kids to my friend’s house so I can haul all of the stuff inside where I have another friend waiting to unpack it into my new cupboards. Thank heaven for friends or I’d seriously get nothing done.

Well, I need to get on the phone and see if I can scrounge up another herculean specimen of piano moving strength to help out. So that’s that. You’ll have a guest poster tomorrow

Today I ate chicken feet.

Ok, I ate a bite and decided that it was just too gross to continue even though my crazy sister in-law was snarfing them like they were oreos. They taste, well, just like chicken. The trouble with these feet are that they are, well, feet. Feet are quite tendony and have bones running through them and so while the taste won’t make you gag, the texture will. I think it is best described as smooshy yet crunchy, which I realize is a contradiction in terms, but maybe that’s why it’s so hard to handle. (Jellyfish are actually similar in texture only more smooshy less crunchy.) Texture really freaks me out. I won’t cook anything but chicken breasts, and even then I have to cut every trace of fat off of them because gristle and tendon gross me out to no end. The mere thought of eating anyting like that is enough to make my stomach heave. But sometimes you do things you wouldn’t normally do for the bragging rights. I can now say, “I ate chicken feet.”

So how did I come to be eating feet on such a mild Sunday morning? Well, my other sister in-law got married yesterday morning, and now that all the wedding hoopla is behind us we still had a horde of people visiting at my in-law’s house so my brother in-law’s father, who is Chinese and a very sweet guy, decided to treat us all to a dim sum brunch. In San Jose. So we drove forty-five minutes to eat chicken feet.

We had custards, sea bass and sharkfin, crab and shrimp thingies wrapped in noodles and it was all very good. The one thing I didn’t try were the baby octopuses, so I can’t tell you how they were, but they were on the table, and I saw them, and cringed, but hey, I had just eaten a chicken foot. My adventure quota was filled for the day.

I am blogging from my in-law’s house today. What was originally an overnight trip has turned into a three night extended stay, and I am grateful to be out of my house which looks like a bomb went off what with all of the packing and moving and piles for the thrift store and such flung about. Tomorrow I have to go home and face reality and finish packing so I can move on Tuesday. Remember how I said we were moving on Thursday? I changed my mind. Why do tomorrow what you can do today? I hate living in limbo so I upped the move date so we could get things done before I went insane in the mess.

So here I am. Chicken feet traveling through my digestive system.