Today I met with our new landlady and gave her a big fat deposit towards our new house. My companion and I were having last-minute freakouts about moving, the kind where you’re like, “oh my god, do we really want to stop giving the current people a huge percentage of our income and start giving someone new a huge percentage of our income?” The answer turned out to be yes, but last night we had to stop and read the “for rent” signs on the way to dinner and the bank, juuust in case we stumbled across something better. I don’t know how there could be anything better than what we found, unless there was a place that had a man in a closet (Raoul) who would come out every night, 1. give you a handjob, 2. make you a mai tai, and then 3. go back into his closet. I’m Just Saying. Also it would have to be fifty dollars less in rent. Also, Raoul would wash his hands between step one and two, don’t worry.

We (okay, me) were also freaking out a little bit about the bedroom arrangements. There is one bedroom on the ground floor, and two upstairs, and when you have two adults and two small children it’s sort of like that puzzle with the paparazzo, pile of cocaine, Paris Hilton, the sparkle dildo, and the rowboat. How can you get all four across the river safely? You can’t, my friends, you can’t. So I brought the landlady the bucket of paint she requested for Frannie’s room, in the color Franny chose: “Breathtaking Beauty.” If by “Breathtaking Beauty” they meant a bottle of Pepto Bismol humped a sack full of gumballs, then I see their point. It’s PINK, people. Really pink. I tried to steer her towards lavender, but man, that girl is seriously five or something. I thought maybe the landlady was going to balk at that color, but she just took it cheerfully and said that the same color is featured prominently in her six-year-old daughter’s room. This age, what are you going to do?

SURPRISE! I have a point: it’s that with the bringing of the can of paint, we had to decide which room was going to be painted pink. So we decided. And it was good.

I just felt weird and non-funky-fresh all week, because moving is good and bad, but seeing the house again made me relax. It’s awesome. The landlady’s nice, the only-two-years-old hardwood floors are warm and lovely, they’re going to let us garden, and I just found out that the person on the other side of the duplex is going to pop sprog in two months (suckers). So we will be trading child noise back and forth through the walls. Hooray, I was afraid they were going to be gleefully childless since they have a little yap dog.

Now I get to start sorting through our things, and deciding which books to sell. I sort with confidence and pride, because I am a Librarian. Thank god I suffered through two years of monkeyscience (tm halo) so I can authoritatively decide which slotted spoons and back issues of Vanity Fair to keep. The landlady even gave me the key, so we can come in and harass her general contractor and leave buttprints on the kitchen counter. You will be perplexed by our pressed ham-plus-fruit cup prints, which will appear inexplicably in the night like crop circles. DAVID LEE ROTH HIGH KICK, BITCHES, WE’RE MOVING.