I’m only moving a couple of miles, but it feels momentous. P is less thrilled, but I simply can’t wait. I’ll miss my morning view of the sun coming up over a bank of pine trees. I’ll miss my bathroom (it’s nothing special, but the new one isn’t great). I’ll miss controlling the heat for only my own apartment. I’ll miss not having to think about snow removal. But everything else will be orders of magnitude better. I hope.

I’ll finally feel free to invite my local friends over (more room, walking distance to everyone, no parking restrictions). I’ll be able to walk just a few blocks to everything I normally visit in town. I’ll have a gas stove, free laundry, and a basement for tornado season. I’ll have a little yard and a three-season porch. The cat will enjoy all the critters he’ll be able to see. Maybe we’ll get a bird feeder.

But more than looking forward to the change, something bigger is happening to me. It’s like I’ve finally decided to be a member of this community. I don’t know what took me so long. Maybe it’s that I’ve almost never lived anywhere as long as I’ve lived here. By the end of next year, I’ll be tied for the longest I’ve lived anywhere. I know that when I moved here I wasn’t planning to stay longer than 4 years. Maybe I’ve just been waiting to suddenly have to leave.

So I think I’ll subscribe to the local paper. I think I’ll finally start my tandem reading club.

A good friend came to live with me a few years back. She had to put up with being a semi-permanent guest, sleeping on my futon in the guest room, having almost no say about the arrangement of the house. And yet, I think we had a pretty great time for those months before she found a place of her own.

Now, every time I get mail addressed to her dad, two completely different emotions jostle for prominence. On the one hand, I remember those months fondly. On the other hand, I remember how creeped out she was that her dad was signing himself up for junk mail using my address.

She had a restraining order out against her dad and had tried to keep him from knowing her current address. Somehow he found it, though, and this junk mail with his name on it was his way of saying, “I know where you are.” Later, when she moved again to get married, it took him a couple of months before he mailed her Google Earth satellite images of her house.

She’s since moved yet again, and I’m about to move, too. I imagine this will be the end of my getting social security information in his name.

Last week I had an MRI (adding to my first-hand investigations of the tests I see every week on House). I can now report that MRIs are loud and long and every once in a while they hit some nerve or other that make your hands tingle like you’ve just hit both your funny bones. Lying still for 40-ish minutes is hard. Lying still that long with your eyes closed (as directed by the technician) with strange loud noises coming from all directions can lead to disorientation. Sometimes it sounds like a jackhammer, sometimes like the machine is being whacked with crowbars, and sometimes like a landing alien space ship. Also, it apparently doesn’t matter if you have metal on you unless it’s very close to the part of you that’s being scanned. I could wear jeans, for example, since they were scanning my head. This was a surprise.

All in all, it’s not painful or anything, but it thoroughly wiped me out. Thoroughly. Utterly.

A few days later I went to see my doctor who gave me the news that I do not have any visible abnormalities in my brain, and specifically that I do not have MS. Good news for sure. (She also told me that there’s nothing left to test for, which wasn’t so much fun to hear.) When she handed me the radiologist’s report, though, I had to smile.

MRI BRAIN WITH AND WITHOUT CONTRAST

CLINICAL HISTORY: Generalized muscle weakness, coldness, fatigue

TECHNIQUE: Images of brain obtained using non-contrast sagittal T1, agittal FLAIR, axial T1, axial FLAIR, axialdiffusion, post-gadolinium contrast axial and coronal T1 weighted sequences. l4 mL Magnevist contrast agent was utilized.

FINDINGS: Brain is normal in signal intensity. There is no hydrocephalus, mass effect or midline shift. There is no abnormal subdural collection. Diffusion weighted images show no evidence of acute infarction. Flow voids are present in the internal carotid and basilar arteries. Brainstem and cerebellum are normal. Orbits and paranasal sinuses are normal. Post-contrast images are normal.

CONCLUSION: Normal brain.

Ok. All those things that I don’t understand may be true, but that conclusion … The radiologist clearly doesn’t know me very well.

Walking to my car with an arm load of groceries, I saw a woman standing next to the driver’s side door. With the car between me and her, I couldn’t quite tell what she was doing, but it sure seemed like she was examining the insides of the car pretty thoroughly. She looked confused enough that I didn’t think she was breaking in or anything. And besides, this is small town, middle-of-cornfields USA. Grand theft auto doesn’t really occur to me as an option here.

This was going to be awkward. I wasn’t up for awkward.

Any second now she’d realize she’d gone up to the wrong car and walk away. If I just walked more slowly we could both pretend nothing had happened.

And still she stood there, every ounce of body language projecting confusion and frustration.

So I unlocked my car. I figured when the lights went on she’d get a better look at the interior, realize it wasn’t hers, and still be far enough away from me that we could avoid discussion. I really, really wasn’t up for discussion.

She didn’t scurry away. She opened the door and started getting in.

She didn’t seem the type to hot-wire the thing, but she clearly didn’t have keys that would work. She was getting set to put her groceries across onto the passenger seat. This was no heist. Was it possible it wasn’t my car? The license plate looked pretty familiar, but I really don’t have my license plate memorized. Still, at least two of the letters were right, and the numbers seemed to flow from the letters in a predictable rhythm. Surely this was my car.

“Uh… that’s my car,” I said. I mean, what do you say to someone who is getting into your car?

“Oh my goodness!!” she bounced up and out of the car. “I’m so sorry! I couldn’t figure out why my key wasn’t working, but I guess now we know. I’m such a space cadet!!”

Continuing on in this vein, she practically ran across the parking lot to her own car and got in. And while you’d think it would have been a car similar in make, model, and color to mine, you’d be wrong. I do not drive a silver Prius.

Pippin woke me up this morning in his utterly passive-aggressive way: purring. In his defense, it was nearly 9am — long past the time for The Feeding Of Cats. So he placed himself attentively near my face, front paws neatly lined up against each other, tale curled precisely around his body, and purred. Loudly. All things considered, this is a much better way of waking me up than almost any other way I can think of, so I’m not complaining. All things considered, I even kind of like it. And I’d already slept for most of the past 12 hours, so it was ok.

…

Maybe it’s the fact that my new doctor seems to be taking me seriously, but suddenly my family members are bursting with ideas of things to ask him about. The latest include kidney function and lyme disease. Apparently it’s less likely but not impossible to get tick bites in January, and apparently enough of lyme’s vague symptoms are like enough of my vague symptoms that the fact that my lyme test last year was negative may not mean much. Apparently lyme tests are often falsely negative. Apparently going to Mayo is really the best way to figure out if this is what’s wrong with me. That makes three votes for a trip to Mayo in the last two months. I’d really rather not go, but not for any good reason. It just seems like if I go to Mayo that’s making this into a Big Deal because only Big Deal diseases go to Mayo. That’s a mental shift I can’t seem to make. What if they look at me gravely and say, “We’ve figured out what’s wrong with you. As it turns out, you are lazy. The recommended treatment is prescription strength Get Off Your Butt.”

Either that or they’ll find out that it actually is a Big Deal, and then I’ll be crushed. Basically, I’m impossible to please, so it’s easier just to spend the day lying on the couch or sitting at a coffee shop, contemplating lethargy, watching Friendfeed scroll past, and wishing I had enough brain power to participate rather than just watch. Or rather, that I had anything more interesting to say than “I’m tired and feel kinda crummy,” all the permutations of which would inevitably be translated as “please pity me” by all and sundry when really it’s just a statement of fact.

…

It took me until 4 to do anything constructive with my day. Well, no, that’s not true. I backed up my computer this morning in case it dies semi-unexpectedly. I’ve been getting blue screens lately, so I’m less and less confident that this thing will live very long. At one point the computer told me it estimated over 6 hours until the backup would be done. 10 minutes later, it said 23 minutes remained. Time flies when you’re having fun?

…

I’ve finally figured out how to use this travel watercolor brush. The idea is to squeeze water out onto the pallet and then paint as usual, dipping the brush into that water. Otherwise there’s no way to control the amount of water on the brush. But used this way it works quite well.

And I finished the fourth postcard just now, so I now have one for each person who requested one. I know good matches for two of the postcards, but the other two are kind of up for grabs. Who needs a lily? Who needs a bridge? I’m just not sure. And ultimately it doesn’t really matter, so I should just write addresses on them.

Now that I’ve finished that project, I guess the next one is to get over my fear of figure drawing and just practice. I’ll never get better at it if I don’t start.

On the other hand, I could paint a few more postcards…

…

Leaving the coffee shop, I realized it was a beautiful evening. Pitch dark since 4:30, of course, but beautiful nevertheless. So I walked the few blocks to the co-op and back to get a few groceries rather than going straight home. I’d never seen the cashier before, but she was quiet a flake. A very cheerful flake, but a flake all the same. I’d brought my own bag, so she gave me the little piece of a paper bag that can be redeemed for 5 or 10 cents or donated to the charity of the month. As usual, I refused it, since the co-op is my charity of choice. But when she questioned my “Thanks but you can keep it” with protestations that I could donate the money, and I said, “Thanks, but I’d prefer you kept the money,” she looked at me confused and said, “But I can’t get at the money.” And a beat later, “Oh, you mean the store!”

…

And now I think I’ll curl up with an episode of the Midsomer Murders before bed.