It’s not that weird that I sometimes talk to myself when I’m home alone.

It is a little weird that I sometimes answer.

As of Friday we will be the proud owners of our very own laundry machines. What are we going to do with the 300 quarters we still have?

A. Responsibly use the money to pay our electric and water bills.

or

B. Giant arcade party!

Thoughts?

The kitchen in our new house is going to need a little updating eventually. I was browsing around looking for ideas and came across an article entitled “Smart Appliances — Ovens and Refrigerators That Think for You.”

Yikes.

This is not an Onion article. These are real appliances. There’s a fridge which can play DVDs and forecast the weather. An oven that offers cooking tips. (I’m picturing the pre-recorded voice of Gilbert Godfrey yelling “You’re doing it wrong! YOU ARE DOING IT WRONG!”) Another oven which can be controlled over the Internet or your cell phone — based, of course, on NASA technology. (Women are allowed to be astronauts now, and their families deserve a hot meal even on days that they’re riding the space shuttle.)

Hasn’t anybody seen The Matrix? Why do humans do this to themselves? One day your fridge is predicting the weather, the next day it’s enslaving the human race. Learn from your fictitious mistakes, people!

Packing, packing, packing. The house is full of boxes. “I’m realizing we really do have too many things for this space,” I told Jack when he was visiting, and he said “Yeah, I got there two years ago when you choked off one entire hallway with piles of stuff.”

In this new house we have four bedrooms. Four! That’s a room for us, a room for guests, a room for computers and a whole extra room that we don’t even know what it’s for. Many have suggested we store the pheasant couch in there and just close the door permanently, but I’m leaning towards having a library upstairs. It’s only five bookcases and twenty-eight boxes of books to carry up two flights of stairs. How hard could it be?

Gene is already excited about being able to play his music as loud as he wants — no more shared walls. “You’ll be sharing walls with me,” I pointed out, but he did not seem to feel this would hamper him in any way.

I hope this house and Aphex Twin do not destroy our marriage.

I’ve been snooping around various design sites on the web lately, coming up with ideas for how to take some of our beat-up old housewares and make them look, well, better. Fortunately there is a design style called shabby chic which seems perfect for us. As far as I can tell, you take something shabby and call it chic. I think we can get behind that.

Unfortunately, the shabby chic aesthetic does seem to depend on having a lot of unused shabby stuff lying around, which doesn’t really work for us. Our shabby stuff is all in use. For example, we have a tool kit that would work perfectly for displaying pictures:

But Gene inconsiderately insists on keeping his tools in there.

We could put cut flowers in a coffee pot:

Except then I’d have to make coffee in a vase.

I would absolutely decorate my kitchen with a giant apple:

But then what would I fake-eat when pretending to be the incredible shrinking woman?

It looks like our decorating scheme is doomed.

Tomorrow I start packing up the apartment, because — assuming all goes well with the last remnants of inspections and repairs — we move into our new love mansion on September 11.

I spent all yesterday evening chanting “higitus figitus” at my books, but so far they have shown no signs of jumping into boxes on their own. I believe I’m going to have to pack the damned things myself. Good thing the library sale happens after we’re in the new place or I’d be in real trouble.