We are back–back on the Internet, back on the blog, back in an apartment that we can call home for at least a little while, until the sub-prime poo that has constipated the housing market gets cleared out and our house . . . well . . . until our house sells.

Moving on, so to speak, from infantile metaphors, I’ll give you a brief update on what’s been going on. During that little holiday towards the end of last month, which raised its feeble hand from the rubble of the consumer-crazed train wreck we call Christmas, Fred and I a) moved and b) visited our respective families in an odyssey across the Southeast. Our journey culminated in a six-hour drive with four sullen, mewing creatures in the back of a rented SUV as we continued the transfer of our worldly goods from Atlanta to Durham. (Poor Louise’s bladder gave out about an hour from Durham, so her first experience in her new home was a bath. She has since recovered–as I look at her now, she is sprawled out on the living room floor, just waiting for one of her kitty friends to stroll by so she can give her a good swat.)

The first part of the transfer was effected by Jamie (no relation) and Chris of Two Men and a Truck. They began in Atlanta at 9:00 a.m. and arrived in Durham that evening. They then spent a heroic four hours lugging furniture, and boxes and boxes and boxes of books, and painting after painting after painting, across roughly one quarter mile and then up three flights of stairs, finishing at 1:30 a.m.

Since then, I’ve been unpacking books, hanging paintings, and generally reveling in the arboreal splendor of our new home of a large, impersonal apartment complex smack in the middle of Duke Forest. As I type this, I’m perched on the third floor, staring out of a large window across our screened-in porch at . . . trees. (And the outline of a nearby condo, but you really have to be looking to see it.) No buses. No earnest, fat-eschewing thirty-somethings jogging along as they push the baby stroller and walk the Golden Retrievers. No drunken, meth-addled neighbors knocking on our door to ask for “bus fare” or a chance to mow our lawn for five dollars. No construction workers ripping down the small house next door to put in a half-million dollar monstrosity that will only CLOG UP the housing market even more and keep our house from selling.

I am beginning to like it here. Now we just need to get the Fred to join me. He continues to live in a vegetable-free house with a futon, a couch, and a TV, with the buses, the earnest joggers, the meth addicts, and the construction workers just outside the door. If you are one of our Atlanta friends, please do invite him over for dinner, or take him out somewhere besides Twain’s.