Diana's Diary

2001-09-09 - 10:32 a.m.

Home For Sale

My mother had a garage sale yesterday. I made $60. Sweet.

My mother moves--for good--in less than 10 days. It occurs to me that this won't be like when I was in Los Angeles and she was in the Bay Area. That was only a 5-hour drive, so it was feasible for me to decide to go see her on the spur of the moment. Utah is more like a 12-hour drive. Not quite so easy. (Oh yeah, and back then, I could always blow off class to make the trip. Blowing off work isn't going to happen.)

The best trip from Los Angeles to the Bay Area I ever made was last October. It was late on the Thursday night before Halloween. Paris and CE were pissing me off, Orange was pissing me off (we had a class together), and I knew that I had an entire weekend to kill, without any homework or anything to do. I was talking to Willow online, and she told me I should come home. I thought about it for about twelve seconds, said, "yeah," and then signed off to inform my mother that I was coming. 8 o'clock the next morning I was on the road. (Funny--the only time my last couple of years of college when I was ready to do anything at eight in the morning was when I was driving to the Bay Area.)

My mom had Friday off from work. I don't even remember what we did when I got there. I think I might have taken a nap as soon as I got there, and then she made dinner that night and we watched TV. Nothing special, except I was home.

Saturday she had to work. It was raining, and I hadn't brought a jacket with me, but I found this raincoat of my father's in the hall closet. It was cold, which was also nice, because Los Angeles had been pretty warm. With the rain and the cold and Halloween just a few days away, I was getting into the holiday spirit. (Said holiday spirit deserted me as soon as I got back to L.A., and never really made a reappearance.)

I went over to JB's apartment. We watched Daria tapes. We watched the episode where Jane makes a sculpture, and then wants to use melted gummi bears to paint the statue with. JB and I wondered if that would work. (JB and I get creative sometimes.) So we went out and bought a bunch of Play-Doh and gummi bears. We made little sculptures, then cooked them in her oven. (Play-Doh and an oven being our substitutes for clay and a kiln.) Then we melted the gummi bears.

Sticky!

Watching boiling gummi bears foam up in the little paper cups...definitely something you don't see everyday.

Hint: don't try to use a paintbrush when your "paint" is melted gummi bears. The bristles get pulled out and stick to the gummi mess on your sculpture. Use your fingers instead.

The only bad thing is that we had to keep reheating the gummis so that they were liquid enough to work with.

Jane was right. The result is a stain-glass like effect. JB and I decided that we should try to use melted gummi bears to decorate sugar cookies that next Christmas. (We didn't.)

This was also at the height (well, one of the heights) of the JB-Mil-Willow drama. Willow and Mil were going to a Halloween party together Saturday night, so I was JB's moral support when he showed up at the apartment.

Sunday I had breakfast with my mother and drove home in the rain, feeling a lot better.

Even though I didn't really get to see much of her that weekend, just coming to her house made me feel better. It was a safe place. And now that safe place--my safe place--is up for sale. And the people who just made an offer on it are assholes.

Aunt Co says this shouldn't be too traumatic for me because it wasn't really my childhood home. My family moved a lot.

Well, yeah, but this is the house where I lived when I was in high school. It has memories. Ex and I messing around in the den. All of those slumber parties where we were awakened the next morning by Jehovah's Witnesses. Calculus study groups. And my dad--my dad will have never have been in my mother's new house. That is so weird to me.

I am trying to be a good sport about this; I'm really, really trying. But it's hard.

-Diana, signing off.

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2003-12-16 - Ow! My Nose!
2003-12-15 - 'Tis the Season...For Moving
2003-11-17 - Rush, Rush
2003-11-03 - Apartment Hunting Sucks
2003-10-22 - Apparently, "nauseated" is a good look for me.

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