Still no DSL. I’m waiting for the dial-up to finish downloading email. With 367 pieces of spam and growing, I may be waiting for some time.

We painted the living room/dining room. We moved in the plants. We unpacked some of the books and all of the CDs. It is now starting to look like our home. Somewhere just after the painting, after we ordered the couch, right around when we put the table back where it belonged, that’s when I realized how much I love our home.

The sunsets are beautiful, and if you stand in the middle of the living room, it’s a panoramic view of the setting sky. A breeze kicks in through the house in the middle of the day that I love.

I’m glad I’m in love with the house by now, because I’m pretty sure in an hour the DSL guy is going to tell me that we can’t get DSL in our house. We’ve already been told that only one phone jack in the entire house actually works, and we’ll have to pay to rewire the other three to working order. If there are two lines going into the house, why does the phone company turn on the phone line that only has one jack?

Cal figured out how to get outside this morning. Back in the West Hollywood apartment, we had a screen door that led to a bricked-in patio. Cal’s favorite thing was to run from one side of the apartment, deep in the bedroom, all the way to the screen door, leaping four stairs and wailing, until he knocked the double doors open with his body weight. “Ta da!” He’d strut around the backyard until you dropped him back into the house. It was his version of cat and mouse. We had to install a separate latch to keep Cal from knocking the doors open. This house has a screen door with a lock, but if you don’t lock it, we very recently learned, Cal will once again open the door. This time he’s running into the front yard, down many steps. I had to chase him on tiny rocks this morning in my bare feet. I think we’ll remember to lock the screen door from now on.

When I’m unpacking another box I keep thinking how glad I am that this huge change in our lives is happening during the Olympics. I don’t know why this is a comfort to me. But I like thinking at the next Summer Games I’ll have these nostalgic feelings. “Oh, the last time we watched the Gymnastics Finals, we were unpacking the kitchen in the Eagle Rock house. Remember how I couldn’t reach half of the shelves without the stepladder?”

It’s quieter. It’s calmer. I think it’s what we were looking for when we moved into the Silverlake house. Jessica thought I was bullshitting her when I told her I repotted a few plants. She actually laughed in my face. “Yeah, right. You potted a plant.” But I totally did. His name is Phil. He was very happy with his repotting until Cal ate one of his leaves in the middle of the night. (I sprayed it with bitter apple spray this morning, so close that email you’re about to send me, telling me how to keep Cal off the plant. But since you have the box open already and your fingers are poised, yearning to tell me how to do something, wanting to be so helpful, answer me this: am I dumb for thinking I can make my own curtains when I don’t own a sewing machine? Some of the windows are about six feet wide and three feet tall.)

The DSL guy is here, so now I can’t be online. Time to go back to working on the novel, which has moved up in deadline by such an alarming degree that I now cannot ever stop working on the novel ever. Ever. Even next month when:

I go to work on the pilot for the Oxygen show. Yep. Because I’ve got nothing going on, the fates thought it’d be really funny if I also had to help create a television show for a few weeks. I’ll be going to an office in Hollywood and I’ll be a real tv writer. Pretty cool.

That entire paragraph reads like a letter from Dad. Oh, boy, have I started turning into my parents. I heard myself ask stee to do a favor just like my mom would have asked my dad. And when I introduced myself to the next-door neighbors, I totally turned into my mom. “Looking forward to getting to know you,” I said as I poked back into the house. What? Who talks that way? My mom does. Not me.

So, I’ve got about two weeks before I have a full-time job at the Oxygen studios (But only for three weeks. I keep reminding myself that, as if that somehow makes it easier to keep writing the novel at the same time… and recapping, possibly. Oh, man. I bet I even have a recap in the middle of that. Dan? Wanna maybe do a recap? You still owe me for O-Town.). I have no idea what the hours will be like. I also have a wedding to attend in the middle of that, in New Mexico. This is shaping up to be the most insane year of my life. It’s already far and away the most expensive.

Here’s where I hope Dan does an update here soon because I miss him. I’m gonna go find out if we’re ever getting DSL in this house.

DSL is up. The friendly, helpful man told us that the phone wires are all jacked and need to be replaced. He suggested we do this project on our own to save the two hundred dollar labor fee. Is this a dumb idea, or are we actually capable of rewiring phones? The friendly, helpful man also told us our house was “awesome.” That’s what you want: totally unsolicited compliments on your first week in the home.