So.  It’s Sunday.  I have a lot of work to catch up on.  I should be doing that.  Heck, I should have been doing that since we woke up at 10ish this morning.  But instead I’ve been puttering around not doing a whole lot because, at some point in our day, we are going to go out and acquaint ourselves with the neighborhoods on the east side of town.  I don’t know when we will be going.  Will has decided that today should be a “fly by the seat of our pants!” kind of day.   We have been together for over five and a half years.  You would think that, after five and a half years, he would have figured out that “we could be going to do something at any moment” does not make me productive.  In fact, it has quite the opposite effect.

See, I like to get in to things.  I like to get absorbed in the books I read (even the kind of boring non-fictiony stuff that I need to read for work).  I like to get involved in the television shows I watch.  I like to find something to do and just do it.  I am not one of those “I’ll do this for the five minutes before I have to leave” kind of people.  In fact, I find that kind of thing very jarring.  For me, trying to do that is akin to that feeling you get when you’re jussssssssst about asleep and you jerk awake because you’ve missed a step.  It is that disorienting.  Will seems to think that if I just “practice”  I will get over this.  That I will learn to be able to just read a half a paragraph in an article.  That I will learn to be satisfied turning off a television show fifteen minutes in.  That I will be able to learn how to pick things up and drop things without it bugging me.

Maybe I will.  That certainly seems to be a skill that would be good to have once we have kids.  But then I remember my Grandmother telling me that she only got into reading trashy Harlequin romance novels once she had kids because she needed a distraction but she needed something she didn’t give a damn about so that she wouldn’t mind when she had to put it down seventy five times in an hour.  And you know? I’m just not there yet.  Plus, I’m not sure how Will would feel about his being compared to a small child…probably not good.

So why are we going to go out and drive around the east side?  Because we don’t know it very well and we have “we want to move!” fever.  A couple of weeks ago we helped a couple of our close friends move into a super cute house in North Portland.  Last night they had their house warming party so we got to see how most of the house has been arranged.  It looks so nice!  They’ve done such a good job!  And it has very much reinforced our “we want to mooooooooooooooove” feelings.  We are so over living in an apartment.  And sharing walls.  And parking lots.  And having to walk a block to get the mail.  And having to share a laundry facility.  And living under the constant threat of being fined if we leave anything on our balcony that is not on the approved list for any length of time (approved items: patio furniture, grills, live plants. Nothing else. Ever).

Unfortunately we can’t really afford to move right now (we’re still catching up on our bills and I’m still trying to make this month’s rent).  We can, however, start really exploring our city and its suburbs and figuring out where we really want to live next.  We have a really great neighborhood right now and rarely leave it, except to go downtown, which is why we don’t know a lot about the other parts of town.  We thought it would be nice to have some frame of reference when reading rental ads that talk about neighborhoods instead of cross streets, so… as soon as my lovely husband gets bored with whatever he is doing right now, we will be on our way.  That could be in twenty seconds.  It could be in five hours.

*Sigh*