There's no place like home...

You have to love living in the country. My dear friends from Noho sent me a surprise package and of course I wasn't home when it arrived. In Noho the UPS driver would have left a form to sign and it would have taken two more days to actually receive the parcel. In this little town the driver simply left it on my screen porch.

Even the post office is more informal. The postman and I exchanged hand written notes over what to do with the former tenant's mail. I of course didn't have a clue as to how to find him, but apparently the postman finally did because I found a note from Troy stuck in the door when I arrived for my daily "bake the paint" session last evening. The paint, I'm happy to report, after five days of running the heat at insane temperatures, seems to have finally cured. They painted the entire place from the ceilings to the doors down to the trim around the floors. The fumes were absolutely toxic for a while.

I have to figure out what to do about an answering machine this week. I used to have the voice mail service from Verizon, but now that I'm stuck with Sprint again, I don't think I'll get it from them, meaning of course I have to go out and buy a machine. I loathe Sprint - I've had nothing but trouble with the company when I've been forced to use them in the past and it doesn't seem to be any better now. It took me three tries and 15 minutes on phone trees to get a live human being on the telephone to find out why I didn't get a phone book when they installed the phone. It seems rather than have the tech who flips the stupid switch or whatever they do that takes them a week to organize and thirty seconds to execute, doesn't leave the phone book. They mail you the phone book, which arrives seven to ten days later. I find that kind of stupid corporate inefficiency particularly irritating. And I might mention, the only reason I know my telephone number is that I called someone with caller ID to find out what it was. They didn't even leave me a note with that information.

However, the phone at least seems to work. I've received two phone calls already. A wrong number and a recorded message from Sprint purporting to be checking my service but in reality, it was merely one more pitch to attempt to sell me additional services. Mind boggling.

Meanwhile, I'm expecting to have a few days off and I'm looking forward to unpacking and settling into my new digs. Well okay I'm not actually looking forward to the unpacking part but I will be glad when it's done and it will be good to actually spend some daylight hours in the house so I can figure out where to put my house plants. I have a lot of windows but also a lot of trees and the house faces east so it's a little tricky. And of course, I can't wait to have my own computer back and some extended time to myself so I can catch up on the cyber-side of my life. Keep your fingers crossed for me. Here's hoping I'll be blogging from home tomorrow.