Well, hmmmm

I have a new plan about the house, which may or may not be a really bad idea. I'm supposedly meeting with a lawyer to talk about it very soon, so perhaps things will work out? If not, then I'm going to be looking for a rental ASAP. Big fun, not. However, at least I feel like I'm kind of moving again. Sorta kinda, anyway. All the bookcases are empty and the garage is full of packed boxes and of course I have now thought of about ten things I want to reread, since I just finished the terrible novel I bought at the hospital gift shop 2 months ago and I'm down to the Feng Shui handbook and book of faux painting techniques I refused to pack when I was still thinking that I was buying a goddamn house and moving into it and would soon be able to transform it from dinky 60s ranch into fabulously trendy modern wonderland. That's going to be difficult in any case since the fucking dogs just ate most of the cushion for my funkiest chair. Argh.

Meanwhile, I borrowed my friend H's food dehydrator and I've been trying to dry some of my bumper crop of hot peppers. Do you know how long it takes to dry whole jalapenos? Much longer than you would think. Longer even than that. In fact, there are still some of them out on the back porch (why the back porch? Have you ever smelled drying hot peppers? No? Trust me, you don't want to.) in the food dehydrator even as I type - and I started this process on Sunday afternoon. So, roughly 48 hours and counting. Also, only one pepper of the many many I'm drying turned red and pretty. The rest are black and wizened, like my soul, and thus are somewhat unappealing as a condiment. I put them in a small mason jar that I had left over from the last jelly making day and they make me feel like a witch. Nasty black wrinkled toe of toad, anyone? Mmmmm mmmm!

In other news, I spent the morning in court where I discovered yet again that the system is completely fucked beyond repair. This is the court which isn't really court, where you wait in line around the marble atrium to finally go into a packed room where the only thing that happens is you wait some more and then the judge tells you when your real court date is. This could, of course, be done by email or something but then I suppose the whole machinery of the "justice" system would collapse. Besides, it's also when you get to hear what everyone else is in there for and muse deeply on the fact that assault only has a 60 days in jail maximum penalty whereas writing a bad check has 120 days and that this would seem, to an uneducated legal mind like mine, to exhibit some seriously fucking skewed priorities on the part of the county. But there you have it and so we will be returning to court again - and again - in the next six weeks. Yay, us.