“So, how does it feel to be 30?” Maria asked me tonight as we ate more and more birthday shoo-fly cake.

“Well, not any different,” I said. “See, emotionally and mentally, I’ve felt like I’ve been 30 ever since I was 16.”

“Right,” she said.

This past week a lens fell out of M’s glasses. A screw had loosened, so I put the lens back in and tightened the screw.

“So that’s what was rattling when I went jogging,” M said. “I thought it was my back.”

Yes, we are jogging these days, usually in turns. I get up bright and early and head out, and then M takes her jog.

It’s good we’re doing this, since my lunch today consisted of nearly 1,800 Burger King calories. Truth be told, however, jogging has nothing to do with those numbers; their justification is that we’d just finished hoeing corn at the nearby volunteer farm (the food goes to the area food bank) with our youth group. (Well, we’d just finished hoeing with one member of our youth group–the other two who showed up stood around and threw rocks into the pond and then made fun of the farm staffer who twice told them to stop.)

But at least half of my calories came from the soda I drank quite lustily, considering I hadn’t had enough water all morning, and those calories were caffeine-laden, which makes it relevant to everything happening since then, herein and hitherto, forthwith, and so-on-and-so-forth.

My condition of hyper-inebriation, although not unique in the greater scheme of things, has caused me to feel about myself as one young daring swimmer’s mother said at the pool earlier this week: “Darling, you’re crossing the line of my comfort zone.” It’s not that I’m uncomfortable. After all, what can be more terrific on a hot afternoon than sitting in front of a fan, in the air conditioning, using (in Windows mode–sorry, Ubuntu people) my super-cool computer with super-cool partitioning. It’s just that I never know what’s going to spill out from inside my sparking, crisscrossed brain wires. Tighten the screws! Tighten the screws!

Speaking of spillage, we may end up pouring half of the juice from each of yesterday’s canned jars of bread and butter pickles. I’d called my dear mother–bless her heart now and forever–last night to ask her about the recipe, and today she called back to warn us that it occurred to her (probably in the middle of the night, and well into the morning) that if we used too many cucumbers and too little vinegar (which I think we did), our pickles will quickly become little botulism stills and before we know it we, her dear family–bless our hearts at least for now–would need pickling ourselves. (Just in case: Don’t take me to a funeral “parlor.” Instead, donate my body to science or organ wanters, when I die, if they take botulism victims.) So we may have to replace some of the weak brine with new, but we’re not thinking about that now, since both M, who only partook in about an inch of my soda, and N, who partook in none, are napping. It’s only me who’s thinking.

If I survive this caffeine induced stupor and any pickles I might eat, I’ll be back in school in a few short weeks. My new classroom is mostly ready, although I still need to hang a few pictures on the walls, and I’m beginning to read through a couple of the many novels I can choose from to teach. I think I understand correctly that my students are required to read for half an hour every day, during class, which means–yippee!–I’ll only have actually to teach for about three hours a day. While this may be too good to be true, it is at least potentially true, and so I am hoping to join the students and read a lot during those class reading times. I’m going to try to, anyway. At any rate, I need to try to, since my pleasure reading has suffered ever since I’ve started blogging, playing with N, and working hard with the youth group.

Which, I am now noting, has caused my back to hurt a little. But at least it’s not rattling.

The emotional whirlwind of looking for apartments perhaps merits a brief sketch, or at least the people we met do.

We already knew the property manager for 1757, apartments C and H, an insurance broker we’ve used before. “We should revisit your disability policy,” he reminded me as we left the apartments. He did not also mention selling me life insurance, which surprised my steely resolve to just remind him that I’ll call when interested.

At 3190’s institutionally impeccable basement, with motion sensor floodlights outside, inset florescent ceiling lights, and a tremendous north facing view, the landlady (“overbearing” is an apt understatement) asked to hold N, gave us the tour of the apartment, took us upstairs for an abbreviated tour of their house, and then sat N unattended on the floor where, much to my and M’s gasps of horror, we could see her impending topple backwards materialize with another bump to the back of her head.

The last apartment we had planned to visit looked like a utility closet, and so we moseyed over to J&J’s for lunch. In the words of one of our own recent guests, “I dig the grilled cheese.”

Finally, on our way home for the day but feeling a bit unsettled with our limited options, we drove through the tiny town of my new employment, with our eyes on the lookout for “For Rent” signs. I recalled from my newspaper perusals one apartment being available above a gift store, and so M waited in the car while I walked in to the first shop we found.

The lady, her eyes pointing in different directions, maybe to keep an eye on the glass cats (“All critters in display $2.00 each”), the murky water in glass fishbowls, or the “WOW! Walkie Talkies!” in the glass counter, under the shelf with the used paring knife, said that the place just up the street might have one, but they didn’t answer the phone, and so she walked me over.

At that store, filled with beautiful, hand- and American-made pottery and some incense, the proprietor told me that their upstairs apartment would not be ready for awhile (“The last tenant had a cat, and the cat would climb up onto the ledge above the door, I don’t know how, and, well, you know”) but that they are selling their $500,000 property right next to my new school, with a pool and a rentable guest house. Her husband, meanwhile, explained that their daughter is a good writer in English (“She uses big words, anyway”) but is studying Spanish in college.

I left with a phone number for another apartment owner, and the husband pointed me down the street to another small shop also rented from the owner. “She might know where he is,” they said.

It was another small curio/gift shop, quaint and finely scented. I explained myself, and asked how business was.

“You’re the first person to come in today,” the lady said. It was after 4:30. “See that shelf of books? I’ve read all of those. Would you like to use my phone?”

“Hello,” I said. “Do you have apartments for rent?”

“Who are you?” the gruff voice said. “You’re calling from number seven.”

I more adequately introduced myself to the cell phone in my hand and again explained my station in life.

“I have a one bedroom and a two bedroom available. The one bedroom is too small, though,” he said. “I’ll send someone down in 2, 5, 6, or 10 minutes.”

“Great,” I said. “What’s his name?”

“D, and he’ll be on a motorcycle.”

D, it turned out, is an online gamer. “We’ve been playing a game for six years now,” he said. “In fact, we have two computers. Two people, two computers. In fact, we just bought the second computer–we spent $2,000 on equipment to play a twenty-dollar game.”

The apartment was dingy and smelled like smoke and was across the street from an auto detailing enterprise that blared radio music.

At our last stop, after we saw a small sign by the street, a man who struck me as a retired sailor even though the confederate flag tattooed on his shoulder isn’t typically a maritime emblem said he’s lived here for twenty years, and it’s a nice place, and the vacant apartment is small but worth the money, and I’d have to call the owner for a tour because the sailor hadn’t been given a key to the place, a couple rooms up a rickety stairway.

“Don’t forget to call, now,” he said to me as I thanked him and walked away.