Okay, okay, so I’m learning–to procrastinate, to jump no gun.

A month ago I eagerly set up my new classroom. It was super sweet. Last week the principal called to say he needs to move me to a different room. Did I want them to move my stuff, or did I want to do it? he wondered. I said they could do it.

Then, last week, I learned that since our house will be vacant while we find renters or buyers, our homeowner’s insurance with Travelers may not be renewed. I quickly called Travelers to find out if this was actually the case, and was relieved when the agent told me very plainly that they would allow renewal (at the end of August, for a whole year) so that we could have time to sell or rent the place.

However, yesterday I received a letter from Travelers stating that the policy would not be renewed. I called them tonight, and the dude said that sorry, if only I would have called a few days later, they would not have had time to notify me of the impending nonrenewal and so they would have had to renew it for the upcoming year.

What in the world! My de-stressing strategy of handling situations before they become crises has become distressing! I think I’ll just have to become a lazy, uneager, live-for-the-moment-because-actually-caring-about-whatever-is-about-to-come-down-the-rapids-only-leads-to-premature-anxiety none-go-getter.

“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.

Remember our neighbor Buddy? He’s an owner of one of the dogs who drives us crazy, “who” referring both to him and the dog. Anyway, he was out on his back step the other morning when I went out to our shed to retrieve some speakers I wanted to take to the thrift store, after helping a pack rat move.

So there I was, lugging the heavy speakers into the house, to take through to my truck parked out front, and there was Buddy, sitting on his back steps, two houses down, smoking a cigarette.

“Good morning!” he called out to me.

Feeling a bit as though my personal space had been violated from not so afar, and knowing that he could possibly think I hadn’t heard him, I failed to respond.

“Good morning!” he called again.

“Oh, hey, good morning, Buddy!” I called back.

“Are you moving?”

“Yep. Planning to!”

At some point in this conversation, or maybe it started even before the exchange, Buddy’s dog started barking at me or at the world, whichever.

“Ronnie, be quiet,” Buddy started. Oh no, I thought. Here we go.

In the next moments, Buddy did his best to out be-annoying his dog, to out-perro the perro. “Aww, Ronnie, stop! You’ll have to go inside! Nobody wants to hear you barking this early in the morning! Ronnie! Do I need to take you inside?”

Can we say empty threats? The next thing I knew, Buddy was shutting the door behind himself, the dog still out in the yard, still barking.

As I have previously noted, this dog problem (well, neighbor problem) is a detriment to home selling. Maybe, as my dear reader Dr. Perfection suggested, we should find some way to sedate the dogs while prospective buyers are present. Or, as my pastor suggested after reading an article in our local paper, maybe we should try out www.RottenNeighbor.com, although I’m guessing that further noting our neighbors’ deficiencies won’t help sell the house. My mother suggested listing “great for pets” as a perk, an idea our real estate agent turned down. At the moment, we’re letting the situation play itself out in hopes that someone just like our neighbors, but with money and much bigger dogs, will happen by.

At any rate, in case you were interested, I’d like to share M’s most recent dog experience with you. It took place just half an hour ago, while she was burying our compost in the garden:

Our “sermon” at church today was a picture show and report by an older couple who just returned from a service project to an orphanage in Tanzania. One picture, tucked in among the aerial views of the Swiss Alps as well as other pictures of banana and mango trees, lazy men, African community people, storks, an elephant, other missionaries, and undecipherable alligators, showed the entrance and menu of a favorite restaurant, “The Carnivore.”

“It was really good,” the lady said. “We ate liver, and ostrich balls, and–.”

It may have been just me, but I perceived an intense restraint zipping around the entire sanctuary of congregants, and I nearly blurted out, “What did they taste like?”

Yesterday I spent over three hours being reminded of an ever-vital life lesson as I helped an acquaintance move from her run-down, dingy apartment. A horse trailer and three pickup loads later, half of her belongings were stored in a garage adjacent to her new mobile home, which became available today.

I wasn’t the only person helping. Two ladies from church were packing boxes as one of the acquaintance’s grocery-store coworkers and I carried furniture and stuff, stuff, stuff down the stairs, where the husband of another coworker told us where to put the metal desk, the Christmas tree, the Halloween glow-in-the-dark skeleton someone had found in a closet, the grimy card table, the filing cabinet holding a folder labeled “loan documents. Throw away when I die” and old Hardy Boys books, an in-chair back massage thing, Rubbermaid box after Rubbermaid box of who knows what–you get the picture.

After our morning of work, the acquaintance went to buy pizza for us. Just before she came back, one of the coworkers explained to the church lady that she was going to “wash these” for the acquaintance, “these” being two brown owl hot pads. A bit later, though, after the pizza had arrived, I heard that coworker say to the other coworker, “I’ll put these out in the car now; she’ll never notice.”

It’s true–the moving lady really would never notice. Today, several men from church and I helped haul the rest of her belongings from her old apartment into her new trailer, and move her things from Saturday’s storage into, well, the same trailer.

The new landlady observed throughout. “My husband died twenty years ago, and so I’ve learned to do things on my own,” she said after I suggested waiting to load a dresser onto my truck to take from the garage to the trailer, and then she showed me how to load it easily. A bit later, as we walked towards the trailer, the landlady toed a flattened, dried up toad: “Oh, look at this toad; it’s croaked.”

Someone mentioned how good ice cream would be. “I don’t have ice cream,” the landlady said. “All I have is iced tea.” That sounded really good to me, since I’d given the second half of my water bottle to an older man who was helping and feeling dizzy, but she never brought any out to us.

In the trailer, the acquaintance was sitting on the couch, which was the one accessible piece of furniture besides her bed and the kitchen table. Everything and everywhere else, including in front of the kitchen sink, was piled high with boxes. What actually seemed rather spacious at first had quickly become jam-packed with, well, junk.

“I don’t even know what’s in most of these boxes,” she said. “I guess I’ll have to have a yard sale.”

Out in my truck, right now, in my driveway, is a large dresser that she didn’t want any more (and that would not have fit into her new home even if she did want it). I agreed to take it to the thrift store tomorrow.

I’m going to take some of our furniture, too. When it’s time for us to move, and people show up to help us, I know full well how they might feel to be enabling my stuff habits.

Several years ago I wrote a song called “Sleepy Tirade,” about being too tired and distracted to sleep. One line from the song is, “Someday, someday, those barking dogs will die.” This is not my general sentiment towards the neighborhood barking dogs, for I fault them not for being who they are. But that doesn’t mean they’re not a problem.

Our church’s vacation Bible school was this week. In addition to leading the VBS music, I was in charge of the offering project, which was to buy animals for Heifer International. We ended up collecting enough money to buy a pig, honeybees, rabbits, and geese. (Geese, according to Heifer’s literature, are good watchdogs.) Anyway, on Tuesday evening, while we were at church, our house was shown. According to our agent’s report, the walk-through went very well, but only until the prospective buyers reached the back yard and were blasted by the barking of dogs.

Now our dilemma is this: What should we do?

Nothing? After all, maybe the next shopper will love barking, and who needs annoyed neighbors?

Call the sheriff? I researched the ordinances again and yes, we would be justified, and maybe the neighbors would eventually tire of paying the fines, and get rid of the dogs.

Write a letter? Dear Neighbors: We have appreciated your kindnesses over the past years and will be sorry to leave our good neighbors. This week our house was shown to some prospective buyers. Our real estate agent said that the showing went really well until they went out into the back yard, where the barking dogs prompted them to say they will continue looking at other houses. We are, of course, disappointed, and wanted to express our frustration about the barking dogs. Not only have they been a nuisance to us personally, it appears that now they are a deterrence to potential buyers. Please get rid of the dogs, or put barking collars on them, or something (or maybe buy our house–it’d make a great rental!).

Talk to them? Maybe if they knew of our dilemma, they would willingly–tearfully?–repent and send their canines to faraway places.

We’re still thinking. Any ideas?

The bane of my existence in this townhouse has been not the neighbor teenagers chasing each other with sticks and lawn trimmers, not the street-front fist fights involving the same teenagers, not the cigarette-smelly exhaust from the same neighbor’s indoor, free-standing air conditioning unit blowing right onto our porch. None of these, my bane (although they’ve all been quite bane-ish, if not banish-able).

Rather, the bane of my existence here in this place is dogs. Barking dogs, howling dogs, dogs that know not that we care not what they think, although we do pity them, cooped up there in their insensitive owners’ small back yards, dogs whose owners are, in fact, the aforementioned (among others).

While we did (with good results) call the sheriff’s department about a different neighbor’s barking dog, a couple of years ago, we have refrained from doing so for the immediately adjacent neighbors, partly because we in no way want to jeopardize our friendly terms, and partly because the woman of the immediately adjacent, nicely air conditioned home, works for the sheriff’s department.

But today when M looked out the front door and said to me in a low voice, “Animal Control!” I snuck to the window, saying, “This day may change our lives forever.” Someone else must have done it! I thought, my heart swelling within. Done what I have for so long longed to do myself!

The truck was parked out there in the driveway, still occupied, I figured, since the brake lights were on. Perhaps the deputy is filling out his paperwork, I thought, or double checking the address. Or waiting, for something.

I continued my office work for the morning (perusing online real estate listings), until I saw the neighbor lady’s daughter’s van pull in. Kids piled out, calling, “Daddy!”

Daddy?

I was deflated. What could have become for our sanity’s sake a new day dawning had instead turned out to be an on-duty family reunion to gossip about so-and-so’s crumbling marriage and whatnot (yes, I could listen, up in my lonely writer’s garret).

For now, I will continue to do as M has taught me: When the dogs bark, instead of cursing, we sing the hymn “Dona Nobis Pacem.”