Unpacking proceedeth apace. I have unpacked all the tea, but I still don't have the darn tea kettle.

The weirdest part of unpacking is that I've unpacked a bunch of our wedding presents that have been in storage since we got married. It's thrilling. I want to write people thank you notes all over again. I'd just been thinking, gee, I really need to get a spice rack, and what do I unpack? A spice rack that somebody gave me and Daniel 8 years ago.

Unfortunately, we still do not have a washer and dryer. Lemme tell ya, they may have offered the cheapest prices, but I'm going to think darn hard before I ever order anything from Lowe's ever again. So far, the saga has included:

• Someone from Lowe's calling me on Thursday and leaving a cryptic message that I should call about my order. Doesn't leave a name, but leaves a telephone extension.


• Calling Lowe's, and having the following exchange:
  WomanWhoTalksTooFast: Thank-you-for-calling-Lowe's-blah-blah-blah, how-may-I-direct-your-call?"
  Me: I'm calling about my order-
  WWTTF: OK!
  (2 minutes of hold music)
  WomanWhoTalksTooFast: Thank-you-for-calling-Lowe's-blah-blah-blah, how-may-I-direct-your-call?"
  Me: (thinking, didn't I just speak to you?)I'm calling about my order-
  WWTTF: OK!
  (2 minutes of hold music)
  WomanWhoTalksTooFast: Thank-you-for-calling-Lowe's-blah-blah-blah, how-may-I-direct-your-call?"
  Repeat 5 friggin times, culminating in my getting hung up on. We did this whole sequence twice.


• Third time I call back, and say what are the apparently magic words, "I'd like to arrange delivery." I get a guy who claims that he's been trying to call me, but he doesn't have my phone number. He indeed has the wrong phone number, which raises the interesting question of who called my home phone and left this message. We arrange delivery for Friday evening.


• Friday afternoon, they call Daniel and say, "OK, we're coming by to deliver your washer." Daniel says, "Um, what about the dryer?" "Uhhhhh...we'll call you back."


• Some time later, Daniel attempts to call and find out if they've found our dryer. He gets caught in the same endless phone loop that I was caught in, culminating in his being hung up on.


• Some time later, we get a call saying that they cannot find the dryer, but they should get one in a week, so they've scheduled us for delivery next Saturday.

Daniel and I have contemplated cancelling our order and ordering from somebody else, but it would be a minor miracle at this point if they actually processed the cancellation correctly. I could, of course, sic my credit card company on them (yay, USAA), but really I'd just like my washer and dryer with a minimum of fuss. We'll see if they can actually produce it next week.

This is quite a contrast to the process of ordering a refrigerator from Sears, which was utterly and completely painless.

I've been reading a ton of mystery novels lately, which are my preferred form of brain candy of late. I've read two from Anne Perry's William Monk series. First, Defend and Betray, which was incredibly good - I cried a couple of times while I was reading it, which was a little embarrassing, because one of those times I was at the laundromat doing laundry.

Second was A Sudden, Fearful Death, which was still quite good, but not nearly as good as the other one. It hit a couple of my pet peeves: one is that there's a bit of an idiot plot thing going on: fairly early on the characters discover a piece of evidence, and the reader immediately realizes what it means, and the characters take half the book to figure it out, even though they have all the information needed to figure it out right from the start.

The other thing was that the plot of the book revolved around abortion, and Perry rather uncharacteristically put some pretty anachronistic language in her character's mouths at times. One of the things that I ordinarily like about Perry is that she can write Victorian characters who have attitudes that are ahead of their time, while still making them speak and think in ways that seem very characteristically Victorian. Somehow, when a Victorian surgeon suddenly whips out a phrase like "it is the woman's right to choose," it rings false to me. Maybe I'm wrong, though.

My other big amusement of late has been playing Katamari Damacy. I've been hearing great things about this game for ages, most recently from Jed's blog. So, when I saw a copy in Best Buy for $20, I picked it up. Oh, my. What a strange, quirky, game. The gameplay is brilliant though - it's simple and yet challenging.

What nobody told me, though, is that the theme song is an incredible earworm. I can't get it out of my head. I've been wandering around all day going, "Na-naaaaah na na na na na na na, na na na na na na." I'm probably going to drive Daniel crazy. Or get him doing it too.

Okay, time for me to sign off. Talk to you later.