About a week in the new house. I can't believe that we have lived here that long already. This house is almost eerily quite and dark—no neighbors playing Halo on the other side of the wall, no people clomping through the hall laughing at full force, no street lights shining through the window, no omnipresent spouse always together in that two hundred sixty square foot box (even though we still seem to always be in the same room anyway. We must like each other).


I realized that I can't watch horror movies here—kind of a strange realization, I suppose. Not one I expected. It must be the oldness, the darkness, the silence, the dilapidated bits (a combination of all that). I almost watched a horror flick the other night, but I would be jittery now if I had. At least I have the shotgun right here. Maybe I should find some bullets to go with it. Of course a shotgun probably wouldn't work on a paranormal apparition manifested out of the morass of my disturbed mind. In the moment it would probably seem like a very good idea to try anyway. Shooting a shotgun in the house is every young mans dream, isn't it? I should probably start taking it with me when I go into the basement/crawlspace (whatever you want to call it). There is a pair of shoes lying awry down there in the shadows. That's spooky, right? There is something about empty shoes and misshapen wads of clothes that could probably use one or two rounds of clay-pigeon shot, just in case there is something even slightly amiss.

I'm not used to this much space. I've lived in a shoebox with Rebekah so long that now I am lost in the woods in this new house. We don't even use the upstairs yet, even though there is tons of space up there. Ultimately that will probably be our bedroom, but penultimately our bed is in the front downstairs room and will probably be there for awhile.

My brother Kurt asked if we had problems with ice dams, and my immediate reaction is to think, “I don't have problems with ice dams,” as if he'd asked me if I suffered from indigestion or something. But once he explained it, I realized that our roof is covered in ice dams. I'm sure it is mostly because our gutters are screwed up. Just another thing to discover in the great home ownership adventure.