Good News!!!

Our car insurance people got back to Hubby this morning and it was good news!!! Finally! Some good news. They're going to give us $5100 for our 10 year old Grand Marquis!! Fantastic news!! We're looking at a 2004 Grand Marquis for sale for $7500. So we won't have hardly any car debt.

Also, there's good news on the nutty neighbor front. Since we moved in, we've had a nutty neighbor catty-corner from our house. In his yard, just for fun, he keeps a 6 foot Jesus, 4 foot angels on either side of his driveway, plus a smattering of 5 or 6 foot tall angels scattered around the yard. Also there is a nice collection of tombstones (no joke) both in the front and back yard. Each tombstone, upon installation, creates a flurry of wheel barrow and shovel movement around the yard. Last time, though, I strongly suspected that there was nothing in the wheel barrow, he just kept moving it and walking around with a shovel. There's a 40 foot wooden cross in the back yard. There's an enormous eagle sculpture on his roof where the eagle is just about to land on a huge sphere. He has slowly formed a mosaic over the majority of his driveway. He has installed stepped terraces over his whole yard. Just after the birth of my son, he installed two coup-alas on the top of his house to look like church belfries.

Please understand, he is not religious. He's just a nut. This is the same guy who during neighborhood yard sales will loudly advertise that he has underwear for sale. He refuses to shake hands, too.

We have a home owners association that prohibits all of these items and they're sufficiently scared of him and wouldn't say anything to him, much less fine him, for years. Finally, there has been a court order forcing him to remove all that stuff. And the amazing thing is that YESTERDAY HE MOVED ALL THE STATUES, TOMBSTONES, CROSSES AND THINGS!! It took him all day with one hireling and they took a sledge hammer to a couple of the tombstones.

All us neighbors were calling each other to report what we could see out of our windows while peeking and not obviously staring. I set up my camera and would zoom so I could more closely examine things. Awesome!!!

My son the octopus

So it's just been like a week since Quint has been able to ooch, wiggle, nose-dive, belly-flop, then roll to wherever he wants to go. As long as it's within 2 feet of where he started. But he has turned into an octopus! And of course has magnetic eye-sight to whatever is nearby that I really don't want him to hurt, drop, or drool on. Especially if it has a plug or batteries.

Last night while we were conversing with our smoke detector (more on that later), I was trying to calmly hold Quint in my lap in the rocking chair in his room. Suddenly, at 1:30am, he finally realized that there are adult things on the shelf near my right shoulder. I certainly don't mean adult as in XXX (always be careful when searching for an adult anything on ebay, BTW), but water bottles, tissues, contact saline, granola bars, the white noise maker (lots of fun buttons with noises!), and CD cases. And he had to have them NOW!!! He suddenly transformed from this groggy, nursing baby into this quick and agile grabbing machine! I finally had to just stand up with him where he gazed longingly over my shoulder at all the fun bottles and things. And thankfully, object permanence hasn't kicked in yet, so I was able to throw burp rags over most of it and, to his mind, they magically disappeared!

I have GOT to finish baby-proofing his room this weekend. The quick version of that chore would only take like 10 minutes, I think. Then I would have his room, my office, and one of the living rooms completely safe for crawling small fry.

Smoke detector: Several times in our lives, twice actually, our smoke detector has tried to warn us of big mistakes we're about to make. True, we have trouble understanding it sometimes, but with the hindsight of about 2 months, we realize that the huge life changing decision was being endlessly discussed when the smoke detector spoke. Or honked in a conversational way. Or whatever you want to call it. We're some of those weird people who think that relatives or others might be floating around with us in our house, trying to find ways to communicate with us. Or perhaps we've watched WAAAAY too much Ghost Hunters. Or perhaps we're crazy. But not nearly as crazy as our nutjob neighbor who recently put his decorative cement pig up on one of the steeples he had affixed to his house just to piss off the homeowner's association (MISSION ACCOMPLISHED!). The placement of the pig has become a daily "where's waldo" game to everyone in the neighborhood.

But that's this whole other type of crazy. Our brand is much more normal, right?

Anyway, every other time we've gotten (listen for the echo effect) "messages from beyond" it's been while we were debating a huge, life changing decision, or just after a beloved relative has died. We currently have no big decisions before us. So is this just a general warning? Will the big decision present itself fairly soon? We asked it about several subjects and got no response. We asked each other, "what does THAT mean?" only to have it honk at us again. We then said to each other "keep trying". We proposed some more subjects, but never could figure it out. We were watching the baby to see if he was acting like he could detect anything else, but he seemed perfectly normal, if a bit grabby. And rather awake for 1:30am, but who wouldn't be with a smoke detector honking right outside your door.

It seems important that the detector did not wake us up. All three of us were awake when this started, which is unusual. Typically, Hubby either still is legitimately asleep, or (I suspect) he's doing a darn good impersonation of his own snoring. After my curiosity had waned, I went back to sleep and the detector didn't honk again.

We did, of course, do the regular precautions in case the thing was actually, you know, detecting smoke. Hubby went downstairs to investigate. And found nothing amiss. And the smoke detector was silent the night recently when I left a scented jar candle burning in the kitchen. Aheh heh... Don't tell hubby that.

Quint did act weird starting at 5:30am, but that seems unrelated, I think. I accidentally showed him that it was daylight at 5:30 (I didn't know that?!) so he thought it was time to start the day. We all got very little sleep from then until we all finally got up around 7am. FUN!

So we've checked with various friends and relatives and everyone's OK. We're just going to be cautious and alert. While sleep deprived...