1. The buttholes yelling outside our window are real jerks.
2. The Air Force can be crazy paternalistic sometimes. As a military member, I am entitled to a housing allowance. This allowance is a huge part of my pay -- in fact, if you were to look at what I actually receive in salary, it would make you cry. But once you factor in the housing allowance, it's a decent living. The Air Force likes to remind us of this: "Don't forget, if you get a civilian job, you won't get a generous tax-free housing allowance." Here in England, however, the Air Force has decided that I am not an adult and cannot make good decisions on my own, so before we can move into the off-base house we have picked out, the Air Force needs to send over some bureaucrat to do a "safety inspection" and give the house the Guv'ment's blessing. The housing office explained that this process is necessary because "we pay your rent." Um, no, you don't. The Air Force gives me a housing allowance, which is part of my compensation package. I should be able to spend that allowance however I see fit, whether it's on a beautiful house in the cathedral city of Ely or on firecrackers and RC Cola. Using the housing office's logic, the Air Force also pays for my cars, my student loans, and my groceries and toiletries. Hopefully no bureaucrats will be coming by to make sure we purchased the low-fat sour cream that was on sale instead of the real stuff at full price, or to inspect the effectiveness of our birth-control products.
3. The housing office's safety inspection did reveal a gas leak at our would-be house, so I guess that's good.
4. On Monday, I will be representing a client at my first court hearing in three years -- and my first as a senior defense counsel. It's possible that a person can make up an allegation. I've had some success before in showing that a complainant is crazy and very likely isn't telling the truth. It's even possible that two "victims" are lying -- of course, it's not ideal to have two different people saying you committed a crime against them, but I can work with it. But dude, when FIVE different people come forward with similar allegations, I wake up at 2:34 in the morning wondering what in the hell I'm going to do.
5. Our minivan smells like the bottom of a pond. Even at 2:34 in the morning, I can't shake the odor. When we dropped off our van at the port in Baltimore to be shipped over here, it was in great condition -- and most importantly, it was bone dry. When we picked it up a week or so ago, the interior was covered in mold. The shipping company had tried to clean the van before we picked it up, and didn't volunteer that it had been moldy, but they missed some spots. They also didn't bother to look in the center console, which contained a small lake, or the glove box, which was full of still-soggy maps and service records. So the shipping company spent another 3-4 days getting the van cleaned out and dried. It's clean, but it still smells like a primordial swamp. The shipping company's explanation is that "um, maybe somebody at the port in Baltimore left a window down, and, uh, then it rained, and then, um, the water magically flowed into the glove box, and then, uh, the center console ... ah hell, nobody knows."
6. Our LDS ward in Cambridge is pretty cool so far. The only problem is that it has been overrun by visiting BYU students who are here studying for the summer. They are a nice bunch, of course, but man do they say some stupid things for people ostensibly smart enough to study at Cambridge for a summer. I would tell you what those stupid comments are but I would lose brain cells in the process. One of them gave a talk last Sunday and I swear, she mentioned "tender mercies" at least 1,478 times. Luckily, Emily and I were not playing our Tender Mercies Drinking Game (a favorite of mine during General Conference -- it's usually the only way I can get through a Saturday session) because it would have gotten really, really ugly. The students all left this past week, so it will be nice to go to church on Sunday and see who is really in the ward. It will also be nice to hear a lesson that doesn't involve inane comments about how Facebook is a great missionary tool and how there are so many great blogs out there that are tremendous testimony-builders. Of course, we will smell like dead, bloated catfish after our 40-minute drive to church in the Mold Mobile, so I'm sure we'll make fast friends.
7. Our (hopefully) soon-to-be landlord apparently is going to replace the boiler, which was causing the gas leak. I have every reason to believe he will do this, and that he will do it in time for us to move in on September 17th, but it has been well over a week since this problem was discovered and the boiler still hasn't been replaced. I've been told by numerous people -- the realtor, the landlord's property manager, even the bureaucrat-inspector at the base housing office -- that this delay is normal because it's England and everything takes a long time and blah, blah, blah, but don't these people know who they are dealing with? I've got anxiety problems, man! It does not matter that the landlord has all the motivation in the world to fix this problem and get the housing office to sign off on the safety inspection -- in my stupid head, I've created a plausible scenario where the landlord says, "Screw it, I'm not dealing with this idiotic Air Force base and their stupid, overly paternalistic safety inspections, and I'm walking away from up to three years of guaranteed rent in a terrible housing market and renting to somebody else who doesn't mind not having any hot water."
8. We've been living in temporary lodging -- a.k.a. the seventh circle of hell -- for 27 consecutive days now. That entire time, our family of six has been in a two-bedroom suite. I've got kids sleeping on just about every surface of this stupid place. It's like a Cambodian flophouse in here. To top it off, our refrigerator stopped working the other day -- a problem I didn't discover until I took a big ol' bite of granola and curdled milk. We called in the problem and the front desk arranged for a different refrigerator to be delivered. It works great. The only problem is that it reeks of cigarette smoke. I don't know what would cause that, unless these anti-smoking laws have gotten to the point where the only place you can legally have a puff is in the inside of a fridge.
9. I wonder if cigarette smoke would mask the dead-turtle-and-rotting-lily-pad smell in our van.
10. When I was a freshman in high school, I developed an insomnia problem. Well, really, it was an anxiety problem that manifested itself in an inability to sleep, but whatever. I shared a room with my two brothers, one whom snored like a 55-year-old man with sleep apnea, so every night it was a race to fall asleep before Paul. He always won and I swear that kid slept with a smirk on his face every freaking night. But Paul's snoring wasn't the real problem -- the real problem was that I was obsessed with getting at least 8 hours of sleep, because if I didn't get at least 8 hours of sleep I wouldn't get good grades, and if I didn't get good grades as a freshman in high school there was no way I would get into an Ivy League school, and if I didn't get in an Ivy League school I would probably end up in the military (shudder) and bureaucrats wouldn't let me move into the house I want to live in just because there's a tiny gas leak that could kill me and my family as soon as one of us lit a cigarette somewhere other than inside the refrigerator. So I would stare at the clock and do math in my head: "Oh great, now it's 9:17. Because I have to get up at 5, that means I will now get 7 hours and 43 minutes of sleep, which means I will bomb tomorrow's Alegbra test, which means I can definitely write off going to Yale." "Oh great, it's now 9:22. I will now get 7 hours and 38 minutes of sleep. I'll probably end up going to BYU and attending a ward in Cambridge, England during the summer -- because the closest I'll get to going to an elite school is paying an exorbitant amount in tuition for a meaningless summer semester -- and I'll make stupid comments in Sunday School about something called Facebook." "Oh shit (I swore a lot more back when I was a freshman, sorry), it's now 9:44 and I'm down to 7 hours and 16 minutes, and why am I covered in cold sweat? Oh, that's right, it's because I'm going to be a construction worker at this rate." So on and so forth. Well, it's now 3:36 a.m. and I fell asleep at around 10 (party animal, I know). I woke up at 2:34, which means I've had approximately 4 hours and 34 minutes of sleep. If I fall asleep now and sleep until 6 a.m., that would give me 6 hours and 58 minutes. I already went to two mid-level public universities, so I don't have too much to worry about because my life's ambitions were pretty much destroyed by the end of that freshman year thanks to my average of 5 hours of anxiety-riddled sleep every night. But if I don't get at least 6 hours and 58 minutes of sleep tonight, there's no way I'm going to have the energy to worry about my client and his five complaining witnesses, the Essence d' Everglades in our van, or the possibility that we will have to find another house in which to live after the landlord refuses to replace the boiler. Fall asleep ... now. Fall asleep ... now. Fall asleep ... now. Crap, at most I'm looking at 6 hours, 56 minutes.
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