The last few weeks have been rather life changing, I suppose.

First, my chick and I went and bought a house. Yes, a house. We've been looking since the spring and, after seeing many properties that were substandard even by crack house standards, we finally found one we can both survive in.

One thing I've learned in this whole process is that houses around here are insanely overpriced in many neighborhoods. I saw a 1,000 square foot home on a tenth of an acre of land selling for over $200 grand. For a price like that, there had BETTER be a damn pirate treasure included with the property. Some of these houses were over 200 years old, stank of animal urine, and had zombies clawing their way from their graves below the house, and the people were STILL asking for ludicrous amounts of money (indoor plumbing is extra).

Then there are the OTHER ones. I'm talking about the house with 5,000 square feet and seven bedrooms that is selling for $100,000. We didn't actually go to see the house, because there's something just not right about that. I'm all for a bargain, but if a one-eyed surgeon with the shakes offered to give me Lasik surgery for $20, I think I'd pass.

So we ended up with a nice house right in the middle range. Some old people used to live there, and unfortunately they are all now dead. They did some nice work on the house, except for the main bedroom which is a rather shocking shade of pink with a magenta carpet. I feel myself turning gay every time I'm in there. Pretty soon, my chick's going to have to start wearing a fake beard to get me interested.

So the house is nice, but homeownership is not so fun. The actual move can only be described as sheer unadulterated hell. One of the hottest, most humid weekends of the summer hits right when we have to get it done. From Friday evening right after work to Sunday night, we moved our crap and cleaned the apartment we left behind. That was July 30-August 1. Since then, we've slowly worked our way through the mountain of boxes to where our place is almost livable. We're still not done, but we're closer.

I appear to have earned a strange souvenir to remind me of the move. I have a reddish-brown streak etched into my middle finger tip that has not even begun to fade in the past two weeks. Perhaps some rust or something was ground into my skin giving me an unplanned tattoo to always remind me of that one tortuous weekend.

THEN, on Monday night, the day after we finished moving in, my chick does a load of laundry and we find that the pipe to the sewer is blocked! We got to call someone, and we find that the phone company screwed up our phone and disconnected it! We also can't find my chick's cell phone charger and it's almost dead! What a friggin' party! All that stuff is resolved now, but it was pretty damned stressful at the time.

So now we're homeowners. We take the trash to the curb every (mumble)day night. We conserve water and heat. We're going to have to strip and repaint the porch. What fun.

In a strange parallel, my computer became a very heavy paperweight a couple of weeks before we moved. The primary hard drive had been acting dicey for several months with bad sectors and such. It finally gave up the ghost, though, with a bizarre death whine that I didn't think computers could make. Fortunately I had moved most of my important stuff to my second hard drive (i.e., my Web pages, stories, porno), so I didn't lose anything that couldn't' be replaced. My new computer arrived last week and effective yesterday I am back online! Hooray for me!

Dude, I got a Dell.