L-O-V-E LOVE, IT'S COMING BACK, IT'S COMING BACK.
Today is the big day. Ben returns to L.A. with his visa! My Legal Man!
I can only explain my excitement as follows: I feel like a little kid who is so excited about Christmas morning that they can't sleep. I don't think I fell asleep last night until 2:30 am. So with Ben's jet lag and my lack of sleep, I imagine we're both just gonna pass out pretty early on tonight.
This weekend I tried to get things sorted out around the house before Ben's return. I didn't end up going salsa dancing after all. I watched the L.A. Galaxy soccer match and they won the championship, it was so exciting! Amber and I had a nice salon visit and went to visit our parents and went to the pharmacy and went shopping. Amber's 1950's costume is so terribly cute. I'll bet she's going to get a few dates from this one! It was nice cos we went shopping with our sister-in-law, Tiffany. It was girl bonding time. Even though we've known Tiffany for 12 years, I can't recall ever going out shopping together, just the girls.
Last night I tore apart the closet and put it back together again. In the apartment, Ben and I have this huge closet. It's the size of a small room. So I had to rearrange things so that the things we need to have more accessable to us are closer to the opening of the door. I think it works very well. But Ben is going to be sad when he sees that my 40 pairs of shoes have taken over both sides. At least I'm getting rid of 2 pairs that I never wear. Of course, I got 2 more pairs since he's been away...
On Friday I saw Vicky, but she and Amber had gone shopping and didn't come home until later to make Vicky's brownies. I took a nap. I was a bit hurt because they didn't tell me that they weren't coming to the apartment right after work, and I thought that I was going to be included in their plans. I stayed in my room sulking for a bit, but then I was lured out by Halloween cookies. I let them know that I misunderstood what was going on and that I had wanted to hang out with them. So everything was good after that. I guess Vicky's special brownies were a success. Amber tried one, but I figured I didn't need any more "mood enhancing" so I abstained.
Last night I watched old video tapes from my camera. One was from Christmas of 1996. All four of us kids still lived at home. There are some pretty great statements being made on it! I was so young and thin! My skin looks beter now though, so there's something good about getting older! I still feel like a fat cow today, though. Ben said he'd help motivate me to take walks and even jog in the morning. He's a good influence!
There was footage of two cats that are dead now. Well, on the Christmas tape I could hear my old kitty Scheherazade meowing. She used to whine, these long drawn out meows that would go on forever. I swear she had a lisp, too! That cat was so insecure and such a nuisance sometimes. But I had her from the time she was a kitten until she was 15. I miss her a bit, but she was really annoying and needy. But hearing her meow on the tape made me miss her a lot, and I remembered how she used to console me when I would cry and try to lick the tears off my cheeks. She was a sweet kitty, but sort of ugly and mental, and she had people eyes! She got sick, her kidneys were failing and she started having seizures. So I took her to the vet's to be put to sleep cos my mom couldn't do it. I opened the box to say goodbye and she looked at me with those people eyes and meowed her whiny meow. I could see it in her face, she knew that this was the end. I tried not to cry til I got out of the office because I knew it would upset her and she'd try to lick my tears away. The other kitty on tape was Andy Warhol. He was Vicky's kitty. But she got him when we lived together in an apartment in Studio City and he was only 7 months old. So I got really attached to him, too. The footage of him is from when we first moved into the house in Simi Valley. He's laying stretched out on the patio in the back yard and he looks so relaxed and cute. He was a great cat. Enormous. I swear his head was as big as mine! He was so smart and so sweet. He was like a person. We always used to say that we named him right cos he acted like a gay man! My brother David used to call him Vicky's husband, cos he was on a people schedule and he'd get mad if she stayed up past their bedtime. He'd sleep in the bed with her, with his head on the pillow next to hers. When Vicky moved out of the house this summer, it was pretty sudden. It was hard getting used to not having Andy and Vick around. They moved to Burbank with Chris and Annie. Andy seemed happy for that first month, climbing trees and playing in their yard. He didn't even seem to mind their 2 little dachaunds too much. And then one evening he didn't come home when Vicky called him. It's been a couple of months now. It doesn't seem likely that he's coming back or even alive. I always pictured Andy living to be really old, but he only made it to 4. Now we're still grieving over our dead friend. It made me very happy to see that video of him, but it also made me very sad, too. I'm glad that I have it to remember him by, but at the same time it makes it a lot harder to accept the fact that he is gone now.
Even though it's a very happy day for me, I was surprised by how much watching those old videos affected me. It made me have strange dreams. I dreamed that my brother David was putting eyedrops on the bubbly spots of his pizza crust! Eeeeeew! I think I might have to make copies of the Christmas video for the whole family, I think that was the last year that we all lived together at home. I can look back at those times very fondly now. But it's amazing that we all survied without strangling eachother!