I finally made an appointment with a hypnotist. I am hoping I can finally get some real help with the perennial insomnia problem, because I would really like to avoid becoming a total sleeping pill fiend. I don’t think I’m there yet, but you know, I can see the fork in the road coming up: fiends this way, non-fiends this way. And lately? Lately the pills don’t even work. Xanax does, but it’s not really a sleeping pill per se and my doctor’s been real stingy about giving that to me. Ha ha! Like it’s addictive or something! Yeah, we all know where that road goes.

We had a garage sale yesterday, which went well. A rocking chair that’s been in my family for generations got sold for $15…s’okay, we didn’t have room for it and probably never will. My parents brought it to me because they didn’t have room either. I yanked two of these from the sale because people kept offering next to nothing and it was getting annoying, and I was honest with another twin mom that was interested in the two of these and told her it was basically the worst toy ever for twins. It’s almost totally impossible to use if you have more than one baby. (And like suckers, we thought the problem was we needed to buy another one). I never did sell the damn things.

All told I think we made about $90 or so, enough to let me order another one of these. If you’re wondering why I don’t just get the dead one fixed, not only is a new one cheaper ($123 vs. $150 and no promises) but there’s nobody in town that fixes Panasonics. When I brought it to a camera store in SLO, the first thing the guy behind the counter asked was, “Where’d ya buy this?” As soon as I said Internet I knew I should have lied. “Mmm yeah, THAT’S why you shouldn’t buy cameras on the Internet.”

Mmm yeah if you guys sold cameras at prices a little less than the cost of an organ transplant I might consider coming here. But hey! You don’t! So off to Internetland I go. And it’s not the Internet’s fault that sand killed my camera, you fool.

The highlight of the day was a group of Gen-Xers that came by, looking for books. We only had a handful of books out and they were mostly stupid ones like ancient books on bird watching. They noticed, however, that just inside our garage was an entire wall of books. They politely asked if any of those were for sale, and I said not really, but they could have a look anyway. They seemed fascinated so Bruce told them that if they found some they really liked, they could put them in a box and he would review them when he got back from his soccer game, and see if he wanted to part with them. So they did. They stayed a long time, carefully going over everything on our shelves. I heard one of them whisper, “Damn, these guys have really good books.” Oh the shivers of pride that sent down my spine. When we moved in here all that would fit upstairs is a couple of bookcases, which was not enough to house the majority of our books, so we had to put most of them in the garage. And we don’t throw parties in the garage, so nobody sees them. And obviously they don’t get touched very often anymore either since we had the twins. So the compliment on our bibliophilic tastes was quite delicious to us both.

At left there are the books they picked out. The witchy, comics, handwriting and Russian books are mine, the poetry, short story and music books are Bruce’s. Bruce ferreted out just a couple that are probably collector’s items and I took one out that I haven’t had a chance to read yet, but other than that we decided the thinning of the herd was a good thing.