One of the reasons I haven’t been able to write much lately is that I’ve had HUGEchanges in my life. First there was the bit where I reunited with a long ago flame, fell in love with him again and spent nearly every spare moment of my time on the phone with him since he happened to dwell in the depths of the Texas badlands along the Mexico border. Being a single mother of three children  meant we most often stayed up super late or got up extra early to get in a few minutes on the phone that didn’t involve Devon tugging on my sleeve to help him log on to Lego.com, Cassidy rolling her eyes at me or Loren glaring at the phone once again pressed to my ear. Late nights had previously been my blogging time and early mornings reserved for a quiet cup of tea before the madness of the day ensued. All the time on the phone has paid off because now? On February first Dude packed up his two enormous dogs, all his stuff and hauled it the 986 miles from Texas to set up house just 15 miles away from me! Needless to say that for the last four weeks my giddiness has known few to no bounds. (Yes, there is children drama but that is fodder for later posts.) Despite my euphoria at being half of a really good thing, the move hasn’t been without a few hiccups  -and not necessarily the kind I saw coming. Funny enough most of them have involved our cars.

Within the first week or so of Doug living here we were driving to dinner and chatting about nothing in particular when I spun my car 180 degrees on an icy road and stuffed it quite nicely into a snow bank of the oncoming traffic lane. Lucky for us I was going fairly slow and there were no cars coming the either direction. Not too long after that Doug left the lights on in my car over night, requiring a jump start from him the next day. The jumping blew a fuse under my wee Bug hood and it started lurching in lower gears. Nestled in between those times Doug’s two dogs managed to wrangle open a large container of honey in his car which resulted in a sticky buffet of yumminess for them, not to mention of couple of very large beasts hopped up on sweetness. Then there was the morning we forgot my dead car was parked behind his much larger one and he slowly backed up into mine. Good thing for that front license plate, it has amazing absorbency abilities for larger SUV’s. Forward to this week when I took my lurching clown car into the VW boys and they hooked it up to the computer to reset all the mysterious what nots so that I could again use fourth gear. And then today, the icing on the cake was when I let Devon go out to my car to retrieve his Star Wars Lego figures and he stopped, as he always does, to play with lock and unlock buttons before he got out. I keep my keys  in the car because obviously that is the safest place for them. We live in a small mountain town where people rarely lock their cars, at least the people I know don’t. So when this afternoon I went to get into my car and could only pull helplessly at the handle as I gazed my key ring there on the dashboard it hit me that I have become something of a love blinded idiot as of late. If I keep going at this rate I’ll be borrowing Loren’s skate board to get around town. Now I’m not saying Tex has to go back to his dessert but between the two of us somebody needs to buck up and start paying attention. I hope it will be him because I’m having a rather lovely time in my current oblivion -well, other than the ever accumulating car related fees.