To further delay the postyness, Casa del Olsen has been delivered a pestilence. A snotty, kleenexy, orange-juice intestive pestilence.

Oh! And also! It seems our lease is up on August 28th, not September 1st! So, guess what? We are moving on ***FRIDAY***. We get to pack all our shit up in eight hundred percent humidity, saddled with the Plague, and under the thrall of Lost, Season One. Which we have watched all of now, by the way, instead of packing, until midnight. What are the numbers all about??? What is in the hatch, and is it bad??? What is that robot/dinosaur/misty thing that kills people??? Who are the Others, and how are they going to get Walt back??? Will Sawyer stop creeping me out because he looks so much like an ex-boyfriend of mine???

In other news, The Otter is Goddamned Delightful. Por ejemplo:

She loves to eat crushed ice, like her dad. She runs up to him when she hears him crunching and shoves her pudgy long fingers into her own eyeballs and pleads, “Eyes? Eyes?”

I am going to go out on a limb and say that there will be sporadic posts at best until we finish the television-based crack that is the first season of Lost. Haven’t gone to bed before midnight since Sunday, as it is impossible to watch just one episode. Thank goodness there are only 4 on each DVD, which gives us enough of a chance to break the spell and drag our weary selves to bed.

Also, in bad parenting news, The Baby now shouts “Spongebob!” whenever his image is around, which is always. (Actually, it’s more like “Pungepa!” but I know what she means.) It’s all the big kids’ fault. That, and the fact that we were melted to the couch for 3 days watching Spongebob.

Today I saved a kid in Target.
Okay not “saved” exactly, but I was a good samaritan. I came upon a little boy, about seven, looking around in a panic and starting to really cry.

“Do you need help?”

(sniffle) (snuffle) “Yeahhhh….” (quiver)

“Okay, I’ll help. Are you looking for your mom or your dad?”

“My….(snurfle) (sob)…mommmm….”

“Okay. Great. What does she look like?”

“(Sniff) She has a red shirt on…”

“Okay, a red shirt. Like the one you have on?”

(Looks down in dawning realization that he has a red Spiderman shirt on) “Yeah-?”

“Great. And what color hair does she have?”

“Brown, like mine.”

“Okay, let’s go look for her. You look down those aisles and I’ll look down these and we’ll find her, okay?”

“Okay (barely holding it together)”

We start to walk, and I look up to see a woman with a multi colored shirt and what could possibly be described as more of a dark blonde-ish hair coming towards us, smiling. Little Boy wipes the flood of tears and snot from his face, then notices her, too. He immediately covers up the crying and says:

“Oh. My bad. Thanks!” and takes off towards her.

Yes, he actually said “my bad”. Too cute. The mom came and thanked me and I said, “No problem, I’ve been lost before too.*” What I wanted to say was, “If you are anything like me, kid, get really used to feeling silly that you are panicking over something that does not require any kind of panic response. I do it all the time.”

*Once when I was about 7 or 8 I went to an ice cream place, probably Kimballs, with my uncle and cousins. For some reason as we were headed into one of the extremely long lines I ran back to the car, I guess to retrieve something or other. Anyway, I ran back to my uncle and tugged on his khaki shorts. “Uncle Lee,” I said, “I want a pistachio on a plain cone.” Uncle Lee looked down at me and turned into a stranger. “I’m not your uncle, honey,” the man said, and I freaked. Black was white, up was down, 2 plus 2 equalled yogurt. I took me about 5 seconds to be reconnected with the clan, but I think it was enough so that from then on my brain doubts reality with alarming frequency.