DOOOGKS!

Do you ever wonder what happened to colicky children born into forest-dwelling tribes (or any groups that lived out in the open with little protection)? Not to be morbid or anything, but how did they not get eaten by bears? This question plagues me far more than it really should. I wonder about it daily.

That last bit had nothing to do with my kids, by the way. They have been unusually pleasant for several weeks. I have to wonder if they’re lulling me into a false sense of peace. When my motherly benevolence peaks, they will once again tag team me with simultaneous horribly needy phases.

It is finally summer here. Utah is GLORIOUS this time of year. I can’t imagine why we didn’t move here, oh, fifteen years ago. Why doesn’t everyone in the US live here? Is there something I’m missing?

I thought the honeymoon glow would wear off after we’d been here a few months, but I’m just loving this place more and more every day. At its worst, it’s like Wisconsin, only slightly warmer (and without the depressing knowledge that that first drift of snow on the front walk will STILL BE THERE next May). At its best, it is paradise.

My only complaint is that we live right next to a marsh. It makes for a great view, what with all the pelicans and cormorants, avocets and blackbirds (all lumped into one category by 2.0: DOOOOGKS!, roughly translated as “ducks!”), but it also means there’s a big bug population. They aren’t horrible bugs. Mostly just hordes of mosquito-looking things that don’t bite.

But you know what eats bugs? THE SPIDER.

Yes, the joke is on us. Half my excitement over moving here was the knowledge that I would be moving from a bug-infested town in the middle of two rivers and a marsh to a dry, bug-barren desert with fewer spiders. Hahahah! Funniest joke ever. If huddling in a corner and chewing one’s hair can be called “funny.”

Also! We have new upstairs neighbors. And I want to kill them.

I think it’s actually the woman I want to kill. The man has been very apologetic about the music volume the first night he was here. And since that first night, there has been no nighttime bass throbbing through the walls and into my rapidly-liquefying brain.

But in the morning and afternoon, SOMEONE likes to party like it’s 8th grade rec night. And I know it’s not him because he works nights. So it must be the woman (“the girl who lives with me,” as he put it, whatever that means). I can’t decide if I want to make friends with her and reach a happy agreement on what does and does not constitute reasonable noise, or if I want to go up there with a heavy blunt object and commit a felony. It really depends on the day and how much wine is available.

We have friends coming over this evening, so I suppose I should continue getting things ready for that. Have I mentioned how much love living here? How I love having friends nearby? How inviting people over doesn’t feel like an imposition (“Hi! Come drive 45 minutes each way to spend time sitting in our living room with my husband and two small children while I sequester myself in the kitchen down the hallway, and we all sweat to death in air-conditioning-free house in the most humid northern state in the union!”)?

I miss our old friends very, very much, but coming here has been like coming out of a thick fog. I am so grateful.

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