I am a raging caffeine addict. I am very open about this, and if I remember correctly, one of Dan�s wedding vows was �I promise to make you coffee every day and stop at any Starbucks we run across on road trips.� The problem is that he�s too good at this, and now I�m dependant on him. He�s like my coffee drug dealer. Every morning he gets up and starts a pot of coffee while I�m in the shower so I can drink some while I�m getting dressed and then fill up one of my eighteen trillion travel coffee mugs for my drive. This little system has worked wonderfully for the last 18 months or so. But Thursday morning, I realized the fatal flaw when Dan. Forgot. To. Make. Coffee!!!! I went into the kitchen after Dan left and there was only a half-inch of cold coffee from the day before in the pot. I actually touched the pot to see if maybe it was hot and for some reason the coffee pot just turned itself off in mid-brew. It was like when your car doesn�t start, but you keep turning the key in disbelief. After a few minutes of panic, I cut my hair-drying routine short and left the house with wet hair so I would have time to stop by Starucks. Crisis averted. But it threw me off for the rest of the day. So what am I going to do about it? Nothing, actually. I�m beyond helping myself. So I better be really nice to Dan, or he might cut me off.
A note about the photo: This photo was taken of Dan at my family's home at Christmas. He is modeling a scarf and hat set given to me by my grandmother. Both the hat and scarf are the right size for me, but are rendered somewhat absurd when worn by Dan the Giant. I chose this picture because it is the most drug dealeresque shot I have of my husband. Aren't you intimidated?

Dan is forever being entertained by the weird things I tell him about from my adventures as an active sleeper when we wake up in the morning. As my old college roomate, Robin, can attest, I do a lot of talking, gesturing, sitting up, and occasionally, walking around when I am asleep. But I never get to see that stuff, because I�m unconscious, and dreaming. I have always been a pretty vivid dreamer, but lately my dreams have gotten just plain weird. It�s worse when I am stressed out, and, lately, the stress is mounting by the second, so the dreams are getting more interesting. So here, for your entertainment, are the two latest dreams my anxiety-riddled mind has conjured up:
Dream One: I am at a graduation for Belhaven College, my alma mater. I�m not graduating, so apparently I�m there to see someone else graduate, but tons of people from my graduating class are there, too, including people I haven�t seen since the day we graduated. For some reason, we�re all wearing graduation robes, and my hair is really, really messy. And we�re all talking and they�re telling me things that have happened in their lives since 2001 that actually sound kind of plausible. (It�s weird to me that my brain takes the trouble to make up realistic-sounding things for people I haven�t seen in three years to be doing with their lives. Meanwhile, I can�t ever find my keys.) We�re all sitting on these risers that are almost completely vertical, straight up into the ceiling, and you have to lean back so you don�t fall off the front. I�m talking to one of the �01 grads, and then I lean forward too much and I fall and wake up. End of dream.
Dream Two: For some reason, my wedding rings start disentegrating. The platinum is actually falling apart into little flakes, and the diamond is crumbling, and I�m trying to gather up the pieces so I can take them to the jeweler and he can melt them all back together. (How would he do this? I have no idea. But I know what the guy who sat behind me in Biology at Belhaven is doing!) For some reason, in my dream, I am laughing about this, but I�m still really freaked out. When I wake up, I am genuinely surprised to see my rings, intact, on my finger. I am so relieved that I wake Dan up to tell him about it. He is also vastly relieved to learn, at 4:30 a.m., that my rings have not dissapeared into thin air.
If dreams really are the brain�s way of sorting through the puzzles of your life, I have big issues.

I had just drifted off to sleep last night when I woke up to see Dan standing in the light from the streetlight outside out window, looking through the blinds and laughing. I thought this was just another bizzarre dream until I heard the noise. The incredible noise. It was like hundreds of people were throwing rocks at all of our windows. It was hail. Really really big pieces of hail, and it was coming down like you would just not believe.
So Dan and I stood around in our pajamas looking out through the blinds until I had a terrible thought. My plant, the only plant I have ever managed to keep alive for more than ten minutes, the plant my old editor gave me when I lived in Clovis, the plant that has been with me longer than Dan has, was sitting on the porch. In the hail!! So I run out there, in the hail, which is basically flying in horizontally at 100 miles and hour, crunching around in my bare feet (Word to the wise: If you ever need to run around in the hail to save your houseplant, you should pause a moment to put your slippers on, because you will probably also want to walk somewhere the next
day.) and scoop up my plant, which is all broken and naked and leafless and extremely dejected looking. I took it inside and scooped all the ice out of its pot and cleaned off all the killed leaves and talked soothingly to it and gave it some warm water and put it on top of my dryer to warm up, but I�m afraid it�s totally going to die. And if it doesn�t I may still be screwed because my husband might have to leave me after seeing me talking to a plant at midnight in my pajamas. Anyway, here is a picture of my sad little plant, proof positive that I am not fit to have children, since I might leave them out in the hail.

Tomorrow, I am going to go to the New Mexico Motor Vehicles Department to make my SIXTH and, I might add, final, attempt to register Molly the Malibu car in the state of New Mexico. Yes, that's right. I have lived here for going on three years and I have never registered my car here. This is due to many things, among them, my own laziness. But for the last six months, I have been making every attempt to get the job done. However, thanks to a debacle involving MVD, my car title, and the bank that held the title to my car until I paid it off in April, this has not happened. At one point, I was actually on the phone with an MVD employee who informed me that my bank mailed my title to MVD in New Mexico TWICE this summer, when the whole time, it should have gone to me, because I PAID FOR THE CAR! I have thus far restrained myself from physically reaching across the counter and choking someone, but when I walk in there tomorrow with my title, and my marriage license, and my social security card, and my little piece of paper proving that my car does not cause too much pollution, and my drivers license and my blood type and a piece of paper entitling MVD to my as-yet non existent first born child, if they do not give me a tag for my car, someone is going to get HURT. I will keep y'all posted.

I went to the MVD today, and still no registration for my car. But, this is because they did an inspection on my car, and supposedly, once it is approved, in something like 48 hours, I have provided all the proper documentation to register my car, and so I should have a New Mexico license plate on my car in the next few days. So the employees of MVD live another day. Unless they don't give me a car tag on Wednesday.

Is it wrong that I love NBC's show Scrubs so much that I was insanely annoyed that the presidential debates pre-empted it last week and that I am ridiculously overjoyed that is is back on during its regular time this week? I need to know. Because, to quote the Scrubs theme song "I can't do this allll on my own, no, I know, I'm no superman. I'm no superman."

Behold the glory of the New Mexico license plate! This is just a picture of a generic license plate, but one just like this, with numbers and letters and everything, is now proudly displayed on Molly the Malibu. I think the MVD people thought I was crazy, the way I walked out of their office holding my shiny new license plate like it was the Holy Grail. But they probably never waded through six months of red tape in order to obtain a rectangle of metal. Also, they let me keep my Mississippi tag. I think I am going to clean it up and get it framed. It has served me well. But now, it is time for Molly to step up and become a New Mexican like me. It's actually kind of sad. I'm completely official now ... New Mexico driver's license, new social security card with my married name, and now, a car tag with a hot air balloon on it. As far as the government or any other official entity is concerned, I was never from Mississippi. I might have to have a special ceremony to retire my Mississippi tag. But then I will have a big old party to celebrate my victory over the dark power of MVD!

This afternoon, Dan and I ventured into the horror that is J.C. Penney on a Sunday afternoon in search of dress pants, shirts and ties for him. My brother, Aaron, is getting married on November 20. As I have been telling Dan, it is our responsibility to try to look presentable given that photos are taken at weddings that will be hauled out and shown to posterity long after we are dead and gone. When those photos are brought out, we don't want our children's children to say "Why is that one couple wearing sweatpants?"
Since this will be an evening wedding held in First Presbyterian Church of Jackson, Mississippi, I have been trying to ease Dan into the idea that he is, in all likelihood, going to be required to wear his suit. This he seemed to accept, but convincing him that the onoe dress shirt and one tie he owns might not be up to the weekend's repertoire of wedding and pre-wedding events we will be attending was another matter. Men, I have learned, basically don't understand why they can't just wear the same clothes to everything. Pants? Check! Shirt? Check! Shoes? Check! Everything else is secondary.
So today, when we went to J.C. Penney (Am I the only person who cringes at the mere mention of J.C. Penney?) it was not without some tension. The first task was finding pants, and this brought our first interpersonal derailment of the afternoon. It turns out that Dan, as a man of a manly sort, does not understand that just because a pair of pants is black, it doesn't mean they are dress pants. Khaki can be dyed black. It doesn't make it dressy. So it was like he was playing a game where he didn't know the rules. He would hold up a pair of pants and say "How about these?" and I would sort of look at him like you would look at a person who was proposing that he wear black jeans to a formal rehearsal dinner, and he would get all discouraged. It was sad, but he got better at it as we went along.
The shirt thing was going slightly better until I realized that Dan has never found out what his official shirt size is. I will cut him some slack on this, because the menswear system of clothes sizing is WAY more complicated than it is for women. There are like three numbers involved in buying a real shirt for guys. Women pretty much only need to know a couple of numbers for their entire wardrobe. So we got Dan measured and found out that at a shirt size of 18 inches in the neck and 36 in the arm, Dan fits into a category known as "Virtually Non-Existent in Normal Men's Clothing Stores" and "Too Small to Qualify for the Big and Tall Department."
After much digging through the endless pile of shirts, came up with three nice dress shirts, a gray, a dark blue, and a red, and three ties, plus one pair of pants, for a price that we could live with. We came home and Dan tried on his new duds with his charcoal gray suit to make sure they matched like we thought they would. And here comes the point of this post.
Have I ever mentioned how great-looking my husband is in a suit? Probably not, because he never WEARS ONE. But let me tell you, he is a handsome man. I am almost afraid to take him to this wedding .. someone will steal him from me! I didn't think to take pictures because I was so busy looking, but I'll take some at the wedding. Wow. Men should wear suits more often.

So far in the short life of this blog, I have discussed both the recent hail storm of Albuquerque, and my trials and tribulations as a person who has been trying to register Molly the 1998 Malibu in the Great State of New Mexico. (Official motto: What do you mean, you don't have time to come back tomorrow?) As fate would have it, it now seems that these two events are intertwined. Today, Dan took my car to have an appraisal done related to the extent of the hail damage that Molly sustained in the Great Hail Storm of 04. And, the preliminary verdict from the insurance people is that they are going to TOTAL MY CAR. Yes. My car, it seems, is such an incredible piece of crap that it is not worth paying the two grand or whatever it will cost to get a bunch of hail dents taken out of it.
Now I am not going to argue very much about this. My car is a wreck. When Dan and I got married, various groomsmen of ours thoughtfully smeared shoe polish all over it. They smeared about an inch of polish on the gas cap apparently working on the theory that the gas cap should really stand out. The next day, we ran the car through a drive through car wash, and most of the polish came off. But not the polish on the gas cap. It just kind of streaked downward, creating this very classy look, sort of like milk was frothing out of the gas tank. We left the car baking in the Dallas sun for a week while we were in Hawaii, and, as you can imagine, that pretty much means that I now have permanent shoe polish milk on my car. In the year since I have been doing the Commute from Hell, Molly's windshield has sustained more than one crack. OK, the truth is that if my car ever takes a rock in just the right spot, the entire windshield will shatter. This is also a good look. The inside of my car is perpetually stained with coffee and other beverages and littered with every reciept for gas and fast food and groceries that I have accumulated in the last six months or so.
But the crowning achievement, in terms of my car officially crossing the line between "I belong to a sort of cute girl with a professional job" and "I belong to a sloppy girl who probably wears fuzzy house slippers to work" came when the hubcaps started falling off. Once I lost two hubcaps, Dan decided it was time to make a big investment. So he went to Wal-mart and bought a set of hubcaps apparently manufactured by the Tupperware company for a grand total of ten bucks. These fell off within two days. So now my car is a certified ghetto-mobile. And now we're trying to decide if we should just pay the salvage value on Molly and drive this car into the ground or spring for a used car with lower mileage and a better chance of seeing 2006.
I'll keep you posted. In the meantime, has anyone reading this blog ever experienced a situation this grating? I just got this car legally up to speed. I just paid it off this year. I haven't been so good about the cosmetic stuff, but I have changed the oil religously, fixed every major mechanical issue that has arisen, and put a CD player into it last year. And even though I could be in the position to trade up for a much nicer car, I am totally annoyed that I might lose my hoopty car after all this. It just goes to show you. Never give your heart to a car.

Dave Barry, my own personal hero, has announced his plans to take a year off from writing his column. Not only that, but he isn't making any promises that he will pick it up again after a year. I know it is silly to feel this dejected about a humor column, but I don't care. I haven't been this upset since the Calvin and Hobbes comic strip retired.
Who will make me laugh now? (Sniff!)

On Sunday, I went to the mall to start my search for something appropriate to wear to my brother's wedding. As you can tell from the fact that this is the second post I have written about it, getting dressed for this wedding is becoming very stressful. This is because it's an evening wedding with a reception at a place where my college once held a formal dance. Since most of the weddings I have attended have been of the "wear church clothes" variety, this has created a bit of a wardrobe crisis in the Wachdorf household. Getting Dan up to speed in the suit department was bad, but, as you know if you know me well, I really hate to shop. If I don't find what I am looking for in half an hour, I am very likely to give up. It must be a genetic mutation, because my mom and my sisters could shop until the Kingdom comes and never get tired. So it is to my eternal credit that I kept going for six hours until I found exactly what I wanted.
But along the way, I had the following slightly scandalous, but really funny experience. I was trying on some clothes in The Limited, and while I was in the dressing room, I was listening to the lady in the dressing booth next to mine talking to her four year old son, in a language that sounded like Japanese. Apparently, he was requiring a LOT of instructing, because she was talking to him at a high rate of speed and volume. Then, all the sudden, the talking stopped. I thought "Well, at least it's quiet in here. Now I can focus on trying to figure out how this strappy top is supposed to fit. I think I'm wearing it backwards." So I turned away from the mirror to try to wriggle my way out of the thing. As soon as I got it over my head, I looked down towards the floor and saw that the reason it was very quiet was that the child was lying UNDER MY DRESSING ROOM DOOR, looking at me! I don't want to get too graphic here, but I was in a definite state of undress, and this child was just lying there, staring at me like this was completely normal. So I started trying to tell him to go away, but I couldn't tell if he spoke any English, because saying "Excuse me!" and looking very indignant was having no effect on him. So finally I started making these shoo-ing motions with my hands, and he kind of rolled back out into the dressing room and never came back.
I now think this is hilarious, but at the time, I just kind of got dressed and left. Now I am a big advocate of dressing room doors without spaces at the bottom!

This has been a busy weekend. We voted, bought a car (more on that when I have time to take a photo. Needless to say, I am ecstatic.) and made an executive decision to stop answering our phone unless the phone number of a close relative of friend popped up on the caller ID. I don't know what it's like for those of you not living in swing states, but out here in the Land of Enchantment (really, that's what they decided to call New Mexico) we are just getting pounded with campaign commercials, mail flyers, and worst of all, incessant phone calls advising us on how to cast our vote. It is outrageous. In the last two days, we have logged a total of 18 messages on our answering machine, ALL of them automated recordings of people like Laura Bush or the Secretary of Something telling us why the fate of the world rests on us voting for either George W. Bush or John Kerry depending on who is calling. If there were real people on the phone, that would be great, because then I could explain to them that SHUT UP, I HAVE VOTED! But you feel pretty funny yelling at a recording, not that this has stopped me much in the last few days.
This is all to say that I have many stories to tell, but they are all going to have to wait until after the election. I have to work election night, which means a long time spent hanging out in the county courthouse, waiting for returns. In the meantime, I think the blogging world is going to have to wait for my return. I'm sure I'll have plenty of funny stories to tell on the other side of the election. Stay tuned.