If you wanted to switch nerd preserves and nanny actuaries, I could find you a nice apartment here in town for that amount and Ruby could have her own room.

But I suspect some talented LAista with some wicked real estate skillz will find you something on craigslist. You definitely need a new place and your landlord needs to get the oranges-in-the-sock treatment.

Allyson, did you have any luck with lawyers or tenant associations?

As soon as I sent a letter to the company with the word, "uninhabitable" in it, I had the building owner in my apartment fixing the pipe. But now it's coming through a different area, straight into my bathtub, which i suppose is a good place if you're going to have a leak.

So, my friend with the two-month-old is apparently still all cracked out. She sent me the birth announcement (a photo postcard -- super cute!!) twice. Basically the same hand-written note. Heh.

Um, my brain is kinda melty and I'm supposed to be somewhere, so just to say "Yay, Buffistas then and now on 9/11, boo terrorism"

Also, when I heard the news on the radio, they just said "a plane", but I assumed it was a small plane because of that small plane that hit the Empire State Building a few years before that....I figured it had happened before, and anything else didn't even occur to me. Until I turned on the TV.

I think I just need to stay away from appliances. The microwave set off the breaker (fixed that.) Then my freezer spontaneously exploded and attacked me with frozen naan. Then I made the mistake of turning on the tv at the worst possible time and I threw the remote at it after 5 sentences yelling "Banality fuckers banality!" and the batteries popped out. So I had to endure long enough to manually change the channel (to fuzz) and reprogram the remote.

Maybe I should cut the lights and use candles. Maybe my laptop will explode next!

Emeline in her Krav t-shirt and ready to take anyone on... [link]

I tried tocut and paste from laura'spost, but somehow I screwed up-- but WRT Kenedy getting shot and the world changing:

I was not born when Kennedy was shot, but my parents and grandparents were. I remember that things would happen, like the challenger blowing up or the Gulf War, and people would say "this is your generation's JFK getting shot", But I never felt my world changed. When 9/11 happened-- I thought... "This is our JFK" and I felt, even though I was already an adult, that I finally became one because I understood the idea that nothing was safe or sacred.

WRT Geo Bush on my TV:

I realize that one of the reasons I so dislik him is that he brings out things in my psyche that I don't like about myself. I like to think that as a liberal, and a realist, and someone who values constructive discourse and fairplay-- that I could think of Geo Bush and say " I really disagree with him. I don't like what he says and I oppose it." Instead, I look at him and think "You look like a monkey on my tv, and I feel like an actual monkey is insulted by comparison. I think you are a liar and completely selfish, and I think you make decisions based on what will work for you, and not for our country. And I think you invoke religions, and "family fellings in such a transperantly fake way that I can't understand how you fool anyone into thinking that you have the best interests of our country at heart."

Also, WRT to the twitching-- I used to, when falling asleep or perhaps waking up, have a waking dream where I was falling off a ladder, or that I was climbing a ladder leaning up against a house, and my grandfather grabbed it and started swinging it, and I would twitch and wake up horribly like I had actually fallen. This happens not so much anymore. I also used to dream that there were all these people looking at me over the bed. I think that the early teen years are hell for sleeping, because in addition to these things, I would constantly lay there and thik about what would happen if the house caught on fire, or I woke up blind or deaf or paralyzed. Or if my life was really a dream, and my dreams were really my life.

My twitch dreams (when I have them) usually revolve around taking a step and my knee giving out. Now, I genetically am predisposed to bad knees. Brother got the military to cover his! Dad's been roto-rootered several times. Lately, I've had moments on the stairs where I stick close to the railing with a hand hovering because one knee just doesn't feel right, as if a tendon slipped and went over where it should go under. But I've never had my knee collapse. And I've had this dream since I was wee. I'm gonna blame the morning ritual of listening to my dad's knees pop as he walked down the hall past my bedroom.