Pooped.

Our trip to Durham got off to a shaky start Saturday when our rarely-reliable Suburban went kablooey on us (for the fourth time in as many months) as we were just pulling out of the neighborhood. We had to deal with getting it towed to the garage before we could continue our trip in another vehicle. We considered bagging the trip altogether but we were meeting a contractor friend and conducting some other unpleasant business and we didn't want to get further behind than we already are. So we went. Ended up rushing to get some things done before dark but we managed okay.

The bright spot of the weekend was dinner at Tyler's in downtown Durham with Richard Case and his wife Colleen and Andrew and Vanessa of Chapel Hill Comics, where Mike bought his comics. Tyler's is a great place with an amazing beer selection and they actually serve meade, which I've been dying to try. (It was really good but not something I'd drink all the time.) We had a great time and it was nice to actually be doing something fun for a change. Mike really had some great friends and we could see why he brushed off all my attempts to get him to move to Richmond. They're such nice people and they really cheered us up.

Today was a real drag. The contractor came over and had some good news and some bad news. I'll pretty much be spending every free minute in Durham until January. Afterwards, we ran some errands, ate lunch at one of Mike's favorite places (used to be Le' Coco) and hit the road back to Richmond. Because of bad timing, I ended up missing the Packer game which I didn't realize was being aired. I'm hoping they'll air a lot of them this year since it's probably Brett Favre's last season.

When we got home, I tried to mow the grass but it's so dry here in Richmond that the cloud of dust created by the mower nearly choked me to death and polluted the whole neighborhood. We've been using ChemLawn for a year now and the yard looks twice as bad as when we started. (In their defense, we're never home to water the damn lawn so what can we say?) I gave up and decided to work on the inside of the house. Vacuuming was out of the question because I burned out the motor when I ran over one of Charlie's cat toys and it tangled around the brush. We started moving some things up to my attic office which looked like a bad flea market and ended up hitting my head on the top of the door frame. That was fun. We did end up getting some work on my office done so we can at least walk around now without tripping over something. Probably the first step in getting our house back. I tend to get depressed when the house is messy so it was very encouraging to see that a little progress was happening.

All in all, it's been an exhausting, frustrating weekend. I'm ALMOST looking forward to going back to work tomorrow. But, since I'll be pulling another all-nighter, maybe not. I'm so glad we got to have dinner with everybody in Durham, though, because it really overshadowed all the bad stuff. And Suzanne worked hard to cheer me up all weekend and really kept my spirits up during a frustrating and pretty bleak time. I just don't know what I'd do without her.