Ugh, so much to tell. I've been very bad and not written anything for a long time, and then I started feeling like I had too much to say and was too lazy to type it all.

First of all, I am back in the city now. I've been here almost two weeks, but I just got the internet Tuesday. (The cable internet guy came an hour and a half EARLY! What is the world coming to?) Got my pets back Wednesday, and apart from the shameful condition of the bunny's nails (I have got to take him to a vet SOON to get those trimmed. I don't do it myself cause I value my fingers) they're doing fine. The guy who was keeping him is really glad that we moved and could take them back, cause his baby is crawling now and he's starting to really motor around and poke his nose into everything. I guess he thought my poor innocent bunny was gonna eat his kid.

The new apartment is pretty nice, and spacious, although it looks a little bare right now. When we moved before we threw away a lot of stuff that was falling apart, so at the moment we've got one chair in the living room and a folding table with no chairs in the dining room. I've got a bunch of stuff promised to me, though, that people are supposed to take to my parents, so I think I'm gonna have to rent a truck to go home for Christmas.

So on to everything I haven't written about in a month. My mom bought herself a digital camera, and I spent two days teaching her how to use it, and how to get the pictures onto the computer, and how to use the editing software. She has this notebook where she keeps instructions on how to do everything computer-related, and she sits there and writes down every word I say and draws little diagrams and stuff. She filled up like 5 pages about the camera.

Thanksgiving was really sort of strange, because my brother turned up. It'd been a pretty long time since I'd seen him, and he was in an odd mood. For those who don't know/remember, my brother is about 16 years older than me, so we've never really been all that close. But he and his wife are separated and he's gotten really depressed about not having anyone to leave his things to when he dies, so he's started giving all kinds of stuff to me. It's really sort of morbid. (Although I must admit I was rather excited when he gave me Sgt. Pepper on vinyl, even if it did turn out it's not worth anything cause it's missing the paper liner.) He had all these pictures that he was showing us, of some gorgeous place out in the woods that he goes when he wants to be alone, and I offered to enlarge them for him, and he cried all over me. I decided to find some nice frames and give him the pictures for Christmas. I think that'll be the first time I ever gave him something that was supposed to be meaningful. Like I said, I've always felt like I didn't really know him, but it was great spending that couple of days with him and remembering that he really is my brother.

I saw my sister briefly when I was at my parents', too, although not at Thanksgiving. Her husband's mom was in the hospital and they came to see her, but his parents only live a few miles from mine. I couldn't believe how big her kids are. One of their voices has changed since the last time I saw him, and it freaked me out. I was like, oh god, I remember changing his diapers. I should not feel this old!

I can't believe it's almost Christmas. Mark and I are going to go to WV, and I feel like I just got back up here yesterday. I've only just started to shake the accent that I picked up (urgh.) Oh, for anyone looking for a bit of local color, here's a good WV story for you. My parents actually live in a two story house, and so do two of the other three people on the street (yes, there are 4 houses on the entire street, it's a dead end) but the last one was this ugly ass trailer that no one's lived in for ages. It was falling apart and most of the windows were broken, and the yard was like a jungle. Well, someone finally bought the land and came over and mowed the lawn and everything, but the trailer just sat there for a couple more weeks. Then one day a couple of guys show up with one of these. They hook the damn trailer up to it with some chains and start just dragging it out of there. (And my mom and I were being very nosy and watching this whole thing out the window. Like you wouldn't!) It took an hour or so to get it out of the yard, and then they just start heading down the road. There's bits and pieces of the thing falling off everywhere, and plumbing and insulation dragging along underneath it. So about a half hour later my mom and I leave the house to go somewhere and we end up behind the thing, which has made it maybe a mile. Still dragging crap behind it and the entire thing is bouncing up and down, and you just knew that at any second it was gonna come loose and go sliding down the road. Of course everyone was completely unfazed by this, and just pulled around to pass it, which in my opinion was the best part of the whole thing. And for those of you unschooled in this sort of thing, yes that was extremely illegal, but cops never bother to venture that far from town.

Okay, I think I've been writing this for about an hour now, so that's enough out of me for today.