My apartment looks like a bomb site.  Don’t tell my mother.

Despite my best efforts, starting our apartment search a month in advance clearly didn’t work in our favor (we started 8 days before our lease was expiring last year, so a month seemed generous!). Meg’s main priority was finding a two-floor apartment in our price range; we did that, and put down a pre-security deposit of a couple of hundred bucks to prove our intent, and waited for the day that we would meet the landlord to pay the rest and get the keys … but that was never to happen.

Instead, the night before we were to do the swap, the landlord called me.

“So, I need to talk to you guys.”

“Oh? What about?”

“I didn’t think I had to tell you before … but I put the house on the market a couple of months ago, and now I have an interested buyer.”

[ pause ] “Huh.”

“But I do have a condo in the same community that’s available!”

“Does it have two floors?”

“No.”

Needless to say, I was pretty peeved. What happened to common courtesy? One would think that when we first went to look at the townhouse, she might have mentioned that it was on the market. Instead, she said that we would sign the lease for a year, and if we liked, we could buy it after that.

Ridiculous.

So it ended up being a crazy weekend of visiting loads of apartments in the area, because, well, our lease is up August 31 and I really would rather not be homeless. Unfortunately, none of the two-floor places we looked at had central air, or they had strangely-shaped and very small bedrooms, or they were totally beaten up. You’d think that landlords would take care of their property, but apparently that’s not the case.

At this point, I am just awaiting confirmation from the landlord of a place right on the border of Edison and Metuchen. It is one floor, but it has two good-sized bedrooms, a spacious kitchen, gorgeous hardwood floors, central air, a large yard, and is located close to the Parkway and Turnpike - must-haves in my book.

I wish I had someone else to go through this process for me. I’m exhausted. And so is Meg.

The sad thing about all of this is that, for what we pay in Jersey for a two-bedroom, one-floor apartment, you can get a three-bedroom townhouse in Northern Virginia, or a 2500-square-foot house with a two-car garage in North Carolina.

Can you tell I miss the South?

Meg and I took a much-needed four-day weekend two weekends ago and got out of Dodge, driving four hours north to Lake George in New York. I had never heard of the place before, but our friend Melissa recommended it, saying that it was “beautiful and quiet and perfect,” and indeed, it proved to be just that.

We stayed at the Fort William Henry Resort, a hotel located next to the fort of the same name (now converted into a museum) that played a huge role in the French and Indian War, so much so that it had a large role in the book-turned-movie “Last of the Mohicans” by James Fennimore Cooper.

I can’t say we did much over the weekend, and that was absolutely perfect. We ended up renting a motorboat and spending most of the daylight hours fishing and relaxing on the water. And while we didn’t catch anything, we did get some nibbles, and the whole appeal of fishing is the relaxation thing anyway.

I just don’t understand why it’s been so cold/windy/rainy lately. This doesn’t seem like nearly-summer weather at all!  I’m hoping that today is warmer.

I am officially twenty-five years old now. Time to grow up and start being responsible, I guess. And what timing, too, with my boss leaving the company this coming Friday! Things have been crazy-busy at work this week as we try to transition, in the smoothest way possible, all of his responsibilities to me, our CEO, and our PR firm. I am now 100% in charge of trade shows and web events, and will have a large piece of lead generation development along with my usual day-to-day activities. It’s going to be time-consuming and stressful, and I’m looking forward to it immensely.

Meg took me to a Yankees game last Thursday as my birthday present.  Though the first, well, eight innings were rather uneventful, the last inning was fantastic, which included a hissy fit from the coach as well as a last-second line drive that pushed the Yankees 2-1 over Baltimore.  And I hate the Orioles, so that was totally cool with me.  It was also Fleet Week last week, so there were people in military uniforms everywhere - total flashback to that Sex and the City episode (and I am so excited for the movie, by the way).  We ended up getting off the subway early to walk twenty blocks through Times Square, just to experience the city a little more, and ran into a drunk homeless guy who planted a wet kiss on my cheek (I washed my face three times later that night) and grabbed onto me and Meg, whispering, “Do you guys want to taste some chocolate?”  (He happened to be black.)  Frightening.  Meg looked like she was ready to punch him.

I went down to Virginia this past weekend to celebrate my birthday alongside my dad, who shares the same. After cooking a massive, heart-attack-inducing breakfast with her boyfriend for everyone, my sister took us to Top Golf in Alexandria, which has a driving range that actually scores your shots so that you can play versus other people. I officially have forgotten anything I learned from those golfing lessons I took back in high school, but at least the weather was beautiful and everyone had a good time. We had a BBQ later in the day on the grill that my sister and I bought for Dad, and PS, cayenne pepper in a burger is amazing.

My sister had her own barbeque at her house on Sunday and we pretty much just chilled there all night. In all, it was a low-key weekend, which is precisely what I needed, and the weather was just amazing.

I’m hoping to make an appearance at New Jersey Pride this weekend in Asbury Park.  Meg’s working until three that day, and our friend Chris is at school up in Connecticut, so unfortunately the Tripod will not live the excitement together of two years past, but it should still turn out to be a good time regardless.

Plus, my best friend from junior year of high school, AK the Swede, is coming for a visit next week!  So excited.  I haven’t seen her since February of 2002.  She’ll be in New York City for the weekend, and then head down to Virginia to stay with her host family from when she was an exchange student with AFS.  I’ll undoubtedly go down to Virginia again when she’s there so that we can have a mini-reunion with our mutual high school friends.

Speaking of high school, Madison is number 151 on Newsweek’s list of the top public high schools in the country, down from 141 last year.  Still, that’s not bad!

I dreamt about zombies last night.

This isn’t a rarity. One every two or three months I’ll have an extremely vivid zombie dream, and it isn’t simply because I’m inclined to watch more than my fair share of living dead movies - and last night was no exception, as I watched the first Resident Evil, which was good until they introduced the slimy monster guy.

This recurring dream - and I refuse to call it a nightmare, because somehow it doesn’t feel like one - involves me, a group of people who I have never seen before, and a world overrun by zombies. Consider the most recent remake of Dawn of the Dead, where the zombies can run, are very strong, and are generally not as stupid as they usually are made to be as the basis for this.

I never die in these dreams. I am usually leading a group of people to some semblance of safety; a few months ago, we were trying to reach a loft space in a large mansion by the side of a lake, for example.

The interesting part of these dreams is that it always somehow parallels something going on in my life at the time, and is usually work-related. Some time ago I was stressed out over the fact that I felt myself to be the minion of the marketing team whose ideas and suggestions always seemed to be overlooked by the higher-ups. This was echoed in the dream; I was doing my damnedest to get the group I was leading to safety, but for some reason no one acknowledged me as I tried to maneuver an extremely heavy ladder towards the loft we were trying to reach.

I’m curious as to the basis for these dreams, not so much because of the parallel between the actions in the dream and what’s going on at the office, because that’s rather obvious, but because of the prevalence of the living dead. The most common interpretation I’ve found of zombie dreams includes the subject as a zombie himself. Dream-Meanings.org says,

To see or dream that you are a zombie, suggests that you are physically and/or emotionally detached from people and situations that are currently surrounding you. You are feeling out of touch.

Alternatively, it may indicate that you are feeling dead inside and are simply going through the motions of daily living.

This is decidedly not the case with me. Apart from randomly being stressed out about something, I’m generally happy with my life and everything in it. I have a great home life, and despite somewhat tumultuous periods - perfectly normal, I’ve heard - I do love my job.

Anyway, the point of all this is that, in last night’s dream, there was a first-time experience: I chopped off the arm of one of my company’s software engineers. Maybe it’s the fact that I’ve been feeling overwhelmed lately with the big launch and all (in this dream, there were far more zombies than usual - another parallel, methinks). But I have no ill well towards the guy. In fact, I thought it to be rather amusing.