In one week, I drove by 37 houses in Eugene; walked through 11; showed the best 3 to Daniel; and agreed to make an offer on 1. We accepted the counter offer this afternoon.

Daniel's graduation is in the morning, and I've assembled an amuse-Elaine-kit to help survive the hour and a half long ceremony. I'm reasonably certain that it won't actually be enough to keep Elaine in the auditorium for the whole time. (Elaine's a very active child.) And my mom and sister have promised that between the two of them, they'll see to it that Elaine is watched and I can stay. However, I figure I should make it as easy for them as possible.

So, I've packed my blue backpack from elementary school with all kinds of treats and toys, including...

*Three kinds of snacks: the standard cheerio/raisin mix, a quartered tortilla (they travel really well because they're flat), and some special fruit and nut medley from Costco
*Plastic dogs and dinosaurs
*Finger puppets
*Assorted foam letters
*Two alphabet books
*Some scrunchies that Elaine thinks are bracelets
*A brand-new deck of playing cards (I think she'll like looking at the numbers)
*Felt pens and a pad of paper
*Extra pacifiers on beads
*And Bert

Lots of things that can be doled out slowly and played with quietly. Even so, I think we'll be lucky if she makes it twenty minutes.

When I first watched Farscape, I was still living in the basement apartment by Green Lake. So, I didn't think a whole lot about the plot lines where Moya would lose control of life support and everyone would have to scurry around trying to fix the situation before it got too hot and Aeryn Sun's brain would melt. See, Peacekeeper's can't get too hot. Or their brain's melt. Like I said, I didn't think too much about it at the time. It was a cute but silly plot device.

Since then, however, we've moved into a house with giant, west-facing windows. None of which open. In fact, in the entire house, only one window opens. So, it's a heat trap. The afternoon sun shines in, and then it stays in. The house lopsidedly follows the heat patterns outside: the temperature rises when it's hot outside, but holds steady when it gets cool at night. So it stays hot until we finally get enough cool days in a row to slowly pump the heat back out through the one open window.

The practical upshot? Between six pm and midnight, it's 83 degrees in here. And I get Aeryn Sun. With that kind of dead heat, I can feel my thoughts disassembling, breaking down like complex proteins fracturing into their constituent molecules. Pieces of thoughts float around incoherently in my mind, and it feels like my brain is melting, just like a Peacekeeper's.