And I shouldn't be right now, really. We have a flight tomorrow for a family reunion (not my own, although... wait, I guess it is my family now!) and I should be packing or showering or sleeping, but...

You'll notice, if you've been reading Terribly Happy lo these four years that a recurring theme with me is, "What the fuck is up with me this week?"

Thematically, holistically, I'm on top of the world. We're buying a house, building it, picking out all the shit ourselves -- tile, paint, stone, wood floors. That shit is FUN. I've been staring at the Home Depot circulars for three years thinking there was no way I could ever afford that stuff in my old (not really old, just more recent) house. Now, those things we pick are going to be what I wake up to every morning. I'm jazzed.

Rebecca and I will finally get to see each other every night like an actual real married couple.

¡ahora sí! is going great: It's been a lot of positive response and a very rewarding way to work. But it's still a lot of hours and a lot of stress and although I'm no longer drowning, I do feel some water in my lungs on occasion.

But physically? I'm an absolute fucking train wreck. I haven't been to the gym in over a month. The only thing keeping my weight steady is that I don't have time to eat more than a hurried lunch and an exhausted dinner.

The only writing (here or elsewhere) that I've been doing is in frantic short bursts between editing stories, trying to make out translations or dealing with the dozens of phone calls (50 percent in Spanish) we get every day from prospective freelancers, PR people, community folks and random readers.

I started an entry, a real one, not a bloggystyle entry, and midway through this story about how I overslept through a TV interview (true story), I bored myself and just couldn't finish it. I bored myself. Do you know much narcissism you have to push aside to acknowledge that you can bore yourself enough to stop reading your own work in the middle of writing it?

I sleep, but not enough. I wake up in the middle of the night thinking about accent marks or whether we're missing a calendar listing or whether I wrote a tagline for that religion column.

If I were on the biorhythms chart, my mental would be pretty way high with all this activity, but my physical and emotional would be down near the bottom. It's not that I'm sad and mopey or that I'm tired and fat. I'm just in panic mode.

If you were stuck on an island and had to eat coconuts and fatty birds and mercury-laden fish, you'd do it because you're on a damn island and that's all you can do. My body and my emotional parts (the elbows, I think) are being fed only what I can find nearby. It's not much sustenance there, but it's all I can find near me on this tiny island, this emergency isle where I can see solid land on the horizon, but it's not quite close enough to swim toward.

One half of our favorite hetero-life-partner simian couple receives an award in a new Space Monkeys! comic.

On a different subject: Some days are nice, but today just totally feels like ass. It's just an assy, assy day, a buttocksy time that just seems all but inevitable. And I don't think it's just me being oversensitive here. You can feel it in the air, man. Assyness.

A couple of things ran today, including two DVD reviews I wrote, one of "Red vs. Blue: Season Two" and another of "Da Ali G Show — Season One."

The AmStatMan (that's what I call the paper now, but only in print. I think it's a good nickname. My pal AmStatMan who pays me.) also ran a review of our weekend Latino Comedy Fiesta shows (which I forgot to warn you about; forgive me please?), which my man (but not AmStatMan) Michael Barnes seems to have enjoyed.

Quick alert: We may have a surprise LCP 40-minute show here in Austin on Sept. 11 (it's not an anniversary commemoration or anything; just a coincidence). I'll keep you posted if that gig does, in fact, materialize into the Reality Plane.

Li'l Floaty Omie Head salutes my friend Patty (whom some of you might remember as Supermodel Pattí from the Terribly Happy store) and her birthday fiesta last night, which was all kinds of fun.

I forgot to mention before that I had a short iTrip review that ran in the paper last week. I've got a few DVD reviews coming up in tomorrow's XL section, too.

New Space Monkeys! comic is up, and it's adventure-oriented this time. Find out why they call Bobbo "The One With the Rocket Pack."

So, in the middle of all this work insanity, Rebecca and I found time to drive down to New Braunfels one early morning and put some money down to build a house.

For the next few months, we're going to picking doorknobs and tile colors and all the crap that bores apartment dwellers to tears. We're in Home Depot Heaven.



This is the lot we're building on. They've assured us that the big trash bin will be moved before they put a house there. Otherwise, we can turn it upside down and make it into an oversized coffee table.




This is the house being built for our future neighbors. I swear the last time we went out there (not even two weeks ago), it was just a concrete slab. Now it's a concrete slab with wood on top of it!



These are our other neighbors. Nice stones, huh? They have a similar archway thingee to what we'll have, which I imagine will infuriate them when we start building. Sorry, suckas! We'll try to make it look as different as possible. They also had a sign outside that said that they'd had their sound design done by some audio specialist. I think I'm going to like this neighborhood.



This is "Across the street" looking out onto the sorta hill country. We thought about building on that side ("What a backyard!" I told Rebecca), but not only does it face the sun in the afternoons, it's also where more houses are going to be built later and who knows what our back neighbors will be like. Will they be Peeping Toms with two-story houses? We didn't want to take that chance.



This is a house similar to the one we're building. Ours will have that pretty archway. When you walk out your front door and see that long entryway, it's like you're in In the Name of the Rose all of a sudden. You keep thinking somebody's going to flagellate themselves with a horsewhip. Or maybe that's just me. Anyway, this gives you some idea what our house will look like. Except ours is going to be painted purple with burnt orange polka-dots.

Our neighbors are going to think we're The Shit.