This morning Ethan woke me up at 7:45 by shoving a pad of paper and a marker under my nose. "Tac-tor!" he demanded. "Draw tac-tor!" Tractors are his latest obsession. But they're a little hard to render when you're still half asleep.

Yesterday the landlord woke me up so he and the contractor who wired the new dryer connection could fix it. "Oh," says the contractor. "I forgot to hook up the wires." Then he looks at the outlet where we plugged in the washer, before it, too, quit. "Oh," he says. "There's a broken wire here."

So after everything is fixed, I call my husband, and he says, "Wait a minute. When we plugged in the washer, it worked and then it stopped."

"Right," I say.

"Because there was a broken wire."

"That's what the guy said," I say.

My husband laughs with that quiet kind of laugh that is not exactly desperation, but just a result of too many things going wrong in too short a time. "I don't know if you know this, Angela," he tells me, "but we've got to get out of that house."

"Yes," I say, "that's what I've been telling you!!!"

Still, I am not sure whether we should make an offer on the log house with the big pond, or if we should pursue the post office route. Apparently very many homes here are sold word of mouth, and you can only find out about them at the post office. But inquiring at the post office would mean I would have to give my shy self a big kick in the butt. Which, perhaps, I really should do. But then again, maybe the log house is really okay.

Decisions like this keep me up at night -- have been keeping me up at night -- so the past couple nights I have been trying not to think about them. Instead, I have been having almost-anxiety dreams -- not the really bad kind, but teetering on that edge. For instance, last night I had the "I'm back in high school and I have to take gym, but wait I'm almost 33 years old," dream. (Actually the thing which has helped my school nightmares subside the most is homeschooling. Now in my dreams when I walk into a class I forgot I registered for and face an exam I haven't studied for, I just think, "Wait -- I can homeschool!" And walk out. It's very liberating.) Then I had the "I am taking care of this baby, but she isn't mine, only I'm supposed to have two babies, and she's two months old and has teeth" dream (a variant on the zillions of baby dreams floating around there in the universe.) Night before last I had a much better dream, which involved a silly little Western romance between two story characters. Driving back from dropping off a cup of Katie's pee at the lab-staffed-by-one, I thought, "Maybe that would take my mind off things, to write a silly little Western romance. The first line would be, This is a silly little romance…"