Here's a picture of some of the henna I did over the Christmas holidays at home. The pattern is from Arabesque, by Jessica McQueen. I love the two-toned effects!

I had my landlord over this weekend to tweak a few minor water pressure problems, and I presented him with my itemized list of damages. I think I was pretty fair. My CD player on my stereo works again--ironically, better than ever!--so I didn't include it on the list of damaged items. I also managed to rehabilitate all my damaged library books, and quite a few of my own, so I didn't have those on the total either. Grand total requested for what was apparently an event that left 2 inches of water on the floor for several hours: $271. But of course there was a lot of sidestepping. "Well, now, if you were submitting an insurance claim, you wouldn't get full replacement value; things would depreciate." (um...wasn't really aware that brand new items purchased a couple weeks prior as gifts would see so much "depreciation." And how much do pristine, like-new condition books depreciate anyway?) "So, you think that this is a fair value?" (Um, yes. As a matter of fact I think you're damn lucky I'm doing my best to minimize this total and not gleefully inventing or exaggerating damages to extort out of you.) "Well, I'll see what I can do." (Oh thank you, mighty benevolent one!)

Anyway, it's not so much money that I would hurt too much to lose it. It's the principle of the thing, mainly. You say you'll pay for damages, it would be nice if you'd actually pay for damages. Especially when, as I've said, I've done my best to keep the claim low.

In other areas, not much is going on except efforts to start my packing and get organized around the move. We have our new exact address and phone number, and so now I'm wracking my brain trying to remember everywhere I need to change it. We're also going to hopefully be able to consolidate our car insurance etc as well as our other utilities, so there's a lot of running around, phoning around, etc., around that. Michael has had some water leakage issues at his place this past week, too, so we're both really looking forward to getting out of our current situations!

Holiday weekend coming up for us...naturally, Michael and I are on opposite schedules, so I work Friday and he works Saturday, but at least we get the Sunday and Monday together. We're hoping to start packing, do some henna, and finally see The Incredibles.

Before you leave, take a look at this eBay auction item. Priceless, no?