Pack N' Party, Take Two.

Kacoon came over to the apartment again last night, and actual packing was done - mostly by her, of course, since I am the most easily distracted packer in the world. (No wonder I don't have a boyfriend.)

We began to piece apart Vic's cookie last night, and I ended up on the phone with Vic in the middle of all that.

"I don't think you can read the message anymore," I told her. "I didn't know when I was going to see you next, so we just started eating it."

"Is enough of the message left so that you can rearrange the letters to spell out 'Unreliable Bitch?'" Vic asked.

"YOU READ THE BLOG!" I exclaimed.

"You all but told me to," Vic said.

"Are you mad?" I asked.

"No, I'm not," Vic said.

I asked her if she was mad again, even though she told me that she wasn't. Then I asked her again and again and again.

Vic finally asked if it was OK to come over to the apartment, and she headed our way. I hung up the phone.

Kacoon, who doesn't read the blog for fear of what I might say about her, asked me if I really did call Vic an "unreliable bitch" on a previous entry.

I told her yes.

So Kacoon called Vic up and began to denounce me again, saying that she couldn't believe I would write something like that.

"Hey, if it had happened the way he thought it had happened, then he would've been perfectly OK calling me that," Vic told her, I think.

I wrote that blog entry before I spoke to Vic about what happened. I love that my friends are that understanding.

Kacoon read the original copy of the "Of Mice and Friends" essay while Vic was on her way to my apartment. She was surprised by how accurate it was, including a lot of the quotes. She was amazed that I didn't blow any of it out of proportion.

"I didn't realize how funny we were until I read this," she said. "We do the oddest things."

At one point in my living room, Kacoon was telling Vic about her own birthday party this year, which I nicknamed "Death Has Birthday Cake."

On Kacoon's birthday party at her mother's apartment, she went outside on the patio to smoke before I showed up. And Kacoon is having her cigarette, watching a scene across the complex. A woman had apparently dropped dead in front of her whole family while Kacoon was standing there, and people were running around yelling. When I arrived later and joined Kacoon during one of her other cigarette breaks that day, a hearse pulled up, and its crew brought out a covered body.

Kacoon got all depressed about it that day, telling me that it made her feel old, but I thought it was darkly funny myself. I mean, everybody dies. Kacoon told me she didn't want to think about it.

But I'm just like that.

Anyway, back to the present.

The packing effort winded down.

Vic stayed past midnight, though Kacoon had to leave at 11:30 again, so Vic and I were together on her actual birthday. She took a piece of the cookie.

I told her, at one point, that all this silliness had stemmed from the fact that I loved her. She told me she knew that.

The living room is essentially done. The kitchen is, for the most part, half done. The bedroom is nowhere near done, but it will reasonably be finished by the time I get the truck on Sunday.