Drum roll please...

And the official moving day is....Monday!!!!

That's right, THIS Monday. That means starting next week, I'll call Clarin, Bohol, home.

And just in time too.

Though I've managed to keep myself in good spirits since The Break In - distracted by endless episodes of House, one incredible book about the Amazon, and my wonderful friends - this week has worn on me a bit. While not actively paranoid or scared, something, almost subconsciously, has me on edge. The first night it was a dream that someone was in my house, but I couldn't find them. I kept running from room to room (in real life there are only two, but in the dream I had about eighteen more dark, creaky, full-of-hiding-places rooms), where it was clear someone had been moving things, but no one was there. I started rushing around, growling, increasingly panicked, trying to act tough, and proclaiming out loud that they better show themselves...or else. When I finally saw a human form hiding under an old blanket, I woke up. Lovely, right?

That morning, pouring myself some cornflakes, I noticed a match and a needle lying together in perfect parallel directly between the four legs of a chair in my kitchen. Though they had obviously rolled off the table on their own (though I don't know how the match wiggled from its box first), and there were no signs of someone having gotten in through the door or windows, and everything was telling me that would be a ridiculous thing for someone to do if they had been in my kitchen in the middle of the night, there you have it. The hairs on the back of my neck just don't listen to reason, no matter how hard I try explaining things to them.

The next morning it was an origami flower, which had previously sat on a shelf next to the Virgin Mary, lying all to deliberately on the living room floor. It is not hard to dislodge a paper flower from its perch - any passing breeze could do it - but onto the list it goes: Perfectly harmless things that would hardly have caught my attention a week ago, now intent on driving me mad.

The paradox is that I either have nothing to worry about, or I'm dealing with an absolute lunatic who can walk through walls and has a very sick and subtle sense of humor.

Waking up the other morning to a chasm violently splitting open in my bedroom wall was less subtle. Though I almost immediately saw that a pair of stray cats fighting on the roof had just knocked a board down, the fragment of a moment just before that realization was enough time for my just-waking mind to form the though, "Oh great, now they're really trying to kill me."

Plus, now there's a hole in the wall of the room where I sleep. That same day I spent a significant amount of time turning imaginary skulls and pelvises around in my mind, trying to wedge them through, before concluding nothing but an infant could really make it. And I'm pretty sure I could take an infant.

Though I'm quite certain I'm not in any danger of the Butterfinger Bandit's return, my own mind might just do me in.

So for many reasons on top of the reasons I already had for making a site transfer, this move to Clarin is a welcome and wonderful change. Bring it.