FRIGHTENING BABY-TALKING MEN

I awoke this morning to sounds of Peter speaking some kind of strange baby talk downstairs. All right, I have lived through the door locks. I have thought nothing of the towel thing, or of his reluctance to have me use the telephone. But this scared me.

Oh, we now have a system of magnets worked out to let him know when I am in the house, because I tend to keep to myself in my room. Believe it or not, I'm actually painfully shy. I'm serious. As anyone in my family can tell you, my sister's friends thought that I didn't know how to talk when I was a little girl. And I still panic at the thought of having to call someone on the telephone.

Anyway, it's not that Peter wants to be intrusive or anything, it's just a matter of security alarms. If I'm in the house and just sleeping, then if he leaves, he'll set only the downstairs alarm. But if I'm actually gone, well, he needs to set an alarm for the whole house. (Speaking of which, there are all of these signs here that say things like "This door is alarmed!" which I find hilarious and nobody else seems to notice. Of course, there are also all of these signs that say "TO LET" and I asked Matthew how it was that people could possibly refrain from running around the country with paintbrushes and painting a letter "I" on all of the signs. He explained that a) he was sure it had been done, and b) it wasn't actually funny. Then, we met up with his friends, and one of them, Sean, in the middle of the day, said, "Oh, look! They have a TOILET! Oh, wait, that's just TO LET," and I was euphoric. After all, there's no way Matthew could possibly hope to convince me that he didn't find his *best friend* hilarious.) We have settled on a system of refrigerator magnets which indicate my presence or non-presence as the case may be.

So I came downstairs this morning, and there was a note for me. He has posted the instructions for the washing machine on the wall, which is actually quite helpful, but I think that he's probably done it because he feels strongly that I am doing it *wrong*. In my own defense, it really is a weird and confusing washing machine, but I also think that I'm capable of determining things like what temperature I want the water to be.

Anyway, on the way in to the city this morning, I passed the Horniman Museum. That's the only exciting thing that's happened so far.

All right, back to the job hunt. Wish me well.