Category Archives: House

Cleaning Out

26 Saturday Mar 2016

Posted by in House

≈ 6 Comments

My plan for the day was just to get my house in order. No worrying about writing, other people, getting out of the house, doing anything except clearing up the supremely gigantic mess that has been made of my house over the past two weeks.

It’s now 1PM and I’m feeling like maybe that was an overly ambitious plan. And maybe I should go back to stressing myself out about writing instead, because it’d be easier. Or maybe I should just go back to bed.

It’s strange to drag all of your past out into the light and examine it. Trying to decide what to keep, what should go, what matters, what doesn’t. We have, of course, many DVDs. Not an atypical number, I don’t think, but an assortment. I’ve got four complete seasons of the Simpsons. Keep or sell or discard? My first impulse was keep, of course, because R loved them, but I easily managed to over-ride that impulse. They’re out for the garage sale now and if they don’t sell, they can go to Goodwill. The Sixth Sense. I loved that movie. That DVD goes into a “maybe I’ll watch this again before I decide” pile. Star Wars, Lord of the Rings… garage sale. But the cleaning issue is that every single solitary thing has to get thought about. And with a lot of things, spread everywhere, all that thinking adds up.

Some of the decisions go with the writing that’s connected to my marriage. I spent an hour today reading the journal where I fell in love with my ex. At the end, I threw it in my bedroom trash can. Did I pick the bedroom so that I could change my mind and pull it out in a few hours without worrying about coffee grounds or other ickiness on it? Yeah, I think so. Am I going to? Probably not. If it was filled with happiness, I might, but it wasn’t. The seeds of doom were planted early in that relationship and in retrospect, they were pretty obvious, even that first year.

Yesterday I spent an hour reading another journal, the one from our first break-up. Oh, I wish I could go back in time and yell at my former self. There’s one particular section where I’m agonizing about why he doesn’t trust me and I just wanted to slap myself. I almost saw it, so close, so damn close! He had accused me of reading a letter that he’d left in the room and my feelings were hurt. Why would he think I would do something like that? I would never. Around and around and around about what it meant that he didn’t trust me and never once did I stop to think, “Maybe it means that he is not trustworthy.” Came close once, when I questioned what he was writing that he was worried about me seeing, but if only I’d taken that thought just a little farther. Ugh. And sadly, that was before I married him. If only…

But this isn’t either getting my house clean or getting my words on Grace in, so I should move on. Last week three houses in my neighborhood had sales pending. This week, all three of those sales have fallen through. That probably means that they didn’t get appraised at the prices that people were willing to pay (I think) so the market is heating up but the banks may not be on board yet. Alas. But that’s okay. I keep reminding myself that I don’t have to be in a rush, and I don’t, but I’d really like to move on to the fun part of this big adventure instead of wallowing in the hard part.

I’ll get there, though. And meanwhile, the pile labelled “watch/read before deciding” is big enough to keep me busy for weeks.

The Earthquake Theory of Karma

19 Saturday Mar 2016

Posted by in House

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By 8:58 AM, I had burned myself on hot oil, cut myself on a can, and stepped on something sharp, either a tiny piece of glass or a thorn. When I turned around too fast and hit my elbow on my vacuum cleaner, I knew it was probably time to go back to bed. But I have a belief that keeps me going on days like today — the earthquake theory of karma. Basically, when lots of little things are going wrong, I think it’s the universe’s way of bleeding off your bad luck, like the tiny earthquakes that can alleviate stress on a fault line and prevent a major earthquake from happening. So when I’m poking at my foot, trying to figure out what just caused that drop of blood and whether it’s still in there, I’m trying to remember to be grateful that I’m not going to get in a car accident today or drop dead from a heart attack or experience whatever big bad luck might have been headed my way.

Yes, I know it’s ridiculous. But it’s still comforting.

And I’m feeling the need of comforting. I keep reminding myself that this is my choice, my decision, and I can change my mind if I want to. But the fun part of my adventure is a long way away. I’m currently in the stressful part of deciding what needs to be done before I can put the house on the market and what I’m going to keep and how. I’ve done this kind of major purge before, but not nearly as extreme as I’m planning to do it now. When I moved from California to Florida, I got rid of everything… or rather, everything that didn’t have sentimental value. That is a really important distinction.

In the ten years since, I’ve gained lots and lots of stuff, some of it just from living, which is easy to let go of, if tedious to go through, but plenty of it from processes that give it sentimental value. So I look around my room now. There’s a LLadro centaur sitting on my bookcase. I bought it in Spain when I was 17 years old. It lived in my parents house until my mom died, but now I have it. Am I getting rid of it?

Next to it is the entire collected works of Lois McMaster Bujold, everything except her last book, which I have electronically. Am I keeping them? In the corner is a Beanie Baby hedgehog, one of the only stuffed animals left from when Rory was that age. He had dozens, of course, as kids do, but they’re all gone, except for this little hedgehog that’s been keeping me company for the past ten years. Can I say good-bye? In front of it, a tile with Rory’s five-year-old handprint on it. How can I possibly toss that out? And on, and on, and on, it goes.

But I’m basically choosing to re-purchase everything that gets stored. If I rent a storage unit big enough for some items of furniture, it will probably cost $100/month, for a 10 x 10 unit, for maybe at most 400 usable square feet. (I’m calculating 10 x 10 x 4 feet high, but obviously it could be taller. Equally obviously, nothing packs without some room for air, and I can’t just stack all my possessions neatly to the ceiling, so not all the space can be used.) Say I live in the RV for three years, minimum. (And I think those three years will fly by — it could be much longer.) Every item is costing me some portion of $3600. Would I spend $9 on my Lladro centaur? Sure thing. On my Beanie Baby hedgehog… hmm. $50 for the collected works of Bujold? A bargain, but if I was in the bookstore, I wouldn’t choose to spend $50 that way. For Rory’s handprint? Maybe I’ll just drop that on the floor and keep my fingers crossed that it breaks, heartless mother that I am.

I own three sets of china: my mother’s, my grandmother’s, and my great-grandmother’s. The sentimental value is obviously enormous. When I use my grandmother’s plates, I remember Christmas dinners in Bethlehem, putting olives on my fingers, wiggling in my seat while I waited for a pause in the conversation before I could ask to be excused. When I use my great-grandmother’s dishes, I think of her and I think of my aunt, who sent them to me. When I use my mom’s china… you get the picture. But I hardly ever use any of it. Does it really make sense to put it in a storage unit racking up costs indefinitely? It’s not like R wants to inherit three sets of china.

Meanwhile, of course, I’ve barely managed to write a word of Grace because I’ve been so distracted. I write sentences here and there but the chapter I’m in is the hellish “time passes” chapter. I was joking to my friend Lynda yesterday that I should really just write, “Chapter Seventeen, Time passes. Chapter Eighteen,” and get on with it. While walking the dogs this morning I told myself firmly that there is no putting the house on the market until the book is done, so the longer I delay on the book, the longer everything will take. It’s a good mental promise, but instead of coming home and starting to write, I came home and started to clean out the garage. But I am making that commitment — I’m going to finish the book before I try to sell the house. I’ll just be doing all the stuff to get ready to sell the house along the way.

Tomorrow I pick up R in Sarasota for spring break. While he’s home, we’ll go through all this stuff and see what tough decisions he wants to make. I have a feeling it’ll be easy for him and he’ll say “toss it all” but I’ve still got lots of his toys so there might be some serious nostalgia happening first. The Playmobil train is definitely going to be hard to say good-bye to. I might have to set it up and play with it a little first. And somewhere there are some Thomas the Tank Engine pieces that I really might simply not be able to let go of.

So, decisions, decisions. It’s not going to be easy!

Water

17 Thursday Mar 2016

Posted by in House, RV

≈ 2 Comments

Last night, I walked into the kitchen to get a snack and found water on the floor. Not a lot of water. A tiny trail in the cracks between the tiles.

Two years ago, I would have said, “Huh, must have spilled something,” or blamed it on the dogs. I would have wiped it up with a paper towel and forgotten all about it within ten minutes. Not anymore!

I crouched down on the floor and examined that water like it held the secrets to the universe. It didn’t touch the walls, so it couldn’t be coming from a wall, thank goodness. It didn’t touch the refrigerator, which halfway makes sense, since I never hooked up the water to the fridge again after the debacle of July 2014, where a pinprick hole turned into a major remodel, but also ruined my hope that maybe I’d spilled from the filter water without realizing. It did not appear to be connected to the dogs’ bowl, so it probably wasn’t them being messy.

Finally, I opened the cabinet under the sink and damn it, damn it, damn it, everything was wet. My faucet has a flexible head — the kind that you can pull out to spray water, like a shower hose — and I’d noticed before that it had been leaking. Apparently, the head was loose enough that when it was sitting in the stand, water was draining into the faucet and out below. I’d washed a bunch of dishes earlier and the whole time, water had been drip-drip-dripping into the cabinet. Argh!

I pulled everything out, mopped it up, tightened the faucet, watched for drips, (none, whew), and grumbled. But by the time I was done, I felt like it was the universe saying to me, “yes, really–sell the house!” and I felt joyful again.

Over the course of the six days that I’ve been contemplating this idea, I’ve gone from “well, maybe sometime” to “in 2017, I will” to “perhaps by September I’ll be ready to list the house” to “how soon could I have the house ready to put on the market?” At the moment, I think the answer to that question is May: I have some work scheduled to be done in May that should really be done before I try to sell. But May feels awfully far away. I know it’s really not — I’ve got plenty to do between now and then, including finishing writing Grace! And September still probably makes a lot more sense. But I already want to start planning where I’ll be going & how I’ll be living, not keeping a wary eye out for puddles and worrying about whether I need to get a plumber.

Today the realtor comes and this afternoon, if I manage to write some good words, I might take myself off to an RV lot to see if I can test-drive the model I’m thinking about. Good times!

Ten year blogaversary

16 Wednesday Mar 2016

Posted by in House, Personal, RV

≈ 13 Comments

I mentioned this on Monday, but I started writing this blog ten years ago today.

Time is strange.

Yep, that’s my deep, profound, thoughtful cliche on this anniversary of a decade gone by.

I would not have expected this day to be particularly meaningful to me. My blog has always really been more of a way for me to save my memories and talk to myself than any sort of grand project. I’ve never made any money on it, never intended or tried to, and I don’t pay much attention to whether people are reading it, except for trying to make sure I say hi when people say hi to me. For a long, long time my only reader was me, and when a couple of you started reading regularly, it took me a while to wrap my head around the fact that you were there at all. (Hi, Judy! Hi, Carol! Hi, Barbara! Hi, Other More Anonymous Readers!)

It’s sort of like remembering the anniversary of buying a journal, or maybe buying a kitchen appliance. Like, “Whoa, this is the ten year anniversary of my electric kettle — I sure have made a lot of tea over the years.” I will not notice the ten year anniversary of my electric kettle and I honestly have no idea why I remembered this anniversary, except that I noticed the archive list last month and realized March 2006 was the earliest date in it.

But ten years is actually a remarkable amount of life. Ten years ago, I lived in Santa Cruz, with no intention of moving. I am fairly sure that we were living in a run-down, mold-ridden, rental house where my bedroom window was permanently cracked to let an electric cord through (to the sump pump under the house), and if we weren’t living there, we were about to be.

Ten years ago, my son had recently been diagnosed as having severe, even profound, learning disabilities. Ten years ago, I had a job that paid me well for work that I was very good at and very stifled by. Ten years ago, I had an adorable puppy who I already loved with all my heart.

If you had said to me ten years ago, “What’s your life going to be like in ten years?” and then, “What do you want your life to be like in ten years?”, I would have answered with, “I have no idea,” followed by “I have no idea.”

But if you had said to me back then that in ten years, I would be living in a cute three-bedroom house in Florida with a window seat and French doors to a patio with a swimming pool; that my son would be in college, with multiple scholarships, on the verge of presenting at his second academic conference; that I would be eking out a precarious living by writing fiction; and that the adorable puppy would still be as adorable and would have an adorable companion, I would have laughed at you. That set of fantasies would have seemed as unrealistic as they come, with the second dog pushing the whole thing over the edge into haha, ridiculous.

And yet… here we are. Here I am. That is my reality, or at least a little window on it. For some reason, it makes me want to cry. I wish I could go back to that self, who was always tired, and often depressed, being made sick, sick, sicker by the mold in that horrible house, and tell her what the future would bring. Not that it didn’t bring plenty of bad along with the good — these ten years have held more grief and loss than I could have handled knowing about back then. But it is amazing to me to look around at my life, to think about the friends that I hadn’t even met yet, the knowledge that I didn’t have, and realize how far I’ve come, how much I’ve changed.

But the thing about looking back on ten years is that it also inspires me to look forward. Where do I want to be ten years from now? What do I want out of the next ten years of my life?

I got here by taking chances. By doing things that seemed impulsive and scary. Moving to Florida was huge, quitting my job even bigger, dropping out of graduate school terrifying (and yet still the right call, I think). What terrifying things do I want to do in the next ten years?

Five days ago, I thought, “Maybe I should sell the house and buy an RV. It could be my tiny, mobile house. I could live in it with the dogs, write just the way I do here, cook in my tiny kitchen, and drive around the country looking for beautiful sunsets.”

Four days ago, I started telling people — my dad, my brother, my friend Tim — that I was thinking about it.

Three days ago, I started researching RVs.

Two days ago, I stared cleaning out my garage and closets.

Yesterday, I called a realtor.

Today, I’m making it real. I’ve decided. I’m going to embark on the biggest adventure of my life. It’s exciting and terrifying and exciting again. Getting rid of all of my things is going to be hard and painful and take forever; selling the house is going to simultaneously be enormously freeing and agonizing; the process of buying an RV frightens me like nothing I’ve done since buying a house; and it will be ever so strange when Rory has a school break and I offer him a tent to sleep in, not to mention holidays.

But ten years from now, I want to look back and think, “Wow, you might have been crazy, but you sure were brave.”

Meanwhile, of course, I’m going to finish writing Grace. And even before that, I’m going to walk the dog who’s been gazing at me ever-so-plaintively for the last thirty minutes.

The Longest Night

21 Monday Dec 2015

Posted by in House, Personal

≈ 6 Comments

On Saturday, I decided I should hang Christmas lights. I don’t get serious about them — I am not one of those people with decorations on the roof and lit-up lawn displays of Santa and all his reindeer — but I do have a few strings of blue and white danging icicles that stretch across the front of the house. I also have incredible scratchy hedges that protect the front of the house from people wanting to do stupid things like paint or hang lights. But I dragged out the ladder and the step-stool and the lights and tried to find the nails that we put up last year.

Hanging lights is one of those chores that reminds me how my life has not turned out the way I expected it to. Ninety-nine point nine percent of the time, I don’t even think about being single. Solitude doesn’t feel “alone” to me, it feels normal. But hanging lights and putting air in the car’s tires makes me bizarrely resentful. Where is the partner who is supposed to be taking care of these chores? How come he never showed up? This year, I tried to convince R to help me but he was so passive-aggressively hostile to the idea, in the way that only a teenager can be, that I gave up on him. But I grumbled as I hung the lights. An extra ten inches of height and another pair of hands would have made it so much easier.

And then I kicked a hole in my wall.

I was trying to balance on the edge of the window to reach a spot that I couldn’t get to on the ladder because a dying tree is in the way. I feel guilty about the stupid tree because the lawn people write me notes telling me that I need to treat the trees because they are sick. The notes are nice notes, they point out that trees are expensive and that treating the trees is cheaper than replacing the trees, but I can’t afford to treat the trees and so I ignore the notes. And I ignore the tree. But when it’s in my face while I try to get a ladder past it in order to hang Christmas lights, it’s tough not to notice the yellowing leaves, the brown spots, and the white spots that are probably hatching bugs.

I was doing a good job of not noticing the tree, though, or at least of only thinking of it as an inconvenience, as I tried to squeeze past it to reach the corner of the house, so I could hang the lights. But it meant that I was balancing precariously on a very tiny ledge of brick. When I leaned too far, I… I don’t even know what happened. I am trying to picture it now, but mostly, I think my foot hit something that should have been solid and it wasn’t. The wood just crumbled away at the pressure. It wasn’t really the kick that did the deed — the wood was waiting to go.

After that, my interest in hanging lights declined to nil. I draped them across the other corner and let them hang. It is the most half-baked light hanging job ever. If light displays were graded, I’d get points for showing up, but a C for effort and a D- for execution.

But yesterday I went to church. I think I was thinking that if I can’t find the holiday spirit with lights, maybe the music of my childhood would do? It didn’t — largely because the music was not the music of my childhood. Even the offering song wasn’t the same. But the church is having a service today, this evening, a longest night service. The minister introduced it as a service for people who find the holidays hard, a moment to remember those we’ve lost and a time for quiet meditation. I’m not sure if I’ll go — I missed yoga all last week because I’ve been sick, so I’d like to get some exercise today — but I love the concept.

On this, the longest night, I remember my grandparents. I remember my mother. I remember the friends I’ve lost. I reflect on my worries — houses and trees, money and health — acknowledge them, and let them go. I think about my loved ones, with problems that I cannot control or fix, and I remind myself that those problems are not in my hands.

On the longest night, I remember that dawn will come, and that tomorrow, the night will be shorter.

House Satisfaction

09 Tuesday Jun 2015

Posted by in House, Personal, Randomness

≈ 4 Comments

painting the house

Being a homeowner feels sort of overwhelming most of the time. There is always, always, always another thing. If the whole house is vacuumed and dusted, with clean bathrooms and clean sheets and a clean kitchen, then the insurmountable mess of the garage is always there to make me feel guilty. If the back porch is neatly swept and organized, everything in its proper place, plants trimmed back, then there’s weeding to be done and trees that need work and plants that should be treated for bugs or infection. Even when everything’s working, there’s always an appliance making me nervous — the dishwasher not draining, the dryer not drying, the air-conditioner making a funny noise.

And all of that doesn’t even touch the big stuff, like the fact that the paint is (was!) peeling away on the garage and fading so strongly on the sunny side that it looked patchwork. Or the spot on the front where one of the boards is rotting away.

For months, I’ve been wrestling with indecision. Sell the house or get a job that lets me take better care of the house? Those felt like the only two options. Somehow a couple of months ago, I decided to try a third option — at least for the moment — and deal with the big stuff as best I could. So this past week was the week of painting the house. I started working on it a week ago — scraping paint, pressure-washing, priming, and doing my best to patch the area of wood rot. On Saturday, my family and some friends came and helped me paint. We were done with three sides of the house by noon, at which time we had a barbecue — burgers, hot dogs, fruit salad, potato chips, tortilla chips, and three kinds of dip. And then the kids went swimming.

I’m still tired, with sore muscles that twinge every time I raise my arms, but oh, so satisfied. And yes, that picture is me, sitting on my roof (and making my father very nervous — it’s his hand on the ladder, and I can almost promise that there were worried words coming out of his mouth.) But every time I look up at that wall now — nicely blue, trim bright and white — I get to think, I did that. I took care of that.

It’s a good feeling.

Monday morning randomness

02 Monday Feb 2015

Posted by in Boring, House, Personal, Randomness

≈ 1 Comment

I didn’t watch the Superbowl yesterday, because I don’t have anyone in my life who would make watching the Superbowl enough of a priority that we would have figured out how to make it happen. My television is only connected to the internet, so it would have meant caring enough to go somewhere to watch it. I don’t care enough (surprise!), but it is always sort of weird when most of America is having a certain kind of party, with the grocery store filled with the foods for the occasion, to just not do it. Instead, I turned on the butterfly lights in the backyard and lit the torches and ate steak and asparagus on my great-grandmother’s china.

The food choices were because I still don’t have a kitchen sink and so I’ve been grilling a lot. A steak can last me for three meals, so is more economical than it seems. The china was because I do have kitchen cabinets, ones with enough room that I unpacked all of the dishes that have been in boxes in my garage for the past five years. The lights and torches were because it still gets dark early and the kitchen table is packed with stuff that should be sitting on kitchen counters that I still don’t have. All practical reasons, but it amused me to be feeding myself a romantic fire-lit dinner on the patio. I should do that more often, because it really was lovely. Not having company shouldn’t mean not appreciating an enchanting evening.

Anyway, I’ve decided to use the china, because otherwise R is going to wind up needing to make the choice to get rid of it. (Or have a huge kitchen and maybe lots of kids.) Someone is going to be breaking this china, and it might as well be me. The very first use I made of it, somewhat accidentally, was as a temporary water bowl for the dogs. The story behind that is boring, but it was just a convenient thing to do. I had a moment of wondering if my great-grandmother would be horrified — and then I almost heard her laughing at me. She wouldn’t have minded. I only knew her really at the end of her life, when she was in her 80s and 90s. For the last decade, she never had any idea who I was, but she didn’t care. In a wheelchair, in a nursing home, memory shot to hell, she was cheerful and happy and joyful, always positive. I will probably not think of her every time I use her china, because eventually, it will just start to feel like dishes, but I hope it’ll serve as a reminder of her for a while.

I should post kitchen pictures. It’s… getting there. Kitchen cabinets are in and refilled with my kitchen stuff, but I have no counter-tops and no sink. It’ll be, at best, the end of this week before it’s done. More likely sometime next week. I have had moments of great uncertainty. Picking out cabinets, a color, hardware was remarkably stressful. There are so many different styles, so many colors, so many choices. So far with this house, I’ve bailed on even the most basic of choices. I thought when I moved in that I would paint everything colorfully, but nope, not so much. I’ve been too worried about making a bad choice to do anything more than the same off-white that most rentals have. But with the kitchen, not making choices was not an option. I’m sort of at a halfway point, where I can how my choices are turning out, and so far, so good. I went with this cabinet style with these handles. Simple but polished. My kitchen is small — not a galley type, but basically a one-person room, so I was worried that the cabinets would be overwhelming, but I think they work.

It does make me wish I’d had money for new appliances, though. It would look so good with black, instead of the mismatched white and off-white that are in place. Someday, maybe. It depends, I suppose, on my priorities. What do I want most in life?

Hmm, that’s getting very philosophical for a Monday morning, warm-up-the-fingers blog post, but I have been thinking about my goals lately. It’s the January new year’s thing in action — what do I want, where do I want to be, etc.? Last year, I should have started looking for a job in January. That was always the plan. Quitting my job, taking two years to finish grad school and internship, finding a job in 2014. Instead I quit my job, dropped out of grad school after a year, spent a year writing a book and then… eh, started my own business and wrote another book.

So I have deviated from my plan and there’s a new plan in process. And I know that would make a lot of sense, in this new plan, to minimize my expenses dramatically. Do I really need to own a house? Having a lawn and a pool and a spare bedroom — those are all expensive choices, not really suited for the start-up entrepreneurial mentality. And yet… I want to keep my house. So, yes, goal-thinking — how do my plans serve my goals and what are my priorities? Sadly, we’re into February and I still haven’t figured out my answers.

When I decided to go for it on the kitchen — my cabinet choice was not the most economical — it was with the knowledge that if I was going to sell the house, a good kitchen would add value. But now that I (almost) have my kitchen, I’m even more reluctant to give it up. On the other hand, do I really want to make job-life choices in order to have a nice kitchen? Maybe.

All right, my fingers are warmed up and it’s almost yoga time. Writing this afternoon will be all about Noah. For the first time in a while this morning, I actually had snippets of conversation happening while I walked the dog. A good sign!

Priorities

28 Tuesday Oct 2014

Posted by in Boring, House, Randomness, Writing

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Yesterday I was exhausted. I didn’t write a word. I didn’t even open up the file. But I did dismantle the plumbing under my sink to unclog my clogged drain which involved completely emptying the cabinet and then putting everything back into it and I did deal with some work stuff, including some that was not pleasant, and I did call CenturyLink to find out why the internet wasn’t working, so it wasn’t a collapse-in-a-heap sort of day. I could have written. I should have written. At least a couple sentences to get myself back into the spirit.

Today I am off to take my car to the shop (and have breakfast!) and when I come home, I need to move most of the small items in the house, including all the books, into my bedroom, so the flooring guys can fix all the floors tomorrow. Doesn’t that sound fun? I am so not in the mood. But I am going to try to write–not 1000 words, because that would be a ridiculous goal and I’m sick of failing the goals I set for myself, but at least a paragraph.

Tomorrow, flooring guys. I suspect the day will be disrupted and loud, but I will try to write.

Thursday, the cabinet people come. I’d like to make it to yoga, because apparently I’m not going to make it there today or tomorrow, but I think choosing yoga is probably ambitious enough that it would mean not choosing writing. Maybe I’ll play it by ear.

But I need to stop letting one disruption dictate my day. In my head, writing is my priority. In my life, other stuff keeps stealing my energy.

I still haven’t managed to reformat the books and post the new versions, so I’ve also got that as a goal. But first things first–off I go to the car place.

Today’s goal: to write something!

Re-designing everything

10 Wednesday Sep 2014

Posted by in Anxiety, House, Personal, Randomness

≈ 3 Comments

I realized this morning that I’ve been on a redesign binge. I think it started with the pantry, but I suspect I should be blaming it on the insurance company.

So ten days ago, I decided the pantry needed to be cleaned out and re-organized. I threw away a bunch of expired food, gave away a bunch more that I will never eat (products containing gluten), shifted the shelves around so that the stuff we need is in the middle, moved a bunch of appliance-type items into the garage, and wound up after a couple of hours work with a very user-friendly and half-empty pantry. It’s nice.

A few days after that, I decided to attack the spice cupboard. I took everything out, sorted through what we have and don’t have, put a couple of items on a grocery list, and arranged the rest according to categories. All the pepper-based products (red pepper flakes, chili powder, paprika, tabasco, sriracha, Marie Sharp’s, etc., etc.,) are in one group, all the green herbs in another, all the seasoned salts and spice mixes in a third. Frankly, it mostly made me want some really good spice racks or lazy Susans, but for a brief moment in time, it was organized.

Then I did my bathroom. The tea cupboard. The baking cupboard. Finally, I realized that I’m currently waiting on news from my insurance company about whether they agree with the damage control people that I should have all new cupboards and perhaps it’s not really the best time to be re-organizing all of them? Just guessing.

So my attention went bookward. This weekend, I went a little crazy. I went for a new cover on A Lonely Magic. I think I can’t talk about that too much right now, because my anxiety level will skyrocket, but it was an impulse purchase that goes with an expensive secondary impulse purchase and… yeah, anxiety rising. But re-design. And then on Monday, for whatever insane reason, I decided I needed to re-format all my books. I spent the whole day working on it, trying to make them as beautiful as some of the books Amazon is turning out. I didn’t entirely succeed, but I made some improvements and will be re-posting files eventually.

This morning I decided it was time for a website re-design. I opened the dashboard and started to consider my options–and finally, finally, I reigned myself in and said, “What’s going on here? Does everything need to be different?”

As soon as I started to think about it, I realized that all this change is really just a reaction to being in a holding pattern with house changes. I am going to need new floors. But I liked my old floors. I am going to need new cabinets. But I liked my old cabinets!

But my subconscious is busily working away, trying to get my conscious to reconcile itself to change sometimes being positive. Change can be good. My new floors might be as nice as the old ones. My new cabinets might be a lot nicer.

And my new web design–well, I’m going to try to come up with a fancy front page, maybe one of those slider carousels, showing off the books?–and move the blog to a less prominent area. Not hidden, but tucked away so that people who come here merely wanting to know if I have another book on the way don’t need to read about my dogs & other miscellany. Because change is okay. And unlike house disasters, I can always revert it if I don’t like it.

I should probably call the insurance company, too, and find out what’s going on with my claim. It’s time to bite the bullet and figure out how to get my new floors.

Still thinking

12 Tuesday Jan 2010

Posted by in House, Personal, Writing

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Last night I was thinking that I should just write. Every day. 500 words. Nothing exorbitant, nothing structured, just start some stories and write while I was moved by them, then stop writing when the movement stopped. I started imagining one–a woman pulls a veil more firmly over her face as she moves through a crowded street, the heavy cloth of her covering stirring itchy prickles of sweat. But the feeling on the back of her neck? That isn’t sweat. She’s being watched and she knows it, and then I was off and running. I don’t know whether I fell asleep or it just turned into half dream, half awake plotting, but she was smuggling birth control pills, and what an odd thing for my imagination to conjure up. This morning it feels like it was more of a dream, just because it was so vivid and quirky, but it definitely started as something I was writing.

We’re going to be late to school if I don’t start the morning momentum going, but it’s so cold. I’m trying to remember how to enjoy cold, how to breathe deeply of the fresh air and walk briskly to stay warm, but this morning, I’d rather just stay in bed and skip the day.
I’m thinking about tackling a major project, too–moving my desk into the bedroom. I like the front-room office, except for two things: there are too many distractions, ranging from all my books and the television in sight to the laundry room door always reminding me of the need to tackle that never-ending chore, plus the clutter I create out there is driving me crazy. And I have to stay wireless there and my connection is being so erratic–my frustration level is high. If I move the desk into the bedroom, I can actually plug in to the modem, which might resolve some of my problems. But today I have loads of work. And I guess it’s time to get going.