Category Archives: House

Plants and other living things

26 Wednesday Aug 2009

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I can’t believe I killed the rosemary plant. I thought those plants were pretty near indestructible. Less than three weeks with me, and it looks like it was abandoned for months.

I guess it’s still a good home, though. When I looked through the viewfinder, I realized that the plant had an inhabitant that seemed quite happy to be there, although less happy to have a giant looming human peering at it.

Even more than the dead rosemary, though, I can’t believe that the flowers are thriving. Plants are weird.

I had another picture of the plants, a close-up. But I couldn’t resist this one with Zelda smiling at me from the door. Happy flowers, a happy dog, a happy lizard–three out of four isn’t so bad.

Family visit

12 Wednesday Aug 2009

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I claim that I can work through anything and it’s largely true. Long practice, I’m sure: way back when, I could walk through crowded school hallways without ever pausing in my reading to try to get a few more pages in between classes. Back when I was freelancing, I was perfectly capable of writing a coherent news story with a three-year-old pulling on one arm. Reading while walking is actually easier than writing while parenting, but the practice focusing during the former probably made the latter possible. The experience of the latter has made my current work a breeze. I really could probably work through a hurricane, if the power stayed on.

Today, my parents brought the kids over, and while sitting at my desk, I could see R, T, and C playing in the pool. It was another phenomenal day–I might have considered it too hot, just a few short weeks ago–and there was laughing and splashing and moderate shrieking. Meanwhile, the dog couldn’t decide where to be, Dad was working on fixing the wood of the pillar two feet away from me, and the bird was sure that since I was at my desk I should let her out (she’s not concerned with trivial details like the risk of someone opening the doors to the outside) and kept trying to tell me so. Loudly.
And yet still, I worked. I’m torn, though, between being pleased with myself (what focus!) and hoping that this wasn’t one of those days that one regrets wasting on one’s deathbed. The fun chaos of having six people in the house is all too rare in my life.

Leaving the house

09 Sunday Aug 2009

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I’m tempted to find it ironic that I leave this house so much more than the last. I don’t think I could even count the number of places I’ve been in the last two weeks: restaurants and food stores, hardware stores and…hmm, I wonder what the generic name is for stores like Target and Bed Bath & Beyond? Well, plenty of them, too. Ha, and that doesn’t even include the pool supply stores. Oh, the pool supply stores! Yes, how I’ve loved them.

I’d guess that all that will slow down a little now that we’re more settled, and once school starts, but actually it is one of the things that I’m loving about our new home. There’s so much more here. Yes, I could have gone to every place I’ve been from the last house (and did, sometimes) but it was a trek. To go anywhere except the grocery store was an hour commitment for the driving. Oh, and the food–well, our “easy” sit-down restaurants there were Perkins and Chilis and while I don’t mind either, I don’t mind them a lot more if I eat at them very very rarely.
Yesterday, I went to the farmer’s market and it’s the prettiest farmer’s market I’ve ever seen. Considering how crowded it was at 8:30, I’m not sure I want to visit it at 11, but it was lovely. I bought some lemon parsley pasta (which we haven’t tried yet), peaches and green beans, and best of all, a container pot of mixed flowers for the front porch and another of rosemary. I told the saleswoman that I was death to plants so wanted something that had a chance of surviving me, so she carefully picked out a pot with three perennials, including one that looks like beach grass, and told me all the others plants (four or five of them) would die, but that would leave more room for the surviving three. I suspect, knowing my history with plants, that they’ll all die, but the beach grass might survive. I can hope, anyway.
I put the rosemary on the patio table and between the smell of cedar from the shower and the smell of the plant, the patio smells so good that I could sit there all day and just breathe. I ate dinner there in the early evening–a plate of fresh bread and interesting cheese and some smoked salmon and grapes and a glass of San Pellegrino water (eventually upgraded to a glass of red wine, the Menage a Trois that I like so much) and yes, it sounds pretentious, I’ll have to balance it out with a microwave pizza or some leftover Chinese food today, but truly, it was delicious.

The two Floridas

04 Tuesday Aug 2009

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In my head, there are two Floridas. One, rarely seen, is vacation-land, a comfortable tropical paradise with a little bit of magic to it. It’s flowers around every corner, armadillos and alligators and the occasional fox, boat rides at dusk across a quiet lagoon, feeling the slight prickle of a little too much sun, but never the burn. It’s the smell of chlorine and french fries, the sound of roller coasters and happy screams but also cicadas and summer music. It’s drinking Corona with lime on a quiet porch when it’s so hot that just sitting still starts a little sweat.

And then there’s the other Florida. It’s the one where nobody knows how to drive in traffic, and the only nearby sit-down restaurants are Perkins and Chilis. It’s the Florida of shopping malls and too much air-conditioning, grocery stores with aisles of junk food but not a single half gallon of organic milk. It’s the Florida where people actually live, the land of dental visits and bug spray.

Only magic Florida and reality Florida seem to have merged.

I forgot to take out the trash last night, so at 5AM I was hauling garbage bags to the curb. But the sounds that early were amazing; not just cicadas, but an entire orchestra of frogs, so loud they could have been percussion instruments. I came back in and put the water on to boil, then let the dog out into the backyard. While I waited for my tea, I followed her out, and sat down to listen. I could see stars in the sky above me — Orion’s belt, to be exact. And while I sat there, wondering how long it had been since I’d seen Orion’s belt and trying to remember if I’d ever seen it in Florida before, a shooting star flew past. It was gone in a heartbeat, so fast that it was almost as if I’d imagined it. But I didn’t. It was real, and just like every shooting star it was magic.

But magic in my very own backyard.

House or no house

16 Saturday May 2009

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I’m really, really tired of waiting for house news. It’s been well over two months now, and still the bank hasn’t bothered to get back to me. I can’t imagine how frustrating it must be for the realtors: if my income was dependent on this, I’d be going insane.

As it is, it’s been a busy few months, what with illness, injuries, emergency room visits and trips to Texas, California, and next week Seattle. And, of course, the interminable teeth appointments. (Implants finally done, braces close to over. Six months from now, I might have working front teeth again.)

So it’s probably just as well that we haven’t had to move yet. But the closer we get to true Florida summer, the more afraid I get. I don’t like it here when it’s too hot to move. I’m dismayed that I have no escapes planned, and yet, it’s hard to plan for an escape when I don’t know when or if we’ll be moving. And the longer nothing is final, the more I agonize over the decisions. To buy or not to buy. To have a pool or not. To send R. to Walden or back to Center. I hate it when my brain starts to travel in circles around questions that I can’t answer.

FrontDoor

05 Thursday Mar 2009

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FrontDoor, originally uploaded by wendy4767.

The scrapes and scratches on the walls are invisible in this picture, which shows the front door from the perspective of the room in which one would formally eat on major holidays and which would otherwise be unused.

Kitchen

05 Thursday Mar 2009

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Kitchen, originally uploaded by wendy4767.

It is truly pathetic that I don’t understand how to use flickr. Really, pathetic. And yet–I have to wonder–if it’s hard for me, can they really be perfect for the audience they intend to reach? (And yes, my keyboard is still short a critical letter. It interferes with all work to try to think around it.)