Real Q-tips are better than fake Q-tips.

This feels like one of those life lessons that I have to learn every five years or so, but this time around I’m learning a new lesson, too: it is better to throw away the cheap swabs than suffer through using the whole box of them.

I think I might be finally learning this life lesson because I’m getting rid of so much other stuff. It’s ridiculous to walk away from a $400 gas grill but struggle to discard a product that cost less than $2, which I bought in order to save $1. And yet, if it weren’t for the fact that I think these cotton swabs are making Zelda’s life unhappy, I probably would still use the box. Penance for a bad buying decision? Frugality as self-torture? Why choose to suffer? I don’t know, but I know I usually would.

Now, however, I am resolved to throw away the box as soon as I finish writing this post. And then I’m going to go to the store and buy Q-tips, real Q-tips, with plenty of cotton, so that when I’m cleaning my ears, it feels like I’m cleaning them with a cotton ball instead of poking them with a stick. And, more to the point, when I’m cleaning Zelda’s ears, which is how the vast majority of my Q-tips get used, she will feel the same.

Why so many Q-tips for the dog, you ask? Because she loves to swim. Swimming equals water in the ears. Water in the ears equals breeding ground for bacteria. Bacteria equal ear infection. When Bartleby has an ear infection he makes it immediately clear as strongly as he can — he gets grouchy, snappy, hides in corners, resists being touched. If he were a kid, he’d whine loudly and take to his bed the moment his temperature hit 99 degrees. Z, on the other hand, is a stoic. I haven’t realized that she’s had ear infections until she’s done damage to her ears, so I try to be hyper-vigilant about getting water out of them after she’s gone swimming. Of course, in 10 days, she will be swimming a lot less, so maybe I don’t need to worry about this.

But that thought is too big to contemplate. Today, I’m going to focus on Q-tips and shelf liner and triple A batteries instead. A run to the post office to return some products I shouldn’t have bought. A check of the battery in Serenity to make sure it’s charging properly. Writing this evening with my friend J. And if the thought keeps creeping into my head that this is the second-to-last Thursday I will ever spend in the house that I thought I would live in forever… well, that’s okay, too. Because two weeks from today I will be in Pennsylvania, I hope, eating blueberries and counting my blessings.

I haven’t even gone anywhere yet and I’m exhausted. I think it’s excitement exhaustion: it’s not even that I’ve done so much… although come to think of it, I’ve done an incredible amount in the past couple of months. But it’s not even that I’ve done so much in the last few days as it is that I’ve spent them poised to do ALL the stuff and so even though I haven’t yet done ALL the stuff, the tension of waiting to do ALL the stuff has tired me out.

All the stuff: pick up Serenity. Learn how to use her. Figure out what fits in her. Get a storage unit and put some of my belongings in the storage unit. Clean out the rest of the house. Get a Sun Pass transponder. Do some laundry. Get sheets to fit her beds. Figure out what size sheets make the most sense… It feels like I’ve got an overwhelming number of things to do. Realistically, there’s no rush. Tomorrow, the weekend, next week–they’re all just as good as today for getting things done.

Meanwhile, on Tuesday, I was at a meditation meeting, sitting very still, trying to meditate and feeling very itchy. As soon as the meditation was over, I got up and switched seats, thinking maybe I was having an allergic reaction to the fabric of the chair I was sitting in. An hour later, it started to feel like a safe bet that the chair had been infested with some kind of bug. Fleas, maybe?

By last night, it was obvious to me that there was no way it was fleas. I’ve been bitten by fleas before. Annoying little itchy red spots. A pain, but nothing… well, interesting, for lack of a better word. (I’m tempted to use exciting, but that just feels so wrong.)

Anyway, I started researching. What kind of bug bites turn into inflamed red welts, bigger than hives? Ans: bed bugs. I’m now completely paranoid that I brought them back into my house with me. As soon as I got home I showered and threw my clothes into the laundry, but that does not change my paranoia. I am also equally paranoid that since I am one of the lucky people who respond rather dramatically to bed bug bites the welts could actually last as long as three weeks, as the internet tells me they might. I would guess that I have approximately 40 bites on my arms, back and shoulders. They itch and burn and some of them are forming blisters. And yeah, I’m feeling pretty damn sorry for myself.

I also ate some beans yesterday because I am bad at reading menus, and I’m fairly sure my general state of sluggish misery has something to do with that, too.

So, boring whiny blog post… Sorry! And it’s not even what I meant to write about when I opened up the browser. Yesterday I had an IDEA. Or maybe it was Tuesday. But either way, I saw a thing that could happen that would be a better thing than what I’ve been trying to make happen in Grace. It was very exciting. I haven’t actually tried to write it yet, but the day is not yet over.

Anyway, I was talking to my friend Tim about it (when talking is that thing that involves typing in a message window) and I decided to make a new writing rule: the Dany Rule. My Dany rule is, “All the bad stuff in the world can happen to your character, but the story only gets interesting when she starts to burn shit down.” Named, with great fondness, for Daenerys Targaryen, of course, whose clips I watch on youtube, even though I’ve never watched a single episode of Game of Thrones or even read the books. It’s tough to resist a character who is so very good at burning stuff down.

Anyway, Noah is not going to start burning anything down, but he is going to take action, I hope. A desperate action, but one that is going to be far more interesting than his current passive state of letting things happen. And I’m going to take some actions, too — although perhaps not today.

I woke up a while back to the sound of ticking. Not a big sound, a little sound. Tick, tick, tick.

My first sleepy thought was, “I should get rid of that clock. I don’t need more things to ruin my sleep.”

My second sleepy thought was, “I don’t have a clock.”

From sleepy to heart-racing in two seconds. My thoughts went like this: there’s a ticking noise. I don’t own a clock. It must be a bomb. There’s a bomb in my bedroom. Someone must have stolen into my room and planted a bomb under my bed. They want to blow me up because… nope. That’s silly. There’s no reason anyone would want to blow me up.

Okay, then it’s not a bomb. It must be a watch. A loud watch. Okay, someone’s standing in my room watching me sleep and wearing a watch. A burglar? Would you wear a watch to burgle people’s houses? Maybe if you need to time things, like your getaway, like getting in and out of the house.

You’d think they’d use a quieter watch, though. Like why not an iWatch or one of those smart watches that you could also communicate with your lookout with? Although if you could afford an Apple watch, you probably wouldn’t need to burgle my house. There’s really not much to get here. I could see being robbed by a junkie, I guess (do people use that word anymore?), who was desperate for anything he could get…

Tick, tick, tick

Although if it was a burglar, wouldn’t they get on with the burgling? Why just stand there? Also, two dogs… wouldn’t one of them make some noise if a stranger was standing in my room? I can make them go ballistic by setting my coffee cup down a little too hard, how are they sleeping through an unknown person wandering around the house?

Finally I opened my eyes. My fan was on. The tick was the cord, very gently banging on the base.

I find this to be a cautionary tale about my own tendency to jump to worst possible conclusions. Lately, whenever my brain gets stuck worrying about something I can’t control, I remind myself that it’s probably not a bomb. It’s surprisingly helpful!

Anyway, I was reminded of it this morning because I was meditating and I could hear the fan ticking away. I’ve been trying to meditate every day, slowly increasing the time I spend at it. I’d like to get up to a serious number — 30 minutes, maybe? — but at the moment, I’m stuck at 15. Usually, my last couple minutes of meditation isn’t meditating so much as it is wondering if I remembered to set a timer, before finally asking Alexa how much time is left. The last few days I’ve gotten that number down to seconds — yesterday I think it was fifteen of them! — but until I’ve made it to the end without asking several times, I know I’m not ready to bump up the number.

But I really like meditating. Six months I would have said (like probably almost everyone reading!), “Oh, I can’t meditate, my brain just never shuts up.” But someone told me that prayer is talking to God, meditating is listening, and when I think of meditating as listening, the experience becomes… well, I think what it’s supposed to be. My brain still doesn’t shut up, and I have in fact, gotten so distracted by it that I’ve totally forgotten that I was supposed to be meditating until the timer goes off and I realize, oops, I picked up the computer or whatever. And the dogs can be seriously distracting. They think me sitting up with my eyes closed, doing nothing but breathing, either means that I am in need of snuggles or that my hands should be busy petting them.

But some of the time, concentrating on listening, feeling my breath, and trying to exist only in the moment I’m in results in a calm that feels sustaining. And every once in a while, it’s something even more than that. I suspect it’s something like runner’s high or a flow state, but it’s an amazing sense of well-being and joy. I’ve only had it a few times, but it is well worth the fifteen minutes (soon to be twenty I hope) that I give it every morning.

I had a moment of thinking when I woke up this morning, “Thursday, must blog, what am I going to write about?” and then I thought, “Duh.” Seriously, it was a very half-awake thought because in reality I am pretty much bubbling over with excitement, wanting to babble my stuff to anyone who will listen.

So yesterday I bought my RV, a Winnebago Travato 59K. Although maybe I should start calling her a camper? It seems like the class B people prefer to use camper or van in reference to their homes-on-wheels, class B being the type of RV I chose. I am… excited. And scared. And excited again. And overwhelmed and excited and amused and excited and… yeah. I’ll stop there.

I haven’t gotten to take possession of her yet. It takes the service guys a couple of days to prep her and get her ready and then we get to do a big walkthrough where I check everything and they teach me everything I need to know. The walkthrough can take several hours, so I’m not sure when that will happen but not before the weekend, I suppose. Apart from any other issues, I need to arrange for a ride, since obviously, I’ll be driving away in Serenity.

Yep, that’s her name. It’s probably a cliche for geeks to name their vehicles Serenity, but I was thinking of doing so anyway — not just for the Firefly reference, but for the reminder to self that serenity is the true destination of my journeys. Then R said, upon seeing a picture, “You must name it Serenity.” Decision made. (In that list of adjectives up above, the amusement is because I am so very, very excited about Serenity. Oh, the irony.)

Serenity is, if it’s not obvious, very small. Well, relatively speaking. If you’re used to driving a Honda Civic, as I am, she feels pretty big. But more like a mini-van than an RV. And storage is going to be tight, even tighter than I imagined it would be. When I was looking at the overhead compartments yesterday and the depth of the drawers, I quailed. But just for a moment. There’s not going to be any bringing along of stuff “just in case” and I suspect that I’m going to have to make some hard decisions. I have a frying pan that I love and use all the time. I know exactly how it heats, just how food will cook in it, and I would have said that bringing it along was non-negotiable. (Little side note: it took me years to realize how important cooking tools are, but all pans are not alike and a good pan that you know well makes such a difference for consistent cooking.) But my frying pan has a long handle, which is going to waste a ton of space. Decisions, decisions.

Some of the other decisions are going to be interesting, too. I’ve gone through my pantry and gotten rid of stuff already, but I kept things that I thought I might need. So I’ve still got sugar and brown sugar and confectioner’s sugar and honey and molasses and agave syrup. If I’d bought a Class C RV, I probably would have packed all that into a corner somewhere. But with Serenity? Nope. I’ll keep some honey, because that is the sweetener that I most consistently use, but all the rest has got to go. And then spices and herbs — I still have a full shelf of the spices I knew I needed. But Serenity does not have a full shelf to give to spices. I’m going to go from a pantry the size of a full-length bedroom closet and cabinets with multiple shelves devoted to food to one cabinet, the size of maybe half an overhead airplane bin, for pantry goods. From a full-size refrigerator and freezer to a dorm-room size fridge. It sounds impossible. And so, so, so exciting!

In March, R won a fellowship to study James Joyce during the Bloomsday festivities in Dublin. Saturday night, he was on his first ever overseas flight. Before he left, I asked him for his itinerary.

“Why do you want that?” he asked.

“Oh, you know, mom paranoia,” I answered.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that if a plane crashes, I want to be able to look at your email and know that it wasn’t your plane. If there’s a terrorist attack, I want to know that you’re nowhere near it. You know, just your basic mom paranoia.”

He laughed at me, but he sent me his travel plans.

When I woke up Sunday morning, Facebook wanted me to tell it that I was safe. I thought that was creepy as hell and then I read the news. Maybe not quite creepy as hell, maybe just a little creepy. I couldn’t stop myself from hitting refresh, refresh, refresh all day long. I stopped when I reached a photo of a teary-eyed mom, trying, in daylight, to get news of her son. The daylight is relevant, of course, because if the news were good… well, the daylight came hours after the shooting stopped.

Needless to say, R’s hotel is nowhere near the latest terrorist attack. I’m so selfishly glad. I know in my head that no place is really safe — it would hurt me just as badly if R died in a traffic accident a mile away from home as if he did in a terrorist attack fifteen miles or even four thousand miles away, and the traffic accident is statistically a lot more likely. But that never changes the fear. And I really wish I’d gotten him a phone with a travel plan so that I could call him and hear his voice. In our highly connected world, we’re pretty retro — I told him to send me a postcard, I believe — so I don’t expect to hear from him until he gets home. But I keep thinking about those other moms, the ones fifteen miles away, who aren’t ever going to hear from their kids again, and my heart is just filled with sadness.

Time to walk the dogs.

It is another absolutely gorgeous day in Florida. I should spend it writing — a blog post first, followed by at least 1000 words on Grace — and then cleaning out the garage, maybe working on the kitchen.

But I’m not going to.

I’m going to float in the pool, enjoy the weather, and read more Elizabeth Peters. I’ve been binging my way through her Amelia Peabody series and although I have mixed feelings about it, I have about three more books to go. And instead of telling you all about my mixed feelings, I’m going to go read my books. 🙂

Before anything else, you should go visit Andrea Host’s blog and read about a new release from Intisar Khanani, Memories of Ash. I don’t remember whether I reviewed her first couple stories on Goodreads, but I read them and enjoyed them, so I’m looking forward to reading this one.* And at the moment, it sort of feels like I have plenty of time to read. Still no house sale so I feel like I’m living in limbo.

Sort of.

It’s a limbo that involves three main elements.

1) Continuing to clean and get rid of stuff. The cleaning is partly just that houses get dirty, especially when one has two dogs, and a house that’s maybe someday going to be shown to potential buyers (of whom there have been none — it’s not like people are seeing it and rejecting it, no one’s even seeing it) has to look good. So I’m keeping it cleaner than I normally would bother with and that’s annoying.

But I’m also still cleaning things out. I did the bathroom again over the weekend. I’d cleaned it out once already , getting rid of all the extra stuff on the back of the tub — bath salts that I didn’t really like, shampoos that weren’t quite right, moisturizer that wound up sitting there for months, that kind of stuff — and cleaning out the cabinet under the sink. I hauled a small trash can bag out that time. This weekend, I did it again. I tossed the makeup that I hardly ever use, some cleaning stuff that was almost gone, that kind of thing. It’s sort of amazing. I thought the bathroom got a lot nicer when I got rid of the first round of clutter, but it’s seriously nice now. The drawer has room in it for all my stuff, and the cabinet’s not crowded. I can find everything. But why did I need three hairbrushes? Why did I have EIGHT sets of toenail clippers?

I also did the last couple of drawers left in my bedroom and today I’m thinking about tackling the kitchen. My kitchen plan is to put everything that I think I don’t use into bins in the garage and see what I miss. Anything I miss, I’ll retrieve from the bins. Anything that I don’t miss, between now and whenever the house sells and closes, can go to goodwill. It’s going to be interesting to see how that works. I think I use my cutting boards, my knives, two different frying pans, two pots, my micro-grater, my garlic press, a ladle, two different spatulas, a wooden spoon, my oven thermometer, one cookie sheet, one pan, a rack, a round glass dish with a cover, a strainer, a vegetable peeler, and a can opener. I have a lot more stuff in my kitchen than that. Oh, I use my coffee pot and my electric kettle. And plates, bowls, silverware, glasses and mugs, of course. But seriously, I have drawers full of stuff. What is all that stuff? Why do I have it? I guess I’ll find out.

So, yeah, item one, cleaning and cleaning out. Item 2: daydreaming about my future. I actually set up a Scrivener file (more about Scrivener in a future post) titled Destinations, with forty-nine folders, one for each state an RV could reach. Each has three subfolders, Places to Stay, Things to Do, Food. I felt like maybe I should add a People to See folder, but that seemed a little… I don’t know, unrealistic? I’m pretty sure I can keep track of the people I know without needing to list them in a file. I’m planning to use it to track places that I read about, so that I don’t have that experience of thinking, wait, that great campground on the gulf coast that I read about, where was that again? I’ll be able to look it up, I hope. I’m also spending far too much time browsing and reading RV sites. I’m torn between trying to learn ALL the things now, and the practicality of how much easier it will be to figure out, for example, how to use the switches on a refrigerator when I’ve actually got the refrigerator in front of me. So yes, too much time spent doing that.

Thing 3: enjoying where I am. I am probably as tan as I’ve ever been in my life because Present Me has been being very careless about sunscreen, totally unsympathetic to Future Me’s cancer risk. But I’m so enjoying my pool and my neighborhood. This morning when I was walking Z, not quite 7AM, with the sun risen but the sky still holding traces of peach and pink and that blue edging into purple on the clouds, I was filled with joy. The birds were doing their bird thing, whistling away to one another, and the squirrels were running around — one jumped from a branch above my head, just a couple feet away — and the world felt glorious. I cannot say how many times I’ve spent that walk with my thoughts grinding away on worries — what to do about the wood rot in the front door, how to afford fixing the water heater, what sort of job would give me health insurance… the usual stuff. It’s not as if I don’t think I’ll have worries in an RV — what happens if it breaks down, what happens if a dog gets sick, what if I’m in a crash? I’m sure I’ll find plenty of things about which my anxious brain can ruminate. But none of that deterred me this morning from enjoying the moment that I was in.

I should probably add thing 4: writing and planning writing. I’m sort of wondering if the universe is insisting that I finish Grace before letting me sell the house? I did say that I was going to do that and I’m not really any closer than I ever have been. I just fiddle around with the same bits all the time. But I do work on every day and I do think about it a lot and someday, someday I am going to break through whatever has me stuck. Maybe even someday soon. Maybe even today! But not if I don’t get to it, so I guess that’s what I’ll do now.

May your day have joy!

*I am re-blogging in order to enter the giveaway, because I’d really love to win a Fire and those books, but I hope you know me well enough to know that I would never say I liked a book unless it was true!

I’m trying to be really, really mindful these days. Sitting on the lanai…

Okay, little digression about “lanai”. It’s funny to me how just using that word instead of “patio” or “porch” makes me feel like I live in a tropical paradise. I mean, I do live in a tropical paradise. I have a swimming pool, bougainvillea, bamboo, a palm tree… my backyard is as magical as tropical paradises get.

But over the seven years that I’ve lived in this house (almost), I’ve let the magic fade away, drowned in the need to paint the house, repair the sprinkler system, fix the fence, clean the fence, re-surface the pool, sweep the porch, worry about mice, etc. etc. etc. All of the sense of the backyard as a peaceful oasis disappears in wondering whether I need to clean up after the dogs. Well, not whether I need to clean up after the dogs, because I always do, but when the last time was and whether I should today.

But when I think, “I’m going to sit on the lanai,” suddenly I’m reminded that this isn’t just an ordinary patio. It reminds me that I live in a place that once seemed incredibly exotic to me.

I’ve often been grateful when I sat on my patio. I’m grateful for the roof over my head, for how lucky I’ve been in my life, I’m grateful for my private backyard and the space I’ve been given and I’m grateful for my canine companions, even when they’re running around chasing squirrels and barking at people passing by from under the fence.

But when I sit on my lanai (the exact same place), I’m appreciative. I admire the beauty of the bamboo and the softness of the breeze, the warmth of the sunlight, and the way the shadows flicker as the leaves sway with the wind.

I think I used to think those two things were the same: that being grateful and being appreciative were exactly alike. But they’re not, or if they are, they’re the same in only the same way that “lanai” and “patio” are alike. One is prosaic, practical, solid, but the other has a little more magic in it, at least for me.

So yeah, my house is not sold, but I am appreciating it, and my lanai, every day. Adventures lurk on the horizon, but I am so lucky to be where I am right now.