6 posts tagged “house”
I've just returned back home from visiting the place where I grew up:
A small town where most of the cars still have six-digit license plate numbers but is big enough to be infected with the current epidemic of never using the car's signals.
A place where I discover I still have buttons, and that others can decide which ones to push and do so, regardless of how I feel about it.
A town where unwanted and specifically denied headstones pop up out of cemetery ground, bearing your name, while you are still alive.
It's so nice to be back here at home.
My husband and I have just finished re-doing our laundry room. I'll admit that Smike did most of the work, but I did all of the research. I've been cheerfully annoying during the whole process, muttering things to him like "Stewart Copeland never had to hang Debbie Travis wallpaper" and "I bet Hugh Laurie doesn't have a German Shepherd as a supervisor". These types of things don't go over too well after several nights of staying up until 3am getting stuff done. And yet I persist. Sure, he elbowed me in the temple and I dropped a piece of the blinds on his head. But my game is off... I know you have to start this stuff right off the bat, while the late nights are still making you punchy.
You wouldn't believe how the previous owners of this place left it (and I'm serious) so I won't bother describing it to you. Keep in mind that we had planned on putting down a new laundry room floor when we had first moved in, but didn't get the keys to the house until 7pm on moving day and once the dudes put the stuff in there it was too late. So we've lived with this completely shitty room for two years now and didn't notice it too much. The walls were in bad shape and painting wasn't going to work so we put up some Debbie Travis textured-and-paintable wallpaper (the previous owners had put up wallpaper, too, except that it was only attached at the top and at the bottom).
Bearing all of this in mind, here's me towards the end of the last night, doing the flooring:
A work in progress:
Finished laundry room:
The shock of having a nice room in there now is terrific. I'm loving on this room now and even Smike is impressed. Now on to the next project: clearing out 9 years of girl's clothes. Luckily the basement is nice and cool! :)
I cannot tell you what it is like to watch, helpless, as a neighbour family's entire lives go -- literally -- up in flames.
I tried to help as much as I could, but there was nothing I could do except stand back and offer what assistance I was able to. I took photos because I knew I'd have to bring my own kids past this horror and that they'd have heard and seen things from the school, and be frightened. They were. My youngest had been crying and most of the kids thought it was their house on fire. So I brought my camera with me and showed them one of the photos, telling them that they were safe and to be prepared for what they were going to see. They were relieved but still very tense, and when we got to the house I showed them how the firemen (and women!) were keeping track of who was where, how they put on their oxygen tanks, how they checked for hot spots, and why they were pulling down bricks and poking things with long poles. There were hundreds of people out watching and I met quite a few people, including one fireman's wife (who totally understands my thing for guys in uniform) named Beth. She answered a lot of my own questions about what they were doing, and we talked about my fears that someone would get killed going in there at night (they have a night patrol person to stay).
There was at least one person in the house, and all got out safely. They all lost everything. It's such a tragedy, but they still have each other... as unkind as it may seem to say it, the house and treasured things they lost are nothing compared to what it would be like to lose one of their loved ones.
The whole community has tried to come together and help out, I know they have family and many friends in the area who are doing all they can for them as well. If you have any suggestions of what I can do (my neighbours have made me the contact person for them, because I am friends with the gal who took them in while all this was happening), please let me know.
And while I've got your ear, please say a little thank you for the rescue workers and volunteers who put their lives in danger for us. They are true heroes, no two ways about it. Hug your family and thank whatever powers that be that they are safe.
Do you procrastinate?
When you're procrastinating, do you KNOW it's procrastinating, or do you think of it as a more positive thing?
Last summer, I was writing and illustrating my book. Also moved to a new house.
The new owners called my realtor to tell her how wonderful my spic-and-span my house was.
I hit every deadline, but often it was very close. For whatever reason, when I know something has to be done I sit down to do it, but I end up doing something else and thinking "I should be doing the first thing" and feeling guilty that I'm not doing it. So to stop the guilt I don't do the second thing either. And nothing gets done. Except maybe some really, really, really obsessive cleaning.
Obviously I'm supposed to be doing something RIGHT NOW. Instead I'm writing about procrastinating.
I should be finishing my query and sending it off. But I'm scared to. And I'm in the midst of some really scrummy rekindlings at Facebook, among friends I haven't seen in *mumblemumble* years... I gathered about 30 friends in a matter of hours (and more are still stumbling across ME! *lol*). So I've got to write notes and check out pictures and find my own to upload, and fight back the feeling of being flooded due to so many great memories that are coming back to me. I'm finding the whole Facebook experience a very intense one.
Probably the best thing to do is finish the query, send it off, and then keep busy with pictures and my buds and reconnecting with everyone. My kiddoes want to get out of the house, too, so I'll be trying to find good places to take them where they can have fun. Dawn has managed to convince me that no one really cares what I look like in a bathing suit so we might even end up going swimming somewhere :) And I've got my friends here to go galavanting off with, sip cocktails or coffee with, trade kids with, and just chat and hang out with.
Dammit. I don't want to do this query. It's too easy and if it's rejected I'll have to figure something else out, and I'm not sure I can do that. So if i don't send it at least the option of it working out is still there... if I do it and fail, then I have no idea what's next.
Well, other than more housework.
It's been a very long, very strange month :) It's only half over, too.
The new house, while very lovely, requires a ton of work not only to remodel, but to keep up with. We're working inside and outside -- the entire yard needs to be overhauled -- and it's so hard to get the regular stuff done when you're busy with the idiotic things like moving piles of giant rocks, or replacing every doorknob in the house because when they don't work it's a huge safety hazard. We've had to shut off one of the bathrooms again, the one that had been redone before we moved in, to overhaul it.
I'd like a few moments in a dark alley with the previous owners of this house.
I got the new Anne Lamott book at the library and had to stop reading it. I read it at bedtime and just wept. I got to page 78 and had to pick up my electronic Sudoku puzzle instead... my pillow was a giant puddle of tears, so wet that I had to turn it over. Anne's so funny, she's such a giant mess, but she tells the truth. She's honest. And that might be another version of that old saying, The truth hurts. Even reading it, not living it or experiencing it personally, really just bores into the core of your being. I'll pick up that book again, just not before bedtime, and not lying down, as I am not one of those beautiful criers, with pretty silver trails of tears streaming down my soft cheeks. My eyes swell up and I get blotchy, and sometimes I get these horrible red freckles that are actually burst capilliaries, and look like someone tried to strangle me and almost succeeded.
I have my business at Second Life, with five shoppes, and a growing catalogue of products. I got to meet one of my quilting heros there as well (hi, Pat! *grin*) and I'm in a quilt block swap with her, Second Life's first one ever. I sent her a photo of me with the Sock Monkey I bought, and we chatted about sock monkey fabric, and I sent her the location to get one so she could blog about it. She's got a new pattern coming out, and if you see a plastic-covered quilting magazine at the store with a bonus pattern included, she's the creator of that one too :)
Although my computer is ready for the junk pile, it's still limping along, and I'm working on moving everything over to the new one. It's not as easy as you might think, though. So many of the programs I like to use are as old as Barbie and I can't find what I need to reinstall them. Sometimes they are so old they aren't even compatible with the new system. I like low-tech, and I hate change.
My husband calls me a Luddite. I should probably have been born a Mennonite. Buttons instead of zippers is right up my alley anyway; also I really like their quilts.
Anyway, I'm working on my book website now. So far Photoshop has cooperated and hasn't crashed the system. I really despise working with graphic slices, and they are even more difficult to deal with when you hand-code them into a website. But I've got the basics now and I'm just adding in the content. My friend Lizzy gets the credit for making the virtual "me" (she's me but she's not) and when I'm finished, I'll put up a screen grab and URL so you can admire both of our handiwork ;)
Other than that, I'm dealing with the aftermath of a horrendous medication I was taking two years ago, and still having effects from. It almost killed me twice back then and it's doing a great job of trying to do it now. Keeping busy is helping.
And how are YOU doing? :)
The new house we moved into last summer is fabulous. It is, literally, my dream home. It's so big that we haven't even opened up several rooms yet (and only recently started using a few others). Granted, it needs some work, as the previous owners really let things slide -- in fact, they didn't even do a basic cleaning or vacuuming when they left -- so it's been an uphill battle to show this house the love we have for it. You don't even want to know the shape we found it in when we moved in. But it's got big bay windows, a giant kitchen, a huge master bedroom with an ensuite, and a Scarlett O'Hara staircase. I adore it.
The outside, though, is a completely different matter. Their two brutes of the canine persuasion did a number on the backyard, along with a trampoline that shaded a large portion of the grass and killed it, and there was no landscaping or flowers to be found. So throughout the fall, and some of the winter as well, my own dogs would go outside and return caked in mud. There was so little grass for them to walk around on because of the previous owners' neglect, our tidy backyard became a big doggy soup on rainy days.
The result is that there was mud tracked all through my kitchen, and often found on the hallway walls. Sometimes it made it as far as the rugs (which, believe you me, will be among the first things to go anyway -- they were due for removal with or without my little beasties around). Dirt is no big deal and doesn't really bother me at all, you just vacuum it up or wipe it away, but when you have to mop the floor constantly, it's a really big drag.
So you can imagine how my heart was bursting to look out the window and find grass -- yes, that North American yard staple and pride of Hank Hills everywhere -- growing in the bare patches of our back yard. Little tiny sprouts, tender little things, but almost a glowing green in colour and definitely *not* weeds. There is grass growing in our backyard.
It seems that the spot where their pool and trampoline had been is now a safe haven for fresh green grass growth, and if this actually continues it means we won't have to rototill the entire backyard and put down fresh sod. You can probably guess this would cost the equivalent of a college education. So I'm totally surfing on seratonin with this happy weather, the fact that there's real grass growing in my backyard, and the completely novel idea that I can finally -- FINALLY -- put that damn Swiffer away.
