I got eight hours of sleep again! I finished cleaning up the tile piles in the garage! I need to go get approximately a whole palette of double sided tape and I’m ready to rock and roll.

If only my contracting company had decided to start getting an engineering letter promptly instead of waiting. It’s been 37 days. I think it is time to write to the state board.

Well, given how expensive my contract is it looks like they are going to take me seriously. Shit

Maybe. God I don’t want to escalate. This sucks.

I am… other than the remodel… doing really pretty ok. The kids and I are having some interesting tiffs lately. The kids are doing normal, appropriate testing of limits and boundaries. So of course sometimes I get mad.

The thing that makes me want to scream and scream and scream (I don’t…but I want to) is when a kid does something and lies and claims the other did it.

Oh that’s a problem for me.

The kids are finding it easier to lie to Noah. I say, “Oh wait. When kid does ___ it means you are lying.” GLARING FACE.

Kid melts like ice cream, “Ok you’re right.”

At bed time I told my kids, “Don’t feel bad about it. I couldn’t lie effectively to my mom until I was much older than you are now. Moms know you. It’s hard to lie to moms.” Then I got a big hug. I was asked if I could forgive them.

Already forgiven.

I think I forgave you for everything you could ever do wrong on the day you were born. Well, you can’t kill anyone. Uhm, at least not without good reason.

You are my flesh and blood. I never understood what that meant to people until you. I will forgive you anything. I just want to be near you. I love you.

And let’s be clear that on a 1-10 scale of life fuck ups, I don’t think you’ve hit a 3 yet.

But blaming someone else for your misdeeds…. that makes me cranky. Don’t do that.

If you fuck up you take the heat. Every time. Forever. Notice how I have to? That’s what being a grown up means.

I actually think I do a good job of modeling accepting responsibility for when you fuck up and for saying, “Nope this is not my fault.”

I think both are important.

I feel like I don’t know what I want from the future other than lots of time lying in the sunshine in the back yard having sex with Noah. That’s most of why I obsessively garden. Someday my kids will be gone for long periods of time. Then we can have sex in my beautiful garden. I’ve been working on this for like seven years now. It isn’t done yet. In 5-10 more years it is going to be fantastically beautiful.

When I lived at Auntie’s house in the mountains I had to walk to the bus stop. On the route was this beautiful little garden tucked right next to the road. An elderly couple lived there and this garden was the wife’s labor of love. She had been building it most of her adult life. I loved that garden. I would leave early for school and get home late because I spent so much time dawdling in that garden. I would lie on the ground and look around me at the profusion of life, color, and happiness.

I want that. I want to share that with Noah. He really likes the home I’m making.

Not long ago I was on the train and I was speaking with a woman who had never ridden public transit before. She was a career lady. She asked what I did. For no reason that I know of I responded, “Oh I’m a home maker.” (Did I say house wife? I think I said home maker. I’m already forgetting.)

She stopped cold. Stared at me. Then said through pursed lips, “I have not heard a woman refer to herself that way in a long time.”

Clearly thinking I shouldn’t be doing so now. BAD FOR FEMINISM!!

But uhm… that’s the easiest description for what I do.

I homeschool my kids. But we are unschooling so mostly what I’m doing is setting up a really interesting, diverse environment and trying to not get pissy when they wreck it trying to find the boundaries. Mostly I build their home for them.

I do a lot of chores around the house, sure, but I don’t do all of them. I’m not the cook. I make the kids do more and more of their own labor (I don’t fold kid laundry any more; they clean their rooms; etc). I make it so Noah comes home to a home instead of a house.

I know what this place was like when I moved in here. He’d lived here for a while with lots of roommates. The roommates were often fine people, but they left here when they wanted a home.

Noah doesn’t change his environment beyond what is absolutely mandatory.

I make a home.

But he does dishes and if I’m folding laundry when he’s home he helps and he vacuums and lots of other stuff.

I’m looking forward to late summer around here. It’s going to feel like ascending to the top of a victorious mountain. We have worked like fiends for ten years. What has it produced? I’m so happy with our life. I kinda wish I didn’t have such a fierce need to beat people, but I do have it.

I’m seriously wondering how the hunting is going to impact my pot usage. Bdsm does a lot to calm me down. It exercises through all the hormones that can become problematic stewing in my brain. I get catharsis. I get to move through things so much faster. My usage isn’t down very much yet, but hunting is still in the scary stage.

I still don’t know who will like me in three months.

My submissive wants to have dinner more often. That will be easier when Pam is gone and when we don’t have classes 5 nights a week. I can’t do it yet. Not that I’m looking forward to losing Pam–I’m not. But I don’t like having too many days a week booked and she’s been parked on one night a week for a gloriously long time. I’ve been very happy to pick that standing date over lots of other shorter term more rare options. That kind of continuity feeds my soul. It gives me a chance to work through bumps and complications and hard stuff. Because she keeps coming back. So when I have a week I’m freaking out, next week we can process it. It’s not like I have to be super careful to be on my best behavior like with other people because I only see most people once or twice a year and if I freak out at them… they may never want to come back.

Pam has given me so much love, support, consistency, and help. I’m not going to be happy to see her go.

But I will have a free night a week.

Noah and I have been talking, “Does one date a month mean one date per person you are dating (which is a way to set it up to game the system) or does it mean one date per month?”

Honestly probably somewhere in between.

I don’t know yet. Oh god. So far I’ve kept it to one a month. One in February. One in March. One in April. That’s my submissive, the Professor, then the deity. One party in March. Two parties in April. I wish they weren’t on consecutive nights. But that means I’m laying low every other weekend in April. In May I am going to a grief ritual retreat.

My spring is awesome.

The increased sleep is a combination of Lorazepam and “I have to hurry up and go to sleep because then I can wake up and talk to interesting people.”

Between Noah in the house and the folks I’m talking to online, I don’t feel as lonely all of a sudden. It’s ok that my women friends mostly don’t reach out. They wait for me to initiate. But right now there are folks who are popping up to talk to me.

I feel a lot less lonely.

I feel a lot less invisible. This is why I don’t chase women harder. Because I always end up doing so much chasing that it becomes really demoralizing. I feel like men have fewer options for people who want to pay as much attention as I do and they are more interested in receiving it. I wear women the fuck out and they pull back and back and back trying to get space to recoup. Then I stop chasing.

It hurts.

I am sorry I am so hard.

I keep a fairly clean inbox. I don’t like letting coupons or mailing list shit sit in my inbox. I make it go away. In the last 50 emails, exactly 3 women are represented. Pam, who is usually negotiating about what she needs to bring so she can come to my house and cook me dinner, Sarah, and a friend who wants help looking at her resume.

I don’t think I chase women less hard because I’m not interested. I think women are hard to chase.

Completely random change of topic: we are finally going to the local homeschool book club. I’m nervous because the kids are 9-14. My kids are 5 & 7. But you have to start somewhere. The book is Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of Nihm and that seems like a fun way to jump in. It’s an hour long discussion 3.5 miles from our house. We should go.

Do you know why it is easier to pay attention to men? Men act like I’m interesting. Women want me to be interested in them. I mean, I am. But I don’t feel like other women (Pam and Sarah being huge exceptions) find me very interesting. Which is weird because I know I have blog readers who have been here for years.

But you are kinda invisible, you know?

Dudes come and bang on my SMS windows and say, “Hey I want to talk to you.” I promise you that less than 20% of what we talk about is directly arranging sex. We talk about life. They bitch at me and listen to me bitch about whatever is going on.

I have a hard time doing that with women. I overwhelm the fuck out of them and I’m not sure why. I try with women. I can get into patterns that last a few months. Then they get busy and tired.

I know it is partially that I’m at a phase where I really can’t go meet up with people in a neutral location or at their house all the time. That has been most of my social life most of my life. I can’t right now. Not mentally, emotionally, or physically.

It’s so much work. And I have so much work right here making this home.

I’m not really complaining about the work. I choose the work. I’m having fun. It is going to be hard to stop painting at the end of the remodel because there is so much painting I want to do in the house.

Some day my kitchen will be full of colorful flowers and twining vines. It will feel like being encased in a jungle of growth. Me being me, there may be fake and real plants put up near the ceiling eventually. It would be cool to have fake plants stapled to the ceiling and real plants hanging down.

Yeah. No one will mistake me for someone with classic good taste. Ha. No neutrals here. No tasteful expensive art purchased because society says this bozo is important.

I wanna see what I wanna see.

I’m tired of living in cold austerity and severity. I hate white walls. I hate flat surfaces. I don’t want mass market ugly ugly ugly ugly “this is just what people live in” environment. I can’t do it.

I need something different.

Trump needs to lose because I don’t want to move. My house is almost where I want it. My hard work is paying off.

Past Me, well done.

The last time this house was painted was the summer after I moved in. So nine years ago. These colors have been fun, but the teenagers mostly did a shitty job. Ha. I need to slow down on big projects. Which means I really can’t take on another room any time soon. What if I did one wall at a time over a week or two? That would be a much more sane pace of work…

Just stop, Krissy.

But but but… art… pretty…. happiness… hate the ceiling in my kitchen cause there is a horrible white splotch where the old lighting fixture used to be…

The bathrooms will be seasons. The kids say the play room should become a jungle. I am… anticipating fun.

I want to do it slowly. So realistically the spring party won’t happen until the end of May. ha.

That’s ok. I’m pretty busy between now and then.

Do you know why I love country music so much? Because of lyrics like: “If you’re going through hell, keep on going. Face that fire; if you’re scared don’t show it. You might get out before the devil even knows you’re there.”

That’s an awful lot of how I get through life. If something is hard, I put my head down and just push on. That’s how I got through the marathon (whining and griping the whole way with my beautiful, wonderful friend coaxing me on–see, a woman who shows up for me–notice how I fly up to see her!?). That’s how I got through the road trip (whining and griping the whole way with my wonderful beautiful kids coaxing me on–see, girls(kids) who show up for me). This cycle of work really isn’t that hard.

Ok, I hate my contractor. But it isn’t even a school semester. Shuddup and get it done.

I’m scared that I need to make sure there is a chaperone at meetings from now on. He really has to stop touching me or I’m going to flip.

Him being bad at his job sucks. The fact that he keeps calling me “my dear” and touching me when I say stop… I’m going to go postal.

What am I doing with my anger over this situation? I’m trying to strategize so I get my way and I stay out of jail. Seems prudent.

And I’m distracting myself with sex with Noah and talking to other people. It’s fun.