Tag Archives: house schtuff

Why are you so tired?

2 Replies

I always feel kind of stunned by this question and I get asked it a lot. It’s weird living in a place where basically no one is familiar with my back catalogue of writing. I do not direct anyone here at all anymore and I won’t start. I no longer believe that reading my blog is a way for people to know me. It is a way that some people have learned some things about me and then they fill in the blanks with assumptions and projections and in the end I feel like maybe they know me even less than if they hadn’t read the blog at all. It’s complicated.

I don’t do all the cleaning in this house, thank goodness. But it’s a big house. What I don’t do myself I have to manage and parcel out and track. In some ways that is better and in other ways it is just as stressful and challenging. The kids alternate between calmly going along and doing what I ask and screaming at me that I am a horrible person who makes them hate their life so that’s fun. Apparently when I spend two weeks saying, “Look at the current chore list and figure out what/how you would like to renegotiate the things on that list” and they say “Oh the current system is fine and I want it to continue” so I continue to remind them to do the exact same thing they have been doing for 4+ months all of a sudden “YOU KEEP INTERRUPTING ME TO TELL ME TO DO RANDOM STUPID SHIT.” Uhm, excuse me?

I write down chores in a daily planner book. I do it months in advance according to a system that I sat down with the kids and worked out. “About how many days can/should you go between doing your laundry? How often should we clean bathrooms and who should do which one? What is fair for doing dishes? How often should we sweep and how do we want to rotate the chore?” The negotiation is long and detailed. It’s not just “Mom Made Me.” The kids talked about at what point they find using something gross and it needs to be cleaned. Professional house cleaners come in every other week and do a basic upkeep so we are not required to do all of it ourselves.

But when I say, “Hey x, y, and z have been assigned over the past three days and you haven’t done them–can you please take care of that?” I am a complete and total asshole who must be raged at. Awesome. That’s not fucking draining or anything.

I ask my kids if they want to do classes and if so what kind. They tell me they want me to hunt around for them and find classes like a, b, or c. I do that. It takes time. The classes cost money. I find what they say they want and show it to them. “Are you sure you want to do this? It is x-distance from the house and will take you at least y-time to get there? It will take z-money out of the budget so I won’t have money for this other thing.” Yes they want it. Then they get 3 days into the class and all of a sudden I am a horrible person who forces them to do stupid things they hate and it is all my fault that they don’t have any spare time because instead of actually fucking riding their bike they choose to push the bike both ways at a speed of approximately .5 miles an hour. Not draining or frustrating at all.

The older kids have locks on their doors. They usually won’t use them. Youngest child is constantly in their room stealing stuff because obviously big kid stuff is cooler and I have to spend a lot of time trying to keep large, towering people from screaming at a small child until my ears ring. It’s shitty and not cool all the way around. You getting louder doesn’t solve the problem. You locking your door solves the problem. But you won’t take responsibility for what you can do you just want to scream about how you feel violated. Cool. That’s not fucking exhausting.

The amount of hoarding and screaming and fighting in this house over food is making me hate my life and everyone I live with. So fine. We are going to buy more shitty food and I am going to stop arguing because they need to learn how to live with their bodies. When you transition out of limiting food it is always rough. (There are actually principles behind this transition and I am too tired and my hands hurt too much to explain them all. I did a fair bit of research on the topic and I am not going to justify it here. If you are legitimately curious let’s schedule a video call and I’d be happy to talk about food scarcity mindset, neurodiversity, nutrition research, and parenting choices.)

Gardening is a lot. This space is so much bigger than what I had in California and I feel like I am working myself to the bone. The kids are supposed to help and every minute of help is difficult to get and involves a big fight. I am so tired. I do most of it myself because I just don’t have it in me to fight. Sometimes I am out in the yard well past dark crying just doing it all because I cannot fight for more help.

My buddy is here and that is complicated. He has lived alone for a long time. He has never lived with a child in his life–his older siblings were much older than him and he has no memory of dealing with kids beyond hour or so visits sporadically with friends or family. There are a bunch of challenges around that. He’s here for a while. He is being *very* helpful in re-teaching me how to use power tools and helping me build some projects I want done. He is also used to working in a defined way always on a dead line to very technical specs that must be met because (reasons). My compost bins and chicken coop are not similar sorts of things. The amount and kind of project meetings he wants to bicker out every single last detail are hard. The frequency with which he wants me to stop what I am doing and focus on his questions is hard because I am keeping a lot of balls in the air and I don’t change focus that well. I can’t get back on track and half an hour of talking (it’s always “I only have a few questions and it will only take a minute” but really it’s many questions and it’s 30-45 minutes) set me back 1-3 hours because I have lost focus and flow and maybe I can’t even get back to what I was doing because now I have lost that window of time and I have another thing that has to happen Right Now. He has a lot of time to rest and chill out in between work times. I don’t.

I started typing this 45 minutes ago. Then I was interrupted to go fix a computer problem for a child (that has to forking start with a multi-hour download of updates because oh boy nothing will work when you are that far out of date) paused to brush the cat because folks noticed some fleas and the brushing needs to happen before the medication. I still haven’t finished my tea from breakfast, done the budgeting updates I’m supposed to do, or emptied the dishwasher and reloaded it from breakfast.

Why am I tired? Oh my god are you kidding? Do you actually not understand? Really?

I also need to finish taking the labels off the little jam jars so I can put the spices in them because the random bags of spices piled on an open shelf that fall down every single time you do anything cause daily frustration and frequent messes and I just can’t.

Oh, and I should paint today, do some weeding, some carpentry work, hang out the laundry that is in the washer and start another load. I also need to put the food in the fridge that arrived from the farm share box because apparently unloading the boxes means “put it all on the counter” to my kids. (One of them was cooking and me putting it all away would have meant getting in their way and they would have gotten annoyed.)

Did I mention that all of my chronic pain is through the roof and I am just about out of Ibuprofen gel and I don’t really have time to go get more? Also I need to go across town because we are about out of a few things that I get from the co-op and that’s about 6 miles round trip. I will probably wait until next week and go when I am on my way to or from the Youngest Child’s swimming class.

I told someone that I was falling behind on responding to emails/texts/messages on various platforms and she said, “Yeah I’m a procrastinator too.” ……. Does being so busy that you rarely have time to think a full thought outside of “What task do I need to be accomplishing full speed in the next 10 minutes” count as procrastinating?

Oh, and I need to respond to text messages from Middle Child’s best friend’s dad because otherwise the kids won’t see each other before the school year starts in 10 days and the bestie has been out of the country almost all summer. Woo. Haha. Got that done. Excellent. It will be great to see her again.

And really I have to close because ALL OF THE THINGS.

I’m allowed to be frustrated but I’m not allowed to be angry

6 Replies

I wanted to get started on the bathroom stuff in June. I specifically had the thought that if there were delays: hey at least no one minds spending a lot of time outside and avoiding the house when it is a disaster. The contractor wasn’t available to start until November. He started on the 24th. He thought he would be done by the week before Christmas.

Then it turned into outsourcing a bunch of pieces because he hates doing those bits. Their schedule needs became a conflict. Getting accurate lists of everything that should be ordered… is literally impossible. And now things weren’t ordered when they should be and stuff could’t come in until January. I am so very very very frustrated.

Oh, now the contractor is very sick. Deep breaths. Can’t be angry. This is just life.

My bedroom and bathroom tile is done. Yay! That’s worth a celebration. The painting in there is far from done. Roughly half the walls in the room still need a plaster compound skim coat due to the removal of icki wallpaper. The plaster guy is just flat not returning my calls. So I ordered a handful of tools. I’ll be teaching the kids how to do the work. We aren’t supposed to walk on the floor today because grout is setting. I probably *should* stick a heater in there because that will help.

That means I can walk on grout Thursday/Friday/Saturday. On Thursday and Friday and Saturday I can also work on painting the walls that have to be painted first (specifically: the walls where shelves will be attached to the wall and the wall with the glass door, oh and I guess finishing the ceiling would be wise.) Technically I’m allowed to move furniture back in as of Friday but I think it is smart to wait till the plaster sanding is done on Saturday. Deep sigh. I am going to move a lot of the furniture back in pretty immediately. Well, I can do primer on the unfinished walls on Saturday after sanding–there doesn’t have to be a big time gap between those activities.

Then the return of furniture! Of course first is the bed. My lovely bed. My wonderful bed. My bed that means that maybe I’ll get to have sex again. le sigh I do like me a closed door. I will put as much of everything else in there as I can while leaving access to painting wall space. It will be nice to have the furniture in near where it will go because it will help me remember where I don’t need to be intense. I’m stealing one of the white boards from the kitchen so that I can have a visual reminder spot that I can’t put down/lose in my room too. White boards are awesome. But I don’t need to do a lot of fancy painting behind it.

For the bathroom I’m thinking the wall that faces the shower will have a pretty serious tree with holes for various kinds of birds and fairies to live in. I think that a branch will come over the mirrors and have a nest on it with pretty speckled eggs. There will be birds flying in the sky up on the ceiling. Maybe even fairies dancing if I can figure out the perspective. Low grass and flowers down at the bottom and in the doorway.

I’ve already painted a fair bit on the ceiling. A couple of them are highly abstract in a way that will lead to many many guesses and possibilities over the years. One is (pretty fucking clearly to me) a vulva because vulvas are AWESOME. My kid says, “Hunh… I have no idea what that is,” hahahahahahahaha. I added a heart with the word forgive dotted inside it but it’s heavily obscured and I think it will only be visible at some times in some lighting (totally my goal). There is a flower because I love flowers. There is a symbol for finding gratitude that I didn’t quite finish because my neck was very angry with me. Over the bed I intend to put a sigil for encouraging peaceful sleep and banishing nightmares. I have room for a couple of other cloud symbols but I’m not sure what yet. Hm.

The office nook will have very little available space for painting. Above the computer monitor area I am going to put the pagan three moon symbol. I might do some vines or other things growing up in the space between furniture but mostly I will just paint the walls solid green behind the furniture and call it good. And by “solid green” I mean dappled greens so that it doesn’t look like some wacko who believes in one color for each wall took over my room.

In the narrow corner above my bed next to the window I want to do a wheel of the seasons. A reminder that change is always always always coming.

I’m still not sure what I want above my bed. That space feels very important and I can’t visualize what it ought to be. The side of the room with the dressing area and the exercise equipment storage will be all Mother Goddess and Greenman energy. Lots of bright colors even though it’s supposed to be midnight in a fairy glen.

I’m having fun.

More medication changes/observations.

1 Reply

The last time I posted was 2 days after I lowered the Amitriptyline as an experiment. I am talking to my doctor/psych nurse about all of these changes before I do them. It’s kind of weird having a medical team that I call up and say “Hey I want to try x. I will report back on how it goes.” They respond with, “Cool. Let me know how it goes.” I am not used to American doctors being so chill about someone playing with their medication dosages. In emoji terms: 🤯

I had almost three weeks of being on the first step of Amitriptyline dosage. Very quickly I noticed: my mood getting lower (a lot more intrusive obnoxious thoughts during yoga–amusingly), sleep became really hard (the last three weeks I averaged 7.5 hours of sleep when I’ve been otherwise averaging over 8 hours a night for the past few years), I started craving alcohol a lot (back up to probably 8-10 units a week after only 2-4 units/week for the previous month or so), I was more interested in late night snacking, I had several very late night painting sessions because going to sleep just didn’t feel important, I needed more Lorazepam to sleep, my general pain levels were sky high, and I was using more Co-codamol. Oh hey and my blood pressure went from being usually in the 120’s-130’s/80’s to being mostly in the 140’s-150’s/mid-high 90’s.

That’s some forking data. (I mean… sorta anecdata but I have spreadsheets where I’ve been documenting this day by day…) It’s not like I’m trying to apply this population wide or anything.

I talked to my psych nurse two days ago and told her I do not think this is a good time to increase the Lisdexamfetamine because I need my blood pressure under control first; then I talked to my GP yesterday and told her that I think the next step is increasing the Amitriptyline for a month and seeing what happens. They both think my suggestions are dandy and that’s plan A. We will all check in next month and see how things are going.

After another month on the Lisdexamfetamine I am 3.2 pounds lower. That is a very gentle and sustainable amount of weight loss compared to the roughly 10 pounds I lost in the first month. I mean… I’m still 40-ish pounds away from where I feel like my body feels the best in terms of strength and not being limited by chub in the way. I don’t love having to shove a roll of fat out of the way to get into a certain position. I don’t love that it is hard to bend over and tie my damn shoes. But this is way better than the 60-ish pounds I was above that weight for a while.

I have been putting painting progress pictures up on Facebook because that interface is easier for dumping photos. I kind of hope I will get around to putting together pictures on a webpage here sometime soon. It’ll just take a lot more focus and time than I have right now. Erf.

Opportunities and expenses

2 Replies

Oof. I need to start this off by saying: I am so grateful to be in the position I am in. I am very much in the luckiest top I don’t know what % of my age cohort.

Owning a house is a lot. By the time we finish the current set of bathroom remodels (water dripping down through walls and the wood was not replaced in the last 2 or 3 times things were “fixed” because previous plumbers were asshats) we will have replaced 5 showers and we will only have 2. That sucks!!!!!! But this time (because the current guy is so much more competent) we are going the distance and fixing everything else and getting two whole new bathrooms out of the deal. I’m excited and sad to be paying for them. I was going to limp along for a few more years but if I have to do this much work again… I’m coming out of it with a damn heated floor.

I am also coming out of it with a gorgeous bathroom and a slightly different shaped bedroom and I’m going to put heated flooring in my bedroom and ditch the radiator on the wall. This is exciting to me. It will also as a side benefit reduce the rate of mold growing on stuff I store under my bed. Extra score!

But I didn’t really want to pay for this kind of house remodeling stuff this year. It seems like a lot of dang money. I somehow suspect we are not going to get around to fixing the upstairs carpet for another year or two because… money.

“Where is all the money going?”, you ask. Well… our next door neighbor has decided to change up some things in his life and he offered to let us by the adjoining empty plot of land. We dickered over it because oh my god not having debt has been so nice. We had to choose between liquidating some investments and paying cash or getting a mortgage. Mortgage finance rates in the UK are below 1% and people here complain that they are too high. heh. We decided that having a mortgage also gives us the opportunity to build UK credit and that’s something we care about a lot so…

Damnit. I have debt again. But that means I am going to be scrimping and saving as much as possible. You are only allowed to pay 10% extra in a given year so I can’t massively overpay in the exact same manner I did in California but you only lock in a rate every 2 or 3 or 5 years (I’m going with 5 years so we don’t have to pay the £1500 fee for getting the mortgage as often) and at that point you can dump as much as you want into paying off the mortgage. That sounds terrific. If I want to pay it off in 10 years or less I will need to be dumping in the neighborhood of £25,000 a year into this. That’s going to make a big difference in our spending over the next few years and the house remodeling stuff is not helping my stomach hurting over how I will get everything done.

I mean. I’m a lucky asshole and I have more security and financial ability to swing stuff than other people. But I will go back to being as conservative as I possibly can in a bunch of areas. That’s not strictly speaking my favorite.

(The loan is for more than we need just for the property. It’s complicated and I can’t disclose the full details around why the loan is for so much.) If we were just financing the property I would only need to find around £15,000/year. oof.

This is leaving the stock option part of Noah’s income alone as investment stuff every year because we need to be growing the investment portfolio towards retirement. He’s really scared of that cliff that tech workers have where they just… don’t get jobs when they are older. He feels like he for sure has 10 more solid work years left in his industry and he can’t promise 15 more years at this salary level. That seems incredibly fair so I feel like we need to get all the house fixing/mortgage stuff paid off in 10 years. I mean… houses will need more in the future no matter what. We will always have to save for that and have money sitting around waiting for the next disaster. I am hoping that it will all be ok. I mean… I’m a lucky bitch and I have more chance of it being ok than I could have ever dreamed when I was young.

But golly I hate owing anyone anything.

What is a witch?

Leave a reply

Recently a little girl told me that all witches are ugly and old and have green skin. Hm. I’ve been thinking a lot about what being pagan means to me lately. I’ve been thinking a lot about what I want to manifest in this life. I believe that magic is focusing your intention and your will on making something real. I don’t think it has to be about repeating prescribed words or chants that someone else made up. I honestly don’t see much point in following someone else’s path, even as I read books that other people write about their paths.

I think the painting is part of it for me. I often think of it in terms of creating the background setting as if I was creating a theatre set. All the world’s a stage and all the people are but players. (I don’t believe in a binary of genders so the original quote doesn’t seem so fitting.) I am shaping how people see me. I am shaping who people perceive me to be. It matters to me. I put as much effort into this as someone else would put into a spell. I want to draw the right people to me.

Sobonfu told me to make my own community as I will never belong in one that other people have made. I need a place to invite that community. I need a space where people will feel the force of my will and feel influenced without me even having to say anything. If I have to say something then I have missed a window. I have missed an opportunity.

I don’t know how many opportunities I have left in this life. Everytime you miss a window you change the course of your future. You change what opportunities will fall into your lap in the future. There are limits to what any person can accomplish. I know that I will hit limits. I just don’t want to miss opportunities that might be well within my limits.

It feels like it matters so much.

It’s the waning crescent moon. The end of the cycle. Time to let things go, but what? It’s almost time to think about new beginnings again. Oh golly. I don’t know what to let go of nor what to start. So much happening. So many balls in the air. How can I narrow my focus to be more effective? Right now I am spread in so many different directions that I hardly know what to change nor how I will manage.

I know that tomorrow will involve maths, breakfast and a visit with friends, then painting. Friday is a park date with homeschoolers then more painting. My arm is only a little sore. My hand isn’t even numb. Surely that means I am ready for more work. I really want this part of the hallway done.

I really want all of the high stuff done so I can go back to working at reasonable heights with a step ladder. There is no way to get to the other side but to go through. I can do it. I will do it. It will feel good to be done on so many levels. All it takes to get through is doing many more hours of work.

Now that’s magic I can embrace.

Limitations

Leave a reply

What does it mean to live in a place? For most of my life I lived more in a general geographic area than in a place. Then I had my time in Fremont–nearly 13 years. I spent a lot of time in Fremont but I still spent a lot of time leaving Fremont. I traveled around the world while living there. I probably missed well over a year of being in the city in that time with all the trips added up. When I was there, depending on the year, I spent a lot of time driving south or north or west to spend most of my waking hours with other people. I was not content in my skin or in my place in the community.

I feel a bit like a ping pong ball here in this small town. I want to pop out and learn more about the community. I want to get to know people. I am someone who likes to know everyone and so far I know precious few. But I also want to spend an awful lot of time at home. I want to paint and garden and learn how to sew and cook and bake and take care of chickens. An awful lot of my push to go out into the community stems from feeling like I have to create a network for the kids. I don’t know how much I want it for myself. I can’t even tell because it is all mixed up.

I am afraid of looking for community for me. I know that the self I am allowed to bring with me here is a carefully edited version. I know that I have to mask my difficulties and challenges as much as possible and when I can’t mask I need to go home. I have challenges and they have to be utterly invisible. I really suck at that and things leak out. Then people feel uncomfortable and it is my fault.

I am afraid of trying to making friends. I know I have Jenny. We are figuring out how the size and shape of boundaries needs to work between us so we can maintain this relationship that is very important to both of us. I love her so much and I don’t want to wreck everything.

I feel like I always wreck everything.

Do I fear abandonment? Enh… not exactly. The funny thing is: you can do a fearsome amount of damage to a person and a relationship and they still won’t abandon you. They will keep coming around year after year because there is something they get there that they feel they need. People submit to being hurt long after they should just walk away because their fear of being alone is far greater than their sense of indignation in putting up with someone who wrecks everything.

People are weird.

I don’t fear being alone. I fear being the source of pain. I fear being the one that someone hears in their head when they feel bad about themself. The trouble with being a highly reflective mirror that shows people who they are is… reflected sunlight can burn. It can burn all the way to the bone.

I fear causing damage that cannot be fixed while creating a bond that means someone will never want to walk away from me. I don’t leave because I’m running away before you do. I leave because I know you won’t and someone has to think you don’t deserve to be treated that way.

Which is ego, right?

I always come back to Karen laughing when I said I had low self esteem. It wasn’t a chuckle or a soft laugh, no it was a full belly guffaw. “You have the highest self esteem of anyone I have ever met.” Damn. That doesn’t sound like a compliment. I do have an incredibly high sense of what I will accept from people. It’s not even that I feel like “I deserve better” so much as I am not going to put myself into a position where I am going to explode and I know what makes me explode.

I’m tired of exploding. I want a smaller life.

I wrote a letter today; my first one in a long time. This wonderful lady has written me so many letters since I moved she outpaces all other mail from everyone else. I talked about my garden because it is clearly very important to me. I am stunned by the sheer variety of plants in my yard and I have not yet catalogued them nor grown to understand them fully. (Apparently one fucker is connected to tics with Lyme disease?! Ok I don’t like the poky thorns that much anyway.)

What do I want to share of myself going forward? I am not defined by where I was nor what happened to me. I am what I do. I cultivate a garden. I work hard at reducing my impact on the earth. I try hard to be creative and possibly even inspiring. I invite people into my little world as much as I can. I have to share what I have to share.

I want to be a positive force in people’s lives. Maybe it will happen and maybe it won’t. All I can do is try. I have to work within my own limitations.

I want to be done painting by November. If I could be done with all the indoor painting by then it would be absolutely fantastic. That’s 17 weeks. If I could manage 20 hours a week on average that would give me 340 hours of work.

All I’ve got to say is thank fucking goodness I am mostly done with the evil ladder work. A little bit is still to go high up but it’ll pass quickly. I have faith. I hope that all the evil high stuff will be done in another 10 hours. I think I’m 48 hours into the hallway. That totally discounts the time I put into the kid doors during the last big round of painting. But hey. Gotta just count from somewhere.

I’m running into the limits of my body and the patience of my little Shortie. She is so damn done. But on we press.

There is no way out except for through. If I get the painting done this year then I can just… leave it be. I won’t have more of that project hanging over my head. That sounds so absolutely lovely. Then gardening and baking and cooking and sewing can become my projects. Chickens. I want to sit around and read in the yard.

And lots of fully functional bathrooms. Woo.

I miss the chatter.

Leave a reply

I like being able to talk to myself about what I’m doing and why. But I’m scared. On one hand I feel like I am in a more stable place than I used to be but on the other hand it feels so precarious. I might be more stable in a day-to-day way but I don’t think I feel more secure.

I still feel like I am going to hurt everyone and that my words have a lot of power and I am bad if anything I say makes people feel upset.

I feel paralyzed with fear. I don’t write much at all anywhere anymore because I am afraid of consequences, arguments, misunderstandings, different points of view that make me feel like I am doing something bad again. I don’t want to have the power to hurt people. I really, really do though.

I think/process/experience things as these concentric rings that stack on top of one another and drip down into the cracks. It’s not changing what happened but it adds layers of nuance and difference to the memories and I think/project that other people do the same thing. Only the layers we are stacking are so different that the end result is a completely different thing.

It’s like that thing where if people remember that you were part of the “good old days” they forget that at the time they didn’t like you very much and all of a sudden they want to reminisce with you and talk about the people you used to know in common. They have a picture of you in their head but the total experience of it changes over time. Even if they can remember that they didn’t like you–it’s irrelevant and almost funny now. “Why didn’t I like you? Oh, something stupid. Meh. I’m over it.” But if you stayed in daily/weekly contact with them for all this time they wouldn’t be over it.

People are funny.

Ok I am happy that Noah got a full time job again. It would have been kind of difficult and scary to slowly pay for these repairs over years. Instead I have some confidence that we are going to get to the end of this cycle of repairs and not need to do anything big until the kitchen falls apart. (It’s cheap Ikea shit. That’s not a long-term solution.)

I’ve talked about it on Facebook but not here: this house sure has been a sinkhole in terms of money. Noah’s bathroom is such a wreck and leaking water that we waited until our bank account balance hit a certain level and we started in on replacing it. As has happened more than once with this house… the scope creeps as we find out about the level of damage. Former owners (probably including the ones before the people we purchased from) really did not believe in proper maintenance or doing a job right. It looks like there have been big water leaks for years and the under flooring in the bathroom has old massively destroyed wood just kinda hanging out. It wasn’t replaced the last time someone installed a tiny cubicle shower in here. We (meaning the amazing joiner we are employing) are completely ripping everything out down to studs and the whole floor and walls have to be replaced and the water damage drips down into my room. Super fun.

So there’s going to be some pretty intensive floor/wall/ceiling work involved. Could it be patched up for cheap? Sure. That’s what folks have been doing and that’s why there are major systemic problems. We are paying to put good wood everywhere. Taking out all the wonky barely effective plumbing and upgrading it. Noah is going to double the square footage of his shower. (There was literally no reason to create a blocked off corner and a tiny shower in the bathroom… there was nothing behind the space wasting corner wall thing.)

In self defense from the flood of color he has no choice but to live with… his bathroom and office will be shades of grey. It’s going to be a slightly hilarious contrast and statement about just how much he is compromising in the rest of the house. Clearly none of this brightness is his thing. He’s a patient man.

Despite feeling overwhelming desire to paint most of the house in bright murals… I don’t know what I’m going to do in my bedroom. I don’t know that I want intense colors. What I have lived with for 1.75 years at this point is mostly white walls with one blue accent wall with birds and flowers done almost like a wallpaper design. It’s not really what I like. Noah has the same accent wall in his room and it’s even less his thing.

I want an airy, open feel with very light colors in my room. I want shelves with lots of plants on them and almost no furniture.

When I finish today I need to sit down and do some pencil work on the layout of the bedroom and bathroom. There are a lot of specifics to figure out but I really should get back to painting. I started 4 hours ago and I’ve had multiple lengthy breaks… I want to finish absolutely everything I can do with the ladder in this position and then figure out how I’m attacking the project next. I may do no other ladder work this weekend; I haven’t decided yet. Depends on where I finish and how tired I am. I have to worry about the arm spasms and the back pain a lot more when I’m working this high.

But on the upside: I’m really loving what I’m doing above the stairs. It’s turning out well. Back into the breach.

Find gratitude: flood edition

5 Replies

In five years this will be the kind of story we tell as a group and we will cackle. Heck, by three hours after it happened I had already started laughing in that “Holy fucking shit of course this happened this week” sort of way. Ok this is kind of a long story.

We ran out of oil last week. Apparently our tank is set just a little bit lower than the boiler so even when it looks like there is still oil… that doesn’t mean there is enough pressure to get to the house and the water and heat will go out. It took us a few days of messing about with calling plumbers and waiting for them to not show up before we called the joiner-man-of-all-work who has done all of the other work for us. Turns out he has a buddy who works on our type of boiler! He was there 15 minutes later. I’m sure he was shaking his head over how silly we are but I can live with that. Put a call into the oil company: oh whoops. It is after 5 on a Friday. They won’t hear the message till start of business on Monday. Ok. First thing Monday we get an email saying they put in a work order. It can take up to a week before oil is delivered once the work order is put in. Noah calls them and explains our situation. They put a star next to our order to hopefully put us near the top of the priority list. But it’s Wednesday and no idea when the oil will arrive.

This sucks particularly hard because our tenant is Muslim and he should be taking showers and going to Mosque every day right now. Freezing showers are not his idea of a good time. I don’t blame him. I told him not to pay rent on May 1st because this whole situation is our fault and it’s negatively impacting their life to a severe degree and just oh good grief. I feel so bad for negatively impacting their lives right now.

Tuesday was pretty good in the main. Youngest Child and I went for a carefully socially distanced play date with her two little same-age friends at the park. It was nice. Then lunch was tasty. Eldest Child asked me to go for a hike after lunch and we went up the hill into the woods. Youngest enjoyed being in the shoulder-carrier for a lot of the trip up the hill because she was tired. Freakin kids.

EC told me a lot about the characters in the new-to-her anime she is currently obsessed with. What she likes and doesn’t like about them: apparently the best character is a teacher who she says reminds her of me. Every child in the class is traumatized but very prepared for life! Hm. We talked a lot about different things that are coming up for her. We talked about how different people have different skills/talents/things to teach you and it’s ok that you drift back and forth appreciating people more and less at different stages that’s fine. She said something… I don’t remember exactly what. She has this hero worship of me thing lately and it’s frankly quite bizarre. She really wants to grow up and be like me because I am so awesome and I always know the right thing to do. I told her I worry that I haven’t let her fuck up enough. Then I said that I don’t always do the right thing. She scoffed.

I told her that a few years ago I had a birthday party and I was feeling very hemmed in by being a parent and always giving and always having to project happiness I only kind of feel and I was tired of being responsible and an adult and… so I arranged that there would be a morning birthday party that was kid friendly then an adult part afterwards that would be very adult and involve taking drugs. It didn’t start out as a party that would involve drugs but it morphed into one over a couple of weeks of planning. Her eyes got a bit wide.

I told her that in the run up to this party someone that I loved dearly sent me a letter telling me that I was an evil drug pusher and I was ruining people’s lives and I was a very bad person for doing this. I explained that he was dealing with having a child in rehab and he was questioning his own life choices and feeling like he made some bad decisions and really he was yelling at his past self and trying to have me make better/different choices than he had made so I didn’t have so many regrets.

She said she was confused because I still talk to the guy and I talk about him in glowing terms and how can I feel love for someone who was so awful to me?

There is a difference between people who run you down and want you to feel bad because that is the sort of toxic relationships they have in general and people who love you very much where sometimes they have something very painful happen and they lash out with pain. There is a difference between a toxic user and being a human being in terrible pain. It can be hard to tell them apart; it’s about large patterns over many years and typical tendencies not one time things. It’s about believing the totality of what you see from a person and not thinking an outlier is the truth.

I told her that I sat on that email for a few days trying to deal with my own hurt and when I responded I told him that I understand that he is in great pain and he is taking it out on me. I told him that I forgive him and when he is ready to talk to me again I will be waiting. It took about five years. We spoke again and he apologized and I tried to be gracious: goodness knows I have done more than my share of lashing out in pain. I love him and he has been really good to me before and since that one explosion of pain.

We all deserve grace. Human beings make mistakes, most especially when we are hurting and we feel like we have hurt other people through our ignorance or unintentional mistakes. If we want grace we have to give grace.

People are my religion. I believe in you. I believe that you can change and grow and be better. I believe I can change and grow and be better. I want to do that together. We learn the most from our biggest mistakes. We learn from the big mistakes of our friends. If we want to have connection and love we have to see and accept people for the totality of their humanity.

She clutched my hand and leaned her head on my shoulder and told me that she feels very lucky to have me as a mom. My heart soared.

Then we watched YC a little ahead of us on the trail pull down her britches in the middle of the path and pee all over her clothes. It was… hilarious. I did not give her a ride down the hill. She had to walk.

When we got to the bottom after our 5 mile hike EC and I both discussed how much we would like to have ice cream. She said she would deal with cleaning up YC while I rode my bike into town and got some of the good gelato. Noah was making dinner. Middle Child was doing online classes.

I enjoyed listening to Hamilton on the way to and from town and I cried thinking about how hard life is and relationships are so painful. I’m so impressed by the nuance given to Aaron Burr in the story. I was thinking a lot about my mom. I wish that grief could get less intense.

Then… I got home. From the road I could hear an annoying beeping. I prayed that it was coming from my neighbors property and not my house. No such luck. When I walked in the smoke detectors were screaming. It was hard to tell exactly what was wrong; my first guess was Noah burned something while cooking. I looked around and no such luck. There was no smoke. Instead there was water pouring through the light fixtures and smoke detector. It was splashing all over the computer table and floor and I could see it coming from the upstairs. Everyone in my house was screaming at me trying to explain what was going on. I tripped on YC as she darted back and forth screaming and adding to the general sense of disorder and she decided that the absolute worst part of the day was me stepping on her. I did not apologize. I think I screamed that everyone was in so much trouble.

I then decided that the right thing to do was turn off the master power to the whole damn house and I will deal with everything else once the deafening fucking noise was gone. I asked Noah if he had told our tenant what was going on (she was downstairs with her tiny baby listening to all this). Of course he hadn’t so I went and gave her a brief explanation so that she wasn’t concerned while ignorant. I promised I would handle it as fast as possible.

I went in my room and called the wonderful handy-man-of-all-work and said I needed him to talk me through something but I don’t need him to show up. Luckily he pretty much agreed with all of what I was proposing and we made a few jokes about how maybe it would be best to chain the 3 year old to a tree in the yard for a while.

I came out and went to the electrical panel and started doing a little bit of sifting through what could be turned back on and what needed to be left off indefinitely. This allowed me to run an extension cord from the studio to the kitchen with a dehumidifier and a space heater running. There was a lot of confusion and talking over each other and in the process I was not so kind and I told YC that she did this and I was very angry about it.

But after I stuck buckets and pots under the drips (other people thought just putting a towel under the flowing water was good enough… yeah no) and moved computers and had EC move all of the freezer foods out to the deep freeze in the shed and we had dinner and sat down to just… stare off into space that’s when I started laughing.

EC asked what kind of trouble she was in. I said the kind where I’m really mad for an hour or two then I get over it because shit happens. When you have kids… these things are going to happen. It is utterly unavoidable.

I know exactly what happened. YC turned on the shower sprayer attached to the bathtub and sent the water everywhere. She had a great time. The upstairs bathroom is not well sealed at the base of the wall meeting the floor. The water went around the edges and got down through the air space in between floors and then went looking for any hole it could find to come down. The walls and ceiling aren’t soft at all and by this morning it is dried out and fine. I know there isn’t any other leak and the paint job is fine.

This reaffirms my belief that I would like to have every bathroom in my house fully sealed into being a wet room as time and money allows. Shit happens.

Nobody is in trouble today. We had banana bread and ice cream last night. And by we I mean everyone except for the kid who ate about 4 slices of banana bread earlier in the day because holy cheese that was your dessert for the day. Noah decided that he is done messing about with trying to find contracting work that allows him to work part time. He is going back to full time work because when he works full time his income is absolutely obscene and all of the things we’d like to fix in the house could be fixed after a year or so of him working full time. If I am careful about how I do it I can probably get our savings goals to full completion in fiveish years and afford to do the remodel stuff that would give us more space to manage living here pretty much permanently no matter how many kids stay with us.

I woke up this morning and turned the breakers back on. Things are fine and other than some remaining clean up (laundry, scrubbing floors) it’s over.

My gratitude is this: I get to wake up in a safe house and fix my problems. I get to plan for the day when I will have the means in petty cash to fix all of this and every other problem that is going to erupt. I am more safe than I knew a person can be. Thank you Noah for picking the right hobby when you were 7. Thank you for asking me to marry you. Thank you for giving me this life.

When something breaks we can fix it. Almost no matter what it is. And in the long run… we will laugh about it.

Projects.

Leave a reply

I’m up to 6 hours of painting. With design, set up, and take down tack on 4 or 5 hours. I have been leaving the design time out of my tracking so far and I don’t want to. I spent over an hour of practice drawings.

I will decide whether I am doing more ceiling (over the stairwell) just to use up the colors of paint I have in smaller containers or whether I am doing walls and doors when I see how I feel on Wednesday of next week. I don’t have a lot more small containers so I’m a little worried about how I’m going to manage having a bit of every major paint color out in a small container. Maybe we need to get some more takeout… This decision also requires me finishing the ceiling above the landing on Monday. That’s a maybe, of course. I’m adding white to show the light hitting the clouds. It’s going to be fussy and fiddly and take a while. I may have to add more yellow and/or more blue.

I anticipate each door taking 4 hours. There are 4 left on the landing. I’m hoping I can do the smallish bits in between in only 6 hours. That would have the landing done in the 30 hours I guesstimated on the first day. Second day? It’s starting to blend together already. Thus I’m writing it down now.

The stairwell piece is going to be an utter nightmare. That ceiling will probably take 10-12 hours because going up and down the ladder will wear me out. The three walls are probably going to take 10-20 hours each. I already know what I want for 2 of the walls: above the downstairs hall I am going to have a rocky outcrop and a lake; the big wall that started out with the mirrors I am going to use the GIANT oak stencil I bought because I want something that is really structured to balance out how much of my stuff is freehand. I like my freehand work but I also really like having some stuff that is more strictly crafted in the middle. The stencils are fussy and difficult and I will swear a lot while I’m using it. I hope I can get that fucking stencil done in only 3 days. That’s a hope, a dream, an aspiration. The third wall above the lounge/trees? I have no idea yet. Hopefully it will come to me. I need a way to bridge the two pieces I already have in mind. Then there’s the hand rail which will probably want another 10-20 hours because I want to do a lot of detail work. Which may be a bit stupid and/or masochistic because that’s a high traffic piece of wood and it will chip. Hrm.

Then I get to downstairs!

I’m trying to pace myself and only work when I have a babysitter here so that I’m not giving up sleep so I currently have 6 hours a week to devote to this project. Thus I’m looking at this work carrying through for another 16-24 weeks. Cheers. Only half a year. No biggie. Or I could increase her hours a tiny bit and have 9 or 12 hours in a week. That would still be fairly reasonable pacing for body strain (it’s divided into 3 days) and it would let me finish the upper part of the hallway in 8-12 more weeks for a total of 10-14 weeks for this project. That’s not terrible. I could argue that it is quite sane and kind to my body with a straight face.

Then there’s the downstairs hallway, the lounge, and the dining room left to be painted. The only reason I’m pushing myself at this point is because the paint really is thick as mud and apparently is going to get less and less usable over time. Joy.

If I can get through the paint I may just not give a fuck about bathrooms or the laundry room or my bedroom any year soon. Please oh please let me finish up the paint before I feel the need to do any of those rooms. And the youngest kid will have to be old enough to express strong opinions before I paint her room.

Oh hey, and I was going to do a whole bunch of gardening this year. Sure… my body can handle this….

I’m sleeping! This is totally a healthy workload… right? I’m getting a pretty good step count. I’m eating SO MANY VEGETABLES. This qualifies as self care while working, right? Don’t answer that. You aren’t the boss of me.

I do like to do things in contrary fashion.

Leave a reply

In the fall I painted spring. Now that it is spring I am painting autumn. I like to buck trends and all that. I have started on the upstairs hall. The upstairs will be sunset and the downstairs will be early dawn–I want to keep a lot of the soft pink that is currently downstairs.

Recently I was doing a video chat with an old friend and he said, “Why do you have a besom on your wall?” Because I am a witch, naturally. I think of my art as being part of how I try to change the world. It is how I try to change people’s perceptions and emotions. I am drawn to witchcraft because I believe that people have power and they should use it. Power manifests in different people in various ways and you need to figure out what your way is. I am blessed with having many ways that I influence people and I take that seriously.

For now: it’s in a hallway. I am going to do this mural with more limits for the sake of my body. I’m trying to respect the fact that I’m growing old. I got in two hours to start with so far. This one is going to take months because I am getting ollllld. I can’t upload pictures without wordpress being bitchy so I guess I won’t post the pictures here.

So close and yet so far.

Leave a reply

I was done. My share of the project was finished. I had no more painting to look forward to. Then I noticed… Middle Child is really and truly not ready to do her own room. She tried. She did a lot! She did great! She can’t edge to save her life. And she takes the dark edging color and smears the brush all over the super light colored wall when she thinks she has too much paint on it. Insert head smacking emoji.

My hands are in a bad place. Holding a paint brush sucks. I’ve got about three hours of pinchy movement in my hands in a day before I have shooting pains. I did three hours of trim today. I will do three hours of painting on Sunday. And on Monday. Hopefully I will finish on Tuesday. I am both looking forward to and not looking forward to this process.

Eldest Child says she is done and her mural looks fabulous.

Now we get to wait for carpet fitting to be done. ECs room smells strongly of nicotine–that was part of the motivation for her paint job and the carpet is gross too. I don’t like the idea of her having to breathe that crap through another winter so we are making the room less nasty. Apparently the teenage boy who used to live in the room was a heavy smoker. Ugh.

MCs room had a shower/sink wash room taken out of the corner so there is a big patch with no carpet at all and that’s not going to work in the long run.

Neither bedroom has carpeting on the redone closet and they should have. The sub flooring is not meant to see the light of day.

In 34 days we have been in this house for a year. I’d really like to be done with the big fixing jobs. I’d like to spend a lot more time puttering in the yard but by the time I’m done with inside chores I’m so wiped out. I’m still trying to deal with the sleep deprivation I put myself through for the dining room. In 27 days I missed 8 full nights of sleep. That’s too much. Ah well.

I have new glasses! They are amazing! I can see better than I have in such a long time. I like the cool grey metal.

I’m having more interactions with young people here than I am used to. In California my friends group skewed noticeably older and here I seem to be finding a lot of folks in their 20’s. I suspect it is related to people my age being busy and not having time to go meet new people. This is leading to a lot of feelings. Some of the folks are really stellar–don’t get me wrong. I’m truly thrilled about some of the folks I have met. Ironically the ones that please me the most are the in person ones.

I’m having a fair number of online interactions that I’m struggling with. I am a judgy motherfucker. When I was 19 I had this interaction with a 39 year old woman who told me I shouldn’t be in the scene and I should go off and have normal people sex for a decade or so. Now I get it. These kids scare the hell out of me. They… sigh.

They scare the hell out of me. I’m not going to get into what they are doing.

I worry a lot about them as individuals and how their behavior will contribute to their community. I worry about the girls and young enbys in the community and what they have to put up with from the macho “lad” crew. I feel like I can watch this chat room for a couple of days and go “Ah. You either already have or will have a bad reputation because you are dangerous.”

These are instincts I totally lacked 20 years ago.

I have so many mixed feelings about myself these days. I have come so far.

Recently I pissed someone off when I said that I didn’t feel like 9/11, the 2008 financial crash, or this pandemic are going to be the central life changing traumas of my life. I was told that saying that meant I was rubbing my good luck and privilege in other peoples faces. 9/11 happened across the country and I was at least two or more degrees of separation away from people who were really effected. I would feel like a poseur if I said it really changed my life.

I mean, this explosion in Beirut isn’t going to be a formative trauma for me either even though it is absolutely a horrifying trauma. It isn’t mine.

Most of my friends were either above or below the 2008 financial crash. I was in the process of quitting teaching when it happened. Teaching was a career that was insulated from the results. Is that all luck or privilege? A lot of my friends were in marginal jobs or retail or child care and they weren’t impacted. Is that luck or privilege? I lived in a house that had been purchased long before the crash so my housing was secure. That was both luck and privilege.

I feel weird about having white people who started out in the exact same place as me at the brink of adulthood tell me that my life is different from theirs now because of privilege. I think almost everything that has happened to me since I got married has been about privilege. But there was this gap period that I have funny feelings about. I lived a hair above the national poverty line for the first seven years of being an adult in one of the most expensive places in the country. I definitely had times I went on dates in order to eat. Being told that everything that happened to me in that time period was because I was so privileged is complicated. I’m not saying it is wrong.

Sometimes I’m not sure what privilege means.

I’m ready for slower days. I’m ready for shorter days. I’m ready to stop with the fucking pinchy work. I am pretty sure I can finish the painting this week. When I do I think we are entirely done painting for a long while. That’s good. This year has been so slammed and I am so utterly exhausted. I feel half dead.

I want this toddler to stop waking up three times a night and climbing in my damn bed.

Oh, toddler sayings I want to remember: “I have a pooty” for I have a poopy booty. “Clean the pipes!” is emphatically screamed when I am cleaning her up after a pipe. It’s time to go to sleep.

Sleep disturbances

Leave a reply

I get the impression everyone is having sleep disturbances lately. I had a really sad, overwhelming dream about Harry Potter having a very different ending with Draco martyring himself to save everyone. It was intense.

I feel like I could sleep for a solid four days before I caught up on my sleep deficit.

More things have broken in the house over the weekend. And orders for parts have been cancelled so it is going to take much longer to get the house back to a state of not-under-construction. Not being able to clean up and put things away is making me feel crazy. I picked a real lemon of a house. Once we get EVERY FUCKING THING IN THE HOUSE fixed it will be great. But we bought a house at the very top of our price range thinking that we would be able to get away with not having more house spending for a while. Instead we have spent over a year of expected living expenses on fixing things and no sign of a slow down. My anxiety is creeping up massively. We are starting to talk about when Noah will have to get a job again because his runway for getting product-selling up and going is going to come to an end. That feels absolutely nightmarish right now.

Something that I have noticed about many of my friendships from the past. The ones that I am continuing and that feel like they are going ok are with people who understand that when they send me an email it might take two or three months for me to respond. Sometimes six months.

I think my anxiety has generally decreased because I have lost that constant feeling of not-doing-enough for my friendships. In California I knew so many people that I always felt like I was letting a tremendous number of people down by not doing more to keep up the relationship. I “should” call people more. I should have every day of the month booked to sending a certain number of chats/emails to cycle through the hundreds of people I know. I should host events many times a year so that I get enough face time with allllllllllll the people.

Then I moved here and literally the only “should” person is Jenny. Historically speaking we have not done all that well seeing one another often. We are both prickly. We have never had that much in common. We have done best seeing one another a dozen or so times a year and not talking every week.

Then I moved here and she had a massive backlog of being lonely. And I am absolutely used to feeling like I am supposed to put a ton of energy into maintaining relationships and trying to contact people so I transferred a lot to her. We talked a lot about weekly or several times a month in person contact with online chatting being basically daily.

That’s… a lot.

Would things have blown up in the same way if we had slowed our roll substantially when it came to contact? Would we feel like we have to talk about touchy subjects so much if we weren’t using one another for daily support?

It is really rough for me that Jenny wanted me to shove my kids away so that I could instead spend my time with her. Do I need breaks from my kids? Absolutely. Do I need to force my older children into school for 30 hours a week and figure out how to get my toddler into preschool early so I can have a part time job amount of time by myself that I then fill with social visits with her?

That sounds… awful.

Not because Jenny is awful. That’s not my point. Do I get annoyed with my kids? Yes. I just shouted at them to stop fighting over my PT equipment.

There are so many layers of complexity to space from my kids for me. Finding a healthy balance there is not the same for me as it is for other people. I mean, that sounds ridiculous. Everyone has to find that balance; I’m not special. But the things that play into it are different for me. My mom sending me away when I was a kid was super traumatizing and I am not even close to over it. I decided I wanted to homeschool my kids at seventeen so giving that up because I’m tired or want a break is a different thing for me than it would be for someone else. It’s a failure to live up to what I dreamed. I want to home school my kids until they are ready to move off into the world at their own speed.

EC feels fully ready to hit the ground running in August and she knows there will be no more take backs. She is ready to graduate from home school. She did not think that finishing primary school in a public school was right for her. I am trusting her.

MC does not want to go back to primary school. She wants to find activities and make friends that way. I trust her.

YC does a lot of singing about wanting to go to school because her signing program does a lot of singing about how great school is. But I don’t think she is actually aware of any of what it means and I don’t think she would be happy with being separated from the family for 16-30 hours a week anytime soon.

I do not have a job. I am lucky. I choose to be available for this. I do not have to earn a pay check. That means the calculus is different for our family than it would be for someone else’s family. Not that my choice is right. Not that other people are doing something wrong if they make a different choice. If I had to work (for a million good reasons including if I just plain fucking wanted to) then I would figure something else out and I would help my kids learn how to adapt.

We also have such a strong genetic history of severe trauma in the bloodline that this is not the same conversation for us as it is for other families. That matters.

I didn’t move here so that I could give up the commitment I made to my kids and replace it with hanging out with Jenny. I feel like I am being pressured in that direction. I don’t know that she intends to put that kind of pressure on me–that’s outside my ability to know. But I feel it. And I have responded very negatively to it.

In the past month I have spent as much time talking to people as I did in a week in California. And it’s only that high because of forums.

I do need a break from people, from expectations, from having to do a lot to maintain friendships. I feel like I am hurting Jenny by needing that and it’s really complicated.

This doesn’t feel simple to me. I know that I have cut a lot of people off. I have done so to such a degree that it feels… almost callously simple. It is never simple. I don’t want to end my relationship entirely. I also don’t know how to carry the weight of it.

I feel like I am doing wrong no matter what I do.

Why am I not over it.

Leave a reply

I don’t like how long it takes me to deal with my feelings. I want to be done already. I want to know how I will feel in the long run. I am impatient.

But today I am managing three children. I made smoothies to use up the fruit before more arrives in the box today. I made lemon bars (part of using up stuff from the fruit drawer). I have done a bunch of cleaning. I’ve done a load of laundry (with some assistance from kids). I’ve done a bunch of cleaning dishes. I’ve had to have several conversations about the next stages of fixing house stuff.

Turns out the plumber we hired to fix the leak in MC’s bathroom didn’t bother to use any silicone sealant around the shower. So effectively he charged us a bunch of money to set a new shower frame inside the existing shower frame (he didn’t feel like tearing out the old one) then he just kind of left it like that. It leaked like a sieve. Our options are to A) rip out the new shower, old shower, and build an entirely new one from scratch B) be like the old owners of this house and just use it as a closet or C) rip the entire thing out and give up on having a shower in that bedroom.

That shower also was added well after the original house and the plumbing for it all goes waaaaaaaay around the house to come up the outside wall so it is basically impossible to keep it warm for any length of time. If we want it to be an effective warm shower we would have to add an electric boost and the shower is already so tight that I don’t think I could take a shower in there and wash my hair without knocking the door open with my elbow. That would cost a bunch of extra money. It would take up a bunch of space in the shower.

Fuck it, rip the bitch out and all three kids can share the one main upstairs bathroom.

Bonus: Middle Child will no longer have a bedroom that is effectively much smaller than her siblings.

One of the dudes is going to do all of the sanding of the bookshelves today. I am going to start the oil process myself because they are showing up intermittently and paying their hourly wage is adding up pretty fast. We are starting to have anxiety about how much fixing this house is costing. I think it will take me somewhere under 24 hours of labor (not including the time it takes to let the oil dry in between coats) to do all of the shelves I can reasonably reach for myself. That’s a fair bit of cash to save.

I am indefinitely putting off the idea of painting the house in fun ways because I can’t justify spending the money if it means Noah might have to get a job this year. I need to give him a full and complete runway to launch his products and that means I can’t be selfish.

Talking to people through forums is resulting in me feeling overwhelming rage a lot of the time. Almost every piece of major social progress in human history has been deemed impossible right up until the minute that it happens. We have the ability to make peoples lives easier. We choose not to. As a species we prefer to have a majority of people suffer so a few people can be fantastically wealthy. It’s immoral. I need to not be part of any online discussions for a while because I am rapidly growing to despise people I have loved for years.

I am once again in that mode where I feel like I have to move everything I own back and forth and back and forth and back and forth because every fucking area of the house is broken and I can’t put anything in a permanent home.

Did I mention that the kitchen tap broke for a second time? And the bathroom tap?

Fuck everything.

I am so overwhelmed. I don’t know how to process my feelings about people and how I need to be treated in order to be in a healthy relationship.

I don’t think I know what a healthy relationship even means right now.

And I have three minutes until the next stage of work begins.

I have a lot to get done today. How in the hell do I find time to break down all of my feelings so that I can turn around and be support to other fucking people. Because that’s what it feels like is expected. How dare I have distanced myself such that I’m not providing support.

Dad sent me a video. “I haven’t heard from you in a while.” Dude, I think this is the second, maybe third time you have initiated contact in our more than two decade long relationship. I don’t have the spoons to reach out and console you right now. Even though that is our norm.

I feel so much rage.

Drifting

Leave a reply

Hi. It’s been a while. Things here continue. Tomorrow we go back to doing school work after a period off. We have been getting chores done in the house and trying to manage setting up new routines around dealing with quarantine.

I am intensely aware that I am not one of the people who are suffering the most in this pandemic. There are people who are desperately ill and doctors who have to live with making life or death choices for patients. There are store clerks and delivery people who have to deal with the public all day long. There are people who work essential jobs in shipping, construction, and utilities.

I’m… I’m so fucking privileged it makes me sick. So few people get this safety. I feel like my entire life is an over pouring of survivors guilt. I shouldn’t have this safety if other people can’t have it.

The news stories about India are absolutely gutting me. There are so many people suffering. There is literally nothing I can do. But I wish I could. I am so small. I have so little to offer. The things I have to say and do in this life won’t impact very many people. I have done that on purpose.

Small fish in a small pond. It is more true than ever. I worked very hard at that.

I feel like there was a rush of contact with people and now I am struggling with feeling like I can’t maintain it. I feel so sad. I’m not sleeping well. I stay up absurdly late reading new articles and crying. It’s not helping.

I logged off of one of the forums that I have been on a lot for a couple of years. I deleted my access. One of the women in that forum is currently the nastiest person in my life and given that I am doing a fair bit to cut down on contact with people who speak poorly to me, about me, or about my children… that internet person needs to go from my life. I have no sunk cost fallacy going on with online forums.

I feel like things in the house and the yard happen in waves. There’s a burst of activity then the slow receding clean up from the project. I always wonder if I will hit a point where the projects feel… less disruptive? Less like an imposition to daily life?

We are resuming the unit project tomorrow. I’m looking forward to that. It’s neat seeing what the kids come up with.

I feel so small and so unimportant. And like I am insulated and protected and safe. Those things don’t even conflict. Being unimportant is a lot of why I can be insulated and safe.

Our lockdown cooking is pretty epic. I’ve been cooking mass quantities of veg so that lunches are just reheating. The garden is coming along. Everything is blooming and putting out shoots and flowers. There are a lot of different kinds of daffodils in our yard. The tulips are sprouting. I’m slightly annoyed that it isn’t raining a touch more often–I have to water the new plants! What the heck!

I just want to sleep and stop feeling sick to my stomach. Is that too much to ask?

Improving and thinking

3 Replies

I made it through a day out without feeling too terrible. We had some stuff we needed to deal with and we met a home educating family at a park after errands. It went well.

Now my back is quite sore again. I was out too long and I feel really uncomfortable. I won’t die or anything, but it’s feeling like a lot.

It’s kind of funny, but I’ve seen the mama in that family in town with her kids before. I noticed her because I admired her clothes and I wondered about her being out mid-day with her kids in tow. Ha.

It made me miss my clothes that are in transit that much more. I miss feeling like I look like me. I am in borrowed/hand-me-downs or a couple of pairs of trousers I got because I needed something and that’s what I could find that felt comfortable. I don’t have clothing with me that is weather appropriate that feels like my style. This is amusing to me given how much time and effort I spent thinking about how I want to be seen in the world at the encouragement of the horse-trainer-lady. She has a whole workbook she made about figuring out how you want to be perceived in the world and taking concrete steps towards being accepted for how you see yourself. And now it’s all on the boat. I had stuff with me that worked for how I wanted to be perceived in excessively hot weather. For now, I tread water in stuff that feels kind of wrong. Almost 20 weeks of waiting now.

“It’s on the boat” has become an epithet of hostility in my house.

I both care and don’t care about how people think about me. I tried makeup. Frankly I can’t wear it in this environment; even the “water proof” shit runs and then I look stupid. But I’m a hippy. I want my long loose skirts back. I am not a straight mini-skirt person. Knee length skirts barely feel decent to me. Even when I think they are super cute they don’t feel like me. I realized last night when I went to bed in pajamas that had a little hood on it I was literally only exposing a little oval of skin on my face. I had gloves and socks on (keeps the lotion in, yo–I’m dry as fuck). I honestly like managing my appearance in such a manner. I like being covered. I like having my body be private. I have no interest in dealing with other people’s perspective on whether I shave my armpits or not. You can go fuck yourself if you care.

I like keeping most of my body private in this really intense way. And living in trousers doesn’t feel the same and that’s what I’m doing right now.

I miss the super awesome hiking boots that were too heavy to wear in the heat in Thailand. I want them back. They are on this island. They have been on this island for five days short of a month.

If I get a call on Monday for a Wednesday delivery then the absolute soonest we can get our stuff is 20 weeks. This dominates so much of my awareness. I don’t feel settled. I am always waiting.

I am waiting for my life to start. I’m thinking about the fact that a lot of our home school materials are on the forking boat. Give them back.

We can’t “officially start” home schooling until we are given council permission. This is most irritating. If I never enroll YC in nursery and if I waited until the end of this year when EC is graduating out of primary school I wouldn’t need council permission. At this crux times I’m allowed to simply not enroll my children and the council has no say. But MC having another two years in primary school means I need permission. It being mid-year matters.

It’s going to be a few weeks until they are home full time again. The boat stuff had better bloody arrive.

Meh, bookshelves won’t be built until February at the soonest and probably won’t be done until March or April. Noah’s bathroom has a leak. It’s not like we are settled into this house. Still adjusting. Still wiggling into spot.

I’m trying to not get ahead of myself on planning for the garden. I don’t even know what it looks like at the beginning of spring yet. I don’t know the light patterns yet. I don’t know where things will grow and where I want to add things. I just know I need a whole lot more wildness. I need it for my soul.

Oh! I found out that the housing development that is supposed to be placed on the field behind my house is held up because of badgers! They can’t build anything there until they find suitable rehoming spots for all the badgers and they keep finding more! THAT’S SO COOL. In light of the utter total destruction happening in Australia it’s nice that some animals somewhere in the world are being kept safe right this moment. It doesn’t help the half a billion animals killed there in the fires, but it is one set of humans doing something in one place. It’s not enough.

Enough would require about 7 billion people caring. I don’t know how to make that happen.

Our home is becoming really wonderful to me and I have mixed feelings about that. I am a Have in this world. As a result I am building a beautiful home–it’s a process. Making this home is going to take a decade or more. Ha, Noah thinks I don’t have a big project started? I’m just pacing myself. There is no fair. There is no justice. I don’t know how to feel about any of this or what I should do about any of it. I didn’t think I would be a Have. I expected to be a Have Not.

And yet when I look back… did I really? Or was my sense of self esteem so high that I made sure this would be the end result?

I want to learn how to be a lot more things; I want to do a lot more things. I don’t want to buy a lot more things. I want to make my own pretties. And that requires one of the biggest luxuries of all… time.

I’m not a minimalist. I like drawers and shelves and cubbies with things in them. Minimalists think more will appear in the moment they have a need. I like having stock to get me through the lean times when access is harder.

My typing is tapering off because Fluffy is not ok with me doing anything other than petting her.

Skills I want to have:

  • making more kinds of ethnic foods from scratch
  • sewing the clothing I wear, I hope mostly from recycled fabrics
  • make the candles I burn
  • figure out more about growing native plants from cuttings so I can provide food for local insects as many months a year as possible
  • get better at painting
  • figure out how to make bread-making a part of my routine; it tastes better
  • build an exercise routine I can keep with kids around

In 2020 I hope to:

  • read 78 new-to-me books
  • walk at least 1500 miles
  • be consistent with tracking our finances so we have a better idea of what that will look like going forward
  • find more relaxed ways to help my kids learn; I want to be less schooly
  • have more date time with Noah
  • build a play kitchen in the yard for YC
  • organize the books in the house
  • get started on setting up an art studio
  • write at least 10 letters to friends
  • spend less time on the computer or my phone
  • try to incorporate more witchcraft into our family time

That’s a lot. That’s enough. Go to bed, Krissy. Boat stuff won’t come faster if you stay up being annoyed at the delay.

OF COURSE

Leave a reply

In the process of fixing the broken tiles that lead to needing to replace the walls behind the shower… we discovered that the cable for the shower (it’s an electric one… long story) is totally inadequate and I’m fairly likely to cause a fire if I keep using it.

Insert lots of swearing.

Luckily, the awesome electrician who has done a bunch of work for us is willing to come fix it while we are in Edinburgh so we won’t even be significantly inconvenienced by him ripping up carpets and cutting holes in the floor. Woo. And it’s going to cost about 1/8 of what I initially was worried about so that’s not so hideous.

When are we going to run out of broken bits in this house? *sob*

Also: it occured to me today that I need to line up a pet sitter for our “need to be fed three times a day” kittens. It’s not like living with puff where less than 72 hours away just meant top up the food bowl extra much and leave an extra bowl of water.

Right. Ok. Messaged companies about that.

On the upside today we filled out the paperwork for updating our last US bank account to an international bank account and we filled out the paperwork for the kid passports. I don’t know how much work Noah has been able to do… but uhh we are getting stuff done? This is such a rough balance.

This afternoon we are going to go get passport pictures taken of the kids.

Do all of the things. I keep hoping our to do list will get shorter.

One of my online buddies is coming to visit us. She arrives on Saturday and she’ll be here for a week. She needs an escape from her life for a bit. If I think my life is stressful all I have to do is think about what she’s facing. She has been dealing with the aftermath of her house burning down and trying to get one rebuilt for three years. Temporary lodging. Multiple children in different schools and lots of issues there because one of them got a concussion at school doing sports and and and…

Tomorrow the kitties have another vet appointment to check on how they are healing. (They are little fireballs of energy. I think they are doing fine.) On the way to that I am going to return the stuff that Jenny graciously lent us because I need one less thing on my mental to do list. I need to check things off. I need to stop going through the long ass list of “I can’t forget to do_____”. I am really grateful we had help landing.

If the company isn’t FUCKING LYING THROUGH THEIR TEETH AGAIN the ship with our stuff will arrive in the UK in four days. It’s on an icki anniversary of course: my bio-father’s birthday. Ugh. I don’t know how long past then it will take for our stuff to be delivered to our house. It has to go through customs then get trucked to our house. Given where we live, it might take as little eight days from now to get our stuff and it might take as much as two weeks because NO ONE WILL ANSWER MY FUCKING QUESTION about what port our stuff is coming through but based on the home base of the delivery company I assume London. That sucks. People act like London to the Highlands is harder than fucking New York to California. Ridiculous.

Ok, there are upsides to the States. The longer I stay out of the US the more I appreciate some aspects. The very different attitude about customer service. How long it takes things to get delivered. How people handle living “remotely” compared to an urban center.

We are three fucking hours outside the capital city of this country. Folks act like it is closer to thirty hours. Ugh.

Ah well. We do love this city. I just want my stuff. Whine. It’s been almost four months, y’all. I want my long johns. I want my books. I want health records. I want my silverware. I want more blankets. I want the god damn bike trailer. I want my dresses. I want more trousers and sweaters. I want my art. I want the kids to have all of their stuff because they are running out of good cheer too.

We want to be settled already. This feels horrible. It’s just dragging on and on and on. If it takes two weeks to deliver our stuff it will have taken more than four months. For a 5-12 week estimate. I’m so pissed.

Transparent International sucks. They put our stuff in a warehouse for two months. The minute I have my stuff I am leaving negative reviews everywhere.

I have cut my fingers up so much recently that my phone can’t recognize any fingerprints. My hands hurt. I want to be settled so very much.

Less work. I need less work any day now.

Oh hey, I hear that the Highlands will get up to 10″ of snow in the next week or two…. That’ll make shipping our stuff go So Much Faster! There’s flooding. And ice.

Shit.

Thank you!

51 Replies

The text messages while I was running made me very happy. Thank you everyone. I can't go back through and respond because I don't have time. I feel like I have been either extremely busy or asleep since I stopped running. And my computer won't get on the internet consistently. I have stuff I want to write but I have to finish painting today because the washer/dryer are being delivered between 4:45 and 6:45. Must finish! Then the painting will be done in the garage. That will be a euphoric moment of "holy shit I finished a project".

Comedy.of.Errors.

2 Replies

It feels like everything is hitting speed bumps today. My plans for today were: drop van off at mechanic, go home and paint. I woke up at 5am. It seems like that’s not an outrageous list of things to do.

Well. The van has uhm a few more issues than anticipated and I have been on the phone with 3 mechanics, my cousin 3 times, and the guy at the Toyota dealership 5 times. It also involved extensive web searches because holymotherfuckingshit do I not want to pay that many thousands of dollars on repairs today. My cousin, who has been an active mechanic for better than 40 years, says I am getting a good deal and I really really need to do those repairs today or I will be sorry. He has yet to steer me wrong so I’m taking his advice. Even though I want to cry about how expensive this is. Did I mention that tomorrow we have to drop the Prius off for maintenance? 🙁

I ran out of paint after an hour of painting because I didn’t take into account that this is drywall with one coat of primer. It’s thirsty. Noah brought home more and I haven’t been able to touch it because I’ve been busy with other things. Working on the ceiling with Calli on my back made my head, neck, and back hurt so much I want to cry.

We let Shanna help. Of course in the first three minutes she stuck a finger full of blackboard paint (it’s grainy) into her eye necessitating lots and lots of eye flushing while forcibly holding her down as she kicked and screamed. Yeah, that makes my whole fucking day. 🙁 But it was really important. Then we cuddled for a bit to kind of recalibrate.

I have gotten over hungry more than once today and that does really bad things for my mood.

I figured out why our garage is flooding! I thought I had already fixed the problem, but today’s torrential downpour is showing me way more about the problem. Noah and I both worked in the rain trying to get it so that it stops actively flooding Right Now but I have many days of dirt moving ahead of me and I want to cry thinking about it. I will not be painting that wall or ordering the carpet until this problem is truly *fixed*. Ugh.

Calli is teething and whining. And clingy. So.Very.Clingy.

And I’m sober. Sober fucking sucks. My adrenaline is through the roof because of stupid little shit going wrong all day.

And this is with help. This would be why I haven’t started any of the things alone. 😛

Announcement and House projects

2 Replies

I have just decided that I am going to publicly announce that my Sarah (dangerpudding) is moving in with us towards the end of the summer. Right now August 1st is our target date. All co-housing situations have the potential for drama and stress. However we are going to choose to say, “We are ignoring the fact that often there is roommate drama! It’ll work out!” Basically I anticipate us getting some outside mediation at certain points to make sure my head is out of my ass. 🙂 There is so much potential for good here it isn’t funny. Sarah and I travel well together, spend excessive amounts of time together, and are both good at retreating to our rooms when we need a break. Cross your fingers for us and send us your blessings because this working out could be the solution to many of mine and Sarah’s problems. Good wishes are very very helpful.

That said! If Sarah is moving into my house there are many things that must be changed. Our house isn’t very big and we are currently using all of it. It’s going to mean a lot of adjusting our current house usage and getting rid of stuff. It also means that I have to get around to finishing the garage conversion. 🙂 Noah has the next four days off of work and I am going to take advantage of him being home to get through chores as fast as possible. Lots of painting. Lots of moving furniture. Other random sorting or minor chores that need to happen in the next few months.

As is my want, I periodically put on here that I would love house with house chores! Sometimes people show up and sometimes they don’t. Both are perfectly ok. But, if anyone out there has not much to do over the next four days this would be a better-than-average time to come over. Even if you don’t want to do house chores Shanna would love a play mate. 🙂 Or you could just chat with me. I’m open to many variations. 🙂

On clean houses and class

4 Replies

So my dear oldest friend in the world, Brittney, is coming to visit me today. She is doing so primarily because her mother is in town and her mother would like to meet my children. Brittney’s mother met me within days of my birth and has supervised to a greater or lesser extent our friendship of 29 years. It would be quite logical for me to want to “impress” Brittney’s mother. (for the record: Brittney reads this journal) So yesterday I felt like I should rush around doing the flight of the bumblebee making the house at least look completely neat and orderly even though it looks shabby and kind of run down. At some point while nursing Calli to sleep I had a great series of thoughts.

I’m thinking like a poor person. A poor person apologizes for the stains on the carpets, the chips in the paint on the wall, the weird cracks in the ceiling. A poor person notices and feels pain because a poor person can’t fix these blemishes. A poor person cleans everything to within an inch of its life and never has an item out of place. A poor person has to be visibly trying to look like a “good person” and feel shame about the visible slippage from grace.

But I’m a rich person now. My house is not degrading because I cannot afford to repair it. My house has not been remodeled because I would like to spend a month traveling in Europe this summer. We did not fix the interior of the house in favor of putting solar panels on the roof. We took out the lawn on purpose to reduce water usage and I haven’t gotten my act together to figure out a more visually attractive low water solution so my yard looks like crap. I don’t have better furniture because I fully expect my kids to absolutely destroy any furniture we have in the first few years and that’s ok and I don’t want to try to stop them. The list goes on.

My house is in various states of degrading because I bloody well don’t care and I have other things I want to do with our money. Ha! Flight of the bumblebee my ass. We played with Lego’s instead. 😛