Tag Archives: house schtuff

Comedy.of.Errors.

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

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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

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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.

Mmmm nervous energy

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Otherwise known as: what I’m doing with all this anxiety. Cause I’m still feeling a lot of anxiety. Thankfully I’m capable of using it in ways that will make me happier long term.

I have been working on cleaning up the garage and paring things down a little more and a little more and a little more. The shed in the back yard has been awesomely handy for most of the time I’ve lived here, but at this point there are almost as many leaks in the roof as there is roof. Given that it is a cheap metal shed ‘fixing’ it would mean just tacking a tarp over it and my freak out about getting away from my white trash roots mean that I just can’t live with that as a solution. Last year with all the lovely rain we developed a rather unpleasant mold problem and a bunch of stuff had to be trashed. Thus my goal right now is to go through stuff in the garage and shed and get to the point where all of our stuff fits comfortably in the corner of the garage so Shanna can still have a playroom and we can get rid of the shed. I’m not sure how that will long-term affect what I do with the back yard but I can’t help but think it’ll be a good thing to not have random crap living out there that we never touch. I’m working pretty seriously towards this ‘minimalist’ lifestyle thing and it’s making me happy. I am pretty convinced that we will not be able to move out of this house any decade soon and that means we will need to fit in this space comfortably as our kids grow up. This means making room for their stuff. So I’m getting a head start on that process so it’s not a tug-of-war power struggle over who has to get rid of stuff later. Not to mention that the less shit we have the less cleaning we have to do!

So Shanna’s toys are consolidating. The pantry is consolidating. I’m trying to figure out the happy medium between getting rid of too much stuff that we will actually miss and getting down to just the stuff that improves our life.

I’m having a quandary about something though. (Hint: this is one of the rare times I’m open to advice!) I have a gorgeous crystal punch bowl shaped like a huge brandy glass with accompanying tiny punch glasses. This is like 40ish years old at this point so it is very fragile. I think I would be afraid to actually use it because it is a family sentimental piece. It was my moms–one of the few things she managed to hang on to through all the years of her hellish moving. Despite my overall lack of sentimentality I would absolutely never just ‘get rid of’ this. I won’t sell it to strangers and I won’t donate it. But I feel like giving it back to my mother is… awkward. If I leave it at my Aunt’s house for my mom to pick up I feel like I will be opening the door for her to do the same thing to me and I don’t want that to happen. If I ask my niece if she wants it (to ‘keep it in the family) it would be a passive aggressive way of getting it back to my mom because my niece will ask my mom about it, not to mention that they are living together. I would kind of like to just give it back to my mom. This is an important thing to her and I have enough respect for her sentimental attachment to it that I can’t get rid of it… but it doesn’t really mean as much to me. Any ideas on how to resolve this situation?

A good day

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I spend most of my time on lj posting about being unhappy or talking about Shanna. That is totally not representative of my every day so uhm, here’s a post that is less depressing.

Today is a good day. I got a little bit of yard work done out front. It’s been bugging me so I’m glad I’ve gotten around to it. I scheduled house cleaning stuff for the next several months so that I can stop feeling bad about how little cleaning I do. (Noah [whom I do not spend nearly enough time talking up–he’s so fabulous] does most of the ‘picking up’ so our house isn’t too bad, but he doesn’t really like doing the deeper cleaning.) Currently it sucks for me to bend over and do it so we decided that three or four months of someone else cleaning our house was a Good Idea. The vast majority of this additional spending right now is coming out of the much larger than anticipated tax refund, so I am thanking my lucky stars that we got it. I really and truly see the financial privilege I have these days and I feel so grateful that I have it. Money doesn’t buy happiness, but it sure can do a lot of work towards making life easier so that you have less stress. That leads to increased happiness. So I thank anyone upstairs who is listening that my life is so easy at this point.

For all that I’m not a great pregnant person I am deeply grateful that this pregnancy is easier than Shanna’s. I’m super tired. I have a lot of random body discomfort. I’m cranky. But I haven’t puked once! I am not so completely listless that I am not functioning! I do manage to take Shanna out to play at least once a week and I’m arranging for her to have more opportunities than that with other people. I’m cranky with her, but she’s spectacular about telling me, “It’s not nice to yell at me.” Which really puts a fast halt to my temper tantrums. Having a two year old call me on my behavior is incredibly humbling in a good for me way. I really love having her.

I have been doing a lot of thinking about the sexual assault stuff and I am feeling… better isn’t quite the word but less disturbed. I’m feeling more like I really have handled things in a way that is ultimately good for me. Of course I have done things poorly at times. Of course I have not always been in the best place right that minute. But overall I don’t feel like I am a terrible non-functioning crazy person. And sometimes good enough is good enough.

Mostly I had a really good weekend. I really love my family. I have a wonderful, supportive, amazing husband. I feel like I had the most perfect-for-me little girl possible. I like her so much. I’m rather excited about meeting kid 2.0. If Noah and I combined to make one kid this awesome, what will 2.0 be like? I strongly suspect that next kid will be very very different from Shanna. I base this on the differences in the pregnancy. This kid is active in a way that Shanna wasn’t. This makes me slightly nervous because of the potential differences in sleeping habits. Shanna has been an awesome sleeper since birth. But we’ll roll with it. Whatever happens is what is meant to happen. I think that I am nervous about having expectations this time. Before Shanna I had almost zero exposure to babies. I had no idea what to expect and then she was so easy. (Maybe my memory is already getting fuzzy… who knows.) Now I’ve had a kid so I have a bit more of the ‘I know about kids’ attitude. I’d be better off assuming that I know nothing again.

So, yeah. Life is plugging along. I have 6ish weeks to go. I’m nervous but looking forward to the birth. It will be a rather different experience this time. Shanna has expressed rather strongly that she wants to be at the birth so that’s going to be interesting. Luckily nipple stimulation is a big help because there is no way I will be able to keep her from nursing during labor. I’m really looking forward to tandem nursing for some weird, masochistic reason. Something about it just seems really… I don’t know… motherly? Like even if I feel like psychologically I am not always the best at mothering my body is doing GREAT at the physical parts! I can’t quite figure out why I am looking forward to it so much. Too many years on MDC. They have infected my brain.

So yeah. It’s a good day after having a couple of other good days in a row.

Having trouble settling.

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I have a rather spectacular amount of work I need to do and very little motivation/energy to do it. There are a few problems that are intersecting here to make this situation harder. Shanna is… even more festive than she was for interfering in my working. Woo toddlerhood! I am an extrovert so I really thrive on being around people, but the physical load involved in going out somewhere and managing Shanna kind of eliminates the benefit of being around people. This blows.

So I would really love it if someone would come over and talk to me while I do work in my house. I feel way more motivated to work that way. I don’t particularly need help, although there are particular chores I wouldn’t turn down help with, but mostly I would just love the adult company.

Oh, and dear god I need to get some of that meat out of my freezer. Please contact me if you have any interest in the grass fed beef. Laura isn’t so thrilled about storing my 1/4 until this 1/4 is sold. (I don’t blame her in the slightest but I really max out at 1/2 a cow in my freezer.)

Still working

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And I’m still happy about it. I have cheerfully ignored capnkjb so that I didn’t have to argue with her. I got far less done yesterday than I did on Monday but that’s really ok with me. Grocery shopping, mountains of laundry, ridiculous quantities of dishes… it’s still good progress. Today I continue the laundry. (When we get hand-me-downs and do towels/sheets at the same time it’s kind of a lot to deal with folding.) I’m also going to try and get to some of the other household cleaning stuff that is more intensive that I uhm haven’t done in months. My house will be fit for habitation soon!

My cousin’s boyfriend finished the gate and did most of the work on the AC unit and the kitchen fan yesterday. He couldn’t finish either because he needs more parts and it was getting late. Nevertheless I am quite pleased with him. I think my to do list will actually get done! I’m so excited!

My life fucking rocks.

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Let me count the reasons to be grateful towards the universe right now:

-Mo is coming to visit me today and she is going to help me do work! The only yardwork I will request of her is helping me get those @#%^#@ white rocks up. Then we will come inside and she will help me give the house the scrub down it has needed for months. She loves me *that* much. <3 -My cousin and her boyfriend are coming over on Tuesday. Her boyfriend is one of the most hard working people I have ever met in my life. He's going to help me get the rest of the yard work stuff done. I am so excited about this I could float off into the universe. I think that, unexpectedly, I am actually going to get my yard to a place where I am happy with it for the first time since I’ve lived here. That is so cool I can barely stand it.
-Taylor is coming over on Thursday and he will give me a massage. I’m going to be a happy pile of goo after that. And he will help me put the gate up in the side yard to keep Shanna out of the compost.
-I am pretty sure I will have ALL of my projects done by Thursday and I can’t express how happy that makes me. I feel constantly unsettled and anxiety around projects not being done. It really affects my day to day happiness in negative ways. But I will get caught up! Dude! SO EXCITED!!!
-We have a babysitter for 10 hours on Saturday and we get to party hop! This will be thrilling.
-Good stuff with my aunt. It’s nice to have someone in my family sit down and listen to me. I needed that so much. My soul feels lighter.
-I have this wonderful, amazing, fabulous husband and hanging out with him is so awesome.
-Shanna continues to grow more individualistically person-like daily. It is so much fun to spend time with her. I really love watching her charm the pants off everyone she spends time around. She is such a poster-child for reproduction that I giggle when avowed ‘not into kids’ people are all over her like white on rice.
-I’m really excited about the upcoming camping/wedding/festivity in May. I think it will be super fun and really great.
-I’ve been getting out and being more energetic and it feels really nice. I’m less slug-like. I’m even doing better about doing cooking and eating slightly better. I’m being good to my body and the tiny baby and I’m glad I can do that more now.
-For today I feel like the burdens in my life are all in perfect balance and thus there is the lightness of a feather upon my back. I don’t get here often but I really cherish it when I do. Thank whoever is watching for reprieves from hard.

ETA: and I totally forgot to mention that Alex volunteered to make a play kitchen for Shanna for her birthday. Maybe I should be less down on my chosen family. They are totally rocking lately.

Where I am today

Ooh! Ikea!

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I get to go to Ikea today! Would anyone like to go with me?

done

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This stage of the garage project is completely over. YAY!

Plugging along

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Mudding and sanding are completely done. Today I am going to sweep and mop the garage. Then the kitchen. And then we can vacuum the rest of the house. Tonight the garage will get the first coat of primer. I think two coats are a good idea given some of the areas of funk (the wall next to the house is stained and the beams are all pretty foul). The second coat will probably happen on Thursday. The inspector came this morning so I’m about done with this stage of the project. Yay! Decorative painting is going to wait a few months until there is more money in the kitty.

So I will probably start moving stuff out to the garage on Friday and Saturday. I only need help for the biggest pieces and then I can handle the rest of the work by myself over the next week. YAY!

Cookie baking is done. Cinnamon rolls are happening on Saturday.

Christmas cards are completely done and in the mail.

Yesterday I made a whole bunch of Aloo Gobi Mattar and it is really really good. Today I am making corned beef and cabbage (and potatoes, of course). Tomorrow is some cut of beef that Noah took out of the freezer; I should probably figure out how I am cooking that. I should also make veggie soup today or tomorrow and that will use up the vast majority of the veggies in the house. With the generous help of Sarah’s freezer foods I think we will be set for meals (except for Christmas dinner) for basically the rest of the month. That’s kind of awesome.

Wow. I have cleaning, cooking and wrapping presents left on the agenda for this week and setting up the garage for next week. I think this may be my lowest stress Christmas in years. Everything is coming together easily and in advance. Yay!

busy week

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Based on what I have read and how much is left to do I can probably ~~get the mudding completely done this week in the garage (thanks to the generous help of awesome people)~~ and I can probably even get the garage painted with primer if not with colored paint.

~~I need to get baking done. I have barely started. I could also stretch this into next week if I have to but I would prefer not.~~

I need to get the holiday cards addressed so they can go in the mail the day I get the pictures back or they won’t go out at all.

I need to get cooking done that uses up this week’s vegetables.

And there is the constant avalanche of crap inherit in living with a toddler. I would love to just ignore this part for the whole week but Noah gets cranky.

And let’s not get into how desperately my bathroom needs cleaning.

I’m tired before the work even begins.

Mania

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I kind of forgot this feeling. Man I’ve been productive today. Shanna woke me up at 4:30. We didn’t really get out of bed till 5. I left Noah sleeping. Then I got up and got busy. Today I have (in no particular order):

-Cleaned up basically all of the small debris out in the garage and put it away or broke it up small enough for the trash.
-loaded the dishwasher and ran it
-put the dishwasher stuff away
-did a full dishdrainer full of hand washing
-diaper laundry is nearly done
-another load is in the washer
-went through extensive stain removal crap on a shirt of Shanna’s that I love. *cross fingers it will actually come clean*
-completely cleaned off the kitchen counter and scrubbed it and the stove
-cleaned off the kitchen table and changed the linen
-cleaned the cat litter box
-read several chapters in My Mother Wears Combat Boots while Shanna napped (turkey butt)
-got my nephew started mudding the garage (w00t)
-ate the best cookie ever: white chocolate, blueberries, and milk chocolate covered blueberries. I think I died and went to heaven.
-made sausage and eggs for breakfast
-fed Shanna several snacks
-Completely scrubbed down the high chair (it was disgusting)
-spent a lot of time chatting with my wonderful Sarah
-rounded up all the unused Christmas stuff and put it away

And it’s not even noon.

I think I will go clean the bathroom. I’m thinking that I should sweep the kitchen. Mopping is pointless until we finish the drywall stuff. Hmmmmm…. what else should I do…

Just life

Ladder!

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So next Tuesday we will be putting drywall up in my garage. This is very exciting to me. I am curious if anyone has a ladder I can borrow. Probably not more than 8′ and 6′ would be better.

In addition to generically begging for a ladder, if you have time on Tuesday during the day this is the sort of project where additional help could be really really handy.

Whoo hoo!

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Today’s the day! I get to start back-breaking physical labor! Sheetrock is heavy. I keep telling myself, “It will all be worth it when I can walk down the hallway with less of risk of breaking my neck in the middle of the night.”

Man am I grateful to Taylor. Yay Taylor!

ETA:
Apparently today is the day I get to schedule back breaking labor. He had a good point about waiting on delivery so stuff isn’t going to happen for a while. I think I am just as happy. This will give me a chance to do more fussing inside the house with arranging stuff without being grumpy and in pain. I also get to have a couple of weeks between bursts of project obsession. Maybe in the meantime I’ll get around to making jam.

Appreciation

Wallpaper ideas

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Now that I was shown the wonders of wallpaper (previously I didn’t consider them because my experience with wallpaper was all really ugly shit in old people’s houses) I have some awesome choices to make. I am interested in something that encourages a variety of imaginative play. I would like something that isn’t too ‘baby’ because I’m not going to want to change it particularly soon. I would like something that does not dictate that my daughter ought to be a tomboy or a princess. She gets to be whatever she wants to be. And I would like something that is not strictly speaking ‘girl’ because then little boys will scorn it because little boys are trained to be retarded like that. (We have a really machismo neighbor with a little boy Shanna’s age. I expect they will play because I get along with the mom. I expect that his father will make cracks if something is too girly because he’s already made cracks about how I shouldn’t ever cut Shanna’s hair because girls should never be allowed to cut their hair.)

Idea #1 which I like because it’s a neat old library and that’s always fun. I’m not sure how this one would age with a kid.

Idea #2 I like this one because it is very open-ended and it lends itself to all kinds of neat imagination games.

Idea #3 I think this one would age particularly well. I worry that it could be a little spooky for a small child. Of course I do love my tree imagery.

Idea #4 also very open ended but in a slightly more realistic sort of way. This one seems to me to be more about adventure and less about fantastic, if that makes sense.

Idea #5 this is less open ended but really fun.

Idea #6 neat, but I’m not sure.

More cheerful

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Today I am feeling happy because I have made a bunch of progress out in the shed. I am getting rid of the debris left from when the housemate before the last housemate was here. (I’m not complaining! Thank you for the roses!) This means I am able to organize the stuff I want to put in there. This kind of anal retentive organizing makes me swooningly happy.

And I am going to squash my “I can do it myself!!!” attitude and gratefully accept help from the wondrous Taylor in finishing the garage. This way it will actually get done instead of me just bitching at Noah that I want it to get done. Then I get to move on to feeling angsty about my lack of artistic ability. That part will be easier to get done I suspect. I’m not sure exactly how I’m going to do the playroom yet but I feel a tantalizing array of options.

You just keep going

Do the best you can

Tag Archives: house schtuff

Comedy.of.Errors.

Announcement and House projects

On clean houses and class

Mmmm nervous energy

A good day

Having trouble settling.

Still working

My life fucking rocks.

Where I am today

Ooh! Ikea!

done

Plugging along

busy week

Mania

Just life

Ladder!

Whoo hoo!

Appreciation

Wallpaper ideas

More cheerful