A Certain Point of View

It just occurred to me that when my mommy was 35, I was four. And my mommy always felt old. Old! Older than all the other mommies, and crankier and more neurotic. I am older than my mommy! I always swore I would be a funner mommy, and not as hysterical. Too late; I'm pretty damn cranky most of the time already. Crap, the Twenty Year Plan I devised in college is beginning to go to hell.

Meanwhile, my maternal instincts consist of baking (largely for my own personal consumption) and watching the clock so I can wrestle the cats' pills down their throats on time.

Now, some people reading this (thank you, both of you) would be saying "What's SHE so upset about?" Having kids is a tragedy//Not having kids is a tragedy. I've always wanted to have children. I just thought I'd have had them sooner. (Don't tell me 35 is young. 35 is young if you're a tree. 35 is old to an egg, any egg.) I just thought I'd have been ready sooner. (Does this mean my parents and my friends' parents were as stupid as I am now?) (Nah, MY friends who have kids are extraordinary parents. The four of them who have kids...) Truth be told, aside from wanting an excuse to watch cartoons and buy silly toys, I want to see if I can do better than my parents.

There's a Lichtenstein painting (he's the one that does large paintings that look like comic books) where a woman, her eyes wide, smacks her forehead in horror and her thought bubble says "Omigosh! I forgot to have children!" It's great art because it is so meaningful on so many levels...

Is Oprah really right - is 40 the new 30? (In college, my least favorite professor based his entire political science class on the thesis that Power is the Ability to Manipulate Reality. Like, for example, "SUVs Are Really Good to Drive." "We Really Really Needed To Go To War In Iraq.") I worship Oprah, she is my new hero. Wait, wait, oh, no, no, no, she has no children!

Todd has always worried that he'll be too old to play basketball with his kids when he has them. It's scary that when Todd and I are in a quiet room together, his biological clock ticks louder than mine. I used to think he was nuts.

Dammit, my ovaries are doing that twitchy dance thing again.

Each morning, Jessie must be found, nabbed and pilled first. If Doc is pilled first, she will pack herself into the most unaccessible spots in the house and refuse to move for up to eight hours at a time. Screaming does not work; she's deaf, remember. Squirting water, dragging tempting toys or string, dangling treats or food do not convince her otherwise. (After her pilling, she knows she's safe and she's friendly and peaceable again. For 12 hours. How does she know?)

Doc, the most intelligent, affectionate and obedient of cats, (at least, to Todd) has decided he doesn't like pills. Even with Todd there, Doc begins active disobedience. He does this in the most imaginative way I've ever seen -- he becomes, well, buoyant. He floats, he flits, he flies, he weaves (!), he floats around on his two feet, like a dancer. It is very hard to hold him down. It is very hard to get hold of his head to pill him. That's the point, yeah, I know. His movements are just like he's in a tub of water, and he won't sit still. (I've started to stick him in the sink, so even when he's floating, he's still lower than me, poor boy.) Now, once the pills are down his throat, he still holds them in his throat and coughs them up later. So we sit in the littlest bathroom, locked up for 20 minutes, in a stare-down. As a final resort, Doc will just throw up. And he has to do it on carpet, never tile. Sigh. '

Meanwhile, Wyatt cries during the pilling because he is sure that he needs medication too, and we're neglecting him. (After all, he went to the vet, too, right?) I have begun taking him into the bathroom and sticking my finger down his throat just to shut him up. I'm appalled to report that that seems to make him happy. He always was good about taking pills.

My birthday was Friday March 26, and Todd cleared the weekend to play with me. (I was delighted he remembered!) But there was nothing I wanted to do except sleep late and read the paper. (I think I might be in a bad patch, a low period, hmmm.) Todd spent the weekend tinkering and sort of annoyed with me. Were we perfectly happy or slightly discontented?

I finally gave up and bought my own birthday presents today. My parents didn't get me anything (that's good, actually, the last time they got me something, it hurt my feelings). Todd didn't get me anything (although he maintains he WOULD have when we went out). I DO have a wishlist on Amazon!! Hello?! Sniff. I do hate being adult about things. Someone could have gotten me a cake. Grump, grump, grump. I get Todd a cake. Pout, pout, pout.

On December 17, I blogged about how I bought a Christmas present and I figured out that I got $2 more change than I should have, in the parking lot. I wrote about how I decided to pocket the $2 rather than go back and face the cashier, my experience lately being that the cashier would act like I stole the money or was trying to get him into trouble, rather than trying to help him. I concluded I'm just not a nice person. Too cynical, too broke, too phreaked out to stand up to the treatment.

I drove by the store today and it's gone out of business. It's probably not my fault. I feel bad anyway. It's probably the medication. The place in question WAS the Circuit City on Sepulveda (a big national chain) not a Crazy Ahmed's (a local institution or something like that) ...

I like seeing my toes. Or maybe I hate shoes. I go barefoot inside my house and any other house, and I wear Birkensocks or Tevas with no socks if at all possible. I keep my toenails cut short and don't rub my toes against anything, except maybe the sheets at night.

Now. Can someone tell me why the edge of my big toes always get buffed to a high bright shine? It's so mirrorlike, I can't even keep polish there. It doesn't happen on any other nail, just the big toes, and more on the left toe than the right. I'd like to duplicate that surface on other materials with as little effort, I just can't figure out how I do that.

I miss Martha Stewart. Airing at 1:30AM weeknights in L.A., she was an insomniac's friend. The furry kitty cats, the friendly music, the light and airy settings, the tense special-guests, the chatty instructions for projects and recipes I was NEVER EVER going to do, were all so very good at tiring me out and putting me to sleep...tastefully.

I learned a fair bit from her show, how to sugar fruit for a centerpiece, how to iron monograms, how to make perfect bows. (Have I used such knowledge? No...but I might.) She used to smile pleasantly on her show (and sometimes, it even looked real). Towards the end, she didn't even bother to show her teeth. It's been sad, watching her age these last several months. I'm sure she's unpleasant and a tough old witch like they say and I'm sure she deserves everything she got... I'm sure, I'm sure, but it seemed like the Tyco and Enron people deserved a lot worse and didn't get it.

But it boils down to what it all means to me. Martha Stewart doesn't know who I am and surely doesn't care. In that time slot, CBS is running reruns of "Becker," a sitcom with Ted Danson. It just isn't the same. Ted Danson looks like the main character in the movie Hellboy! Is it my imagination?! Coincidence?! Certainly, Hellboy looks nothing like Ron Perelman, the actor who plays him and wears all that makeup. Danson should sue for unlicensed use of his face!

Someone has been shooting out of the sandbox and the urine has been crystallizing. It's a boy. It's not Odo, because it's in boxes he never uses. And Odo is vain enough that he squats low and doesn't mess his long long fur.

Wyatt and Doc went to the vet and stayed there all day. Doc's urine samples were bloody, and his pee is (7.5pH; normal is 6.0) alkaline, creating the crystals I saw. Wyatt had a UTI six months ago. Doc's condition is more serious; if we didn't catch this now, his urinary tract could get backed up and he could build up toxicity in his body. The pills I have to administer tell me how serious this is. 400mg of antibiotics is enormous! I would have trouble swallowing them. Poor Wyatt had his blood and urine drawn for no apparent reason except moral support.

Jessie came with when I picked the boys up. Even though she is happy and playful again, her weight is still low. She is still deaf as a post. (The great thing about a deaf cat going to the vet is, I don't have to talk to her in the car because it doesn't do any good,, and I can crank the radio up to drown out her yowls of protest. Sorry Jessie.) I got read the riot act for not keeping her pilled with her hyperthyroid medication. She's so happy, and she likes me again! Jessie is very VERY hard to pill. Twice a day. Sigh. I wish they could suggest something for her deafness.

Poor Doc, poor Jessie. Poor Wyatt, who went through the whole ordeal (getting stuffed into a crate, driven to the vet, etc.) for nothing. Todd says when the boys were gone, Odo ran through the house and explored parts of the house he had never invaded before. I shudder to imagine the two hours when the Three Wanted Ones were away, what the two Little Interlopers did.

How have I changed from, say, high school?

I have a lot of credit cards, one of each: a Visa, a MC, an Amex, and a Discover. I own or have access to three cars. I'm married. I'm a homeowner. I've gotten an advanced degree. (I wrote a pretty ok thesis as an undergraduate, too.) I've modified my body with pierced ears and a tattoo just-to-show-I'm-a-rebel-in-a-conformist-sort-of-way. I've been diagnosed with a mental disease reserved for grown-ups. I've started a business but it feels an awful lot like sitting at home, working on a three year old computer. I've driven cross country three times. I know the suburbs of Los Angeles, and the cities of Las Vegas, Tucson, and Wilmington, Delaware. Oh, and Winslow, Arizona.

Somehow, I thought I'd feel more...arrived. Birthdays have become depressing lately. Must be the medication.

I bought the Scunci Steamer because I had a 20% off coupon at Bed Bath and Beyond. The TV informercial was just too much fun to watch, and I had to have it. And for 20% off, and less shipping and handling too? Sold.

So far as I understand and remember, it does exactly what it says it will do. It provides copious amounts of steam for cleaning and ironing, out of a nozzle, attached to a trigger handle. The maximum amount of water is about a cup, but the steam, under a fair amount of pressure, lasts a good long while. It doesn't take long for the water to heat up, either. The steam is hot enough and brutal enough that it can sanitize surfaces. For that matter, the Scunci Steamer will let you burn your #$%& fingers off, if you're not careful.

The Steamer came with lots of weird little attachments for different jobs. A squeegee. Cloth covers for wrinkle removal. Metal brushes, nylon brushes, so you can steam and scrub at the same time. (It also came with a little measuring cup and funnel to put the "ordinary tap water" into the tiny tiny opening at the top - what, they couldn't design a funnel into the cap? I've lost it twice so far) It also came with a pointy nozzle so you can shoot it at cracks and crevices and the mysterious area under the toilet bowl rim. I stuck on the brush attachment for the soap scum on my sink and steamed away... for an hour. My arm got tired because the thing gets kind of heavy. And it wasn't really that clean. I could do it faster with Soft Scrub and a sponge, sigh. I tried the squeegee for the shower door, and the results were similarly so-so. (It may be unsightly, but I guess it's sanitary!) It's totally ineffective for hardwater scale, too; you can focus the steam right on there, and you can watch the scale melt away, and then when you pull the nozzle away to wipe away the debris, the scale has reformed and hardened back into position. I'm so disappointed. Is it the medication?

I have a lot of tile, and it is good for cleaning dark grout. Except you have to clear off the counter surface of any loose things, or they'll go flying. Ditty for things you want to keep dry out of the path of the air stream, like a roll of papertowels. It did a fair job on cooked on, stuck on food on my stove top, except it sent the loosened stuff flying all over the kitchen counter and floors, yuck.

It's really really really good for relaxing wrinkles out of clothes.

If you're needing any sort of steam without spitting, good news:it doesn't spit at all, the steam is fine with no big drops, particularly with the towel attachment. But it's forceful, so you have to use it from far away.

I'm still going to try it on oil stains on my garage and the leftover wallpaper in the spare bedroom. My hopes are not high at this point. I'm not going to return it because there ARE uses for focused steam, I just can't seem to think of any right now.

For those to whom this matters, prolonged use opens your pores but makes your hair look really really really funny when you're done.


I have to find and watch the TV infomercial again. Maybe I'm doing something wrong. Funny, I can't find the commercial airing anymore.

His back finally gave out. He's been having trouble walking more than 1/2 a mile. We anticipate back surgery later this year, and some other medical procedures. Together we composed a nice letter and then drove around to his clients, dropping them off. Some of his clients remember me when I was 2 or 3 or 4 and were distraught that my dad was retiring so suddenly. This was really hard for all of us.

The letter went on my stationery and went something like this:

Dear So-and-So,

It is with regret that I must inform you that _______ will not be maintaining your garden today, or from this day forward. He is forced to retire suddenly for medical reasons. My father and I apologize for the abruptness of this decision; after many years on your estate, my father did not intend to retire in this manner.

My uncle, _____, is also an experienced gardener and is available to succeed my father, if you wish. He can be reached at (xxx)xxx-xxxx. If you have any questions or concerns, please feel free to call; my father can be reached at (xxx)xxx-xxxx, and I can be reached at the number listed above.

My father has always spoken warmly of you. Thank you for your kindness to him for so many years.


Afterwards, we went to a diner and had lunch. I paid. I felt bad because my daddy gets no gold watch, and no party.

If you're wearing green on St. Patrick's Day and you don't go out someplace, (out shopping, out drinking) does it still count?

If you wear green normally, ("Exactly how many ugly green sweatshirts DO you own?!") nobody cares anyway.

Another good thing about living in East L.A.: Nobody wears green on March 17, and you get yer pick of corned beef slabs in the late afternoon.

Ran into Scott, one of the boys next door I grew up with. I haven't seen Scott since, well, junior high school, I guess, because he's a good four years older than me. His kid brother Eric was a year older than me and his baby brother Alan was two years younger than me. When we were little, we all played together, but Alan, Eric and I made Scott nuts, tagging along, making fun, trying to impress, having more fun than him. Scott was the responsible one. He thought it was a bad idea, for example, when I got a nice heavy box to play in and we decided it was fun taking turns climbing in, sealing up the top, and rolling the box down my front stairs. Alan threw up after dinner that night, and Scott told on us.

We played together a lot; there was a boy to the left of us, and Scott's family to the right of us. We were all good at sharing, and if we pooled our toys and play-acreage, we could go play for days. Childhood magic and weirdness were commonplace; once, I was playing alone, blowing soapbubbles in my yard, and Alan climbed over the fence trying to find the source of all the mysterious bubbles that were floating into his yard. We all took music, and at any given time after school, "Flight of the Bumblebee" or "Fur Elise" could be heard coming from one of our houses.

I always admired Scott's family. Their house was the Kool-Aid house, everyone wanted to play there; they had a swingset, a four-seat-spinny-thingie that could get you good and sick with just two, and sheds and storage areas that served as clubhouses. My mom always ran to their mom for help and advice. It always amazed me that their dad came home at the same time, every day, and stayed home weekends. I always envied that they knew the rules for any sport without even thinking about it. They were envied by so many people, it was too good to last, maybe. Scott's dad died when I was 10 or 11. Eric died of an undiagnosed heart condition playing basketball when I was 21 and we had moved away.

I was at the ophthalmologists' office, where I was sitting with my mom and dad for their appointments. Scott was there with his wife and newborn daughter to pick up their glasses. He recognized us and said hi, and I didn't recognize him. I apologized, and he introduced himself. I then dropped my jaw with an audible clank, when did he get so ... fortyish? (They, like me, live elsewhere but travel back to the Westside to the old doctors' offices.) My parents grabbed up the baby and I hurriedly explained to the dumbfounded wife that I was born in the front apartment of S's parents' house in 1969. Like it or not, we were sort of family. Waiting rooms can be dreary, but this wait was short.

Oh! He's started to look just like his dad, right down to the glasses.

I suppose I should have asked what he was doing, how old his kids were. Scott was always a little shy. Words began tumbling out and I reminisced about our pop-a-wheelie stunts on our bicycles (this was life before helmets, mind you) and jumping off their garage loft onto grass clippings and getting yelled at. "I looked in there the other day, that loft is really rickety! What were we thinking?!" Other patients began to listen in and chuckle along with us. I confessed that Alan, Eric, and I caught black widows in the back garage, and would make them fight each other. (At that, his wife, Scott, and I all widened our eyes at the immense stupidity and got a collective case of the willlies and I swore there was a separate god for children.) His wife listened to all this with great interest - this was a side to her husband she didn't know. When the waiting room was in hysterics and the three of us were in tears, I finished, "There was no other reason why any of us had all our limbs and senses intact into adulthood. Tell your mother I said thank you; we were such a pain." "Don't worry, she's forgotten a lot of it." Scott confided. "Really! Mine too!"

Modern medicine has improved child mortality, made it so that little kids don't experience lots of classmates dying. That's good! Modern media makes death a daily event, makes you think you can handle it when it actually happens. That's bad. Sex and death is never as pretty (or well lit) as it is on TV. (Did Spalding Gray look as good as Kate Winslet when he jumped? Where was his Leo DiCaprio?) When Eric died I was just 20 and away at college. I hadn't seen him since he graduated high school, hadn't had a conversation with him since, maybe, junior h igh. His death was so sudden. I couldn't make it to the funeral on short notice. My parents had just moved away from the neighborhood and only heard third hand. I got to read the program weeks later, in an attempt to digest the whole thing: who said the eulogy, who carried the casket, what songs were played. Months later, I secretly said a prayer for him during Obon, the Japanese Day of the Dead.

In 15 years, I never got to say to anybody how much I loved him, and it was so nice to finally be able to say how much I missed Eric to someone who understood.

I have decided not to watch the news for a while. I don't want to know about the latest in the Peterson, Jackson or Stewart trials, or that they found Spalding Gray, or that more people have died by terrorist attacks. I don't want to know about selling body parts, serial killers making sausage, or that someone at my undergraduate school perpetrated a hate crime against a professor.

Going to my happy place gets harder and harder the older and older I get. (Maybe, it's like Indiana Jones said, it's not the age, it's the mileage.)

Tell me if we get Dubyah out of the White House, and if we find that Princess Diana has been living incognito all this time in New York with JFK Jr., hm?

I looooove lists. I don't know why. Do you like lists? I'd make lists of lists if I thought it would be useful.

I loved Charlotte's Web as a kid not so much for the heroic spider as for the lists E.B. White wrote, of Wilbur's meals: "...lunchtime. Middlings, warm water, apple parings, meat gravy, carrot scrapings, meat scraps, stale hominy, and the wrapper off a package of cheese." And of stuff rats could eat after hours at the county fair: "A fair is a rat's paradise...you will find old discarded lunch boxes containing the foul remains of peanut butter sandwiches, hard-boiled eggs, cracker crumbs, bits of doughnuts, and particles of cheese. In the hard-packed dirt of the midway...popcorn fragments, frozen custard dribblings, candied apples abandoned by tired children, sugar fluff crystals, salted almonds, popsicles, partially gnawed ice cream cones, and the wooden sticks of lollypops..."

I loved Shel Silverstein poems that were list-y, like "Sick," which started something like "I cannot go to school today//said little Peggy Ann McKay//I have the measles and the mumps,//A gash, a rash, and purple bumps,//My mouth is wet, my throat is dry//I'm going blind in my right eye//My tonsils are as big as rocks//I've counted sixteen chickenpox//...You say today is...Saturday?//G'bye, I'm going out to play!"

I also thought the George Carlin routine about Seven Words You Can't Say on Television was hilarious and monumental. (And for your edification, solely for your edification, in case you didn't know, (where have you been?!)those words are: sh*t, p*ss, f*ck, c*nt, c*cks*cker, m*th*rf*cker and t*ts.)

Anyway, I love lists. I like my list of weird stuff I just wrote and keep wanting to add to it. The point of this is I must be getting slightly better, because I keep writing new lists of stuff to do, stuff to buy, and stuff to deal with, all stuff I didn't want to deal with before. I haven't written lists in a long time. Oh, I love lists.

For the first time in my life, I've got the time and energy to nest. (Up til now, when the house got dirty, I cleaned it up thoroughly and then I'd move!) I've been digging through my stuff and trying to organize my house, trying to make it my house rather than the house that I live in that Todd set up housekeeping in.

Todd came in from the garage this morning and observed he would have gotten cheaper shelves than the ones I got, plastic ones, because they're lighter. (Slow burn: Ooooooooh!) I opted for the good heavy steel ones that they use in museums; they hold everything, up to 5000lbs of stuff. I figure the stuff that needs to be garaged tends to be heavy, like camping gear and seasonal appliances. Plastic shelves crack in the heat, wouldn't last an earthquake and don't hold much for all the bulk of the plastic structure. And the injection port holes start to harbor spiders. And egg sacs. Big ones.

I've come to the conclusion that I own some strange stuff. A silver tea service. A rubber chicken. 10 lb. dumbbells. A fedora hat, leather jacket and a bullwhip, from a Halloween costume in college. Juggling rings. A small piece of carved ivory that was found at a thriftstore in Las Vegas. Lots and lots and lots of books, including a copy of Beloved signed by Toni Morrison, dated before her Nobel Prize announcement and a copy of the Necronomicon, a very boring read. A boxed set of McGuffey Readers. A brass box with the seal of the House of Representatives on the lid. A complete collection of pointy dental tools which are good for lapidary, archaeological and conservation use (not dentistry, I'm not quite that open-minded, thank you). A Girl Scout jackknife and compass. Milkcrate full of acrylic paints. Another milkcrate full of vinyl records, including a limited edition David Bowie LP-single of "Blue Jean" in blue vinyl. Hiking boots. Jumprope. My first power drill.

Todd owns a remarkable amount of sporting goods. A tent or two (tent stakes keep showing up in random areas of the house). Sleeping bags. Camp stove and fuel canisters. Skis and poles. Fishing poles. A tackle box and fishing vest. A bowling ball and (a really cute) bag. Bowling shoes. Free weights. Golf clubs. Golf shoes. A bagful of pointy things you put on golf shoes. Basketball shoes. Running shoes. A basketball. A baseball glove. (What, no bat?) A bicycle. A bicycle helmet.

Then there's the stuff we've bought together, space heaters, fans, the spare microwave I'm not willing to throw away, the coffeemaker I got for Christmas (those in-laws again) I don't need but might want, the carpet steamer, the flashlights, the lanterns, the air compresser, the airmattress, the emergency auto-jumper...

Some of our stuff is garageable, some of it would suffer in the uncontrolled atmosphere. None of it, like the bowling ball, dumbbells and freeweights would stay for long on a plastic shelving unit.

On another, more personal, somewhat bitchy, note, I've never met anyone (let alone thought I'd marry) anybody with their own bowling ball and bowling shoes. Wow, and he thinks the stuff I own is weird.

I'm not a nice person. I'm not. It's just a lot easier telling people I'm not a nice person than actually trying to BE a nice person.

I don't give money to panhandlers if I can help it. If someone is really aggressive, or if I'm holding money right there at the bus stop, well, I'll cough it up, but not happily...(that might be called a mugging, actually). I don't lend money to my friends because every time I did, I lost that friend. (Alternatively, if you lend someone $20 and you never see them again, that might be money well spent.) On the other hand, I don't lie to the IRS, and I do give to charity, and not just at Christmas. I don't give enough money, like the 10% they say you SHOULD give; but like I said, I'm not a nice person.

So there I was, visiting Ralphs for the first time in six months, since the grocer's strike ended. Their milk was REALLY old, (expiring tomorrow!) but I picked up the youngest one I could find. I got ice cream (I guess frozen stuff like ice cream keeps longer, or maybe turns over faster than milk?) which is all that really matters. I guess a lot of strikers quit, because at 6:30pm there were only two checkers, one hysterical bag boy, and two lines with ten people each. I was ninth in line... Then seventh...fifth... fourth in line. My ice cream was melting and I needed to pee. (It's been warm here in L.A.) I stopped staring at Michael's nose job on the cover of some magazine and realized that the woman at the front couldn't quite pay. Her baby was fussing, and she was short $1.60-odd. The cashier counted up all the change she scraped up from her purse and she was still short "mumblety-two cents, ma'am." The baby started to scream, and the woman, an Asian immigrant, blushed deeply and got flustered. What item to return to the cashier? The line was getting looonger and people were grumbling. My ice cream was melting and I needed to pee. "Hey," I called, "How much is she short?" "Fifty-two cents," came the reply. I dug into my pockets and handed it over, reaching across the three people in front of me - anything to get the line moving! - to the gratitude of the cashier. "Aw! Isn't that good!" The woman looked over her shoulder at me, (as did all the people in the line (more Asian immigrants)) and her eyes filled. "Th-thank you," she stammered, and she grabbed up her receipts and ran off, happy to get away. The cashier smiled and comforted "Don't worry, you'll pay somebody else back." and I chimed in, "Yup, you will. Have a good night." She looked back at us in amazement as she rolled out the door. The other shoppers stared and stared at me the rest of the time in the store; they thought I was rich, or stupid, or both.

Rosemead is a somewhat mean place, I think. Asian immigrants (my parents, for example) avert their eyes during little public crises like that. Growing up where I did in West L.A., I had a lot of only-slightly-goofy hippy friends with a lot of radical ideas like actually practicing random acts of kindness and donating time, blood and money to causes. I think one of those friends actually helped out with the movie "Pay it Forward." (Once, in high school, I was stranded in Westwood with no busfare; I took my juggling balls out of my backpack (ah, high school, when I carried juggling toys to impress a boy!) and raised $1.50 in less than ten minutes. That wouldn't happen in Rosemead.)

I'm not a nice person, I'm not. My ice cream was melting and I needed to pee. Fifty-two cents made one lady cry and made the cashier and the twelve people in line with me mildly happier /slightly amazed (and made me all self-conscious, self-congratulatory, strike-a-little-blow-for-American-idealism) and that's a good investment, and that I think that way makes me not a nice person at all.

It doesn't bother Todd that there are skis in the third-floor closet, but poles in the garage. There are space heaters we haven't used in two years in various rooms of the house, yearround. Next to the fans. It doesn't bother Todd that there are boxes in the dining room from when we moved (My clothes, yeah, I should get rid of them, but why?) - oh, wait, actually, that DOES bother him, but he just wants me to dump them at the thrift store. He wants to know why I'm pounding together so many shelving units. "Because I want to move the heaters, the skis and the camping gear from the third floor closet to the garage," I reply. "So," he says, "You're putting away stuff I've ALREADY put away." (Slow burn: OOoooooh!)

Weeeell, dear, I want to put my CLOTHES in the upstairs closets, and seasonal hardware, sports equipment and camping gear in the garage. Like normal people. Makes sense to ME...

It seems obvious to me that this house is enormous and we really don't have a lot of stuff. (OK, ok, I have a lot of stuff.) We have a lot of stuff that doesn't have homes, assigned closets and shelves where they should live when not in use Once everything we own has a home address, I can start rooting through and clearing out stuff I/we actually don't need, neatly and in comfort. When we need the space. Like normal people.

This is all part of my slightly sneaky plan to clear out floorspace from the bottom room for my work room, which is currently full of junk. Good junk, but junk nonetheless. Cat crates, the microwave oven I bought in graduate school, egg crate foam I used to sleep on, lots and lots of books and grad school office supplies and notes. It all has to be evenly distributed throughout the house, not an easy task.

But first, the garage is empty except for two cars and a laundry! Once, I asked Todd why the toolbox and all the bags of kitty litter stayed in the house, in the hallways and the foyer (SO attractive!). And Todd responded that they would get lost in the garage. (Well, yes, maybe they would.) Hence the campaign to organize the garage.

Unfortunate that Todd is a visual person, and yakking my plans at him doesn't help. He's not going to be sold on garage storage until the garage is actually organized, sigh. (I know this because he was balky about the pantry I wanted until I actually defied him and set it up. "That might work out." Duh.)

The feeling of accomplishment is great, really. But the novelty is wearing off a bit, and lugging those big units home is a bitch, grumble. I'm writing this today because I've figured out that I need one more, maybe two, the wide ones to accommodate the big hardware, and I'm tired. Whine.

There is so much to do, resumes to rewrite, people to call, doctor's appointments for my dad to set up, laundry to do, and shelving to put up, and I haven't done any of it.

The weatherstripping I did is falling off of one of the doors.
The shower rod I installed is slipping, but I just keep pounding it back up.
Todd has re-caught another cold (the timber of his cough is different) and is grouchy again.
I found the shelving I used for the pantry on sale for $3.00 less. Can I find the receipt?
I keep finding more #$%#$ scrunchies and hair sticks all around the house. How many of those things do I own?
My hair keeps sticking up in the back, and hanging down in my eyes in the front.

Why is it that my good days are so good, and my bad days/weeks are still so rotten?

I just got back from Las Vegas...again. The condo is, well, immaculate, and perfectly coordinated. The bits of the book I'm helping to write are mostly written. And I landed my first real conservation gig.

Ladeees and Gentlemen, Cats and Kittens, I announce, at this time, the birth of C-------------, Fine Arts Conservation! Well, it would be easiest if I just went with my name and Fine Arts Conservator, but Fine Arts Conservation sounds so official. I talked to the attorney I used to work for, the tax person I used to work for, and all systems are go. I don't even need a dba, just some stationery. I just landed a gig with a small museum in Nevada (there's that state, again) and it's about $3-3,500 of work, and a purchase order for more work totaling $8000. Not bad, for a first gig. And I've got a public speaking gig as my new identity on May 22, isn't that cool?!

I figured out how many weeks (vs. how many billable hours) it'll take, and it works about to be minimum wage, but it's MY money. Can't wait for my supplies to hurry up and get here...

Oh, my.