Another Sputtering Return of the Friday Favorites

1. Favorite moments of the debate (note: this was the first presidential debate I have watched in 20 years, not counting SNL. I might wait another 20 years before I watch the next one.) Was it when Silas, turning away from the evening's Educational Entertainment, emerged with a carefully chosen alternative viewing choice? Or when he realized that no, sorry, we weren't going to turn off the debate to watch Spongebob? Was it the end, when it was finally over? Was it forty minutes before the debate started, when Helen and I were driving home through deserted streets that were gray with dusk and blooming with big dimly orange puffs of autumn ash tree - the debates were held here in Denver, not far from our house, and the interstate closed at 5, so it was like a little holiday time at the end of a busy working day. This one, I think. This was my favorite moment. Before they started.

2. Favorite part of the season. Every fall I think about Kenko's injunction that "branches about to blossom or gardens strewn with faded flowers are worthier of our admiration" - and then I think, nah. The fall leaves at their red and gold peak thrill me much more than a pile of brown leaves on the ground, even if that means I am privileging a certain moment in the eternal flux of the universe. There will be plenty of time for austere beauty in November. Today I remain resolutely delighted by the first flush of golden ash and bitter red sumac. This right here is my favorite moment of fall.

3. Favorite book I read in September: Finders Keepers by Craig Childs. This book hits on pretty much everything I struggled with when I lived in southwest Colorado and made my living (such as it was) walking the National Forest looking for pottery shards and rock flakes. I hated how anytime we found something interesting our job was to seal it in a plastic baggy and ship it to a big artifact storage locker. I hated the feeling of salacious pleasure I got anytime we poked our noses into something that was once private. I hated how I couldn't just slip a pretty little shard into my pocket, no matter how much more I'd appreciate it than the artifact storage locker.

4. Favorite mood for the week: recovering invalid. Between the sewer mess, the melancholy fact of fall, and the trip for work to Las Vegas (whoo boy) (it wasn't like that, just DULL), I am feeling the need to treat myself like a delicate Victorian convalescent this week. Someone who needs to lie about in the sun wrapped in lots of clean linen, being administered medicinal doses of tea and fresh air. So I took yesterday off. I volunteered in Helen's classroom this morning (which was awesome. I will definitely do this again.) I slept in two days this week.

5. Favorite dinner I made this week: make-your-own tacos. I cooked the beef with a new chili powder I picked up on a trip to the Littleton Penzey's: this is actually the first time in my cooking life that I have deliberately purchased a spice mix and to paraphrase a friend, I will need to live forty more years in order to make up for forty years of not using spice mixes. The mix is delicious. I think it has sugar in it, and possibly powdered heroin. It is so, so yummy.

6. Favorite work thing*: my personalized stationery. I like it so much that I hoard it: no ordinary to-do lists for this stationery, no sir. Only the biggest and most important lists go on this stuff.


*I have been feeling insulted and put upon lately by the fact that I need to work. This is not a feeling specific to my particular job, which happens to be going fine, but an irritation at a basic life condition (namely, that I am not independently wealthy; or possibly that the world has not chosen to pay me for doing what I like to do. Harrumph.) However, I am going to counteract this feeling by listing my favorite work activity each week. Identifying details will be redacted, obv.

Great, and yours?

So, how was your weekend, this beautiful last weekend in September? Did you go apple picking? Ride a bike through the first stunning bursts of fall color? Put your garden to sleep? Doze in the sun?

Ha ha, I have you all beat: I got to clean raw sewage out of the basement. And carry everything non-sewagey out onto the porch. Then scrub the floor with bleach. Now our house looks like an episode of Hoarders: But Where Will They Keep the Board Games? Also, my knees hurt. Also, I still have half the basement floor to scrub. Augh. Damn house.

Actually, I have an odd confession to make: except for the raw sewage part, and also the argument that ensued upon the finding of the sewage*,  it wasn't so bad. Cleaning the basement was not at the top of my list of things I wanted to get done this weekend - but it wasn't on the bottom, either. I mean, I wasn't planning to bleach the damn thing. But there was some serious organizing that needed to happen down there. And, uh, still needs to happen, only now it needs to take place with objects stored on the couch, the front porch, and the back porch. But taking everything apart is a critical first step, and that step is DONE. Also, there's no hesitating about chucking a beloved childhood toy when it's soaked in sewage. It makes the weeding out process go really, really fast.

Also, I was the only one with the time to do any scrubbing (exams to grade! so sorry!), which meant that out of guilt M. took care of all the parts that I loathe about this sort of event: the calling and the hiring, and the making decisions about the Solution. Usually we share this part, and I haaaate it. I hate calling people on the phone. I hate making decisions like shall we spend $5000 to do a partial fix, or go all the way and spend $10G to Do It Right? And most of all I hate Talking It Over. I don't want to talk. I just want to jump to a conclusion, stick to it, and run away and pretend we never had that $5000 in the first place.

So anyway, our basement is now really, really clean. Even cleaner than the last time. Except for the parts I haven't gotten to yet, and also the old uncomfortable futon that we've taken to affectionately calling the pooton. (Ewww.) Out it goes, as soon as it's dry enough to lug upstairs without contaminating the whole house.

*Bonus marriage gossip tidbit: One of the most common marital arguments in the Melospiza household involves how we respond to calamity, and, related, how we think the Other Person should respond to calamity. I tend to expect M. to use Pa Ingalls as a blueprint: "Where there's a will, there's a way!" "All's well that ends well!" Which, barring expletives, is pretty much how he does respond. Eventually, and minus the whistling and the extra-soulful fiddle-playing. But he first blames everyone under the frigging sun for the calamity, in language that would singe Pa's eyebrows. It drives me crazy and also, ironically, to the use of non-Ma-approved vulgarity of my own.

Middle Earth

We've moved into November, real fall, the kind with long brown days and freezing nights and sodden clumps of mush where we didn't manage to rake all the leaves before the snow fell. The kids have had the barfing sickness, mostly in our bedroom, which means that our once new rug is no longer safe to do pushups on. The mountains are brilliant white and, thanks to the advent of Daylight Spending Time, my morning run happens at sunrise, which is a beautiful thing. We are as crazy as elves (and not because we're planning ahead for the buying season. As IF.) 

The news from home is bad, and I have been exerting a lot of mental energy to reset my expectations re my mother and the future. Some days I am a mess, but mostly I am melancholy but serene, even happy. The kids and their day-to-day emergencies keep me constantly in the present; the mostly up tenor of their days makes mine up, too. One of my holds at the library comes in, or I get a new idea about a story that I'm s-l-l-l-o-w-l-y working on, or the kids have a good day at school, or my morning run is white and pink and beautiful, and I feel happy, like the world is going well, more or less. Then I remember: no, it is so, so not.

Other times, I will even be sanguine about the so-not-ness. My mom feels fine, after all. I could pick up the phone and call her right now, except that she'd probably be out for a walk with my dad. Things are at-this-moment okay, and new therapies offer so much promise. You hear all the time about remissions that last for decades--maybe it will in this case. Why not?

And then I lie down at the end of the day, and I do that calming thing where I spread my mind over all the people in my life and mentally tuck them in and smooth their foreheads, make sure they're okay--all my chickens under one roof, even if that roof is the wide-open sky of the Midwest--and my hand catches: no. Not everyone is okay. Not at all.

Or I will be fine until I come across a calendar, and my mind is forced into dangerous places, like This Time Next Year. Or the work meeting I go to this spring in Minnesota--how will things be then? Or the baseball meet Si has in June--what will conditions be at that time? Or the 2013 work meeting. Or--and then I shut it down, quick. Because I can't imagine that. No. Better to think about the end of the month, the plans we have to ski in a couple of weeks, the benefits form that has to be turned in next week, the fish I need to remember to pick up for dinner, the email I have to write.

And then I turn to the nearest kid and hug them hard, until they can squirm away.

Grateful, Part 1

My to-do list for the weekend:


1. Make Silas take the floor lamp out of the treehouse;

2. Clear out the old tomato vines;

3. Clean the house (or what is cleanable, anyway).


Not bad, eh? (Also: success. My life is so much easier when I give myself to-do lists that are actually possible to accomplish.) (Although, as easy as Item # 2 seems, the years I actually manage to do this before it snows and the rotting garden becomes encased in ice for the duration of the winter are rare.)


In all it was a lazy weekend, by which I mean we had relatively few things scheduled and M could actually say to me "I'd just kind of like to do NOTHING for a while today" and he could actually do that. Sort of. The state of our lives right now meant that M got to "do nothing" only while playing North American Animal Memory with Helen and overseeing a noisy game of Spongebob Monopoly between Silas and his friend and that these activities took place in our bedroom.

(I was on a run, by the way. Later I got to "do nothing" while sorting laundry and gently reminding small people to please bring their toys back to their own rooms and also planning the meals for the week. I think I planned the meals, anyway. Somehow dinner still ended up being spaghettios, donuts, and store-prepared salad. I SWEAR I will get back to eating well, or well-er, when we have a kitchen. UGH.)

Well, it's Thanksgiving week. I was all set to do a daily post about the things I am thankful for, except that it turned out that enumerating online the things for which I am thankful was the mental equivalent of stating online that no one in the house has thrown up lately or that the kids aren't having sleep issues. In other words, I can't bring myself to do it for fear of the hex. So, instead, I will say: I am so, so very grateful. I am grateful that we are in a position that we could do something about the mold and the ants. I am grateful that we are able to go into debt with a reasonable hope of getting out of it again. I am grateful that I am able to think of money as something abstract, most of the time.

Inching

The past few weekends have devoted almost exclusively to Stuff Management, a term that will be familiar to anyone with children (or anyone with stuff, although children seem to cause an inordinate and staggering amount of it to pour into the house). Unpacking, sorting, organizing, discarding, and, oddly, repeating (it's like the stuff packs itself up while I'm not looking.) However, after this weekend I feel like we really, truly have Made It, and the stuff is in its place and will remain so for the time being. The doors are back on, the kids' rooms are in order, the summer clothes have been sorted and put away or given away, the hats and coats have been exhumed and put where we can both access them and put them away. Hooks are up. Curtains are up. It feels possible that we might be able to live uncomplicatedly for a while, or at least as uncomplicatedly as it is possible to live when the cooking activities are being conducted from the garage and half the house is still a barn.

In a lot of ways I like the coziness of our current arrangement. We all eat dinner in our bedroom; we watch movies together here, the kids do homework, and M dispiritedly works away on his laptop. Lately I've been preparing dinner here, too, bringing the vegetables and compost tub and only dashing out to adjust the heat on the hot plate when I absolutely have to. On Saturday night I fixed a salad while some tortellini cooked in garage, and then we ate it while watching Where the Wild Things Are. We do our arguing over money and contractors here, too, and it helps that the files, digital and paper, are all an arm's length away ("How much did that glider cost? Well, let's find out!") Well. It sort of helps. Sometimes it's a little too cozy. Also, I still manage to forget what I was going to do between walking to the computer to go look up the kids' online school lunch account and actually sitting down in front of it with my fingers ready.

We try to get out as much as we can, although that isn't always possible.


This weekend, though, I did get away for a little bit, to attend Jess's baby shower. I kind of love baby showers, even when I don't really know anybody, like at this one. I mean: babies. What's not to love? And it was lovely to meet so many other women, and eat some delicious food, and just generally sit around in someone else's house and not worry about my own, for a while.

Another holiday down

I'm feeling a bit gloaty on this morning after election day--all six of the statewide races/ initiatives that I really, really cared about went my way, and most important, we don't have a racist buffoon for a governor (so there, officemate-who-insists-on-talking-loudly-on-the-phone-about politics-while-I-am-trying-to-quietly-mind-my-own-business). Perhaps M's job in publicly funded higher ed is safe after all.

Of course, my gloating is tempered, as it always is, by the lingering existence of actual problems. Some of them are potentially solvable. Some aren't. I still kind of believe that there isn't much that the people in office can do, most of the time. Still: cheers. I raise my glass, from the comfort of home.

Which means: yes, we're finally home. (Hurray.)

Now with pictures

I hesitate to post these, since they seem so depressingly unchanged, but behold, our house after two months of renovation:

The kitchen will be to the right of that wall.

Our bipolar house. Half the time it's solid brick, the other half it's crazy window time.

This part looks better.

This part too, although I think the main attraction is external.

Here's Si's room. He doesn't really get why we're dragging our feet on the move-in.

The opposite of fall

For sundry and assorted reasons, none of which, unfortunately, have to do with moving back into the house (an event that remains depressingly lodged in the future), I have not felt up to posting. I still don't, really, but I am tired of staring "Doggy Bags" in the face every time I open up this blog.

In the blogless interim, however, I HAVE felt up to doing other things, including but not limited to:

1. Sanding down assorted bedroom doors. Our house has very nice, solid wood doors. The previous owner had very anxious, insistent dogs that were often closed into the bedrooms. Need I say more? There's a delicious feeling of exorcising the last of the house demons as I rub those scratch marks into oblivion.

2. Celebrating our 14th anniversary at Rioja, one of those fancy downtown restaurants whose menus read like short stories involving collisions of luxury ingredients (Alaska-caught halibut in an Earl Gray-Tarragon reduction with lemon cream fraiche and a fig tartlet) (which was delicious). Pretentious, yet mmmmm.

3. Receiving rather handsome T-shirts from our builder (although the shirts have the alarming motto "It's not our fault!" written on the back). I'm hoping this isn't one of those "I took out a second mortgage and moved out of my home and all I got was this lousy T-shirt" situations.

4. Finishing the fall baseball season with Silas (thank GOD. No more long haul missions to distant fields.)

5. Finishing untold piles of homework with the same. Eegads, the HOMEWORK. It's more than I had in many college classes. The boy continues to soldier on, bravely and stoically, but sometimes it breaks my heart. M offers a refreshingly different perspective, however--he says that when he lived in Germany in fourth grade, his homework loads were similar. Weekdays were for doing homework, and only weekends were for playdates.

6. Being dazzled by the autumn colors. This happens every year. All year I remember, intellectually, that autumn is very pretty, and then every year I amazed again at the incandescent yellows, the burning reds, the glittering grasses, the way a tepid vista of green and brown is suddenly spiced into brilliance, and everyday acts, like driving to pick up the kids or going for a disappointingly short run, become miracles of hope and beauty. (Why hope, though? I don't know.)

Misplaced Persons

I stop by the house three or four times a week--I water the plants, I pick tomatoes, I get the mail, I check on the progress of the floor/ framing/ etc. The kids come with me and get stuff from their rooms or they sit in the car and do homework or they hop around in the front yard, peering up and down the street for signs of their friends. I do this a little bit, too. Then I sigh wistfully and think how this was such a great neighborhood when we used to live here.

Then I remember: oh yeah, I still DO live here. Sort of.

After only a week and a half at my MIL's I feel like we've moved out. The house is so gritty and beat down that it is not at all a pleasant place to be (and oh, the yard, it is in a dreadful shape, white and baked and dry). But I miss being able to walk to the library and the store. I miss being five minutes from the kids' school. I miss my running routes. I miss talking to all the neighbors, even the ones who irk me just a little bit.

The house is progressing. The hall and bedrooms have black tarpaper down (I guess this is what they put between the subfloor and the floorboards.) The laundry room has hardiback subfloor, ready for tile. The front room is promisingly filled with bright new yellow lumber. Progress is on the horizon.

But meanwhile I wake every morning in a tidy white duplex on a golf course, go for a run beneath the stars, wave at the active 55s-and-over who wave back ever so slightly accusingly (aren't you and your children what we moved here to get AWAY from? uh, probably so.) I walk Costi on the lush green lawns and when I scoop her poop into the bags, as often as not a little crinkly crabapple leaf sneaks in too. It's starting to be fall, and I long to be home.

End-of-summer blues

"I better start practicing carrying this," Si says, marching across the living room with his backpack on. "Pretty soon I'm going to be carrying it all the time!"

"Will I be able to ride my bike to kindergarten?" asks Helen, as she straps on her pink Barbie helmet and gets ready for her evening wobble around the neighborhood. (The answer, BTW, is Yes! Only we'll have to leave an hour before school starts because the only thing slower than walking at this point is biking).

"I'm going to take lunch three days a week and on Wednesdays, there's pizza day, so then I'll just get to choose one other lunch," says Silas, and then Helen repeats it, with big eyes, only she makes sure that I remember that she doesn't like pizza.

They're getting revved up for school to start, in other words. We've got piles of brand-new school supplies, we've looked online at the teacher teams for each of their grades, we've talked about the new bus stop, about which before-and-after-school activities we're going to do, and about the fall semester schedule. We've gone through their homework/artwork boxes and emptied them out so they're ready for the onslaught of school projects. We're, uh, going to figure out the back-to-school-clothes situation any day now. They're ready. We're ready. I'm ready.

Except I'm not. I am SAD, and for really no reason at all. I am sad that Helen's daycare/preschool is no longer a place we need to go. I am sad that the bedtime routine no longer involves getting Helen into a swimsuit and remembering to put her undies and towel into her swim bag (both my kids prefer to streamline the morning routine by putting their clean clothes on the night before). I am sad that Si's camps are done, even though they were really vast sinks of inconvenience and he didn't even like them all that much (except for archery. He LOVED archery). I am sad that the summer hourglass is down to its last few grains and we've only gone camping ONCE and hiking TWICE and haven't even made popsicles or used our ice cream maker. I am HEARTBROKEN that Silas is practically in middle school (fourth grade! it's crazy! every year a new grade!) I am sad, or perhaps a better word is sorry, that we didn't schedule our summer better. (For the record, next year we will concentrate on doing camp and swim lessons in June, trips in July, and maybe rely on parents and/or whatever late season camps we can find for August. The last few weeks before school starts are scheduling HELL.)

A lot of this sadness, though, is because we're between routines. As soon as school starts and we have our daily and weekly schedules figured out, life will go back to being predictable and calm.

Except, of course, for the renovation. Demo seems likely to begin NEXT WEEK--just in time for school.

Taste test

As I was saying, on Thursday I made two yummy fall recipes featured on Milk and Cookies: the pumpkin-cauliflower soup and the pumpkin pie ice cream.

Behold, the original cauliflower soup:





And mine:
Please ignore the heating-up stain.

The original pumpkin pie ice cream:


Aaaaand mine:

Although the original (here) obviously cheated. He used props. Perhaps otherwise his ice cream would also have looked like chunks of frozen slush chipped off the bottom of the car.

Favorite things about fall

A Friday Favorites about the current season which is, WEATHER PLEASE TAKE NOTE, fall. Not winter. Not summer. FALLLLL.

1. The colors. Duh. But I like how the reds and oranges and yellows make the world seem three-dimensional again, instead of green-on-green flat. And how I suddenly notice little spots I hadn't before: the line of ethereal rose-petal bushes along Holly Road, the three blazing hawthorne trees at the edge of the park.

2. The holidays, starting with the heathen costume-and-candy one and moving, stuffed-tummy-like, all the way through to the religious one at the start of winter.

3. The closing-in cozy feeling at the end of the day. Pulling the curtains, turning up the heat, making some soup.

4. The crunch of all those leaves. (Please note: I do NOT so much like the juicy squinch of slimy wet leaves).

5. Cleaning shit out. Ripping the black tomato vines out of the garden. Cutting down on those messy, rangy flowers. Shaking off all those LEAVES. It's like cutting off your hair: one day, messy, shaggy, always-in-your-line-of-vision, and the next day, gone. Stark and pure.

Anticipating

I have been totally impressing myself in my ability to wake up every single morning at 5:30 and go for a run. The runs are not long or even particularly aerobic, but they manage to get my wiggles out and allow me to sit in my chair for the next eight hours (plus another damn hour in the frigging car) without feeling like I am going to diiiiie.

In related news, however, I am REALLY ready for daylight savings time to be OVER. I know, I know, I'll be driving home in the dark from now on (ACK). But at least I will have begun the day in the twilight, instead of the pitch black dark. I am SO SICK of running in the dark. Yes, I can see the stars (such as they are over south metro Denver), and it's nice to be learning the constellations, et cetera, but folks, I RUN INTO stuff. Okay, once. But still. Sick of the dark.

Chores

I bribed Silas to rake the front lawn yesterday. Five bucks. That's big money in our house. And I tried to keep my expectations low: I remembered Swistle's excellent comment about when her two bigger kids help out: they are not very efficient or effective, and if they were a tool from Target she would totally ask for her money back, but the little bit that they can do is helpful. Plus, I reminded myself, there's the "building character" factor, although I've never been clear if this factor is negated if you pay the children. I vote no. Because as much as I wishity wish it, my kids aren't going to help out just from the sheer joy of contributing to the household.

But: he did it. The lawn actually looks raked this morning. Not, er, well-raked, but still: raked. Most of the grass is visible again. And there's an enormous pile of leaves in the back, covering up the half of the yard upon which grass does not grow. I haven't figured out a good way to measure Si's character, but I'm confident that it is bigger, or shinier, or whatever happens to it when it gets "built."

These are the kind of chore in which Si excels, anyway. Big, fun, messy, and--most important--limited. Bribery is like antibiotics to this kid: you can't prescribe it too often, or it loses its effectiveness. We tried paying him to mow the lawn (with a nonmotorized push mower, CPS people) last summer, and it worked great for about two times. Then he couldn't be bothered. Same with loading the dishwasher. "Again?" he wails, which I totally get, but still can't really sympathize. And of course we make both kids pick up their crap and put away their laundry. But overall, we're having less success with getting helping out around the house to become part of the daily routine. Chore charts are effective, but again only for about two weeks, and then we all start forgetting to fill them out. As much as I have always admired color-coordinated family chore calendars ("Joe washes the dishes on Tuesdays and Fridays, Ruth on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays, and Karin and Katey on Saturday and Sunday," etc.) I have never been able to actually write one out. It makes me feel a) controlling and b) like a total dork. And no matter what sort of chore arrangement we have as a family, "nagging" always seems to be my job.

What about you? How do you handle household chores?