I can’t believe how this month has passed. All in a hazy swirl of neon lights and a big fat cloud of cigarette smoke. It’s been all words, drinks and drama. It was October when Jake originally got sick, because I was home for Halloween, remember? How is it possible that I’ve been compulsively checking him for red spots for more than a month? He seems to be doing well on these medications, and I will take him in soon for more blood work. Not too soon, though. I am tired of them jabbing him.

I took off every Friday in November to give me more time to get my NaNo book written, and it really helped. I finished NaNo a day early, and will post more on that later. It was amazing, and I can’t believe I did it. So I am glad I took the time off. I also needed this break from work, and I needed to be able to look forward to not being in the office one day a week. This month it has seemed more like work is just something I have to do sometimes rather than the All Encompassing, Never Ending Badness That Rules My Waking World.

And now it’s December. Well, tomorrow it will be. Holidays, festivity, snow. I have to work THREE WHOLE WEEKS in a row with no days off except weekends! Eeek! But then I get a nice chunk of time off work, almost two full weeks. So that’s much to look forward to.

The house… well, I am continually challenged by the perils of home ownership. This time coming to me in the form of a malfunctioning water heater. I loathe dealing with things like this. The interminable phone calls, the arguing with people who don’t speak English, the waiting for repair people, the phone calls back to India, the arguing, the realizing it’s still not working even though the guy just left and swore it was fine. The having to shower at your friend’s place. The feeling that if only you were somewhat smarter you could sort this out. The feeling that you’re the only person in the wold this kind of thing happens to.  Bah to all of it. And when this gets sorted out it’s just going to be something else, some other broken down malfunctioning thing. It wears on me, wears me out. I am trying to just breathe deeply and deal with it as it happens, but it’s hard.

One day I am going to learn to roll with the punches, but you know better than to think today’s that day.

Anyway, that’s all for this month. I blinked and I missed it. But if I recall correctly, it was a lot of fun.

Gah. What a night I have had. Day? Fine. Well, not exactly fine, because great heaving wracking menstrual cramps woke me at 4 in the morning, leaving me to writhe in agony until 6, when the alarm went off and I realized I looked like I’d been hit in the face with a sack that was chock full of “Holy shit you look awful!” bricks. Given the fact that I knew I was going to be feeling worse not better as the day progressed, I gave up and called in sick.

The rest of the day was halfway decent. I am almost out of any serious painkillers, and since apparently I have the only doctors in the world who want their patients to suffer excruciating pain, I can’t get anymore legally, I was carefully rationing them. But still, I could deal. Until around 5pm I went to try to take a nice hot shower, to help me work out a plot issue I was having with my book.

No hot water.

Continue reading »

Well, my worst suspicions confirmed, the U-Haul arrived today. The crazy guy across the street said that they were moving in “the big stuff” today and they were asking him if he knew me. I said that I hoped he told them I had a pack of 18 itty-bitty yippy dogs and was a crazy-ass bitch to boot. Which is mostly true anyway. What total and complete fucktards. Imagine buying a house that shares a common wall with another house and never even SPEAKING to the person living in the next house? How fuckwitted do you have to be? (never mind that I did the same thing, the realtor fucking lied to me straight-out, talking about a three-foot brick firewall. Up his ass maybe. Fucker.) But I also know that they can’t have even seen their own air-conditioner, FF S,because that’s in my yard, to which they have no access while touring the place. Who buys a house without looking at the air conditioner? What house inspector would settle for that? And without wanting to get into my basement to see the venting and stuff? Which I would totally not allow, which would be their first clue that this house might have some issues. And they’re going to have to remove that ratty old AC unit from my yard soon-like, too.

Anyway, I don’t know if I accidentally left my radio off one day and that was the day they came to look at the place, or if maybe the blaring music coming from the other side of the wall didn’t clue them in. I don’t know. I am so upset, I have been crying all day, just at the thought of what I have in store for me with new neighbors. My blood pressure has to be through the roof, and I feel like I want to barf. Todd tried to say that they might be nice, but the situation we’re in doesn’t lend itself to prolonged “niceness.” The first time they have a fight, or turn their stereo up past 20, I am going to freak out. And I will spend the next however long living with the feeling that someone can hear every word I say. For someone with my paranoid tendencies this is not conducive to happy and peaceful living.

And wouldn’t you know it, just when I let my guard down and thought “Ok, things at work are marginally better, maybe my life isn’t the biggest shithole in the history of the world after all.” And then bam, the peace and quiet of my home gets snatched from my grasp, probably permanently. I try to look on the bright side. I try not to be pessimistic, but for FUCK’S SAKE, something is always happening to me. I have no peace, and I don’t think I ever will. And somehow I am sure it’s all my fault, like I have the wrong attitude or something.

Anyway, they were only moving some stuff today it seems like, and are not there now. I haven’t met them yet, obviously. I don’t have the heart for it, and I am a little afraid that I would freak out on them.

One day I will accept completely that bad shit is constantly happening to me (and always will) and that I should give up on wanting to be happy and just appreciate fucking sunbeams and shit. But that day is not today, apparently.

Have to do laundry out the fuck, cut the grass and repair/repaint a stair rail thingee today. Not really in the mood for all of it, but when it’s done I will feel like I haven’t wasted my WHOLE 4-day weekend hanging out with asstards and fuckwits. Also I think I repaired my leaky faucet in the upstairs bathroom yesterday, and if so… hooray for me, I have been meaning to do that for a year.

My friend Dave sent me a link to the bare-bones version of the audio cables I need to rip my vinyl, which ended up being $21.90 on ebay, with shipping, so that’s MUCH more my speed. OK, so sometimes it DOES (literally) pay to establish and maintain friendships. Fine. :-p

I was all overcome this afternoon with the need to do stuff. I needed to clean, tidy up, be useful. Of course I was filled with excessive hostility and aggression all day at work, so that may have been expressing itself in this energy-burst. But there are worse ways to use one’s excess energy, eh? And after the last few months of feeling like death served on cold toast, I will take my energy in whatever (even angry) form it shows up.

But I digress. The whole point of la posta is that I hung my new invisible/floating Umbra bookshelves, and they are just as cool as I wanted them to be. Excuse the flash photography, my room doesn’t actually look like a sterile, institutional-green cubicle (I think).

We all know I feel almost exactly the same way as this author - but for the fact that I kinda love my house too.

homeownership, real estate, mortgage crisis, housing | Salon Life

Thanks to the mortgage crisis and the inevitable mortgage crisis legislation, we have heard a lot of bloviating recently about what Rep. Sander Levin, D-Mich., calls “the American Dream of homeownership.” Yes, along with shopping and invading countries that pose no military threat to us, homeownership is now part of the American Dream lexicon, to be invoked as a single compound noun — like a German word, only uplifting. There is only one problem I can see with the equation of homeownership to patriotic bliss, and that is homeownership itself. How vastly overrated and costly and crazy-making an enterprise it turns out to be.

OK so here’s a cool thing that happened to me. The guys who are rehabbing the house next door asked me if I minded if they painted my foundation white to match theirs. Um… nope. Knock yourself out there, bub. Paint away.

Then a few days later they said they were going to have their contractor up on the exterior of the third floor, removing some kind of rotten fascia board and lining it with copper and replacing it and painting it all white. Did I mind if they did my side too? Again I say “Yeah, go for it.”

Then I was making conversation with this peddler of free services and asked what he paid for his new windows, mentioning that I needed new ones in the front because they both leaked. He said “Oh yeah, our new ones leak too, it’s because of that rotten fascia board right there. That’s why we’re fixing it.” And lo and behold he was RIGHT. Not only does his newly-painted board thing look nice and neat, but it’s raining like all-get-out* here and these windows are not leaking! Now, I still need new windows there, but this buys me time and takes them from a priority 2 project down to… say, priority 5. Sweet huh? Continue reading »

Well, not yet seedlings. But soon!

So I blogged the other week about the nifty pot-maker that I ordered from burpee.com. It came last week and I set to making itty-bitty paper pots. I didn’t have any newspaper because I don’t get the daily paper (waste of time, ink, paper, resources in general - especially my limited mental resources) but I did have an old copy of the New York Review of Books that I didn’t mind sacrificing, and it’s printed partly on newsprint-weight paper, so that was perfect. (OK, I admit that it makes me feel curiously cerebral, recycling that particular publication and growing my organic seeds in it. Sue me.)

Behold the pottage!

Here’re the strips of paper you need to use to make the pots, along with the little pot maker and an apple, for scale.

Of course, you don’t know how big that apple is. It could be gargantuan, or minuscule. Such is the mysterious aura I enjoy projecting around myself and my activities.

OK, here’s the whole mess next to the gimp work-station (laptop set up on first floor so I don’t have to go upstairs to compute) Note the OSHA-approved extension cord that strings along the table, chair and floor because the fuckwits who rehabbed this place (may a sandbag fall on their heads) did not think that someone might, you know want to ever plug in something that is sitting on a table in the ONLY POSSIBLE PLACE to put a table in the kitchen. But I digress.

So I needed something to set the little pots in so that when I watered them they were still supported and wouldn’t sag and melt all over the place. So today at Home Despot I got these cheapie plastic liner things which are the perfect height and hold 16 mini-pots apiece. I got six of them and some extra bags of seed-starter potting mix.

And no, I won’t leave them stacked like that, obviously. That’s just for storage until I figure out if I am hanging a light and planting in the basement or finding somewhere up here to put them.

OK that last one is partly to show my official Stuff White People Like, KitchenAid™ stand mixer. I love it like it was my shiny stainless steel baby. Sue me again.

ANYWAY, I am very excited. I had to make some more pots tonight but I will finish them tomorrow I think and then get to planting mah seeds!

Tomorrow, when I am dead of industrial solvent fumes poisoning, you may blame the Bosnian workers next door who are not only prone to holler at unreasonable levels for protracted amounts of time, but who are also apparently immune to industrial solvent fumes due to some kind of Eastern-European Chernobyl-spawned chromosome abnormality. (That and them liberally spreading said whatever-the-fuck-this-stink-is around right before they left for the day.)

Seriously, I think I need a canary in here to know when to get the hell out of stink-town before I drop dead.

Once this is over I am putting up a tent and living in the back yard for a month. Just to not be in the house.

Wait. No. I will get shot and killed. Fudge. Well, I will think of something to demarcate most strikingly the transition from “house-bound crippled chick” to “regular chick who goes places.” Sounds like there should be a roasted goat involved at some point.

So today is going to be more of the same that yesterday was, including pondering on my unwanted, unnecessary and yet still intensely painful reproductive cycle. Oh, and hoping that the carpet installers from next door are caught in a snowdrift somewhere and can’t get back here today to bang on my walls for 8 hours straight while they blast EZ listening music.

I was exhausted all day today. It was the end of a full week at work, my first in a month, and I was really feeling it. I haven’t been getting great sleep because the dogs are reacting to my stress and getting pissy with each other at night – which means that they wake me up with their squabbling. From about 1 p.m. onward all I could think about was going home and taking a nap. Finally, end of the day, I get to come home. It’s gorgeous weather here today, too. In the 50’s maybe, and sunny. Happy times weather. I get home, I feed the dogs, I check my email and I haul my sad carcass upstairs. My bedroom is the sunniest room in the house, light streams in from four large windows, and the whole atmosphere up there is extremely restful and peaceful on a sunny day like today. I take off the huge Darth Vader leg and nestle under the covers, settling the Pack down with me, and prepare to doze off.

BANG!

BANG!

BANG BANG!

WTF?

SLAM, BANG, BANGBANGBANG.

Oh nice. They’ve started (as best I can tell) laying a hardwood floor next door. At 5:30 pm on a Friday. In the middle of prime Susan nap time. Fuckers. Dirty, dirty fuckers. BANGBANGBANGBANG. SLAM! BANG! I try to ignore it, but that’s kind of hard to ignore. So I doze fitfully for an hour and a half, at which point they stop. But by then the puppies have had all the nap they’re in the mood for – at least Jake has. He starts jumping around the bed like a crazed mini-marsupial. BOUNCE! BOUNCE! Whine. Paw. Whine. SCRATCH SCRATCH. BOUNCE! And then he jumps onto the pillow where my foot is resting and by reflex I do what? I kick out to keep him away. Motherfucking ow.

So, now we’re all up and back downstairs. I can live without a nap.

Well. I am going to have to.

OK so you have read about all my housing drama. Problem after fucking problem that a decent real-estate agent (and not some dodgy, down-home friend of my brother) would have helped me identify and run from. Stupidly, having never bought a house before, I trusted him. He was a friend of my brother, after all.

• Recommend a banker for my mortgage? Sure! (Got a good interest rate, but cost me $1500 in legal fees from his shitty advice)
• Recommend a title company? Sure! (Same thing re: legal fees, from their “mistakes” in closing, leaving me with a somewhat dodgy transference issue with the title. Company was later fined for their business practices.)
• Recommend a building inspector? Sure! (Didn’t notice a hole in my foundation, the fact that most of my appliances fell off the back of a truck and thus were missing their serial #’s and that several of the windows in this place were practically ready to fall from their sashes. Also didn’t point out that the “three foot brick firewall” between these two row houses did not, in reality, exist.)
• Recommend a roofer to evaluate the roof? Sure! (Told me that the roof needed to be replaced, but “would hold up for now” Roof started leaking the week that I moved in. Also told me, in answer to my specific query, that the [nonexistent] three-foot firewall extended right up through the roof, yes sir. Those two roofs were NOT connected, they were separate roofs. Yup.)

So I was checking out my house on Google Earth. It’s finally been updated so this picture was taken after I moved in.  (BTW if you are interested in and able to use this image to track down my house and come and kill me, then good. You’ve got skills and time on your hands. Bring it.)

Here’s what you’re looking at - the top picture is the plain bird’s-eye view of the building.

The left (bottom of the picture) side of the building is mine. The right side was occupied by Charles the Burglar & Family, but since their eviction has become the property of some guy who intends to “flip” it. Mostly through painting it really hard.

In the lower picture I have added a helpful big red line to indicate where the three-foot brick firewall would be if it weren’t a figment of real-estate imagination.

I’ve also circled what I (admittedly no roof expert) would identify as… hmmm… a massive fucking problem on my roof, coincidentally right above where I am experiencing some leaking issues.

In the meantime, Dodgy McRealtor & His Wacky Band of Miscreant Pals are off screwing the next chick who knows jack-all about buying a house.

If I had known better I would have checked, I would have found my own experts, I would have Trusted No One, I would have been on my hands and knees inspecting this house from top to bottom my own damn self. But I didn’t know. (And I only had what, 20-something days? Whatever.)

All I am saying is that I hope this guy eventually receives the full karmic repercussion of his way of doing business. That’s all.

The end of my 2-week vacation is almost here - I have to go back to work Monday. I’ve been absolutely dreading it, not only because my job has been sucking huge amounts of wang lately, but also because it meant the end of my long-anticipated Free Creative Time.

I assumed that with all this Free Creative Time on my hands I would be SO productive. I would write for hours, I would catch up on all my reading, I would do tons of artwork. I was so totally wrong. I have felt mostly shiftless, aimless, wandering. This is too much free time, actually. It seems that I work best when I have a lot going on, I dash out the best stuff in the 20 minutes I can catch here and there. Who knew? In addition to that I am so thouroughly sick of my own company that I could scream. If I’d been able to go to Savannah as I had wanted to (Thanks again, ancient water heater, shitty insulation, Laclede Gas and empty frozen barn next door.) then the whole “sick of me” thing wouldn’t have been an issue. But here for 2 weeks on my own… eeesh. Never thought I would look forward to talking to people, but I do.

So while on vacation I have shopped, organized, cataloged, cleaned up and otherwise accomplished a lot of things that I meant to get done, things that take no creative brain but lots of time - so that’s great. My Runtime is in fighting trim, my downloaded music is all backed up to CD, my closets are clean, my MENDING is done, for God’s sake! I’ve painted, hung pictures, re-organized, weather-proofed, lots of things that needed doing. And I am rested, finally. I’ve been sleeping well, chilling out as much as possible, trying not to stress about anything. I know that when I get back to work I’ve got a lot to do as far as either giving it one last shot (honestly, that’s unlikely) or going into full-fledged job-search mode (unpleasant, but more likely). * Continue reading »

I had a Highly Successful Shopping Trip yesterday, and I found a small table (like I had been looking for) for my bedroom. Here ’tis. Awesome, huh? The chair I had already.

Oh, and I didn’t make my bed, no.

I am on vacation, judge all you want.

Soon my parents will arrive to advise me on all of the things I am doing wrong in my life, at my house, with my dogs and just in general.

My father will prophesy doom and myriad gloom in regard to things affecting me yet completely out of my control. When asked for advice to forestall such catastrophic results he will have no advice to give.

He identifies the problems, people - he doesn’t fix the problems. We all have our own role to play, after all.

OK, sorry - bitterness seems to be at Def-Con 1 today.

I love the holidays.