To Do List

There's so much to do on this house. It's freaking me out a bit. It's like we're on one of those HGTV flip shows, and I'm in a panic that we're going to have to pay two mortgages forever.

Here's what I tell people we're doing:
Replace the Master shower
New carpet upstairs, hardwood downstairs.
New paint throughout


Here's what we actually need to do:
Replace the Master shower
New carpet upstairs, hardwood downstairs.
New paint throughout
New vinyl in bathrooms
Restain all cabinets
Replace all baseboards
Replace kitchen counters(remove the tile, install a solid service to be determined)
Replace all light fixtures
Replace all ceiling fans (there are six-- way too many.)
Replace all door knobs and hinges
Restain balcony
Replace mirrors and towels racks in all three bathrooms


There's more to do, but my head is exploding just thinking of all this stuff.

Here's what we've done so far:


<crickets chirping>

This whole turn-a-crap-house-into-your-dream-home is a lot of work. And the hardest part is trying to decide what to do first.

The New Home

So, it's official. I own two houses.

When we were house hunting, we looked at MANY beautiful homes:

This house wasn't so special on the inside, but look at the backyard! Right on the water! 

All lovely, right?

Here's the house we actually bought:

 Oh, no. 

 Oh, my.

You're kidding me, right?

Now, you might be wondering why, after looking at all the beautiful options, did we choose a home that was so... not.

I wonder this myself.

When we first looked at the house, I vetoed it right away. The pictures don't even do it justice. I had never seen carpet so dirty. I was certain I was going to catch some kind of disease just by looking at the shower. Some evil child had scribbled in Sharpie all over the cabinets. There were puncture holes in the bathroom floor.  It was really just a mess.  Plus it had less bedrooms than what we were used to, and it was a two story when we're used to a single. I really couldn't see us living there.

But The Agent is a persuasive guy. He really liked the house. He felt it had everything we were looking for. It was in a nicer neighborhood. It had rv access for our trailer. It had a  bigger backyard with mature trees. But what The Agent loved most about it was that it needed work.

A lot of work.

I didn't get it at first, but he's right, that really is the best thing about the house. Structurally, the house is in great shape. But because it was such a mess, it was selling for a fraction of the cost of the other homes in the area. We could purchase the home for way under our budget and still have money to remodel. And, since everything needed to be replaced anyway, the home could be exactly the way we want it, and it would really be like a brand new house.

So, he convinced me.

And now the work begins.

The Agent is a handy guy, and can do a lot of the work himself. What he can't do, he will hire out. We hope to be moved in by mid November.

Any words of encouragement?

Twitterisms

The Assignment: 
This week’s assignment will require the fewest number of words ever: we want you to write a story – your choice of topic – as a tweet.


I had fun with this topic, so I wrote a couple different ones. I've always been a girl of few words. 

*****************

Waiting for years, miscarriages and stillbirths, waiting for a miracle. When you finally look in her eyes, you know it was all worth it.

*****************

She walks alone, not because she has to, but because she wants to. He'll never understand her, because he's never had to walk in her shoes.

*****************

The baby is sleeping across her lap as she stares at the computer, waiting to be inspired. Does her lap make a comfy bed? Not likely.

(I wrote this one while BK was asleep on my lap and I was trying to decide what to write!)

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"It's not hard," he tells her. "You scratch my back, I'll scratch yours." Which is fine, except she'd rather stab his back than scratch it.

More conversations with Bug

We had to leave immediately.

“Bug, get your stuff, we have to go.” I'm always in a hurry to pick her up from the after school program. It's late, we still have to drive home, make dinner, help with homework, get the kids ready for bed…. There is just too much to do in a single day.

But the real reason I’m always rushing Bug is so we can get to the car. The 20 minutes it takes to drive from school to home is treasured. There are no interruptions, it’s just me and Bug. We can talk about her day, or really anything she wants, and she has my undivided attention.

“Mommy, you know how we were talking the other day about how babies grow in your tummy?”

Ugh, not this conversation again.

“Yes, Bug.”

“But how did the FIRST baby get here?”

Ummm….

“You know, the mommy must have been a baby, so she was born to a mommy, and that mommy had a mommy, how did it start?”

“Well Bug, people believe different things. A lot of people believe that God created the very first woman, she wasn’t born, she was made.”

“OK. What do other people believe?”

Ummm…

I didn’t study evolution. Something about monkeys? The missing link? How does she even come up with this stuff? She’s 5!

“Well, it doesn’t really matter where the first baby came from. The important thing is that it happened, and we should be so grateful, because everything that happened in the past made us who we are today.”

“Oh! So, if not for that first baby, we maybe wouldn’t be here?”

She’s so stinkin’ smart.

And then we realized we were already home.

Your assignment: 
You must begin your story with the words “We had to leave immediately” and end it with “And then we realized we were already home.” The middle part is up to you.

Purging

I think I might have mentioned that we are moving. We were actually going to move out of state, but we decided to stay in California. We are in the middle of escrow right now, we should close in the next 2-3 weeks. More on the house we picked another time.

I have not started packing yet, but I am in the process of a major purge. I’m doing this for several reasons. One, I can’t stand to pack and move things we don’t need. I want to get rid of everything we don’t use so we can start fresh on the new house. The second reason is that we are moving from a four bedroom house to a three bedroom house. I will no longer have a spare room, the room I call “where things go to die.” And third, the new house is a two story, so it does not have rafters in the garage or an attic for storage. I really need to par down the amount of stuff we have.

(And yet, the new house will have a formal living room, dining room, and a loft, none of which we have now, so we’ll have to buy more furniture. Lovely. Less storage, but more space to clean. More on why we picked THIS house another time.)

So, anyway, the weekend was filled with mass purging. Bug’s room, the guest bathroom, the linen closet, and the front hall closet are all cleaned out. There’s nothing in any of those locations that we don’t want or need. All we need to do is pack and move.

BK’s room was harder, only because half of his closet is devoted to my scrapbook supplies, sewing machine, and childhood memories for both The Agent and myself. For The Agent, this means three fishing pictures and his high school diploma. My collection is a little more… extensive.

Tough love was required. Some stuff was easy to get rid of: I’m married with two kids, I really don’t need the poem my high school boyfriend wrote to me. Other stuff was a little harder to get rid of, like my lesson plans from when I was teaching. I don’t plan on ever teaching again, but it seems a shame to throw it away.

“Agent, do you think anyone would want my old lesson plans? Should I sell them in the garage sale?”

The Agent could not imagine anyone wanting lesson plans I had written 15 years ago. He’s probably right. It’s all probably antiquated by now, anyway.

They’re all sitting on my kitchen island, waiting to be thrown away.

Not today. Maybe tomorrow. Baby steps.

The Agent will be running the garage sale, so I put tags on some items that he would not know about, like “grommet maker and eyelet setter… go to makingmemories.com for instructions.”  I didn't put prices on anything, The Agent can be in charge of that. I’m sure he’ll give away all my expensive rubber stamps for 10 cents each, but at least I’m getting rid of them.

The Agent looked over my piles after I was done for the day: keep, sell, and trash. In the sell pile was a ziplock bag of 6 novelty erasers with the tag “Novelty erasers from England, approx 30 years old.”

“Why do you have those?” The Agent asked.

“I had an eraser collection when I was a kid, and those are the only ones left. My uncle got them for me when he was stationed in London. I don’t know if they’re worth anything, but it seems a shame to just toss them. Maybe a kid will want them.”

The Agent studied them. “Maybe we ought to do some research. What if they’re worth millions and we’re just going to give them away? Check online.”

Right. Antique Road Show, here we come, with some erasers from the 80’s. Cool. Maybe my lessons plans are worth something, too.

Help Lovely be Politically Correct

(OK, if you know me at all, you know that I’m not always politically correct. This post is going to take me to the limits of incorrectness. Please know that I don’t mean to offend anyone, I am just truly ignorant.)


Bug started kindergarten two weeks ago , and she’s doing pretty well. She’s been getting in trouble for talking too much, but I think that’s because the work’s too easy.

Call me shallow, but I’m not worried about Bug’s academic career. She’s smart, she’ll be fine. What I’m
really worried about is if she’s making friends. I want her to have a lot of friends, I want her to be the sweet, pretty girl that everyone likes. Don’t judge me. Isn’t that what every mother wants for her children? Smart, healthy, well liked? She’s got the first two, now let’s go for the third.

So, last night at dinner, I asked Bug if she had been making friends at school. “Yeah,” Bug answered between bites of rice and chicken, “Danielle is my new friend.”

“Oh, that’s nice,” I said. “What is she like?”

“Well,” Bug answered, “She always wears dresses, and she’s shorter than I am, and she has dark skin.”

I found nothing wrong with this description. Short, wears dresses, darker skin than Bug. Cool.

The Agent, however, had a problem. “Bug, we do not describe people by the color of their skin.”

I was really baffled. Bug has very fair skin, so her saying someone has dark skin could mean a Hispanic, a black person, an Indian person…. There’s like 8 zillion ethnicities that Bug could have been describing. “Daddy,” I asked. “What would have been a better way for Bug to describe her new friend?” I was not questioning The Agent, I honestly wanted to know .

“Oh, there’s many ways to describe someone,” The Agent replied, really getting into his lesson. “Like if I was going to describe BK, I would say he has blond hair and blue eyes, he’s always smiling, and he likes to show off his big muscles.”

At this, BK flashed a cheesy grin and flexed his little two-year-old muscles. We all had a laugh, and we moved on.

But I honestly did not think The Agent made a fair comparison. I really think that BK is the last blond haired blue eyed boy left in the valley. His hair is almost white, it really stands out. Of course you're going to be able to find BK by that description.  But what if he was to describe Bug? The brown haired, brown eyed girl? Twenty other little girls would fit the same description.

Bug clearly was not meaning anything bad, she was truly trying to describe what her new friend looked like. She wasn’t attaching any negative stigma to the description, she was just saying what someone looked like. I would have done the same thing. If someone came to my office and asked for Monica Ford, I would answer, “she’s the black girl in the red sweater, three cubicles over.”

So, my question is, is that bad? Am I not supposed to say that? What should I say instead? Or is The Agent crazy? Help!

(Feel free to say that The Agent is crazy... even if he is right!)

The Cleaning Lady

She could tell what had happened as soon as she walked into her employer’s apartment. Oh, Good Lord. Rosie set down her caddy of cleaning supplies and sighed. Every Friday morning, she found the same thing. What is it about Thursday nights? Is it three drink minimum night at Sleazebags-R-Us?

She started in the kitchen, tidying up the mess left behind. Half empty bottle of champagne, wasted. Down the drain it went. The chocolate dipped strawberries she made yesterday sat on the counter, untouched. Rosie dumped the tray into the garbage. That was a useful hour of her time that she could have spent watching Days of Our Lives. Hey, but at least he gave up trying to feed them oysters. The girls he brought home were typically finicky eaters, and it took several hours to remove the smell of oysters that had been sitting on the kitchen counter for 12 hours. This was a breeze in comparison.

Rosie moved into the bedroom and nearly gagged. Ugh, the smell! There was nothing worse than having to breathe in that stale, sweaty stench of a man who’s not your own. She opened the windows right away to air out what had taken place the night before. Then she moved throughout the room, picking up the clothes that were strewn all over the floor. His pants, his lipstick stained shirt…. Ah, there they are! The black lace thong that was left behind “on accident.” Like that will make him call! Rosie used the handle of her mop to pick them up and put them in the hamper. He’ll be able to add those to his collection, the pervert.

She stared at the bed for several moments, trying to build up her courage. Seriously, it was just too disgusting for words. How can he even look her in the eye, knowing that she knows what he does in here? Does he have no shame?

Best to get it over with.

She put on her rubber gloves, closed her eyes, and ripped off the sheets as fast as she could. Oh, God…. What is that on the sheets??? She could live with the food on the counters, the clothes on the floor, the smells… but she could not stand the thought of the sticky wet substance that may or not be penetrating through her gloves right at this very moment.

She was going to demand a raise. Today.

The Topic:
Let's get all steamy up in here and write about sex.

But you know us. There's a twist.

You can't write about the act. I don't want to read about any heaving bosoms or girded manhood (please tell me someone else giggled besides me).

There are so many other possibilities. And I hope you have fun finding them.

 

Conversations with Bug

Mommy, how do you know when my birthday is?

I was there. I was with you when you were born.

I was in your tummy?

Yes, Bug. You were in my tummy and you were born, and that’s your birthday.

But how did I get out of your tummy?

Umm, well….

Is there a hole?

Well, yes, there is a hole.


I don’t see any hole. Where is it?

Do I tell her? I don’t want to lie. She’s only 5, can she handle it? Will she ask what else could fit in said hole? 

Do you have to cut your belly open and make a hole?

Well, some people do, although I didn’t.


Oh, I don’t think I would like that. Doesn’t it hurt?

Yes, it hurts very much.

Why do people do it then?

Well, some people want a baby so bad that they’re willing to go through the pain, because they know the reward will be worth it. That how it was for me. I knew it was going to hurt, but I wanted a baby so bad, I was willing to go through some pain to get what I wanted.

I don’t think I want anything THAT bad.

Good.