Calm Waters

This week.

Oh, this week.

If this past week was the angry, frothing bull, my husband and I have been the novice riders trying to not get our spines compacted riding it for a mere 8 seconds.

Where to begin? How about the beginning? Ok?

Ok.

After a surprisingly short search, we found a house. We liked it, we could afford it, it was lovely. So we put in an offer and waited an interminable 29 hours for a response. The sellers countered with a price a smidge higher than what we offered. We were ok with that. We accepted. They accepted our acceptance. We accepted their acceptance of our acceptance.

Hooray!

That was last Monday. My husband scheduled our home inspection for this past Saturday and we gleefully spent the next 5 days in Homeowners Elysium. It's lovely there - there are acres and acres of yards to be mowed and landscaped, patios to be decorated, soft, warm, rainy days to sit and watch the water drip off the leaves of the magnolia bush in the backyard. We looked at paint samples, looked to see how much a new lock set would be, toyed with where to put furniture. In short, we were excited.

Then came Saturday and the inspection.

There were the normal amounts of dings and dangs in the house. The garage needs a new roof. There's some siding that needs replaced. Nothing major. We thought we were in the clear until we found out about the Foundation. Capital F. It warrants a capital F simply because of the magnitude of the problem. Long story short, the Foundation at one point was starting to bow so whoever was living there at the time had it fixed.

Poorly.

The repairs failed.

So long story shorter, the inspector said that in order to fix this the entire basement would have to be torn out and newer, stronger, Tony Stark Iron Man metal beams would have to be put in to brace the Foundation to keep the house from sliding into a parallel dimension through our TV. It would be quite costly, and the problem is considered a deal breaker. So we started moving ahead to break the deal.

Haroo.

We were disappointed and maybe a little heartbroken. It felt like we'd been stood up on Prom Night by a date we maybe didn't want to go with after all. They always had something stuck in their teeth, y'know?

That lasted until this morning, when our realtor called and said that the sellers may be able to fix this. Apparently when their realtor said 'They have no money to fix anything', she meant 'Ohwait they might. We're not sure. We'll get back to you.'

Haruh?

I don't know where we are right now. We're waiting on paperwork; waiting to hear if the sellers are going to fix this; waiting waiting waiting.

I've also been dealing with a bout of the stomach flu that everyone and their mother (including my mother [hi Mom]) says is from the 'stress' of house-hunting and whatnot. I'm not stressed. I don't feel stressed. I haven't taken on any stress-related tendencies. In fact, what's stressing me out most of all is everyone else telling me how stressed out I either am or am supposed to be. It's like a giant, horrid recursive cycle of self-perpetuating stress.

There is a house out there for us. Whether it's the Foundation house or another, it's out there. My stressing and worrying about it won't help us find it. Your stressing and worrying about it on my behalf won't help us find it.

Just relax, and watch the water drip off the leaves of the magnolia bush.

Papercuts

I take after my dad in respect to not wearing shoes at my desk. I'm not wearing them right now.

That being said, there is a social circle out there who still listen to vinyl records, who hunt flea markets and obscure music shops for LPs and 45s. One of the radio stations where I live will occasionally have a show that plays nothing but vinyls. This social circle says the sound is warmer, more genuine and deeper. They say that with the invention of CDs and MP3s, music has lost its soul.

I used to think they were just being snobby elitists who didn't want to get on the technology bandwagon, but then I realized: I'm the same way with books. I would rather have a broken, creased, dog-eared book in my hands over a Kindle or iPad or anything like that. There are two books that I can think of off the top of my head that I will probably carry with me for as long as I can.

One is The Princess Bride. I grew up with this movie and didn't realize it was an actual book until I was in middle school. My sister had a copy of it in her room that I adopted when she went to college, and within a few years I'd read it so many times that the book literally fell apart right between chapters 3 and 4. I was devastated, but that didn't stop me from reading it over and over and over again. Finally, I stumbled across a roll of packing tape, hatched a little ingenuity, and had the book more or less in one piece.

Fast forward a few years. I'd moved out of my parent's house for college, and decided that it was high time to replace my ratty, taped, and worn copy of The Princess Bride. I toddled onto Barnes & Nobel's site and found hey, a hardcover version! I bought it, but when the time came to actually read it I couldn't. It didn't feel right. It felt like I'd turned my back on an old and reliable friend for the new hotness. Before long I'd popped it on the shelf and had returned to my ratty, taped, and worn copy. It felt a little like coming home at a time when I wasn't sure where home was. My parents had built a new house shortly after I graduated high school, and that didn't feel like home yet. At the same time I had moved into this charming little apartment, albeit with a psychotic queen of passive-aggressiveness for a roommate and even though I had my room and all my things arranged just so, that didn't feel like home yet either. Something about the way the tape between chapters 3 and 4 cracked, though, that felt like home.

The second book is The Simarillion. I was introduced to that book by someone I dated in high school and while the relationship didn't work out, I am glad it happened because otherwise I never, ever would've read this under my own duress. It's by Tolkien, and it's essentially the mythos of Middle-Earth. It tells all these grand, epic tales of the creation, how the sun and moon came to be, the old gods, ancient wars, tragedies, romances, dragons, good guys, bad guys, so forth and so on. On paper it sounds about as exciting as a tube of toothpaste. Some argue that when you read it, it's like reading a tube of toothpaste. It did take me a little while to get used to the language and the names (oh, the names. I pretty much just cough through them in my head to this day) but it is one book I am glad to say I've read and will continue to read.

I went through sort of the same thing with The Simarillion as I did with The Princess Bride. My copy was getting worn out and the thought of losing it was heart-breaking. I bought a hardcover copy to replace it and have not touched it. Sure, the ink on my paperback is getting a little smudged and the binding is broken, but what does it matter?

There are other books that are starting to show their age - the copy of Pride and Prejudice I found at my grandparent's house and kept on a whim, The Lord of the Rings which I saved for and hemmed and hawed over actually buying, various Harry Potter volumes. I'm really hoping that some day I can pass these books onto my kids and tell them that when I was their age, books had a feeling that wasn't plastic. They had a texture, and a smell, and a sound. They gave you papercuts and took up room in your backpack but you could hold them. They had a soul.

And then I'll probably tell them that I also had to walk to school uphill both ways against the wind with my feet wrapped in barbed-wire for traction in the winter, and to go take out the garbage, and to stop picking on their sister, and to not make me turn this van around...

Knit one, purl two

This weekend I was at my parent's house, helping my mother decorate the nursery and toddler room at my father's church. I'm hesitant to say it, but...oh this hurts...I...I liked the crafting. I liked the painting and lining up of big fabric flowers on the wall and painting flower stems under them (even if my stems were wierd and lumpy and possibly genetically erred) and Heaven help me, I liked using a glue gun. A GLUE GUN. I can hardly sew a button on to a pair of pants and I enjoyed using a GLUE. GUN.

I can't even wrap my head around it. I'm not a crafty person. I'm not an artistic person, or musical. There's a very real and tangible reason why I stick to the written word. If I tried another medium I would probably wind up explaining it to a fire marshal or paramedic. But I think I could do a little crafting. I could glue a magnet on to the back of random household objects and before long, BAM. You too can have a wooden spatula, 4 salt shakers, and the top to an empty box of Cinnamon Toast Crunch stuck to your refrigerator, holding up emails from professors you haven't talked to in 6 years and recipes for cornbread-based taco bakes.

It's 9:06 on a Monday. I'm sitting here, blogging about glue guns and tacos, watching the Hallmark Channel (?!), and sewing a hem on a pair of work pants. This is it. It's finally happened.

I'm 27 going on 93.

Yes, yes, Wilford. We can go to Denny's for the Early Bird Special. Just let me get my orthopedic shoes and we can race our Hover Rounds around the parking lot.

Small Corrections

There are three things I remember about my sixteenth birthday. The first was that my dad was in Jerusalem. He called me from the Wailing Wall that day, and bought a hand-made silver and turquoise necklace from a shepardess outside Bethlahem along with a silver ring with my name engraved in it in Hebrew for my birthday. I still have both of them but for the life of me, I cannot figure out which way the script on the ring ring is supposed to face.

The second is that I didn't have my driver's license, nor had I gone through Driver's Ed.

The first two things I remember play a good deal in the third. Since my brother and sister had long since moved out and my dad was halfway around the world, it was just going to be my mom and I. We decided to fly down to Texas to visit my grandparents. They live about an hour west of San Antonio where it's stopped being flat oil fields and starts being a hazy hill country that in November turns brown or purple. They have a cattle ranch and at the time, my grampa still had cows there. Now he rents out the land to a neighbor who grazes his cattle on it. Circle of life.

Since I didn't have my driver's license, I obviously had very little behind-the-wheel experience. By 'little' I mean I wasn't aware of the fact that when you put the car in drive, it goes somewhere. Honestly. The first time I went driving that was a major shock to me. So one morning when my grampa asked if I wanted to drive in to town with him to get the mail, I said sure. We always did it, every time I visited. We'd climb in his old, tan truck with the cracked leather interior that smelled wonderful and trundle on down the long gravel driveway and winding, narrow country roads.

That morning, though, he asked if I wanted to drive. Bear in mind, by now his old tan truck had been replaced with a dark blue diesel leviathan. This truck was the size of New Hampshire. I must've said yes, because the next thing I knew he was talking me through backing it out of the carport without hitting the electric cattle fence, my gramma's car, the house, or the hundred-year-old oak in their front yard. I did it, and managed to drive to the post office without killing either of us. He kept saying 'Small corrections, just make small corrections.' to me, almost as if he knew that any time I played a racing video game I'd treat the steering wheel like a creature that needed its neck wrung. 'The truck will want to go straight by itself, so you don't have to steer hard as long as you make small corrections.' And he was right.

The memory of my normally-gruff grampa, paitently keeping me on the road, has been popping up a lot lately. Not because my driving skills are abysmal, but because I have no patience. When I start a task I want immediate results. When I turn a wheel, something should happen, dang it! None of this waiting nonsense. Unfortunately it doesn't work like that.

I'm trying to start running at the gym in the mornings. I've never been a runner. Never. Put me in the water and I'll go all day but ask me to run a block and I will most likely laugh at you. Hard. I tried it a few months ago, and it worked pretty well but for whatever reason I stopped. I can't remember why (which in itself is funny because I remember what I wore to dinner on my 16th birthday - a grey skirt and sea-green t-shirt. I had no fashion sense, and also chlorine-bleached hair.). I've started it up again though. Something about running, even for a few minutes, seems to set my mind right. I feel organized when I get to work, and less likely to want to take a nap in my car about 1:30.

I am disappointed that I'm not better at it. It seems like some sort of basic human survival trick to get up and run for an undetermined amount of time. If I lived 3000 years ago and was being chased by an invading army of whoever it was that was invading 3000 years ago, you bet I'd be able to run.

I need patience. I need to be able to tell myself that I'm not going to run a marathon next week, nor am I expected to. As much as I may wish it, there is not an invading army of Huns chasing me down with spears and stones and the Black Plague. I am, sadly, only human.

I am only human.

See? Small correction.

What Happens When You Build a Dam Over A Stream of Conciousness?

If I were to ever see Ben Bernanke on the street I can't promise I wouldn't try to hit him with my car or possibly a piece of construction equipment I have no business driving. I don't know if Mr. Bernanke is in any way, shape, or form responsible for the mortgage crisis going on right now but according to the AccuNet Mortgage commercials that I hear on the radio all. The time., he is somehow involved in my not being able to own a home. While the thought of chasing him down in my little 4-banger gleefully cackling out words that I can't repeat here because my mom reads this and then calls me to tell me she's worried about me is appealing, it's not the right answer and I know that.

I've been toying around with the idea of going back to school and getting my MLIS. I went to grad school once. For 6 weeks. I gave it the ol' college try, failed miserably, and have been living with a giant flashing invisible sign on my head that says Beauty School Grad School Dropout ever since.

I don't like failing or deferred sucess or whatever is considered politically correct to call it now. But at the same time, grad school costs money. And time. And look at me make excuses for not going back! What it all boils down to is this: I failed at it once, and I'm afraid I'm going to fail at it again. Failing at something once is appaling. Failing at it twice is downright un-face-up-toable, but is it worse than failing once and never trying again? This is grad school, not skydiving.

In other news, it's 2011 now which in itself is terrifying. What happened to pretty much every year since 1994? Is it still cool to make fun of O.J. Simpson and wear Zoombas? Ugh.

Being an adult is unavoidable and not always fun. You have to do things like make sure you don't go 8,000 miles without an oil change (which I haven't done since 2004, thank you very much) and change the kitchen calendar (which, for those keeping score, is still on May of 2010) and be responsible. I kind of wouldn't mind going back to kindergarden where boys had cooties and it was ok to glue your little history book with the ducks on the cover to your desk accidentally.

Vermicious Knids

What with the end of the year coming and all, I started putting a little thought into New Year's Resolutions. I hesitate to make any resolutions for 2011, mainly because in the past it seems that when I'm unable to keep said resolutions for whateve reason, it usually comes with a harsh life lesson about setting your expectations too high or thinking too much of yourself.

2009 seemed to be the worst in terms of that. My resolution initially was to pay off our credit card and buy a house and obviously lose 20 pounds. By the 15th of January I was unemployed and watching Aretha Franklin's inagural hat domiate the nation in a daze wondering what had happened to my career. By the end of September I was employed again, but also tangled up in a web of indefinite temporary-to-hire work that I'm still in. We still don't have a house. The credit card was paid off, but is sadly no more so.

2010 was a little better. I resolved to keep my indefinite temp-to-hire job and to obviously lose 20 pounds. I did keep my temp-to-hire job, and I did lose (almost) 20 pounds by May. Unfortunately they've come back, and brought some friends. Some people say it's stress. I think I'm just getting ready to go through a cycle of mitosis that, when complete, will finally give the world what it needs: two of me.

I could say that in 2011 I'm going to obviously lose the 20 pounds again and keep it off. I could say that I'm going to keep our apartment the picture of order, comfort, warmth, and welcome no thanks to my Martha Stewart Living subscription. I could say that yes, I will iron every week and water the plants biweekly and cut cupons on a Friday night, read brittle classic literature, and that I will complete all tasks assigned to me at work with a degree of perfection not seen since St. Martha of the Linens herself was born. I get the feeling that if I do that by mid-March I'll wind up under the coffee table surrounded in Hot Pocket sleeves and backissues of Cosmo watching SciFi Original Movies that all star the Lesser Baldwins.

Maybe keeping it simple is key. Alright. For 2011, I resolve to not travel via glass elevators. Very little good ever comes of that.

Redum and Wassail

Before you read too far you should know that this is just an attempt to get my writing wheels flowing again. There was a time when I would write every day, sometimes several times. I'm trying to get back in the habit and it is not like riding a bike. You can forget how to really write.

On Christmas Eve I was on the couch thinking about the Christmases my husband and I have said since were married...all 3 of them to date, and I realized we're lacking in traditions. Severely. I had several growing up - the tree(s) would go up the day after Thanksgiving, St. Nick would visit a few times during Advent. When I was young, my mom would attack my head with hot rollers while I protested (usually loudly), we'd truck off to Christmas Eve mass with my hair still hurting, and then we'd come home to dinner. For some reason, I keep thinking it was usually something Italian. Either way, after we ate we were allowed to open one gift. One. Uno. The rest would have to wait until the next day. When Christmas Day proper came, it wasn't a free for all of paper and ribbons. The presents would be arranged according to who they went to, a process that was re-done several times over Advent and always done by yours truly, and then we'd always start with the youngest. Christmas always went off without a hitch, due in no small part to my mom's planning skills which, apparently, are not necessarily inherited.

The last few Christmases have acted like the topiaries in The Shining - they get closer when you're not looking and then before you know it your face is being gnawed off by an evergreen rabbit and surprise! it's Christmas. And there's possibly a crazy guy coming after you with a roque mallet.

In other news, I feel like I should give my husband a medal for not chucking me out the door the past few weeks. I've just felt mean. Snappish, short-tempered, what have you. It's completely unacceptable. The project I was involved with at work is done, I'm getting back into a regular routine, and all should be well. I just feel on edge and don't know how to relax. Anyway, Husband Dearest, if you read this, I <3.

Did I mention we ran over Prancer one year on Christmas Eve one year? Well, 'Prancer' at any rate. That may be a story for another time but it could be one heck of a tradition. Anyway, it's 8:15 pm, and I am being old and taking myself to bed.