Snapshots: Mid-March 2011

Working on:

Decluttering the house: Every single thing that we tossed aside thinking "oh, we'll deal with this later" or "I'll just shove it in here for now" has come due. Three years, four bedrooms, and 1500 square feet worth. Some days it seems easier to leave the house unlocked and hope somebody wanders away with it all.

Antointte and a few other friends have asked if we could rent the place for a year or two. I suppose we could (we could probably even make a tiny little amount of money doing it), but we don't want to. Things that are happening in and around the neighborhood right now make me think that it would be financially better for us to sell and get out ASAP. I'd be pretty wary of what sort of renters we would attract in this area and I just don't want to deal with being a landlord. I think we are also getting itchy feet again and might want to make another big move in the next few years, and who knows how long it will take to sell this house. It's kind of shame this didn't work out, because it's a cute house (I love the layout) with a nice big yard. It just turned out, for us, to be the wrong house in the wrong neighborhood in the wrong city. This was our first adventure with home ownership and honestly I'm not sure if we'll do it again. We've been looking at some nice apartments and I'm sort of psyched to think about not taking care of a lawn and having access to a pool for all those brutally hot summer days.

Knitting: Warm weather means the neighbors are loud and the teenagers are out until well past dark, so when my husband is working late (at least 4 nights a week), I put the kid to bed, tidy up the house, and force myself to relax by watching TV and barreling ahead with knitting projects. I try to justify the hours spent sitting on my ass by telling myself  "I'm using up yarn, this is part of the de-cluttering!" but it's not completely true. Really, the living room is where I'm least likely to be bothered by the noise outside. But this strategy is allowing me to make progress on a Simo and a Little Bubbles for the kid and prep for Easter with some bunny nuggets. I am also trying desperately to finish the projects I owe for a long-overdue swap. Sherrie probably thinks I have forgotten all about her (I haven't!) because I've owed her something for almost 18 months. The good news is, the knitting project I planned for her second baby will now fit her upcoming third.

Watching: Satsfaction and The Riches. Getting annoyed all over again that The Riches was canceled so abruptly. Really, REALLY annoyed that my favorite new show is probably getting the axe. I've sworn off any new tv shows next season. I just can't take the heartache, you know? 

Listening: I am pretty out of the loop musically these days, since I don't listen to commercial radio, we don't have satellite, and many of my favorite bands have split up or are on hiatus. We spend about two hours a day (minimum) in the car these days, and since our iPod has not been updated in over a year and I don't want to drag 100 cd's into the car, Piper and I pretty much listen to the same 10 things over and over. I have, however, been very much enjoying the free playlists offered by SPIN each  month. I have also been taking advantage of the free weekly downloads from Starbucks. Usually they have the cards with the redemption code sitting on the edge of the counter, you don't have to buy anything or even make chit-chat if you don't want to, you can snatch one and run before the delicious coffee smell sucks you into buying a $4 latte. I've also seen the cards at the mini-Starbucks stores located in the middle of the mall, inside Target, and in Barnes & Noble stores.

Wishing: I need to redesign this here blog - the header bugs me endlessly but I don't have time for the tinkering required to fix it, I hate the color scheme, I really just want to scrap my template and start over. I wish I could wave a magic wand and poof! have a spiffy blog. But that magic wand will probably be called "lots of books and prowling around on the Web" and I will not wave it so much as toil away late into the night for several weeks, cussing and sweating, only to achieve marginally better results. Sort of like most of my sewing projects. Hmmm.

PS. Advice needed: Any other iPhone users with a PC know how to get the photos off the darn thing? I have more than 2,000 photos on my phone which I would like to retrieve, and short of emailing them all to myself individually, I can't figure out how to get them onto my computer. 

Life Lessons, Brought To You By Tragically Ordinary

I am miserably sick today with some sort of sinus thing, and since I haven't quite completed my latest knitting project (and therefore can't share it yet), all I have for you is a list of things I've learned. These are things I've been thinking about a lot lately, because we've had some discussions about our future plans for this little family (actually, at this stage, it's more like 'plans to have a plan to make plans') and for ourselves. Friday is my birthday, which I always dread, but I'm trying hard not to get too hung up on it this year. I'm trying to view all the hard knocks and missteps and bumbling that have occurred in my life so far as learning experiences, instead of a list of reasons why I shouldn't be allowed near people and should never be given power tools or a checkbook.

 What I've Learned So Far:

1. Wear an apron while cooking bacon. Do not cook anything while drunk or naked. Definitely do not cook anything while drunk and naked.

2. If you buy your significant other something awesome for their birthday, and the same year they buy you some unwanted, bewilderingly useless kitchen appliance for your birthday, it's time for a new relationship. This is particularly true of college relationships, and quadruply true if the other party doesn't understand why you're upset. If they can't comprehend that you make $7.50 an hour yet managed to buy them an amazing and perfectly-chosen $125 gift, and that their reciprocal $35 newspaper-wrapped breadmaker might be upsetting, especially given that you don't bake, they're probably not The One. If you've been together for two years and get a shrug and a "I didn't know what else to get you," they are definitely not The One.

3. You will  never be able to convince anyone else that their significant other is not The One. It's really something they need to realize on their own.

4. If your baby makes a gigantic mess every time she eats blueberry applesauce, either deal with it or stop giving her blueberry applesauce. Don't try and feed it to her while she's in the bathtub. It's going to make a bigger mess than you ever imagined.

5. If you're moving to another state, some place you know nothing about, RENT for a year.

6. Investigate strange smells promptly. This applies to any and all strange smells in any and all locations. 

7. All mothers are crazy. All mothers drive their daughters crazy. Most mothers-in-law are crazy, too. Everyone's definition of "crazy" is different, so it's all (HA!) relative.

8. Air conditioning, a working dishwasher, and a sense of humor are key components of a happy marriage.

9.Before you buy that extra t-shirt or stack of discount books or whatever trinket you're eying, consider how you feel about moving it back and forth across the country a few times. Doesn't sound like fun, does it?

10. Don't confuse "adventure" with "stupidity." Don't confuse "caution" or "responsibility" with "fear."

So what about you? What have you learned so far?

Wait, where did summer go again?

I know that the weather turned Fall-ish promptly on September 1st, and I even blogged about how much I was looking forward to the change of season, but it hadn't really occurred to me that summer was over. Somewhere the dark recesses of my brain held the fact that school was starting, temperatures were cooling, and apples were coming into season, but my mind as a whole had not quite processed the fact that summer is gone. The thought "Hey! Fall is here!" was flitting around my little brain like a butterfly.

All the things I was going to do this summer (go to Michigan for a visit, start sewing again, finish the Pay It Forward packages before Labor Day, knit the six different shawls my mom wants, make and send off the birthday presents for all the August birthdays, get started on some sweaters for Piper, start work on the October birthday presents and the Christmas stuff) have slipped through my fingers like sand. But I wasn't worried, because hey, I still had some summer left, right?

Then I woke up this morning and saw a yellow leaf on our back stoop. I raced to the windows on the side of the house and there they were - patches of reddening leaves scattered throughout the trees. My happy little butterfly went away and was replaced with "HOLY CRAP, IT'S FALL ALREADY AND I AM SO SCREWED."

Looking at those trees, thinking about that leaf, I realized the following things:

* The preschool I had hoped to send Piper to started this week.
* I have not even looked up dance studios around here so I have no clue where to send her.
* The August birthdays have come and gone, and I have not even started their projects.
* Labor day is over, and neither the Pay it Forward packages nor my package for the charity I'm sending stuff to are ready to go out (click that link and check out Mel's contest; it's a really worthy cause).
* I can't even find all the yarn for the first of my mom's six projects. I seem to have misplaced a ball.
* If I want to get to Michigan for a visit before Christmas, I'd better get plane tickets NOW.
* We are almost halfway through September.

I have no idea how I'm going to catch up. Apparently I have some sort of time problem, because this is not the first time I've had this issue. I bop along, content to make half-hearted stabs at my gargantuan to-do lists, blissfully filing almost everything under "do later." Then when it actually is later, I scramble and work like mad to get everything done in time. I was never this inefficient when I worked in an office; I just don't get it.

Much of my recent time was spent working doggedly around the house. The mess and clutter and boxes still unpacked after almost 18 months finally got to me and I couldn't take it anymore. We bought actual bookshelves and cd racks so we could finally get rid of the boxes in the spare bedroom. I packed up or gave away most of the (approximately) two tons of baby clothes & toys we owned. I got all my craft stuff together, organized it, and packed most of it up so it can go into the attic until I have a craft room (or, at this point, any little corner would do). We've been tackling one project or so a week, trying at least to tame the chaos of moving our stuff four times in two years. Although my House Project List is by no means finished, my brain is a lot happier and better able to think now that some of the physical disorder is gone.

I am still working on my items for Cris, Jen, Emily, and Lana. I had a wee little setback last week, because I bought the wrong supplies the first time and had to go out and get new and start over. I would up buying the stuff that I wanted to buy in the first place. I should've just trusted my instincts, because then I wouldn't be out the first round of supply money and six hours of time, nor would I have found myself charging through the hillbilly-est Wal-Mart in the area at 9:30 pm. There certainly are some, uh, colorful shoppers at that hour. Oh, well. Live some, learn some, right?

9/17/09: I changed the date of this post retroactively. My apologies if it shows up twice in your feed reader.

I'm about to tell them they can't visit anymore.

My parents visited last weekend and brought another carload of CRAP. They did not bring my bicycle, but they did bring:

- 5 pairs of my old baby shoes, none of which Piper can wear (3 too small, 1 too trashed, 1 with soles so thick and hard I don't know how I ever learned to walk). My mom knew the too-small ones were too small when she put them in there. She brought them anyway.

- An assortment of clothes, baby clothes, books, and toys that I had put in the give-away bag before we left Michigan. I put them in the garbage bags along with the rest of the stuff my mom had designated for her monthly Purple Heart pick-up. The give-away stuff is always collected in the same spot at her house. She would've had to root through all the other stuff just to pick out the sackfuls of useless-to-me things she brought.

- A pile of fairly hideous 80's baby clothes that belonged to my siblings & me. All of which are either years too big or many months too small for Piper to wear.

- A crate of Fisher-Price Little People toys that, while pretty cool (and only partly because they are the old choke-sized ones), Piper can't play with for at least another year. She is too hard on things right now to turn her loose with so many small, fragile parts.

- A stack of baby/kid books, 98% of which I can't give to Piper because they are either too old and completely falling apart, or they are not the thick cardboard-paged kind, which means she will shred them. She's extremely hard on books.

- A crate of my siblings' and my old baby/preschool toys, in various states of crumbling decay. One shape-sorter dissolved into tiny plastic shards when we tried to wash it.

- My old Fisher-Price "School Days Desk," which was a beloved toy of mine, but is made to be used by someone 7 or more years old.

- YET ANOTHER crate of Piper's outgrown baby clothes. I'm pretty sure this is the last one, because it has a lot of things I couldn't find (like the tiny onesies we decorated for her when she was a newborn). If there are any more crates of clothes lurking about, I will probably set fire to them because I am so sick of trying to find storage space for it all and ye gods people bought us a lot of foofy pink atrocities.

- A HUGE crate of Lego Duplos, which I specifically told my mom Piper is not quite old enough to play with. She doesn't have the dexterity yet to put the things together and get them apart; all that will happen is she'll stick two pieces together and then scream because she can't undo it. I don't need any more reasons for her to screech, thank you.

- A random assortment of kid-sized silverware (there's like one fork, 5 spoons, and a butterknife). Plastic bowls bearing cartoon approximations of the characters from Willow. Willow was our favorite movie when we were kids, and my mom dutifully saved UPCs from boxes of Quaker oatmeal to get a bowl and matching spoon for each of us. She could only find one of the spoons, and I don't know what the hell I am going to do with these, but I don't think I can bear to throw them out.

I honestly don't know what the F my mother expects me to do with all this stuff. When I try to tell her to stop bringing it, she only whines "It's your stuff. You wanted it. You asked for it. I didn't do it. You wanted it."

It's all still sitting in mountainous piles in the living room. Piper has managed to scatter a lot of it throughout the house. The house is usually ankle-deep in debris by the end of the day anyway, because she just goes from room to room destroying things and making messes faster than I can clean them up. The debris is knee-deep now, and I am teetering on the brink of a full-scale meltdown because my house is so messy. I have been struck down with a malady that required an actual doctor's visit and medications, and Ryan has had an hellacious school week plus a part-time job, so we haven't had much chance to go through it, much less drop off the stuff we don't want at the Goodwill up the road. Therefore, the piles and clutter and junk have been spreading all week and I have been edging closer to insanity.

The house was spotlessly clean and 85% totally organized before my parents showed up; only three closets (one each in the spare bedrooms, one in the hall) remained for me to divide, conquer, and organize. Earlier this month, my house was so clean and organized that not only did I go to bed at a reasonable hour three nights in a row, I spent one entire naptime reading a book because I had done all the things that I usually try to frantically accomplish during that 1.5-hour window every day. My home was organized and my brain felt wonderful because of it.

Now it looks like somebody is setting up a thrift store in here.

Desperate Measures

My parents are coming tonight and my house is a DISASTER. You can't even walk into the spare bedroom where they're supposed to sleep. Every flat surface in the house is somehow covered in clutter again, despite the fact that I had them all cleared two days ago. Piper got shots on Wed. and has been extra clingy and hard to please ever since. I let her watch the tail-end of Word World on PBS Kids just so I can drink a cup of coffee and asses the mess without her wrapping herself around my legs and screaming.

I always swore I'd never let my kid watch TV until she was older; 2 at least. No way, nohow. I hated the idea of TV for little kids, just training legions of mini-zombies to be the couch-potato consumers of tomorrow. My kid wasn't going to turn out like that. Never mind my own tv-viewing, I would save my child! I thought I would, I don't know, jump in front of the screen or something if she tried to look.

But this is not the first time I have caved. I have been known to pop in my well-worn VHS copy of The Beatles' Yellow Submarine just to get twenty minutes of work-time. She is transfixed by it and will actually sit there quietly and watch, instead of screaming at me and tearing apart whatever I am working on. My kid, who won't even sit still long enough to have her diaper changed, sat in one place for twenty whole minutes.

I didn't intend to let her watch it today. I turned on the TV to find a local news program because of a text message Ryan sent me. It was already on PBS, Word World was on and some computer-generated frog was jumping around. Piper looked up from unloading a file box of our important financial papers and giggled. Then she took a toy and went into the living room and stood in front of the TV. When I went into the kitchen, she didn't follow me and demand "Up! Up!" I got to drink a whole glass of water with no baby-hands grabbing it. The possibility of actually getting something done at some point during the day danced tantalizingly in front of me.

But my glee was short-lived. The show ended and she went back to chasing the cats around and trying to poke them with a plastic fork. Guess I don't need to worry about creating a TV addict so much as an animal abuser.

Oh, THAT's Why My House is Full of Crap

I just cleaned off my counter and dining table. It took me all weekend to do it, and I'm not even done yet. Mostly it was organizing, filing, sorting, and throwing away. I have been bemoaning the massive amount of clutter around here lately, and frequently find myself at a loss as to how we could have entirely filled up our house with crap in the not-quite-five months we've lived here. We don't buy a lot of stuff anymore; I just can't figure out where all this JUNK comes from.

I think I have the answer. A HUGE box (seriously, I couldn't get my arms around it to carry it inside, I just had to sort of hoist a corner and drag) just arrived from my parents' house, containing:

- Various pieces to Piper's three baby gyms, but not one actual complete gym. One of the main supports to the gym she used most often when she was little is broken. Whoever packed the box was so busy trying to shove more crap in there, they failed to notice that they had snapped the foam pole in half.

- An assortment of heinous baby clothes I left at the house when we moved because they were either a)heinous or b) heinous and too small. All of them still have the tags on.

- A pink plastic My Little Pony tea set. EDIT: Oh, God, it makes noise. It even sings.

- An outfit which my mom made herself, consisting of a reversible pinafore, two pairs of matching bloomers, a tiny coordinating purse, and a matching hat with a gigantic bow. The whole ensemble is solid blue on one side and the other fabric is yellow with pastel lollipops. She has got to be kidding.

- A set of 4 pastel-plaid placemats. A set of 2 Christmas placemats. 4 mismatched cloth napkins (I mentioned a few weeks ago I was on the hunt for table linens).

- A kit for making this dress, in blue. It's pretty cute, actually, and totally a project I would've picked for myself. There's a note inside the bag that says it's my brother's b-day gift to me. Nice job, D!

- An assortment of tank tops for me, none of which I can wear. They're all either way too big or feature spaghetti-straps and shelf bras, which don't work at all with my current g-cup nursing boobs and tank-like nursing bra.

- A tote bag my mom brought back for me from the Globe Theater in London that has "blood-splatter" on it and says "OUT, OUT DAMNED SPOT!" It's a little scary-looking actually.

- Some old clothes of my sister's which I was going to keep but then returned to the give-away box befoe we moved, after remembering that I had 10 boxes of clothing in storage.

- A play tent from Ikea which I told my mom I was going to wait to buy until the Ikea opens here next spring because we don't have room for it right now and my stupid cats will just pee in it anyway.

- Two pairs of British-flag "women's boxer shorts" which I can only assume are meant for me.

- 4 pairs of Piper's shoes, all of which are outgrown and one of which I threw away at some point because the sizes were mismatched.

- A musical card for Piper, tucked inside which I found an old non-working cellphone and 8 expired/used-up card-shaped things: fake gift cards/fake credit-cards etc.

- Some actually fairly rockin' H&M clothes for Piper. My mom and sister must've gotten them when they were in Europe last month. European babies apparently don't need pink OR giant bows to signify their status to the world.

- A pair of shoes for me, from my sister. Cute black-and-white slip-on tennies, but I think they're a little big.

The last box like this my mom sent (last month) is still sitting in the computer room, mostly still packed. I don't know what to do with all this...STUFF. I've asked her to stop sending/bringing it. She just sends more. When my parents came to visit in June, they brought an entire CARLOAD of this sort of junk. The one thing they brought that I had asked for was Piper's other carseat, which, in the process of cramming into the over-stuffed car, they broke. Snapped the seat-belt clip on the right side clean off, so now we can only put it in the center or on the left. The broken cordless phone arrived safely, as did 6 of my baby tee-shirts in various stages of threadbare decay, a large pink stuffed elephant that records and plays back sound, 16 too-small outfits I had put in the give-away bin anyhow, 3 dozen plastic Easter-eggs with ancient candy inside, 3 more bath-toy sets (to add to the bathtub-full she already has), and several more frog-themed outfits Piper doesn't need.

I have asked, begged, and pleaded with them to STOP BRINGING JUNK to my house. We don't have a garage. The back bedroom is entirely given over to the cats. The computer room is stacked floor-to-ceiling with boxes of books and cd's we have no storage for. Every closet in the houe is bursting with crap. And still, the avalanche of junk continues.

At first, I was polite and merely eye-rolling about this; I figured my mom was just trying to help. But there is also a purposefulness at work here. My parents actually laugh when I ask them to stop bringing stuff. They laugh and they tell me, "oh, it happens. When you get a house, it just fills up!" or the laugh and say how pleased they are to be cleaning out their basement and dumping it off at my house. Erm, forgive me for saying so, but if you don't want that crap at your house, I don't want it at mine, either.

The kicker is that 95% or more of the stuff that my parents claim is mine or which I should be responsible for disposing off my MOM is responsible for. The tiny clothes she saved from my and my siblings' infancies, most of which are now too trashed, have been stored too long, or are too small to be of use to me. Broken toys. The JUNK which she whines that Piper likes to play with - old wallets, broken cordless phones, creaky plastic picture frames, crocheted fun-fur scarves nobody will ever wear, Christmas decorations, a string of beaded tree-garland I had to take away from the baby because it was shedding flecks of green (and probably lead-filled) paint all over her hands and in her mouth. The remains of all those sackfuls of baby clothes I asked her not to buy in the first place. Tiny shoes and bibs I told her not to buy because I'd never put them on the baby anyway. Dozens of stuffed animals and heaps of garish plastic toys the baby never even glanced at twice. Leaky dollar-store sippy-cups; child-size dishes emblazoned with cartoon characters I despise; hats that Piper refuses to wear; mittens that are impractical at best for such a little kid; knitting patterns for an assortment of strange and scary children's garments or toys.

PILES and PILES of this stuff. In my HOUSE. And they're coming to visit again next month.