Tag: home sweet home

Retrospective

As of April 14, we’ve lived in our home for a year. Mostly it feels much longer, because this house is just us, and we live a daily paradox of feeling as if we belong here and wondering how on earth we became so blessed to get this place. (That, of course, is testament to how God sometimes doesn’t give us what we want and we are incredibly grateful later.)

The only snag for me in our paradise house on the hill is sleeping. I’ve had sleepwalking/sleep talking issues since I was a kid, and I’m still not used to this bedroom. More nights than not I wake up in a total panic and have no idea where I am. I cannot orient myself in this room no matter how much time I spend here during the day.

But that’s my only real complaint. Otherwise, we are thrilled and so blessed to be here. We’ve done really well on both of the houses we’ve bought–maybe not in the Real Estate Guru sense, but in the “I love waking up here every day” sense, which to me is worth a lot of real estate. There are actually moments where I’m trying to decide where to settle in with a book or my laptop or a drink and I like every single room so much that I can’t even decide where to go. That was true in the old house, too. I’m sitting here typing this on the bed, but I could just as well be on the back porch, rocking in my chair in the living room, walking on the TrekDesk, or across the table from Derek in the dining room. Ah, the paradox of choice.

There are a lot of really awful houses on the market. There are some “ok” places, houses we could live with but that weren’t homes to live in. Hey, we almost ended up in one of those, so I know of what I speak. Instead, after four years of beige government-subsidized townhouses, we landed–twice!–in homes so special they literally make me well up with grateful tears. That’s a pretty big deal, I think, because the whole house-shopping thing happens so fast. You never get to sleep there overnight to see if there are obnoxious dogs barking. You don’t get to try breakfast on the porch to see if your allergies act up. You don’t know until it’s too late whether the floor creaks creepily when your husband is out of town or whether your neighbors are total wackadoos. You take a twenty-minute tour, maybe repeat it once or twice, and then you just…decide, and make an offer that will tie you down to monthly payments for 15-30 years. When I think about that, I’m even more grateful for having unknowingly but brilliantly chosen not just once, but twice.

I’m not attached to my home in the way people featured in magazines are, whose sole mission in life is the Perfect Master Bath or Creating a Family-Friendly Outdoor Entertaining Space. I’m attached to it because it’s so useful, so serviceable for our family and (here’s the key) without too much effort, it displays a natural beauty that doesn’t require Home Improvement every weekend. We aren’t Weekend Warriors. We just want to live here and love it. And we do.

Home sweet home.

Home sweet home.

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April 17th, 2013
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Southern Spring

With apologies to my family in South Dakota, where the snow Just. Won’t. End.

Sometimes spring in the south skips the balmy 70-degree days and goes right for the over-80 crowd. But just over 80, without so much humidity that you feel compelled to turn on the AC, but enough heat that you gasp for air and turn on the fans and open the windows and sweat through dinner prep and dinner and cleaning up, only to appear downstairs at 8 p.m. (after tucking the sweating kids into bed, turning on their ceiling fans, and hoping the Stinker Bear doesn’t climb the bunk bed ladder and bust his head on the moving fan blades) and realize that it’s still quite toasty, that going outside won’t get you the breath of fresh, dry air you’re dying for and it’s only April and how can it be so hot already?

For an Idaho girl, where you can watch your coffee steam on a dry, cool summer morning, I find this climate hard to take sometimes. But I almost feel as if I’m a real southerner now, as if I can move with the seasons and sweat through a too-warm spring without cranking up the central air and do it the way they used to, with fans and cool drinks and light food and by letting the body do its thing, shining a glistening sheen on the forehead and sweating out those 8 pounds I wanted to lose anyway.

(Speaking of those pounds. I’m exercising, watching what I eat, and they are not melting away. My metabolism and I are not on speaking terms.)

But really, how can I complain? I read a book about a Knoxville girl in the 1800s, and they had it bad. All that underwear, those layers of petticoats, corsets, long-sleeved high-necked dresses, and still no air conditioning. No wonder girls fainted so much back then.

And the truth is, we live in one of the most beautiful places I can imagine. It’s not breathtaking like some exotic locations, but it’s everyday lovely. The blooming dogwoods have my attention now. A few weeks ago, it was the pink redbuds and the white blossoms on the Bradford pears. Our bulbs have been out for more than  a month, and soon the crepe myrtles will sprout their beautiful pink blooms. Everywhere you look is green and flowers and almost-bloom. Every day I wake up here and look around me and thank God for putting us in this unlikely, unknown, totally amazing place.

And now, it’s nearly quarter after eight, and I think I felt a cool breeze come in the window and cool my neck just now. I also hear multiple door-slammings upstairs, along with a “Jonathan, GO TO BED.” So I must go and investigate, and then I will get back on the treadmill and sweat my way through another Tennessee spring workout. Good night.

 

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April 16th, 2013
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Exciting times ahead

I finally convinced my bosses that I need to leave at the end of this month. They are not happy, but then, neither am I. They changed our working hours and mandated that no one could come in before 8 a.m. due to safety reasons with all the construction going on. Of course I understand that, but suddenly I’m driving in rush hour instead of before it, and getting home quite late. After an hour of battling traffic and getting home and having to rush-rush to get dinner on because my kids are hungry, I’m fairly cranky and resentful of all the time lost.

And frankly it was heading there anyway, so this was a nice additional reason to give.

So that 10 pounds I’ve gained? It’s gonna come off. I ordered a TrekDesk yesterday and plan to use it in addition to my regular desk. I couldn’t bear the thought of coming back home to work again and continuing the same bad habits of being parked in a chair all day. It’s stagnating. Despite Lauren’s dire warnings from the Wall Street Journal, the reviews on Amazon are quite inspiring. I’m super excited to try it out and hope it works with the treadmill we’ve got. We’ve figured out a way to crowd both desks into my office so I can switch off, and Derek can have some extra space to work, too.

I’m working hard on the new business. It’s exciting and terrifying, and I oscillate between feeling convinced I’m out of my league and feeling convinced that a little stretching will feel good. If it sounds like I’m being coy, well, I don’t like to talk much about work in progress. When I was a writer, I never talked about my stories while I was working on them, because when it came time to put the words on the page, they’d fall flat if I’d formulated the language verbally. Now, I don’t want to say much until this whole thing is a little more polished and I’m ready to launch. At this point there are so many unknowns that I’ll look flaky if I announce I’m doing X and X morphs into Z half a dozen times.

In other exciting news, Kate made the Honors Choir at school. More than a hundred kids tried out, 60 got callbacks, and 30 were chosen. We are incredibly proud of her, and more than that, thrilled that she’ll be in a position to learn how to really sing. She’s been participating in the church choir as well (another funny story: as Derek and I also sing, that leaves Sophia to babysit Jonathan during rehearsal, and those of you who know Sophia will be chuckling right now and wondering what kind of trouble they get into; the answer, since this aside is already ridiculously long, is that he ate four desserts last Wednesday, but Sophia felt bad about it and said, “I’m a terrible babysitter!” to which I reassured her that she was doing fine, because in my book if she’s making an attempt she’s doing better than expected).

Both girls are at the top of their classes for AR (Accelerated Reader) points. It’s so lovely to have kids who like to read as much as I do, who get carried away before bed and accidentally stay up late because they couldn’t bear to put the story down, who write their own books with plots and storylines that are better than some of the published stuff I’ve seen. Jonathan still hasn’t figured out how nice it is to take books to bed. I’ve offered, but he says no, though he reads with me and Sophia before bed each night. When the girls were little, they’d take piles of books to the crib and drop them out one by one when they were finished. Jonathan tried once but insisted on getting out of the crib and taking it all the way back to the bookshelf in the playroom.

And speaking of crib, I’ve been talking to him about his “big boy bed” but when we have the conversation, he says, “I want to go in there,” and points to the crib. He’s 2 1/2 now, the same age the girls were when they potty-trained and switched to a bed, but only the potty-training is going for him. He loves getting on the potty, and I broke down on the THIRD kid and bought a second litle potty seat so we wouldn’t have to run up and down the stairs to grab it every time he wanted to go. We got him a Cars seat, and it backfired, because now he will ONLY use the Cars seat and not the old one, so I’m $14 poorer and still have to run up and down to get the right seat.

He’s not seriously training, but he likes it, so we encourage him. Until I’m home again and can really devote time and energy to it, we’re sort of humoring him for now. I think the window will close soon and he’ll be over 3 before we get it done, but he’s my baby and that’s okay.

Sophia lost–or should I say, yanked–another tooth last night, so she’s got her two front and one right next to them gone, all in a row. Her front teeth have been out for months, with no sign of growing in. She’s beginning to look like a toothless old man, but soon those front teeth will be in and I’ll be sad at how she’s growing up.

Last week, pre-tooth-loss, but isn't she cute?

Last week, pre-tooth-loss, but isn’t she cute?

Kate’s growing up, too. She and her friends are obsessed with the band One Direction, and particularly Harry Styles, who turns 19 today. It takes me right back to seventh grade, when my friends and I were crazy over New Kids on the Block. I cringe thinking about how we pored over magazines and crooned to their songs and argued over who was cuter (Joey, duh).

Derek doesn’t have his own exciting news, but he’s excited about happenings at church. The men of the church have been working hard the last few weeks to build interior walls for our sanctuary. They put up wood frames and insulation and drywall, are leaving space for two high windows in the back, and it’s going to be lovely when they finish. We’re also getting a ceiling (you have NO IDEA how hard it is to hear anything in there when it’s raining hard) and new chairs. Part of this is from internal fundraising, but a large portion came from a generous donation from First Lutheran. What a lovely gift. The men at our church are all extremely handy–so much so that my father-in-law joked that they had all chiefs and only one Indian. Ha!

Well, if you’ve made it to the end of this wordy post, congratulations. I understand the value in writing short, but I can’t always do it, especially when I’m bursting with happiness at all the lovely things ahead.

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February 1st, 2013
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Too much and too little

My theme these last few months seems to be too much to say, too little time to say it, and too much to say about things I shouldn’t be saying on the world wide web. Thus, relative silence.

Not to be mysterious. Life is like this: get sucked into the work vortex all week, spend evenings when the kids are in bed frantically working on an escape plan, emerge on the weekends and forget all about that part of life while I revel in being with family, and suddenly it’s almost Monday and it all begins again.

This year I started a goals journal. I got this from Dave Ramsey’s Entreleadership book, and he in turn stole it from Zig Ziglar. You create yearly goals in seven areas–career, financial, spiritual, physical, intellectual, family, and social–and you have to write them down or they don’t count. I’ve always made yearly goals, but never in specific categories and never in one spot. Now that I’m 35, I considered all the goals I’d made over the years that are now lost on scraps of paper or even in my immature head. In a way it seemed too late, but then I figured I have, Lord willing, a good 40+ years goal-making ahead, I went ahead and started the goal journal at this ripe old age.

I won’t share them all, but a few of my goals include

Quit my job. I wouldn’t normally talk publicly about this just in case someone from work happened upon this tiny little corner of the internet, but things at work came to a crux last week when they signed me up for a conference that would have required significant investment in me on their part. I felt I had no choice but to be honest with them about my (non) future at the company and ask them not to send me.

They are, to put it mildly, not happy, and being a middle child/peacemaker I’m unhappy that they’re unhappy. But it’s the right thing for numerous reasons. I’ve had my time to evaluate the grass on the other side of the fence, to take a breather from running my own business, to realize that the advantages of running my own business, in spite of the not insignificant challenges, far outweigh the disadvantages. I’ve gained ten pounds from sitting on my behind all day instead of moving. I’ve lost precious hours with my kids. And, frankly, while I do love the nature of the work and believe I’m making a difference there both with my staff and for the company, I just need to come back home.

(Before you say anything along the lines of “I told you so,” please note that I’ve already heard this from basically everyone I have ever known, ever, so I’ll just assume you think the same thing. And the reality is, sometimes we need to make stupid decisions so we know what the right ones really are, and I think it was ultimately good for me and even for the family as Derek got to be me for a few months. He said at New Year’s that spending that quality time with the kids was the best part of his 2012. I will never get that time back, but he will always have it.)

Lose ten pounds. Work has made me a cliche. I’ve never had to watch what I eat or really even think about food other than how delicious it is, but this whole sitting on my behind all day thing is excruciating. There are moments at work when I’m dying to stand up and scream and do jumping jacks and run laps around the warehouse just to break up the monotony of sitting at the desk staring at the screen all day. When I finally get out of there, I have to sit in the car another hour to get home. The upside is I can’t wait to do dishes and clean up around the house because I need to move so badly.

Get a dog. Derek and I have a semi-agreement that when my new business is profitable and I have the time to train, we can get a dog. We’ll see how this one goes, but dog-walking could definitely help with the ten pounds.

Get to know people at church better. My natural inclination is to avoid people, but pretty much every Sunday I engage in post-church self-flagellation for not reaching out better, not talking to people I should have talked to, not being as social as I could/should be.

Continue to teach our children the faith. The other morning Jonathan spontaneously burst into a rendition of “O Come O Come Emmanuel” before breakfast. My kids know the Sunday school lessons before I even begin to teach them. This is our most important job as parents: arming our kids with the faith. Second to that, we want to teach them independence, to function on their own and to make good decisions. It’s astonishingly easy to do this if you ignore the culture, and astonishingly difficult if you don’t.

hands

Five hands (self portrait)

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January 13th, 2013
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Not blogging

I have a lot to say. That’s never a problem. I have tons of posts lined up in my mind, but time? Nada. Here’s all the stuff I want to write about:

Sophia turned six on Tuesday. Six! I realize I’m channeling my dad when I tell the kids sob stories about how it was only yesterday when they were tiny babies (and they roll their eyes just like I did) but I can’t help it. It really does feel like yesterday and I’m really in awe and disbelief and denial that Sophia has grown this big. I remember in sharp focus her smile, her big brown eyes, her sweet rosy lips and fat limbs, and now she’s six and in kindergarten and so smart and independent.

Our Thanksgiving was fabulous, squared. We’ve had this tradition since we moved to Tennessee to alternate with another family. Over the years it’s grown and grown, but I wasn’t sure if we’d be able to go this year given Derek’s new call. After we made sure no one in Maryville needed a place to go, we headed to Knoxville for a long, food-and-friend-filled day that filled my well of loneliness till the next time we get together.

My job is, as my friend Melanie described it, bipolar. There are days I’m on a Rocky Mountain-size high over how amazing it is, and days when if someone looks at me cross-eyed I could walk out and never look back, no regrets.

I am, at this very moment, talking to my family on Skype. Tennessee, South Dakota, Washington, and Russia all together. It’s bizarre, amazing, and normal all at once.

Jonathan is so totally two. He talks and talks, and he’s adorable. He says, “Mommy, I want to pick you up!” and “I’m Jon-Jon” and he insists on doing everything himself. If I get something for him, he puts it back and gets it himself. It’s both cute and infuriating, but since he’s #3, Derek and I are pretty calm overall. I remember going through this with Kate and thinking the world was ending. It didn’t. It isn’t.

I’ve decided to do all my Christmas shopping online this year. See above re: 2-year-old. Yesterday at Target he threw an average of one tantrum per aisle. His only saving grace is that, when he gets control of himself, he announces, “Mommy, I all better!”

One more Jonathan story: while I was putting groceries away yesterday, he got on my phone, loaded up Google maps, selected a restaurant in Maryville we’ve never eaten at, and wrote a review, rating it with all “Excellents” and even writing some jibber-jabber in the comments section that included the word “John.” He was about to hit submit (posting publicly as me) when I caught him.

Derek and I are on a home improvement jag. Next up: a real fireplace mantel so we can hang stockings for Christmas.

Part of the reason I have no time to blog is that I’m plotting out a new business in my few minutes’ spare time in the evenings. Serial entrepreneur here. I thought I’d welcome the break with my new job, but it turns out starting new businesses is in my bones…much to Derek’s annoyance.

Finally, a little subliminal messaging for my sisters:

 

 

 

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November 25th, 2012
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Ablaze

Derek and I are camped in front of the TV watching the election results roll in, and it’s the nail-biter the pundits were predicting. Not here in Tennessee, which always votes Republican, but in general. I’ll probably have to give up and go to bed soon, seeing as I leave for work at 6:40 a.m., but I’m predicting that Obama wins by the skin of his teeth.

This last weekend was Home Improvement Weekend at the Roberts house. I finally stained my office doors (pics to come; I still have a second coat of varnish to apply), and Derek got a little bug in his brain to build a fire pit.

…which was almost too good to be true. We’ve been talking about doing a fire pit since we bought the house–this secluded hillside space surrounded by mountain trees is the perfect location for evenings around the campfire–but it was pretty far down on my personal to-do list, somewhere after doing the fireplace and building the outdoor bar, but before replacing the windows.

But the kids came running in on Friday, fresh from Home Depot, and Sophia reported, “We were at Home Depot and Daddy has a surprise for you!”

Lovely, I thought. What kind of surprise could this be? A power tool? A can of paint and a mandate to use it? 

Well, it turned out to be the materials for a fire pit. He’d watched some videos on YouTube and was ready to put it together. Sweet.

They started out by stripping off the sod and leveling the ground. Luckily my father-in-law came over to help, and he brought some tools along.

Then, another trip to Home Depot (how do 45-minute, $100 projects manage to balloon to day-long, $250 projects every.single.time?), and they had a bunch of leveling sand to dump in and tamp down.

I was trying to run out and snap pictures while staining, and since I’ve never stained before and didn’t wear gloves, I was a bit sticky.

Luckily the girls took over the camera before I wrecked it. Next up: the stones.

Plus one cute little boy playing in the back of the car (photo by Sophia)

And some measuring and manly grunting and decision-making and cutting and building

And we’ve got ourselves a fire pit.

Extensive varnish-washing ensued on my part, and then I made Petros (chili with the fattening and delicious Southern additions of Fritos, cheese, and sour cream), which we ate camp-style by the fire, before roasting marshmallows and having Sm’ores. Oh, I threw in a green salad, but it wasn’t very popular.

Jonathan LOVED the marshmallows. He wouldn’t eat any of them, but he roasted at least a dozen. Love that kid. Kate and Sophia had more than their share as well, and since it was our inaugural  fire pit evening, I let them.

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November 6th, 2012
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Home improvement fails

I’m writing up a story for Better Homes & Gardens on what might possibly be the most beautiful home, ever. If you think looking at these eye-candy pictures is a feast for the homemaker, try seeing it all in person, in several angles and in three dimensions and from above and below. I’ve scouted dozens of homes for magazines and Edie’s is by far the most original, creative, tasteful, and comfortable I’ve ever seen.

I can’t even begin to put into words how a home like this can make you feel-and I’m writing the story about it! (Luckily, BHG has a tight framework that an analytical person like me can mold the story into, and as we talked during the interview I felt the little light bulb clicking on a hundred times with ways to present Edie’s one of a kind style in a way that women can…not imitate, but use ideas from and apply her creative principles to their own style.)

So even as I’m practically lusting over the indescribable charm and beauty that is her home, I know, if I’m honest about it, that I have not the creative eye, the time, the money, nor the inclination to have such a beautiful house. I’m into clean, neat, simple, and unadorned, although that philosophy has a bad habit of leaning into either spartan (bare walls) or neglected (clean, but not beautiful).

That said, I have a few of my own projects on a to-do list; they’re just so much less cool than Edie’s.

1. The fabric on the headboard has been dangling loose for months, and it will be such a simple job to secure it, but I never seem to connect with Derek at the right time to have him move it out so I can just DO it.

2. I’ve had the pattern for my mosaic outdoor table sketched out for–again–months, but got derailed by the move to Maryville and then the pneumonia and then a new job. I plan to get it out again this winter to work on to pass the time on those cold evenings.

3. I’m going to Home Depot next Thursday to take a “Do it Herself” course on installing tile. Since I’m planning to put in hexagon tile in the kids’ bathroom and to tile a fireplace surround in slate, this will come in handy.

4. My office doors are still unstained. Functional, but unstained. I wanted to wait until fall so I could open up the house and get the stain odor out, and here it is fall, and if I don’t do it winter will come and the project will be postponed another six months. Which means this one should technically be #1.

5. Derek found a guy to put my office ceiling back together after we got a ceiling fan installed, but I still need to go around and touch up paint on several walls and the ceiling from that project.

6. The wallpaper in the kids’ bathroom has got to go. Got. To. Go. But I’m debating whether to strip it and paint, or if I could possibly somehow install beadboard over the top of it and avoid the stripping altogether. How lovely would that bathroom look with beadboard walls and a hexagon tile floor? (Except, then I’d want to replace the gold fixtures, and while I’m at it, the entire tub monstrosity, and then the sink has to go, too. And that’s not happening.)

7. We want to build a little handmade bar on the screened-in porch with a little beer fridge underneath. I have it all planned out in my head, but … sensing a theme here? … a severe lack of time to actually do it.

8. One thing I’m trying to make happen soon: new sofa pillows. Our sofa is ok; it’s a pretty dark blue color with a nice shape, but the pillows are ugly and old. I’m trying to find coral or rust orange Euro-style square pillows, with possibly a second set with a yellow pattern, and everything I find is either too expensive or not the right color. And I can’t sew, or I would have ordered fabric long ago. But I just found this on etsy and maybe this pillow project will happen.

It would be nice to check one thing off of my list, after all.

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October 13th, 2012
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Signed, sealed, and closed

We closed on our house Thursday. It was a wild week, starting the previous Thursday when the buyers closed on their house and…didn’t have a place to live. Not sure why this didn’t occur to them before, but we let them move into our house early in anticipation of a Tuesday closing.

Monday, it poured rain. The roof started to leak. The roof started to leak through the ceiling. Derek called our roofer; no answer. Our agent gave us the name of a roofer; no answer. He finally called back and said it would run around $500. Gah.

It continued to pour rain on Tuesday, but that didn’t matter. Derek drove up to Knoxville for the closing at 10 a.m., and the title people were looking at him funny. Turns out the closing was delayed, and no one told him. Whoops.

Turns out the closing was delayed because the inspector for the buyers’ FHA loan was really drilling down into the regulations and asking for some pretty specific modifications from us, except no one told us because the buyers, decently, decided that since they were the ones getting the FHA loan the modifications should be their responsibility. Only they couldn’t get them done in time and get them inspected, so the closing had to be delayed. And then our agents crossed wires.

Once Derek found all of this out, he calmed down a few degrees, but he was pretty steaming mad at first. He’s so easy-going and hard to ruffle, so watch out if he gets mad, because it’s probably for a good reason. That’s why I hate it when he’s mad at me, because that means I’ve really screwed up.

Thursday came, and they weren’t sure until the last moment if the closing would even happen because they were waiting on final-final approval from the FHA guy, who finally came through.

So, it’s done. Odd how easy it is to buy or sell a house, really, with a few signatures and promises.

After almost eight months of us being real estate tycoons (which is a nice way of saying we were carrying two mortgages), I thought I would be relieved about getting rid of the albatross that is the old house. But it’s so final; that part of our lives is really officially over. And it was a happy time, one I’m not eager to close the door on. Two of our kids were born nine blocks down the street and were brought home as hours-old newborns. My home office, my sanctuary, is now the new owners’ bedroom (I didn’t see it but Derek did, and I’m glad I didn’t because it would have been too much).

In our old dining room.

And now, we move forward. We fix the gutters on the new house, and perhaps pick up some patio furniture on clearance for the screened-in porch. We get used to driving a distance to Kroger, the library, church…and an even further distance to get Magpies and turbinado sugar from the Three Rivers Market.

And we make memories here, in our mountain house.

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September 22nd, 2012
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It’s happening.

Remember awhile ago I mentioned we had a contract on the old house? It’s a contingency contract, meaning the buyers have to sell their house first in order for the deal to go through, and frankly we didn’t have much hope of that because we thought their house was overpriced, had been on the market a long time at that price, and the three online pictures didn’t show the house to any advantage whatsoever.

So today we hear that they’ve got a *cash offer*. I’m trying not to squeal. It’s not completely a done deal yet, but things are definitely looking up, and our closing just may happen after all.

The other thing that’s happening is a job. Remember the interview I was buying pants for? That was Monday at noon. Monday at 4 p.m., they called to offer me the job. Twenty-four hours of excruciating, nail-biting, stomach-ulcer-inducing salary negotiations later, I’m the new web content manager for a restaurant supply company. It probably sounds boring, but the job is the perfect fit for me. I’ll be creating and implementing, with my very own team of content creators, the entire content strategy for a large e-commerce site. It combines all my skills of writing/editing, marketing, and digital know-how into one sweet dream job.

The only fly in the ointment is that I have to actually put on, yanno, work clothes, and drive in to the actual workplace for awhile. They’re fine with telecommuting once all the balls are rolling, but they want face time for me to develop relationships with my team. I get that. Derek and I discussed, and he’s willing to put up with a few late dinners and take on the job of getting both girls in their shoes, lunchbags in hand, down to the bus by 7:06 a.m. for awhile. He’s excited for me. He knows I’ve been stagnating for a long time, and maybe in the back of his mind he’s thinking we’ll have more free time now that we’re not having the “what should I do with my life” conversation ad nauseum.

I’ll be spending the next week and a half tying up the loose ends of my business. This came at an excellent time, as I’ve just finished several big projects and had several more on the horizon, but nothing definite with contracts signed.

And the fact that I don’t feel any sadness about closing up shop after a decade in business says something, don’t you think? I’m sure I’ll have a breakdown some time when I’m dying to get into my sweatpants and not have to talk to anyone ever again. Yep, pretty sure that one’s coming. But overall, it might be good for me to be less hermit-like and learn to place nice in someone else’s sandbox. I’ve become the adult equivalent of the stereotypical homeschooled child who has never talked to anyone but his parents and siblings, ever. (Just kidding, Lauren.)

Seth Godin’s blog post today made me quit hyperventilating about the enormity of this decision. I love that guy.

 

 

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August 22nd, 2012
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News from around here

This week Kate started fourth grade.

Her school is big–more than 850 students in grades 4-7–but the staff has absolutely gone overboard in placing the kids in small groups, helping them navigate both the ginormous building and their own class schedules, and making sure the kids know the members of their own classes well. (This last bit has resulted in Kate complaining three days in a row about having to play icebreaker games with an annoying kid named Gareth who calls her “tall Kate.” I pointed out that she IS tall and he was merely stating facts, but she and her new friends (new friends!) have decided they can’t stand him.)

Kate also learned to navigate the bus, which picks her up at 7:10 a.m. and deposits her in front of the driveway at 3 p.m. Did I cry the first (and, oh, let’s just admit it) and second day she got on the bus? Maybe a little.

Meanwhile back at the home office, I couldn’t deal with the lack of lighting and air circulation any more, so I got myself a ceiling fan. It’s fabulous, with the exception of the five holes they had to cut into the ceiling to get access, but those will be repaired soon enough.

Tomorrow, Sophia starts Kindergarten. She’s more than ready, considering she’s already reading at a first-grade level, writing, and doing algebra. (Kidding about that last part, but the rest of it is true.) I’m excited for her, too, but there will probably be a few more tears shed after I drop her off for her reduced-hours first week. She’ll start taking the bus the following week, and Kate has already pledged to protect, watch over, and boss her to death on the way to and from school.

I’ve been looking at our landscaping and thinking lately that our yard’s best feature is certainly not the weird hillside plantings of crazy-thorny bushes that the former owners put in, but the wooded sections they left intact in the front and the back. So my new idea is to just let the yard go wild–literally. Derek’s not exactly on board yet, since we’re smack in the middle of the sort of suburbia where people diamond-mow their grass and painstakingly blow the cut grass out of the street and spend hours weeding, trimming, cutting and digging so entropy and nature don’t take over.

And then we go to the mountains, reachable by a mere 10-minute drive south, and I say, “Isn’t this lovely? Don’t you want our yard to look like this?” And Derek mumbles something about ticks and snakes, hoping to scare me off.

This month is my 35th birthday and Derek’s and my 12-year anniversary. We are going to take a romantic trip to Memphis for the anniversary (and if you’re not already laughing, you should be, because there is nothing romantic about Memphis, as far as I’ve seen) to attend the installation of our new District President, a good friend of Derek’s. I actually kind of dislike Memphis and would rather go eat at Dancing Bear Lodge in Townsend, but we’ll save that for lucky thirteen and this year enjoy a dozen years and a dozen uninterrupted hours on the road to Memphis and back.

Load the car and write the note
grab your bag and grab your coat
tell ones that need to know
we are headed north west.

 CORRECTION 8/6/12: Having just returned from the parents’ lunch at Sophia’s kindergarten, I learned that they will, actually, be learning a bit of algebra this year. So I wasn’t too far off on that after all.

 

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August 5th, 2012
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