The Idea of Fire

Thanksgiving is a bit late this year. That is how I am going to justify putting the Christmas music in my CD player yesterday. I really should have a little more shame and not tell you that I practically cried tears of joy at the sound of Mariah Carey’s voice singing “All I Want for Christmas is You” but I am generally shameless so now the world of the interweb knows my secret.
I seriously am way more excited about putting up Christmas stuffs than I am about moving into my house. I really think I was supposed to be a 50s housewife because if I think about it, I could be very happy getting overly excited about holidays. I would spend my time concocting signature cocktails for my dinner party celebrating Christmas or Independence Day or the third Sunday in August. . . Any excuse really because if there is one thing I love as much as Christmas and party planning it has to be cocktails . . . or maybe wine.
I am also extremely excited to have a fireplace this year. I hate fires inside in fact I am not so much a fan of them outside either. Really, it’s mostly the idea of fires that I like. And I like the heat. Ok, so maybe I just hate the smoke because it gives me migraines and I also maybe don’t appreciate the special kind of unpredictability that fires possess that often results in leaping coals burring holes through things I am wearing. BUT I do love the possibility of fires and I really really love the cheese-tastic plug-in electric light up log insert thingy that came with my fireplace. Next to a gas fireplace (which is all the heat and none of the smoke and therefore a basically perfect invention) this little thing is the most awesome I could hope for. It really is the embodiment of the idea of a fire.
The other reason I am excited about the fireplace is that it has a mantel. Which is awesome if you are trying to channel a cloistered 50s house-wife because you can hang stockings on it and arrange your Italian, hand painted collectable figurine nativity set on it. And then you can plug in your fake fire, put on Nat King Cole Christmas, and read your home décor magazines while you drink hot buttered rum and wait for your hubby to get home from work.
Jesus I am the worst feminist ever.

No visuals

A few weeks ago I was vey proud of myself for fixing our digital camera. Sadly, as with many good things in life, this pride in my self-sufficiency has met an untimely end. My stubborn camera has decided it wants to be broken again. That is why you will not see pictures of week three of our home improvement epic. This is especially sad because now is when it is all coming together and starting to look like a house that people could live in. There is real paint on the walls! The kitchen has been cleaned! There are new, old light fixtures (antiques I spruced up) and even new outlets and outlet covers. I actually can go over there without thinking “what was I thinking? I will NEVER be able to move in!” Yes we have hit the rewarding stages of the process and none of it will be displayed here.
Luckily I am way more stubborn than my camera. It will eventually bend to my will and at that point you will all get a before-and-after post. I love before-and-afters. Almost as much as I love lists and by God do I love lists. In fact I am pretty sure that a post very soon will be a list of “what were they thinking” moments encountered while remodeling. Now you have so much to look forward to!

Midlife Crisis Plan

Everyone knows about my plans when I get old. I am going to get very fat and spend hours every day at the YMCA doing water aerobics. I am going to get there on the bus which I will ride for free by arguing incessantly with the bus driver over my transfers and whether or not they are expired. And on the weekends I am going to crash weddings pretending to be so-and-so’s great aunt whoever, drinking cheep wine and eating more than my share of cake (I have to stay fat somehow!) Yes this is my retirement dream. It took me years to perfect. But now I have discovered something else I must do and it will require that I not be old, fat, and possibly drunk. So you all get to be the first to know about my budding “midlife crisis plan.”


It starts with this. I am going to join The Sprockettes when I turn 40. I figure by then I will be in desperate need of pink Lycra and black fishnets. I get to be the one trying to pop the other girl's head doff using the strength of her massive rock hard thighs.

More on the disassembly of houses.

So it’s been another weekend of progress at the P-Town pad. This weekend we had help from my father-in-law and his wife plus my Mom, not to mention the usual suspects (myself, DH and the ever helpful Marrs family)
The first major accomplishment for the project . . . NO MORE WALLPAPER! Here we pose with my In-laws in the last room to be cleared of the evil plague that is wallpaper.



Do you know what happens after the wallpaper is all gone? Skim-coating. Basically a fancy word for “learn to apply plaster to your walls” Here my FIL and DH prepare to “mix it up” (the plaster that is)

And here they are actually performing said mixing.

Here is my FIL still full of enthusiasm for the plastering portion of the project, mainly because he has not yet begun to experience the fun that is skim-coating.

Here DH and FIL get down to business.



After 6 bags of plaster have been mixed and applied, DH is sent to the black hole of money and time that is Home Depot to pick up some more, where he discovers that it is just as cheep to buy pre-mixed plaster. Sigh.

Here I am applying the much easier to work with pre-mixed topping compound.

Here is DH attempting to look menacing.

This is Micah. He is helping if by helping you mean following me around asking if there is anything he can screw. Typical man.

Here the team (minus my mom who is behind the camera) takes a brake for sustenance of the Mexican variety.



Basically, we are getting pretty close to being able to apply our fancy VOC free paint. Which we still have to go buy. I don’t even really want to think about all the cupboards and baseboards and cleanings that also need to be primed and painted (and in some cases sanded beforehand) I also don’t want to think about the “office” where I took down more classy 70’s wood paneling to discover . . . well, lets just say it was not a wall as you and I know it. I also don’t want to think about the decorative wall of bricks built ON TOP OF the orange shag carpet in there. Suffice to say, the office project is on hold. Instead of focusing on all that, I will just post this picture of our Toilet Paper Dispenser.

Why yes, that is an alarm-clock-radio and a phone and you can bet your booty-licious moneymaker that it works and we are keeping it. Come visit, it will be next to the guest bed.

How to dismantle your home part 1

So the remodel has begun. That is to say, I have removed much wallpaper and not accomplished much else in the past 4 days.

This happy domestic scene just shows you how crazy we are. We are all excited about our little pink house that needs so much help. Amazing how you can love something and also want to change everything about it!

This picture represents how our life would progress living in our new house if it were to be stylistically preserved. We would have to name all of our children "Chase" regardless of gender and take to wearing dangerously high cut running shorts. It would not have been good for anyone. Taj even looks a bit frightened.

That is why we had to start tearing things apart. In this photo my Husband and his Step-dad discover the "weird black cancer causing glue-tar" that was holding our lovely wood paneling up on the wall behind the fireplace! Notice that I am standing safely behind the camera, away from the bio-toxins.
Other fun discoveries include this weird black stain.
And multiple layers (5 in some places!) of really old wallpaper!

Some of it, like this green leafy scene, would actually not have been bad if it did not cover every wall in a small room.It all had to come down.
Kind of a daunting prospect.
but in the end we have a wall full of glue and the discovery of some very nice hardwoods!
Taj, however remains unimpressed. We think he was enjoying the 70's life and may be a bit sad that the carpet full of 30 years of smells is going to be thrown out like trash. The life of a dog is a hard life indeed.

Stay tuned for the second instalment of our home improvement adventures where we learn how to skim coat and answer the question on every one's mind "will the weird water-soluble goop on our ceiling fall off when we apply our low VOC water-based Paint?"

In support of equality

I do not want to look a gift horse in the mouth. I am extremely happy that we have someone who is not Bush going into the Whitehouse in January. I am ecstatic that he is a democrat who claims to plan on addressing the state of healthcare in this country. I am in awe of the historic significance of electing a minority, a black man, to the presidency for the first time in American history. But all this happiness and hope and optimism is tainted by the ignorance, self-importance, and just plain nosy rudeness displayed by voters who assert that marriage (or even parenthood) is a narrowly defined right only to be granted to those who fit their image of right and wrong.
I know we have all heard these arguments before but I am hurt and I feel betrayed and I want to talk about it again. So here we go.
First of all, in this fine country of ours, all over the country, we have this little thing we call equal rights. And there was a historic case in which we struck down "separate but equal." Civil Unions are the poor minority schools of this equation. They are not as good and everyone knows it. So don't try to argue that gays can just get a civil union and call it a day.
Another common way to attempt to win this argument is to bring God into it. Now I make every effort to live my life in a way that brings God's goodness into the world and I am not in the least being sarcastic when I say that. Whatever or whoever God is to you, it is the same message of love and forgiveness and hope, and faith in the human spirit that drives people to and within religion. And I am not going to argue about what the bible says concerning marriage and homosexuality or whether it is to be read literally, I am simply going to make two points.
First, whatever the bible may say about the definition of marriage or about homosexuality, it says far more about love for all of humanity, and forgiveness and reserving the judgment of others for God. So whatever message you have gleaned from the bible, these important, oft repeated, overarching themes must take precedence in your life.
Second, in addition to equal rights we have something else in this country called the separation of church and state. That is why, if you are married by a member of the clergy, your officiant will name both God and the state as having separately granted them the authority to unite you in marriage. So if marriage is only a sacred sacrament to be administered and defined by God, then the state has no business giving marriage licenses to ANYONE, Gay or Straight and “marriage” should have no legal definition and remain entirely in the realm of religion.
The United Sates of America should not be in the business of dictating morality. It is a government. A secular Government which was created to allow people the freedom and responsibility of making their own moral choices. Not for their neighbors; not for their siblings; not for their coworkers, and not for their friends, but for themselves alone.
So even if you believe that homosexuality is wrong and that God gave the sacrament of marriage as a gift to bless the union of a man and a woman I do not see how that puts you in a position to legislate morality to the other citizens of your state or of this country. If the sanctity of marriage is threatened by its application to two consenting adults, then perhaps the fight should be to remove the label “marriage” from the public realm and rename the legal contract by which we recognize the commitment of two people. Because this is not about semantics, this is about rights and equality and I hope that in this, the twilight of a historic milestone in the struggle for equality, we do not lose sight of the ideals we are so proud to watch come to fruition.

Go Vote Your Ass Off

There is a whole lot of extreme voting going on out there today. Living in mellow Oregon, I voted by mail and get to sip my free cup of coffee from Starbucks and simply listen to the war stories on NPR. But seriously dude . . . 7 hour lines, camping out since 4am, rain, snow, hail . . . voting today is like being a freaking postman! And I applaud you all. Truth be known, I was feeling sorry for everyone who had to put up with going to the polling place and I was even feeling a little self important and maybe in my head there was a tiny bit of “Oregon is paradise” preachyness developing about our progressive statewide vote-by-mail system. Then I read Dr. Spoke’s ode to the neighborhood polling place and suddenly I was a little sad too. Thanks a lot Papa. I will take the shout out though as a consolation prize (I’m the kid who voted three times and was telling my grandmother how to vote at the age of 5) because we all know how much I like attention.
But really, the most exciting part of the news today so far is that the voter turn-out has been crazy-mad-bad high. It’s causing long lines and breaking machines and all sorts of madness but people are enthusiastic about voting. And that is awesome.
Now lets all hope that we continue to get awesome news all day (and tomorrow too if it comes to that) because Aarwenn can attest to the fact that I have never voted for the winning presidential candidate, and watching our guy lose last time was not pretty.
Me + Despair + Tequila = . . .
well let just hope it doesn’t come to that.

Fear of pen and paper

I decided to celebrate Halloween this year by doing the scariest thing I could possibly imagine . . . signing mortgage papers.
Seriously.
Terrifying.
Experience.
I mean I am really quite proud of myself for not fainting, barfing, screaming, crying, or really showing any overtly visible signs of the minor mental breakdown I experienced. The entire series of events seemed orchestrated to bring about my demise. First of all, my incredibly patient loan officer and real estate agent both assured me that the escrow officer would call me to schedule an appointment and that I did not need to call her. Basically this was their nice way of allowing her some peace and advising me against subjecting her to the same level of harassment out of me to which they had already become accustomed.
So I took their advice and I waited. While I waited I called each of them. I also emailed each of them. I also made my husband email them and perhaps I even pestered said husband to call them as well. I am not really such a neurotic person it’s just that things do not register in my plane of reality until they have a color-coded place on my Google-calendar. Therefore a lack of a solid appointment or even a specified day that appointment would take place, meant that I did not feel confidant the signing of our mortgage papers would ever happen.
Then, on Friday October 31st and about 11:00 the phone rang and it was our escrow officer. Now it is entirely possible that it was in my best mental interest to schedule the appointment not too far in advance of it actually occurring, thus giving me less time to stress out and increasing the chance that I would not curl up into the fetal position at the thought of that much debt and therefore be unable to leave the house much less drive to an office and appear mentally competent enough to enter into legal contracts. Yes it is entirely possible that if the escrow officer had called days in advance like I wanted her to, I would have been dragged into the office by my husband whimpering and slobbering all over myself. BUT if I could have been called perhaps, oh I don’t know, 30 min to an hour before I needed to be there? That would have been just awesome.
Instead a very cheery lady called me to find out if I “had time to come on in and sign papers” RIGHT NOW. So in a flurry of paperwork and forms of identification and phone calls to previously mentioned, incredibly patient, loan officer and real estate agent we made our way down to the title company’s office. Where we were greeted by a receptionist who offered me candy (because it was Halloween) and coffee (because the only thing in the world my nerves needed less that sugar was caffeine.) So I am sitting in the lobby vacillating between thinking that I might have some coffee because it would be comforting and realizing that I am already shaking and even decaf would probably send me over the edge into full on convulsions, when a cheerleader comes out and announces she is our escrow officer.
Yup, a cheerleader.
This annoyingly cheerful woman was so fit and thin that she was apparently able to fit into her old high school cheerleading outfit 20+ years after the pom-poms were put down. I, on the other hand, had not yet managed to do my hair, put on make-up, or even eat breakfast. Sigh. I can tell you that God is up there somewhere though because she was very efficient and thorough and we were out of there in under an hour with zero questions to take back to our real estate agent. I will however, probably be unable to attend football games due to my new phobia of cheerleaders.