In the late 90’s, I lived at my grandparents’ house for six or seven months. It was wonderful – I’d never really grokked them before then, not really. But living with them as an adult showed me that they weren’t unemotional but subtle, they weren’t grouchy but outspoken, they weren’t scary but fun.

I learned a lot about myself and my family during that time. It gave me perspective; I hadn’t sprung whole from the ether. I was the product and result of a family in addition to being what I’d made of myself. A lot of my faults and strengths came out of my genotype… and that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

I developed opinions I wouldn’t have had otherwise. For instance, I realized that I myself value a certain amount of emotional privacy and I don’t really think people need to spend untold hours in therapy delving through every single time they’d ever had their feelings hurt. I learned that I felt this way after my own mom came to the Hall’s house for a weekend, and left early on Sunday. When I asked her why she and her husband weren’t staying for dinner, she told me that she didn’t feel comfortable in her own mother’s house, that she felt her parents were both intolerant of emotionality and quite controlling.

I think that’s the day I realized that my mother had a relationship with her mother exactly the same way I had a relationship with my mother. It seems obvious, but I’d never really understood that before – I remembered childhood with my mom’s probably slightly synthetic rapture about “going to the grandparents’ for Christmas! Aren’t you excited?”. My mother had her own opinions and feelings about her mom! Wow.
Continue reading Things I Learned From My Mother's Mother →

Today Outlook 2002 informed me that I was supposed to clean the laundry room and entry way. I did that, sort of, but instead focused on accounting.

This meant I drove to the bank and put money in the hole, and I dropped off bills by hand to those dumbass local companies who either don’t process credit cards or who want me to pay a fee for the priviledge.

I spent two hours opening and processing mail and organizing our February bills. I keep a box a little wider than a standard envelope – it once had tangerines in it – and on each bill I write the due date and amount owed on the front of the envelope and file them by due date, then I make an index card to put in the front of the box with a list of all the bills. (This is for my husband, who sometimes doesn’t understand why I take all his money all the time. It’s worth my time to write up a visual aid. He rarely questions me, but I figure it’s got to get really old handing over your paycheck week after week after week… and I want to be able to show him that I’m paying our substatial bills and not spending his hard-earned dough on crap. Sure I buy my fare share of ebooks, but I doubt I ever spend more than $50 a month on crap just for myself unless I’m on vacation.) In the back of the box is a zippy pouch with the kind of stuff you’d normally keep in a desk: stamps, post-its, return address labels, coupon books for loans, scissors, Sharpies, etc. There’s also a box of envelopes in there. It’s basically a portable desk. Anyway, that’s probably much more than you ever wanted to know about how I, a fairly high-tech chick, processes her bills in a really low-tech way.

Next I balanced my checkbook. IT SUCKED. Remember how my Pocket PC reset itself recently? It took my checking account balance off to lost-data-land when it did that, so I had to print my last two bank statements off the web and figure out what was still uncleared, find a starting balance, and work forward from there. I think I know how much money I have. I’m usually pretty careful with receipts from debit card transactions, but you don’t get receipts from online transactions or from phoning in a payment. I’m going to try to let the account rest as much as possible to let it all shake out. (I hate not being TOTALLY IN BALANCE ALL THE TIME so much that usually when shit like this happens I just open a new account, but I’m getting too lazy even to do that any more. Snort!)

So I’ve done your basic tidying, a little dusting, a once-over of the laundry/entry area my schedule says I was to focus on today, and a bunch of tedious too-much-like-real-work bookwork.

I did NOT, you’ll be proud to learn, put the Jeep in either the pond or the ravine opposite it while driving down our treacherous ice-encrusted driveway this afternoon. I’ve been using the “back” driveway (the Adrian’s driveway) since I got the Jeep back, but today I was feeling adventurous… well, FUCK that! I was in FULL TIME FOUR WHEEL DRIVE and lost control of the vehicle going about 4 mph! That’s just too damned icy for me to think its funny.

It’s also why I’m afraid to check the gauge on the propane tank. I mean, we’re probably running low, but it’s not like it makes any difference what the damned gauge says because there’s no way in hell Double Circle (excuse me, it’s Farmer’s CoOp now) could get one of their duallies up our damned driveway anyway! Last year they refused to deliver one time because they thought the trees lining our driveway would SCRATCH their truck! (True story.)

Yeah, yeah, I know. Ice Melt. LOTS of Ice Melt.

Needless to say, I came in the back drive when I got home from my errands, and just basically slid into my parking space. I’m getting pretty good at it!

Brett made the dryer work yesterday. It was (are you ready for this?) a bad fuse. Not a blown fuse, but an intact fuse that was bad out of the box. Can you believe that?! I did three loads of laundry yesterday and it was heaven, I tell you. Sweet, warm, fluffy heaven.

I did basic kitchen maintenance.

I cooked twice – and dinner was black bean, onion, and Mexican feta enchiladas, fried hominy, refried beans, and a fantastic rice pilaf I made up.

I did surface maintenance of the living room (dust, tidy up, throw away Brett’s junk.)

I took out the garbage. (Not as trivial as it sounds. “Taking out the garbage” at my house means collecting current trash into a plastic bag and hauling it up to the dump truck and chucking it in. Since the weather’s been so muddy and shitty, I had three of those bags, plus all the shipping material from our recent Amazon.com order to carry up there in the rain.)
I put laundry away.

And I cleaned the bathroom. Which made me feel utterly overwhelmed and disgusted with my gross old home.
Continue reading I think I'm officially sick of my house →

Sunday I bought a new drier at Menard’s. We stopped for cocktails and sandwiches at the Tom-Tom Club. We went home and Brett installed the new appliance while I started a load of laundry.

We were surprized to discover that we never did have any kind of exhaust pipe or hose installed, not even when the old drier still worked. We’d both thought for sure we had that shit laying around.

But no mind! One load venting into the house – no biggie.

So when the wash was done I put it in the drier and it made the whole house smell like a laundromat and the clothes came out all warm and fluffy.

Not crunchy, like line-dried clothes.

Hooray! A drier that works! **snoopy dance**

Monday at lunch, Brett asked me if I’d dried anything yet that day. After lunch I did a load of whites and when they were done, transferred them into my new high-capacity drier…

…and it wouldn’t turn on.

I checked the fuse box, I unplugged it, plugged it back in, checked the Troubleshooting section of the manual. Everything. The thing won’t turn on.

So now I’m calling Menard’s to see if they’ll replace it. Meanwhile, my load of whites has been sitting wet for two days. Sheesh.