I don't know their names, yet - these green things that are outside my back door. Plants of different varieties. Some have flowers. Purple ones. White ones. Blue ones. Some are long vine type things. Presumably, they all thirst for water. And from what I hear, morning is a good time to provide it. Before the sun rises, when the plants are waking up. I know I'm thirsty in the morning, so it makes sense that they would be, too. So this is now part of my routine - watering the plants. It's a nice way to start the day, helping keep things alive. But prolonging life for some plants means ending it for others. This morning, I pulled some of the weeds that had begun to grow since we moved in. They were beginning to take over chunks of garden real estate. Sometimes it's hard to tell the weeds from the plants. They're clever that way, those weeds. Hiding among the plants, starving them of food and water. I filled an entire kitchen bag with them. I don't have the bigger garden bags, yet. I've not had to buy those in a long time. You know, the black ones. As a kid I'd fill those things all the way up with grass clippings - five or six of them - and leave them at the end of our driveway for the trash men to take on Monday morning. They would be fat and heavy, and the plastic would get hot in the sunshine. I'm glad I only need one kitchen bag right now. I have a hose. And a spray nozzle, though I hardly use it. I don't have any of the other gardening tools, yet. Clippers, tiny shovels - objects and devices to assist me with the prune. I'm excited by the prospect of these things. My heart quickens a bit just thinking about them. Maybe I'll get a pair of heavy gloves, too. But I don't think so. I like getting my hands dirty.

link to this | comments (1) | File:  Ho_Hum 

One of the fascinating parts about moving into a house when you've always lived in apartments is the simple idea of multiple rooms. The fact that your bedroom no longer needs to double as your office. Or that your living room no longer needs to double as your dining room. All these books we have with titles like, "Living in Small Spaces" or "How to Fit 1200 Square Feet of Crap Into a Single 12' X 12' Room" are no longer as useful to us. I mean, we still have smallish rooms, but at least there are multiple smallish rooms. And a basement. And that makes all the difference. We'll keep the small-spaces books around, you know, so we can refer to them smugly and point at them and laugh from time to time. But mostly they'll be relegated to the harder-to-reach shelves.

It's hard to break old habits, though. And that might be one reason I'm currently officing in the dining room - some ingrained need to make the most efficient use of space. Or it might have to do with the fact that we don't have any dining room furniture. But if I had to take a guess, I'd say the main reason I'm officing out of the dining room instead of the room properly referred to as 'The Office' upstairs has to do with the large holes I made in the plaster walls only a day or two after we moved in.

The office walls were always a bit strange. We knew this before we bought the place. They were 'bubbly' and there was some strange particle-board wainscoting going on in there. We figured the bubbly stuff on the walls was painted-over wallpaper, and the wainscoting could probably be made a little more aesthetically pleasing with a good sanding/painting. We were partially correct about the wallpaper. There was, in fact, wallpaper on the walls. And it had been painted over. At first I thought maybe I'd just sand out the bubbles and paint from there, but then it became clear that the best thing to do would be to remove the wallpaper. There were a couple of tears in it, and when I pulled at it, I found it peeled away remarkably easily. I pulled off the old wallpaper on one entire wall in no time. It revealed a second wallpaper underneath, this one with cartoon images of Davy Crockett on it, the leftover artifact of a boy's bedroom. It was not pretty, but it had been applied to the wall much better, and I figured I could probably sand down this surface, prime it, and paint over Davy no problem. So I kept on pulling the outer layer of paper off.

That's when I discovered that the 'bubbles' and soft bits were about more than just the wallpaper. There was crumbling plaster behind this stuff. As I peeled back the wallpaper on one span of wall, I uncovered a soft spot about the size of a fist. No problem, I thought. I'd just spackle it up and paint over it. So I pulled some of the plaster out to make a neat square. But the more plaster I pulled away, the more the plaster around it crumbled. And pretty soon I had a 2' x 2' foot square hole which looked directly at wood lattice work beneath it. Hello, 1915.

I was now at the point of no return. I went on to find more 'treasures' in that wall. Creative carpentry. Patchwork from the last 90 years. Adolescent graffiti from a boy named Rich who must have lived there sometime in the 80's. On the one hand, it was strange and fascinating. On the other, somewhat macabre. There's a spookiness that comes from uncovering these remnants of people who have lived in a place before you. Perhaps it's because you don't know these people and so they seem akin to ghosts. Who was this 'Rich' kid? Where was Rich now? Was he still alive?

As I looked around the room at all this, catching whiffs of old house through my protective face mask, the realization began to sink in: this room would need more than a good sanding/painting. This room needed Work. With a capital W. Some drywalling, skim coating. Perhaps even a few carpentry repairs. Nothing too difficult, but enough to make it more than a simple weekend project. This room would need to be put 'on hold.'

And that's why I set up shop in the dining room.

At first C and I thought we might hire a contractor to do the work in the office. But this weekend we were inspired by C's cousin Alex and his father JR. Alex bought an old house in Montreal about a year ago, and they've completely gutted it and are in the process of putting it back together. It's incredible that they're doing it just the two of them (along with some help from family members.) Of course it helps that JR is an electrical engineer and Alex has a penchant for putting things together. But still. It's amazing. Of course, the downside is that since it's just the two of them, it takes more time. They've been working on the house for the past year, and there's probably at least six more months to go before Alex and his wife can move in. Luckily, they've been able to stay at JR's house until the renovations are complete.

Anyway, if Alex and JR can rebuild an entire house, C and I (and maybe some willing friends) can certainly put the walls of a room back together, eh? Pizza and beer offered to any takers.

link to this | comments (3) | File:  House 

There are several things that are currently missing in my life, both corporeal and metaphysical. Some are the result of our recent move (we still do not have the screws and bolts to put our bed back together and there's also a tape gun and a lamp that have mysteriously gone into hiding). And some are the result of a general dulling of the senses, and a waning ability on my part to put things in their proper perspective (examples here are harder to peg down). The latest thing to have gone missing (in the former realm) is my wedding ring. It's gone, gone, gone, and for the last couple of days it's been difficult to think about anything else. But let me back up, because the disappearance of my wedding ring has at least a little bit to do with the refinishing of our hardwood floors in our old apartment in DC.

We had decided the floors could use a facelift before the new tenants moved in. (I think I'll just refer to them as K&J because I don't like using the word 'tenant.' It seems kind of cold and impersonal.) Anyway, there were some cracked boards that needed repairing and it made sense to go ahead and have the entire surface redone since the apartment would be empty. So we called in Danny Hardwood Floor Company. Danny Hardwood (which isn't his real name, but I like to think it is) is more than just a floor repair man. He's an artist. We'd seen his work in another apartment in our building a couple of years ago and we had been really impressed because, well, if you'd seen the apartment before the job was done, you would have thought nothing could bring back those dead boards short of magic. And you know, who's to say there wasn't a little bit of the hocus pocus involved?

In a sea of contractors who cut corners and do shoddy work, Danny is refreshingly fastidious. He takes the kind of care with the job that you yourself would take if you had the skill and the time. He spent six days sanding and applying coats of polyurethane to our floors. Other contractors might have tried to do it in two or three to cut time and cost. But Danny knows there's only one way to do it right. He has a zen-like patience when it comes to this stuff. His rates are extremely reasonable, too, given the amount of time and effort he puts into his work. When we saw the finished product on Tuesday, we were again amazed. A neighbor in the building had his floors done at the same time by a different contractor, who spent two days on the job, and there's really no comparison. You'd almost think we had brand new floors. Between this and the new bathroom, the apartment is really the nicest we've ever seen it.

So all this stuff about the floors is a backdrop, but it's important if we're to understand the whole context of the wedding ring disappearance episode of 2007. See, having the floors refinished put us far behind schedule for getting the apartment cleaned and ready for K&J. We had originally intended to do this all over the weekend, but couldn't due to the drying polyurethane. And on top of the main things we needed to do (clean the refrigerator, stove, bathroom, windows) we now had to paint all the baseboards because one side-effect of the floor job was it left a yellow residue on them. So Tuesday afternoon, after the final coat had set from the night before, I drove down to DC and got started. C joined me that evening.

Normally, I don't wear my wedding ring when I'm doing manual labor of any kind. I also don't wear it when I'm working out or swimming. One reason is it's annoying to have on when you're doing these things. But the more important reason is it's liable to slip off, particularly when it gets wet. And wetness is something that is apt to happen when you have your hands in water, or when you're sweating.

On occasion, I find myself with my ring on during these moments when I shouldn't. And usually I mindfully and deliberately put it in a place where I will not lose or forget it. If I'm working out, I double-knot tie it to my shorts drawstring. If I'm swimming, I triple-knot tie it to my swim suit draw string. And if I've got my backpack nearby, I put it in the small inner zipper compartment. You get the picture. It's not something I care to lose and so I'm usually very conscious of . . . not losing it.

But things have been kind of chaotic lately, and my mind hasn't really been right. And so when I found myself with my ring on while sticking my hands in soapy water, cleaning the outsides of windows, and painting. I made note of it, but I never removed it. And at one point, sure enough, right around six o'clock on Tuesday evening, it even slipped right off my finger and made a loud clunk on the fresh hardwoods. C picked it up. This much I remember. Then we both laughed uncomfortably because I had been about to stick my hand outside to clean the window. And wasn't it lucky that it fell off inside instead of falling to the sidewalk below? Lucky, yes. But also not. Because that moment is the last moment I remember seeing the ring. What happened to it after that point has been erased from my memory like writing on a chalkboard. Did C give it to me and did I put it back on my finger? Did she set it on the counter for me to retrieve when I was finished? Why in the hell do I have no recollection of it after that point? These are all really good questions.

The rest of the evening was a blur. We wound up staying at the apartment until about one in the morning painting floorboards. It was raining when we left. We carried out several things, including a few bags of trash, and I deposited those in the back dumpster. We drove back to Baltimore surprisingly wide awake, our heads buzzing with paint fumes and items to complete the next day. Back at home, I unwound by gluing an arm that had come loose on my glasses. It now looks like this. Then I hit the sack around three.

We got up later that morning, had breakfast, and did some odds and ends. C decided to take the day off so we could finish up in DC. As we were walking to the car I was suddenly conscious of a lightness on my left ring finger. I stopped walking as I realized I had no recollection of seeing the ring after the point where it had fallen to the floor the night before. I went back inside and it wasn't in the normal places: beside the bed, by the sink. Panic's righteous fist took hold in my chest. And a litany of self-flagellation and abuse began to stream forth from my lips. I was a nervous ball all the way to DC. I hoped it was there, although something told me it would not be.

And it wasn't.

And it was not in any of our bags or our pants pockets. My only thought now, looking back, is that it fell off while taking out the trash. Or worse, that I actually threw it into the trash inadvertently. I keep replaying things in my mind, wishing I had done something differently. I keep trying to rationalize things and say, 'It's only an object. It can be replaced.' But it's not just an object. And there will not be another one like it, period. And whenever I try to feel good about finishing our move and being through with prepping our apartment, that ring pops into my head. And it's not the fact that it's gone that really gets to me. It's the not knowing where it is. I wouldn't mind so much if it were out of my possession but someplace known. Or even if I knew it no longer existed. That would be so much easier to deal with. For instance, if I was out in the ocean deep sea fishing - which, by the way, I've never done, so this would be a highly unlikely scenario - but still, if I was and it fell off my hand and plopped into the salty darkness, it would be gone, but I would at least know exactly where it was: In the ocean. I would have watched it disappear. And it would even be kind of cool to know that my wedding ring was carrying on at the bottom of the sea, or in the belly of a shark and maybe it would be found a hundred thousand years from now. But it kills me, the not knowing. It kills me that it just slipped away. And for all I know, it fell off right outside my building, or it's sitting in a trash heap somewhere.

My mom lost her wedding ring once. It came off in a file cabinet at work. But she didn't know this. She thought it had fallen in the trash and was gone forever. Than years later it turned up when she was sorting through that same file cabinet. I still kind of hope this will happen for me. I keep expecting I'll turn over something and find it sitting there on a counter, or underneath a piece of clothing. Then there was Julie, who lost her wallet outside of our building and it was returned to her by a considerate neighbor.

But I probably won't be so lucky, and pretty soon I'll be okay with the idea that this inanimate object has gone on to have a life separate from me and C, symbolic of something beyond our marriage. Meaningful in an entirely different way to entirely different people. And since I'm on the subject of inanimate things, our apartment is another thing that will go on to have new lives that are separate from me and C as it becomes populated by new people with their own joys and heartaches, their own loves and disappointments. It'll continue to exist and take on new meanings, and probably become the backdrop of other stories, just as it was before we even entered the picture, as it's been for the last 100 years. And it'll go on existing entirely on its own, refinished floors and all.

link to this | comments (3) | File:  Ho_Hum  Chewing  Ring 

We met Lily tonight. So beautiful. Congratulations E&M!

link to this | comments (0) | File:  Friends  Babies 

Wednesday was our big move to Baltimore. As the moving van and I were driving out of DC, there was a sudden downpour of rain mixed with frequent thunder and lightning. Some might view a thunderstorm on the day of your move as a bad omen. But I'm trying to think more positively these days. That's why now, two days later, I'm still asserting it was a great move. Damnit.

Great.

Except for a few, itsy-bitsy details:

1) As we hit the 50-295 split, I noticed the moving truck wasn't getting on the parkway to Baltimore with me. This was surprising to me since I had just gone over the directions to Baltimore with him before we left. I called him to ask what was up. He said he couldn't get on the BW Parkway with his truck because he'd get a huge fine. "But I told you we were going 295," I said. "Yeah, I didn't realize that was the same thing." In other words, he knew enough to know he could get a ticket on the BW Parkway, but not that the BW Parkway was 295. A little frustrating, but I didn't let it get to me. I had to go a little out of my way to pick up C from work so this would give me extra time to get up there before them. See? This is how we look on the bright side.

2) About 45 minutes later, I got a call from the driver. The truck, which - and this might be stating the obvious, but I want to bring the point home - was carrying all of our worldly possessions, including our bed, our spare air mattress, photos, music, memories, and a cooler full of frozen food - had broken down. According to the driver, who was speaking to me from somewhere off of 495, it probably just needed oil.

3) As it turns out, the truck needed more than oil. In fact, it was so debilitated that it had to be taken back to the mover's warehouse in Sterling, VA. No passing go. No collecting $200. Directly to Sterling. And all of those possessions I mentioned earlier? They had to be transferred to another truck. A newer truck. Now I might say (if I were somebody who was prone to sarcasm) that it was a dang good idea to have taken out the 'old' truck on our DC-Baltimore move. You know, instead of the newer, more reliable one. Luckily, I never use sarcasm if I can help it. (Such a vulgar word, sarcasm, the root meaning of which is tearing of flesh.) Here's how we shed this one in a positive light: the move was so good, it had to be done twice. And besides, they promised to deliver our stuff that night in the new truck. How could we possibly be upset?

4) The crew arrived at our (empty) house around 9pm. It feels weird to move into a house under the cover of darkness. Not that it was a very 'covert' operation. I think the truck knocked most of the branches off the trees on our block. And nothing beats the sound of a growling diesel engine right outside your window on a week night. The only thing that could have possibly made us any more loud and imposing is if we set off a few fireworks to mark our arrival on the block. Naked. I think we must be off to a great start with the neighbors.

5) Two of the guys who loaded the truck in the morning did not accompany the team leader on his late-night delivery to our house. So two new guys came instead. The good thing about this was that these new guys were actually much better than the two guys from the morning. The bad thing is that the new guys knew nothing about what the two guys from the morning had done with the hardware to our furniture. (You know, all those pesky screws and bolts without which assembling something like a bed frame becomes a remarkably complicated task.) But again, let's put this in a positive light: resting the mattress directly on the floor put us closer to our new house, both in body and in spirit. Again, how could we complain about that?

6) There was no financial compensation for all the inconvenience. And we were really too tired to argue much about it. But they totally deserved the money. You know, for a job well done. We've tried calling the company a couple of times since then to express our undying love and gratitude, but they must be really busy. They're not returning our calls.

So, you see, there were just a few minor glitches. But otherwise, it was a perfect move. So if you want the kind of experience we had next time you move in the Balitmore-DC area, be sure to contact Relocation Systems in Sterling, Virginia. Ask for Wayne or Cathy. Oh, and make sure "D" is the team lead on the move. He's a true multi-tasker. He's really good at taking personal calls while he 'supervises' his crew.

link to this | comments (3) | File:  BMore 

I thought it would be interesting to jot this down from underneath the fog of a massive headache. It's crazy heavy in here. Like God playing chess with Nietzsche. Because that would be one serious chess match, wouldn't it? And ironically, this heaviness, it makes my thoughts kind of light. Like this one: a pecan half looks kind of like a squished brain. And while I'm on the subject of pecans: p'con, pee-con, or p'can? My childhood in the south leads me to pee-con more often than not. But I've been known to utter all three variations, and maybe a few others, depending on my mood. Language should be flexible, shouldn't it ya'll? Sorry . . . hon?

And . . . oh, look here, I just went to answer the phone and, well, I ripped a hole in my shorts. Not in the ass, though. But down near the end of the left leg. Down where the cuff is. Is that a cuff, that thing? I mean, a cuff - that's usually something you'd envision on a pair of pants, isn't it? Not shorts. But I guess just because it's on a pair of shorts and not on a pair of pants doesn't make it any less of a cuff, does it? Or maybe it does.

Oh, shit. This is why people ridicule blogs, people. Look carefully. IT'S ALL RIGHT HERE.

What's really troubling me isn't the correct pronunciation of pecan. Or the use of the word cuff. What's got me is the lists. And I know I wrote about this last time, but what can I say, these are some massive lists, brother. You don't make laundry with these here lists. These here are dry cleaning lists. Because lists are supposed to consist of tasks. And sure, mine's got a few of those things on it. But mostly it consists of projects. And the projects are sort of undefined, which makes breaking it up into tasks it's own task. So I try writing that one down: break project up into tasks. But making a task like that is kind of silly. I mean, where does it end? You never reach a step that you can execute without actually executing the step. Here's another one that's hard to act on: Determine timeline. When the project is undefined, and the tasks are non-existent, how does one come up with a timeline? Still, it needs to be done. So I put it down. Then there are the tasks that you hope to complete, and they just remain partially checked off. A good example here would be paint bedroom. I got this one mostly done yesterday. But not quite. So there it remains. And the others pile up on top. Making them all heavy. Like God. And Nietzsche.

Sometimes the obstacle to a really good list is that you have to make decisions before you can jot down the task. And I can be really lousy at those things sometimes. Freakin' decisions. For instance, there's the whole issue of a second vehicle. I could easily put on my list, Get truck. Because, good god, I'd love a six or seven year-old Toyota Tacoma 4x4. So I could put it down, and I could work towards that thing and eventually cross it out. But it's not on the list right now. And the reason it's not on the list right now is that in order to put it there, I would have to add a few words in front of the primary action. So it would come out reading something like this: Decide whether or not to . . . get truck. And you can't put a decision on a list. Sure people do it, but they really shouldn't. Because you're just asking for trouble. In my case, I start considering cost and affordability and weighing those things against the benefits and drawbacks, and pretty soon I've reached an impasse with myself and I'm dead center on a rickety old bridge above a huge chasm and walking to either side or staying where I am, none of it seems to matter much. They all seem like bad ideas. And so, when that happens, you have to take it off the list, and hope the answer will come to you in your sleep. Which is unlikely given the amount of that stuff you're getting these days.

But there is this to feel good about: I started this with a headache. A big one. And now it's gone. Sometimes all it takes is sitting down and jotting down some words. Even from underneath it all, writing has always helped me focus. I suppose I should learn from that. Huh. I'll add it to the list.

link to this | comments (4) | File:  Writing  Ho_Hum