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After two weeks in our new house, here’s what we have unpacked: the kitchen the master bathroom Here’s what we’ve accomplished in terms of all the work that needs to be done in the kitchen (spackling, priming, painting the walls, painting the trim, painting the ceiling): painted the built-in so I’d have a place for all my cookbooks. Here’s how this makes me feel about life: AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH. I always thought that the reason my housekeeping skills were a little on the sloppy side was that I am a working mom. In the past, I’ve been known to go to bed, not only with the dishes undone, but the dishes still sitting on the table where we left them, with the dirty and half-full-of-now-spoiled-and-no-good-for-leftovers dinner on the stove. It turns out that being a modern working woman with too many things to do and not enough time to do them has nothing to do with it. The reason my housekeeping was sloppy is that it COULD be sloppy. I could leave crumbs on the counter and not worry that they would be replaced by mouse droppings in the morning. Women of the olden days weren’t BETTER housekeepers–they were SCARED housekeepers. And nothing motivates you to clean the kitchen spotlessly like an army of mice waiting in the shadows. I went to the University of Washington, where giant class sizes are the norm. For all classes outside of my major, I went through college with the following philosophy: you can either go to class or do the readings. It is a waste of time to do both. This was, by and large, a massively successful philosophy. In fact, it only let me down twice. In the first case, I ended up with a 1.7. I had been turning in my homework religiously, but since I never went to class, I didn’t know until I showed up for the midterm that I’d been using the wrong textbook. All of my homework was wrong, since it was all for completely different questions. That was also the quarter I barely made it through Latin 102 in spite of the fact that I was meeting with the professor every week before the test and the passages he would hand me to go over WERE THE SAME PASSAGES ON THE TEST THE NEXT DAY. Also that quarter? I had started dating a handsome young distraction named Nicolas. 😉 The second failure of my otherwise brilliant philosophy was in my final quarter of college. I had mono, was in charge of the “Joint Service Review”–the big annual event for all three ROTCs on campus (Air Force, Army, and Navy), and was getting married in a month. It was for some basic appreciation of architecture course, and there were something like 800 people in the class. It was crazy easy. I knew the material well and I was 4.0-ing the class. All I had to do was look at my book for about an hour every few weeks, show up for the test the next day, get 100% and carry on. It was a perfect arrangement. Five tests, all evenly weighted. Until one day I had a feeling that it had been a little too long since the last test. I ran to my syllabus and sure enough…the last test had been a week and a half before. SHIT. I spent about an hour with my heart in my throat. A week and a half?! How on earth was I supposed to pass that off as anything innocent?! And getting a zero was totally not an option–it would destroy my GPA (which, after Nic graduated, I suddenly cared about again). I went to class the next day, waited until after the lecture, and approached the professor, who would have been a complete stranger even if I had been going to class for the last few weeks. I told her that I was completely mortified, but I hadn’t been to class in a few weeks and had just realized that I’d missed the last test. That I knew I didn’t deserve anything but that zero, but I knew the material and if I could just do the make-up assignment (she didn’t allow make-up tests–if you were ill and had a doctors note you had to do a make-up project) I would love to accept some kind of modified grading so that 100% on the project would equal 50% on the missed test. She gave me the make-up assignment. And at the end of the year when I looked up my grades do you know what it said? Architecture 120 – 4.0. (This story still makes Nic super mad. And it is still one of my greatest college triumphs.) I thought of that today while I was driving because I am at my most over-extended. It’s making those college days look like a cake walk. And even as I beg clients for forgiveness over their missed deadlines or skipped emails, the tests I will most want to make-up are the ones no one can repeat. As I look back on this fall, there’s no forgiving professor to fudge a little and write: Mothering – 4.0. The kitchen floors were replaced today. Or I should say over-placed, since the original linoleum is now just underneath the new stuff. I celebrated by making dinner from scratch (clam chowder) and chocolate cakes with Will. Later this week we will also say goodbye to the royal blue counters!
I was feeling pretty good about the whole thing–starting to feel at home, starting to feel like I didn’t need to wipe down every surface every 5 seconds with chlorox wipes, starting to feel like maybe I could let Will eat a cookie without panicking that the crumbs would bring on the mouse invasion when I saw a gray blur out of the corner of my eye scurry under the oven. Of course, it was very fast and it was out of the corner of my eye, so I can’t be SURE that it really was a mouse (or even a gray blur). After all, we haven’t caught a mouse in almost a week. And there hasn’t been a dropping to be found. So maybe it was a mouse, and maybe it was a figment of my imagination. Either way, I finally carved out a little time for a Halloween themed project!
(ETA: the cake was an uber simple boxed chocolate cake with powdered sugar added to the top using these stencils from Macys. The witch one is the cutest but it was bigger than the house one and didn’t quite turn out right for us.) 😀 That cake totally rocks (recipe pretty please?). Super mama! And get rat-tack. It’s heavy duty stuff that you have to sign for at the hardware store, and you would have to put it places where Will couldn’t get at it. But with the number of mice you have (by the sounds of things!) it may be the only thing that works. Can’t wait to see the kitchen with it’s new floor and counters 🙂 Love it! Adore the pictures of Will the photographer! And the cakes look fabulous!! One of the things we were very excited about in our move was to get away from our neighbors. There’s the homeschooling family of 7 across from us whose children are overly fond of dressing up in chamo and playing militia up and down the street, the teenage girl next door who, while an amazing playmate for Will, can be a little overbearing, and the neighbor to our right who gives hobo a new name. Phrases like “ugh–what are her ferrel children doing now?” were not so much uncommon in our house. So of course today when I went to meet our renters and have them sign their lease, the woman’s very first question had to be: “Why did you move? There aren’t any crazy neighbors you’re running away from, are there?” Oh crap. I’ve only known the woman for three minutes and I’m already throwing out lies. We DID want to get away from our neighbors. I laughed to cover up my panic. “Oh no–we just wanted a bigger house. Everyone here is really nice–no psycho killer neighbors.” (Notice how carefully I steered away from “crazy” and instead went for “psycho killer.” Crazy neighbors we have. Psycho killers, not so much.) Then she mentioned that she’s not really big into the whole neighbor thing and prefers to be left alone. Danger, Will Robinson. She’s going to HATE her closest neighbor. I’m pretty sure come October 12th at 5:00pm EST we’ll find her combing the streets of Black Forest, looking for an isolated farmhouse of her own. For the last week, our thermostat has been set to 65 degrees, all day long. I first noticed that this might be a problem when Will voluntarily began wearing clothes. The next hint was when Nic said he couldn’t wait to run some errands so he could “go sit in the car where it’s warm.” This morning, I left the house early to photograph a birth, but it was a false alarm so I have a few hours to kill before my next shoot. The logical thing would have been to come home and shower. But I didn’t want to come home where it is cold. I wanted to go to Starbucks and sit there with my laptop and the free heat. I came home and bumped the thermostat to 67 degrees. Fueling this heat nazi behavior is the fact that last year, the gas bill for this house in January was $320. Last year was a MILD winter. The worst part of it is that I have no idea what they were doing–they might have been paying a small fortune to keep the house at 62…and they might have been cranking it up to 75 and walking around in their underwear all day. I can surmise that they didn’t have window coverings from the lack of brackets around to hold them up, but you really never know for sure–maybe they spent the entire winter with the windows boarded up with triple layers of blankets to hold in the heat.. But I’ve decided that it doesn’t matter. 65 degrees is too darned cold for this family, and if we have to stop eating out to afford the luxury of not wearing scarves indoors, so be it. Traci – do you have a wood burning stove in this house? 65/67 is definitely too cold. 🙁 We’ve got a fireplace downstairs, but it’s currently surrounded by boxes. 🙂 We’ll definitely be using it though!! You are SO your dad’s daughter! He’d rather be warm and starving than cold and fed. Thanks for the laughter! |
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Kelly - Yeah I tried that whole, either read the text or go to class thing once. And yeah I did manage to pass that class…squeaking by with a C…but definitely failed the second course in the series as I had no background! Stupid Chemistry classes…
I mean…yeah Chemistry (as am off to teach a class of it myself right now…)
thebighouseinthelittlewoods - Yeah–the “outside of your major” component is pretty important! (Unless you happen to have a bogus major like poli sci or communications or something like that…)