The Pale Wisconsinite

(That’s what she said…?)

Wake, office, paint, collapse. Repeat.

Oh I’m sorry, do you have things happening to you too? I’m too absorbed in my own life at the moment to notice. When I get home from work we rush over to the new house and paint as long as the light will allow. The movers come at 8 am on Saturday; by then we have to have the living room, master, and office fully painted and all the carpet in the living room and hallway pulled up.

…. Yeah, I’m not optimistic either. So far we have the ceilings in the living room/hallway and master painted. Nothing else. Tonight we’re aiming for second ceiling coats and hopefully the first ceiling coat in the office. I might have to start pulling carpet too. Thoughts:

+ Through this whole process we’ve encountered salespeople and professionals that have been totally honest with us. Our appliance guy didn’t try to upsell us, the paint guy turned down purchases we didn’t need, and the plumber we had in to look at the basement drain today told us flat out we didn’t need the work done and to call him if something else comes up. $150 saved! It’s easy to chalk it up to living in the Midwest, but I know it’s not exclusive. It’s just made all of this stress a little easier to bear, knowing people out there aren’t out to get me.

+ We have an account at Sherwin Williams so we got all of our paint for 30% off. Kinda proud of ourselves for that one. We probably saved a good $200.

+One-coat ceiling paint, my Aunt Fanny.

+ Who paints a ceiling lime green, anyway?

+ Seriously, all the rooms are Boxes of Color Emotion. Even the neutral surfaces are a weird biscuit color. And the living room walls are Snookie Flesh Tone.

+ If you are doing major repainting, get thee an edging tool. Once we got the hang of it, it has made everything go infinitely faster. Though I am debating taping the ceiling edges once we get to doing walls, just for insurance.

+ I am very annoyed because the bedding I wanted to buy was discontinued mere days before I made up my mind to buy it. And now NOTHING ELSE will do. Besides, do you know how hard it is to find pretty orange bedding? I have ordered a second best and we’ll see.

+ I have a very hardworking husband. Not a complaint from him as we try to accomplish this task during the last week of classes of the semester.

+ You should see the current house. Cue the banjos: the resident bunny can now officially hide in the dandeliony, weedy, shin-high front yard. If nothing else happens, we have to get that yards mowed and the brush hauled before we hand the keys back. It’s embarrassing. And the inside…. thank goodness movers don’t judge. We are totally That House on the block right now.

+ Mr. PW and I agree: it’s far more fun to buy stuff for inside the house than it is to buy the house itself. We’d budgeted for a new sofa, a new bed, a new mattress, a new washer and dryer, and some things like bedding and bookshelves, and we went on a little spree last weekend to get most of those. Why wait? I’m kind of stupidly excited about our new washer and dryer. We’re going to go from using 60 gallons of water a load to 18. That’s crazy! I’m also ridiculously hopeful about our mattress. We’re switching from inner spring to natural latex in an attempt to maybe not wake up every morning needing painkillers just to function. I’m only thirty – I shouldn’t feel this way. And Mr. PW’s only twenty-nine, and doesn’t have a chronic illness. He has even less reason. Crap Inner Spring Mattress now becomes our guest bed.

+ Which means now most of the money we have left goes to those little repairs…. like fixing the hot water heater that’s plugged into an extension cord. And those cracked rafters. And the carpet in the bathroom…..

+ I’m hoping we have enough money left over to paint the front cedar siding and the front door. We have a gorgeous color scheme in mind that could make the whole house look completely different. I’ll be sad if that doesn’t come to fruition.

So. We’re homeowners.

It was all at once an excruciating, stressful process, and a moment in time that happened faster that I could blink.

Yesterday’s closing was, in retrospect, anticlimactic; we did our final walk through, went over to the title company, signed papers for a bit, and we were done. Oh yeah, and handed over the biggest check I’d ever held in my entire life.

The seller lives out of state, so he wasn’t at the closing. It was just the selling agent, our agent, the notary public (I think that’s what she was), and Mr. PW and I. Everyone else was having fun, laughing, joking around, and I couldn’t hear any of it because inside me was a tight ball of fear and overwhelmed-ness and anger – yes, anger, I don’t know why – and I just wanted everyone to stop finding this so fucking fun, because it wasn’t fun, okay? It wasn’t. Up until the very end, when the ridiculously perky notary public chirped out “Hey! You just bought a house!” I was waiting for someone to stand up and declare that nope, the rules had changed Yet Again, and we didn’t get the house and we’re not worthy of this massive amount of debt. But somehow that never happened. We scooped up our piles of papers, hugged our realtor, and went to our favorite diner for pancakes.

I’m pretty sure I was a buzzkill for Mr. PW. He was trying to coax a smile out of me, asking me how I felt, getting me to remember how stressed I was while we were hunting, and I couldn’t. I just couldn’t feel happy or relieved or anything. I was just totally and completely numb. And exhausted. The rest of the day I could barely keep my eyes open.

It wasn’t even bad, as transactions go. Yeah, the hunting part was stressful. Until we found our house, we’d get so excited about showing after showing only to be disappointed in the actual property or even worse, being told by our realtor that there was an offer on it – mere hours before our appointment. I think we only managed to snag this one because we were literally the first people to view it, and we put an offer in within three hours. At least it wasn’t a foreclosure, we didn’t have to deal with that current form of insanity. It was so aboveboard that I really have no room to complain, objectively. But I still hated almost all of it. We actually watched some close friends of ours go through the process of buying a foreclosure – they offered in February and their closing got pushed back four times thanks to wankery by Bank of America, and only managed to close a couple of weeks before we did. They had to get a lawyer involved. It was ridiculous. I know some of you out there have had similar troubles – I’m looking at you, Emily – so I know we’re fortunate.

I’m still tired. I’m still numb. 24 hours of perspective has allowed me to be a bit calmer, lose a bit of the anger at the torturous, nervewracking process, and start planning forward for the first things to get done (hire a plumber! buy primer!) but I’m still wondering when I’ll feel like I can celebrate.

Sorry, is that a downer end to a post? Here, have a photo.

*Yawn*

Uft! Excuse me.

*YAWWWWWWWN*

Man, you guys. I’m beat today. And it’s not because of daylight savings time. I just couldn’t shut my brain off last night. You know the feeling. You’re bone tired and have been lying in bed for at least an hour but suddenly you realize you’re simultaneously wiggling your left foot, singing to yourself, running down the grocery list for the week, and coming up with a great comeback for a conversation that happened three days ago. (I can’t be the only one…)

Truth is, we’ve been doing something major that’s taking up all of my spare time and mental energy… house hunting.

OKAY, UNIVERSE. It’s out there, okay? Please don’t screw us. We were trying to keep it quiet but we keep needing to let more and more people know and so it’s really just out there. We have pre-approval and our 20% and we in theory are set to go, but my worst case scenario brain is waiting for it to all fall through.

I’d be lying if I said this was fun for me. Well, it’s a good deal of fun, but not all fun. The loan process! Holy cow, is there anything that makes you feel more inadequate as a person? And looking at houses – here, let’s repeatedly get your hopes up only to dash them like so many raw eggs upon a cold Chicago sidewalk. Houses that look sweet and cozy on the MLS listings have trees growing into the soffits, bowed walls, fist-sized holes in the drywall, tile laid on top of linoleum in the kitchen (without any appliances, of course) amateur electrical work, mold smells, and a host of other problems that make you turn on your heel and run, no matter how big that garage is or how nice the storage space in the basement is.

Or, you know, squatters. Which is what we encountered in the very first home we toured. As Mr. PW said, they looked like extras from Winter’s Bone. our realtor* cheerfully took it in stride, and when we made it to the basement where we were alone, turned to us and said “Now I encounter that kind of thing all the time, but I imagine you feel a little awkward!” Um, yes. Good thing that house wouldn’t have worked for us anyway.

Quite a few of the houses we’ve seen are actually quite nice – or could be, if we had a place to stay while we fixed them up. But we need a place that’s livable immediately – our lease is up on May 31, and we have to move before then thanks to things like finals and grading and a trip Mr. PW is taking. And of course, we need to know whether we’re staying in our current place or we’re going even earlier than that. Worst case scenario is that we could ask to sign another year lease. But we’re hoping we won’t have to do that. Did I mention our landlady is showing our place on Saturday so I’m doing the mad-rush spring cleaning thing on top of all this? I haven’t had any down time, period, in days.

Of course, my impractical brain skips right ahead from buying a house to buying things for the house – a new table and chairs, a new sofa, a king size bed, art and paint and nice things that one might find at Ikea or on Pinterest. But make no mistake – no one’s going to want to Pin this house. It’s going to be modest. That’s just where we are as a couple, and in our lives. But it would be nice to have a little place of our own, don’t you think?

*Whom I adore, and has really kept me sane. She’s been so calm and upbeat. She loves first time buyers and it shows. If you ever need a realtor in the area, let me hook you up. I’d recommend her in an instant.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

 

Whenever I’m stopped at a light and pedestrians walk in front of my car, I stomp as hard as I can on the brakes. I’m secretly terrified that if I don’t, my car will jump forward and hit someone and hurt them. This has never happened, that I am aware of. Yet I will never trust that I won’t be the one it finally happens to.

 

 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Had one of those “is this real life?” moments lately? I have.

We went to see Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy on Friday night, at the Sundance theater here in town, where, as Mr. PW said, we might luck out and get a more adult-acting audience.

Now, Tinker Tailor is a quiet movie. There’s no car chases. There’s thick British accents and a lot of names flying around. One would think that everyone would be quiet and pay attention, right?

Five minutes into the movie I hear zzzht zzzht zzzht zzzht.

For a second, I think it’s part of the movie, but for the life of me I can’t figure out what it is.

Then I hear it again. zzzht zzzht zzzht zzzht.

I look to my left where a fifty-something couple is sitting and chickie is filing her nails. Big-ass metal filer, talons out, scraping away. zzzht zzzht zzzht zzzht.

If you’re anything like me, your spine is crawling just at the description. Mr. PW and I exchanged wide-eyed “For REAL?” looks, and I glared at her for a few minutes, to no avail.

Alas, Midwestern Nice is a terminal disease, and I couldn’t bring myself to say anything to her (like “how about you maybe do that some other time?”) (‘you self-centered bitch”). I just sat there and fantasized about driving the nail file through her palm. Just before I reached my exploding point she put the file away for the rest of the movie.

On what planet do people find behavior like this acceptable? I’m stumped.


Ever experience someone else’s cluelessness? Were you able to bring yourself to do something about it?

Random thoughts from the week:

- It’s my year to catch up on old books that I ought to have read, but haven’t. I finished Nickled and Dimed this weekend (holy krap, what a read) and I’ve started in on The Handmaid’s Tale. Also on the docket this year are Ender’s Game, My Antonia, Love in the Ruins, and Another Country. My brother in law and I have started a challenge to read 20 books each this year. I suspect he will beat me. I go days without having enough time to read. Are you on Goodreads? Let’s be friends!

-Rhianna is a boring, boring singer. She’s really bad, okay? She makes me yawn. But her songwriters are fabulous. I’ve been singing we found love in a hooooooopless plaaaaace for weeks now. And now you’re singing it too.

- We have a youngest feline child who’s decided that he’s much more comfortable without his collar. We’ll put it on him and release him to play and 15 minutes later he’ll saunter up naked as a jaybird. It’s funny, until it gets aggravating. Mr. PW and I say it’s like putting a toddler to bed before your fancy cocktail party, only to find him, an hour later, cheerfully making friends in the midst of the crowd, sans pjs and diaper.

- We have two lovely friends coming to visit us this weekend, so I’ve been working to get the house in order so I’m not to embarrassed by it. I’m self-conscious because not only do they keep an immaculate house, but theirs is about four times bigger than ours. In my saner moments, I realize they’re the last people in the world who care about such things, but it’s a hard feeling to shake.

- in August we’re going to Seattle to attend our best man’s wedding. His fiancee is a Russian girl who only speaks okay English (he’s Russian too, no mail-order bride shizz here). All I can think is how much I want her to be welcomed and how I’m the only one of the four of us that doesn’t speak a lick of Russian! I’m going to be so left out of any conversations.

- I’m waiting for an exciting package from Amazon, and I can’t wait to show you what it is. It’s something I’ve been hoping for for a long time!

Do you have anything random you want to tell me about?

 

 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

This made the rounds a few months ago, but I keep coming back to it because it absolutely takes my breath away. Nature is beautiful and terrible and frightening and amazing.



Murmuration from Sophie Windsor Clive on Vimeo.


~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

So, I know it’s January, and everyone’s setting resolutions and goals, and this post is when I’m supposed to set goals too and declare that I’m Starting! Fresh! and Making! Myself! Over! and Changing! My! Life!. I have done it before, even to some success.

But this year, I just can’t. I’m not going to set myself up for failure. I’m too tired. I’m too aware of how I measure up to “normal” people – right now my goals are to sleep through the night and not poop myself in public. Am I a Crohn’s patient or a six week old baby? YOU DECIDE. Right now my mom is cringing that I’m talking about that on the internets. Sorry, Mom. I never could keep my mouth shut.

So this is the year of no resolutions. No goals. I’m going to keep my goals very close to realistic – “today I’m going to do two loads of laundry” kind of realistic.

There’s some possibly rather large things happening this year, some that I have to be vague about, sorry. I know how obnoxious that is. But, we both turn 30 this year, Mr. PW may go on a cool trip in May, we both may go on a cool trip in August, we’ve got two wonderful weddings for two very dear couples (on the same weekend in June, eep!) and both brides have asked me to do their makeup (HALP HALP HALP).

Besides that, I just want to live, day to day, take good care of my family, and not screw up too badly. That’s not unreasonable, is it?

 

Leaving you with one of my favorite moments from our subdued holidays: my lovely Papou, who’s too old to have a cat of his own but still loves them dearly, having a moment visiting with our youngest, Charlie, who obliged us by sitting still and purring in his particularly loud and rattly way, and making Papou’s day.

Hello, folks.


I hope you all had lovely holidays, whatever and however you celebrate.

I’m not going to lie. it’s been a long, sad month for us. Ten days before Christmas, Mr. PW’s stepfather was killed in a workplace accident. The past few weeks have been a blur of making arrangements and shaking hands. If you recall, Mr. PW’s father died in April. So we’ve buried two parents in eight months.

Christmas was understandably subdued. Cookies were baked, presents were exchanged. But no one’s heart was really in it.

Mr. PW was in the midst of finals week when it happened. Again. So he’s picking up those pieces. The house is a mess. We have no food in the fridge. I’m behind on bills. The stress of the past couple of weeks has thrown my Crohn’s into a tailspin.

I will see you after the New Year. I am happy to see 2011 in my rear view mirror. It’s been a long, sad, demoralizing 365 days. After the New Year we will try again, because that’s what we do.

Because it has to get better sometime.



 

 

This Veteran’s Day, I’d like to thank my husband. Not only for his service, but for what he’s taught me since then. Before Mr. PW, I thought that everyone in the military was the same – right wing, fundamentalist Christian nutcases with racist views against brown people. After Mr. PW, I’ve met enough veterans to realize that that view was incredibly sheltered and naive – the kinds of people in the military are as varied as the kinds of people in the civilian world. There are indeed some of the people as described above (just like there are in my office), but there’s plenty of people with the opposite views, and plenty of people who fall somewhere in between – and all of them are just doing the best they can under very stressful circumstances.

Also, in the past couple of years we’ve become immersed in veterans’ issues, specifically the special issues that Vietnam Veterans face, and it’s become something I feel deeply about. The fact that we may see the same – and worse – happen with our Iraq and Afghanistan vets is something that seems unavoidable yet wholly preventable.

I hope you’ll take the time to get to know a vet in your community. They’re good people, with strong hearts. My vet certainly is.