Usually at lunch I head across the bridge to daycare. It’s maybe a mile and a half. Four stoplights. It takes longer than you think it should, but I get to daycare in under 10 minutes, spend 15 minutes with the boys and head back. It’s a nice interlude in my day.
On Monday, they closed the bridge for repairs. I can’t really argue. It needed it. The bridge was built in the 1800s and is made out of a metal mesh. You can see under your tires to water — by design. It wobbles when you cross it. It’s hardly confidence-inspiring. It will probably be closed for a month. Right now I have a great view of the construction and there is a very large hole in the approach to the bridge. Your stimulus dollars at work.
This is all well and good, but it makes that trip to daycare longer. This is compounded by the fact that the NEXT bridge up the river is ALSO under construction and has been for ages. This I consider to be bad planning. Finish one first THEN move on to the next bridge.
So what do I do at lunch?
My options are:
1) Walk to daycare. Tempting in the nice weather. Will take longer than the budgeted amount of time.
2) Drive to daycare. I’m trying various alternate routes to see which one is least obnoxious.
3) Use lunch to go check out preschools. This is probably what I should do instead of hanging out with my three year old peeps.
I keep deciding to do one. Then changing my mind. Then changing it again. I have half an hour until it’s time to go, and I still have no idea which one I’m going to do!
I’m working on this query that has so far taken 25 minutes and isn’t done yet. (Which would be why I’m working on it.) I wonder if it will be done before it’s time to go! Working on performance always takes forever because every time you test it, by definition it takes a long time!
UPDATE:
I walked. It was lovely. It’s about 15 minutes each way. (You can still cross the bridge on foot.)
And the query took 38 minutes and 33 seconds. While it was running I rewrote it. It now takes less than three seconds. I could probably file it down further if I spent some time on it.
So I’ve been working my way through a book about photographing children. It had a small but useful chapter on the technical stuff that cameras do. I’ve discovered my point and shoot does NOT have any manual controls for aperture — the bit where you can blur backgrounds. Given the clutter that is the normal state of my environment, that would be mighty useful. But I did discover ISO, or how not to use a flash indoors. I think some of my photos are “noisy” from having gone too high in the ISO settings, but generally I like the light better.
The bulk of my pictures are of Thane. There are two reasons for this: 1) He is a baby and therefore massively photogenic 2) He sits still, unlike his cute (if snotty) older brother.
There are also one or two pictures I just thought looked cool and so left in place.
I laugh at you, stereotype that second children have fewer baby pictures than first! Thane shall not lack for baby pictures!
I remember that at the end of summer vacation, I’d rush around attempting to do or finish all the things that I had thought about with the stretch of unbroken leisure in front of me in June. That’s sort of where I am now.
So about a week ago I looked at the downstairs bathroom and thought, “I can totally do that.” The bathroom looked dated with a poorly installed wallpaper, a medicine cabinet with plastic handles (one of which had fallen off), a non-descript wooden towel holder and a toilet paper holder that looked for all the world like a 7th grade shop project. (Let’s just say that I did similar things in 7th grade.) I thought the paint color I used for the living room would look great in the bathroom, and that I needed nothing to start but to start.
So I removed the medicine cabinet, washed the walls, slapped on some primer and was off and running.
Coat 1: the primer didn’t do enough to block the wallpaper color splatches
Coat 2: the paint color was fine for the wall tile but ALL WRONG for the floor tile.
Coat 3: I decided to retry, this time using a gray primer to truly eradicate the wall splotches.
Coat 4: I discovered that the nearly-white paint I was using totally didn’t cover the gray primer
Coat 5: Still didn’t really cover the primer, but it will have to do.
Then I Shang-hied my husband into installing the new medicine cabinet, rewiring the light (twice) installing a new light and installing the tp holder and towel bar.
As a reward, the bathroom now looks better. But my husband confessed, as I was in the bowels of the project, that he hadn’t minded it before.
Next time I decide I can just slap up a coat of paint in a day and have a trasformative effect, someone take me aside and talk sense, please?
I NEVER remember to take before pictures, and the bathroom is really tiny so these pictures are a bit questionable, but here you go!
One of the great tensions of being a person is finding balance. I have so many things I need to balance with a finite set of resources: who I am as a mother, a wife, an employee, a church member, a homeowner, a citizen. Most of these identities make demands of my time and energy. It is terribly easy to get wrapped up in those concentric circles of need and not create the space at the center that is none of those things — that person who is me. Without knowing who I am and taking care of my core, all those offshoots of my energy suffer. They need a strong, centered, joyful person in order to thrive.
But it IS hard. There are two ways I’m bad at it, and if they appear to conflict, well, maybe they do. The first problem I have is guilt. It’s hard for me to do things for me, that I enjoy, without feeling guilty for not spending that energy elsewhere. Last night, for example, I thoroughly enjoyed reading a novel. Hardly high crimes and misdemeanors. But I still feel like I should make up for this transgression in some way — work extra hard today or apologize or something. I certainly don’t feel like I have the right to read another novel this week (which I’m dying to do!) The best way I have around this is to turn a pleasure into an obligation. But the problem is that I have obligations enough. I actually enjoy (looks at list above) all of my obligations. I love being a mother. I am a delightedly happy wife. As much as is possible, I enjoy my job. I like going to church. I get satisfaction out of a newly painted wall. I take pride in being an informed citizen and exercising my responsibilities as such. It’s not that my obligations are onerous, it’s that they are tiring. But guilt is tiring, too. The time I take to renew my spirits carries a cost that it shouldn’t — a counter-productive cost at that.
The second hard thing is to really figure out what *I* want. That’s pretty easy on the scale of an evening. Heck, you can pretty much lay money that on any given evening I would enjoy doing one of the following:
*reading a book (preferably in the bathtub, especially in winter)
*watching a baseball game
*working on crafty/papery things
*goofing off online
*playing games with friends (anyone want to come play Agricola with me?)
*playing video games
There are maybe, uh, 5 nights a year I don’t want to do any of those things, and none of those nights coincide with Red Sox games.
But in a longer span context, it’s harder. What do I want to do with my career? What about continuing education? Do I ever want to go back for a graduate degree? (My problem there is that I’m not well suited to pursue my passionate hobbies — no Latin — and a graduate degree in those areas would be decidedly un-useful. But fun. I loved what I got to do in pursuit of my BA.) What sort of activities would I want to do to be healthy and active? If I had the desire and commitment to pursue a dream, I could doubtless make it happen. I just don’t know what dream that is.
This is all very long background for a revelation that’s been creeping up on me lately. The revelation is small and simple. Perhaps even anticlimactic.
I want to learn how to take good photographs.
(Waits for howls of astonishment and amazement from the crowd.)
You see, I really enjoy doing … well, this. I like to write. I think I would like to write fiction too, but I find that such a big bite to chew that I never seem well-rested enough, ready enough, prepared enough, with time enough to tackle it. But this informal, first-person, day-to-day writing and the sense of community and communication it brings are pleasant and sustainable. I write this for me, although I need the sense of audience in order to find my voice and to capture the urgency and need to report in.
But a truth I have learned about blogging is that if the words are the peanut butter, pictures are the chocolate. A well captured, well chosen picture illuminates the idea. I take literally hundreds of pictures. I took 300 this month. All of them were taken with my (quite nice for what it is) $200 point and shoot snapshot camera. I have some idea how much I don’t know about photography: shutter speed, aperture, focus, lighting, framing… there are a thousand things that go into taking a photograph that I know exist to be known, but that I do not know. These days, there are about two thousand after the photograph has been taken, but one thing at a time.
I could do something about this. I could decide to become a competent photographer. What stands in my way? Well, I’d like to take a course in it. I have taken no courses whatsoever since I graduated college. But it needn’t even be a long course. A few evenings. A long weekend. I suppose a book would do as well, but at this point in my life I think the commitment of a course would do better.
But then there’s the sticky part — the camera. Some of my friends and loved ones have real cameras. I am rather aware that they are what you might call a pretty penny. And to learn about all those fancy words above, you need a camera with, like, lenses and more than two settings.
Thus we come back to guilt. I would have a hard time justifying either the time (for classes and practicing what I’ve learned) or the expense (for classes and hardware). Justifying both seems downright greedy — but the one isn’t much good without the other. It seems like I should be happy with my point and shoot and my little blog and the myriad other things I need to do. But I so rarely can articulate what I want on any grander scale than this week or smaller scale than “at the end, looking back” that I feel as though I should take this impulse and run with it. Please mom, learn how to take better pictures!
After I had Grey, I had a tough time losing the weight. Despite nursing, it didn’t just “melt off”. It settled in for the long haul.
After a Fourth of July when I saw a picture of myself in a bathing suit, I decided that I must have an issue with my thyroid or something. I knew any doctor I approached would ask me about diet and exercise. Of course I eat a reasonable diet and exercise regularly! That couldn’t be it! But they’d want, you know, facts of something.
So I found a website, Sparkpeople.com, that helps you measure calories and exercise. For a lark I entered how much weight I wanted to lose in what amount of time. The site told me what I needed to accomplish that: namely eat 1200 – 1500 calories a day and exercise for another 500 calories worth a week (a combination of strength and cardio training). I tracked my calories for a day, not actually intending to change what I ate, until I saw how the calories added up.
I tried their recommendations for a week, and discovered I’d lost a pound or two.
And then I discovered that every week I followed the calorie and exercise guidelines, I lost a pound or two.
It took me just about three months to get back to my prepregnancy weight. It turns out iron willpower is good for something: namely for sticking with a 1200 – 1500 calorie a day diet and exercise plan. It helped that I had some internal goals around other nutrients that kept me interested. For example, my “normal” diet includes about 17 grams of fiber. My recommended fiber intake is 25 grams. I never make it, but it’s kind of fun to try.
Once I had the pregnancy weight off, I didn’t have to work very hard to keep it off. I had developed a much better understanding of what foods sink you and what foods don’t. For example, the decadent feeling 220 calories for a pack of Oreos is equivalent to two barely noticed glasses of milk. The milk is more nutritious, but I’d simply never realized how quickly something like drinking milk could add up. I tweaked my favorite drink at Starbucks so it would be only about 30% more calories than an equivalent glass of milk (the primary source of calories in it). I ate more fruits and vegetables. I paid more attention to what I ate. I didn’t go crazy — it’s not as though cake never crossed my lips in that time. No food is forbidden, it just needs to be accounted for. And even the annoyance factor of having to enter the foods helped me resist.
The two miscarriages I had actually added a few pounds (I was in no mood to work to remove weight from them). And Thane graced me with slightly more weight than Grey had.
Now, I’m not crazy. I’m also a nursing mother. As I understand it, Thane gets first dibs on my calories — my body will starve itself to provide for him. I still need to make sure I eat enough to feed us both and NOT starve myself.
I actually find it really encouraging that I have done this before. Were it not for the pregnancies, I truly believe I would’ve kept off most of that weight. I would like to weigh the same when I’m 40 and 50 and 60, instead of starting off higher and adding on the 2 – 3 pounds a year that is normal. I believe I can do it in a healthy way.
I know there are people who cannot calorie restrict healthily. I think I’ve shown that’s not my case. I know there are people who have medical or genetic considerations that make it difficult for them to lose weight. That is also not the case. I know that yo-yo dieting is counterproductive. I do not think that this is a yo-yo diet, although pregnancy sort of makes that a fuzzy issue. I have also made sure that I have enough clothes to feel good about myself at the weight I am, not the weight I want to be. It’s hard to exercise when you don’t like your body.
I have trouble finding online time when I need to take care of both boys (and not at work). Finding it while my parents were here and wacky hijinks were ensuing? Not so much.
To sum up:
*Christmas was really wonderful. I got an embarrassing proportion of the goodies.
*The after-Christmas clothes shopping was amazing. I got, uh, 4 really nice-looking sweaters (in a nice, washable fabric), 3 jeans that fit the me I am right now, a really nice skirt, a sporty (but cold) shirt, and three pairs of fun tights for much, much less money than you’d expect.
*I have now finally been to Cape Cod — all the way to P-town. I am happy to report that it’s cold. And windy.
*The living room has been repainted. It looks much better, but I’m no longer convinced it was the right color of cream. Also, the ceiling really needs to be redone, I think.
*And what goes better in a newly repainted living room than a SWEET big-screen tv, with a bonus $250 unexpected rebate due to my previous switch to Comcast? (FTW!)
*Thane is the sweetest, most kissable, best-sleeping baby in the world.
*Grey is like a barrel o’ monkeys — tons of fun with an astonishing amount of energy.
*I’m really a good cook. All the meals I made came out well, and I made a lot of tasty meals.
*I really like Avatar. It’s nice to have a tv show I’m enjoying watching with la famiglia.
*I will miss my family greatly. Sniff sniff. Imagine having to do my own dishes? And whole hours will pass without puns!
*On the other hand, it is sort of nice to have some quiet. That was in short supply with the number of adults extant more than doubled.
The new carpets have arrived and the makeover of the living room is now complete. I’d originally thought of adding color to the room by painting the walls a fairly saturated color (originally blue, but green in this scheme). With all the color we’ve introduced with the carpet and curtains, however, I suspect that would be too much and that if I repaint that blasted paneling, it should be a white or a cream. I wonder if I could paint the ceiling tiles too….
If you’ve ever met my mother-in-law, you’ll know she’s a force of nature. When she knows she’s right, she’s like water. She can overwhelm you in one great flood, or wear away at you like long, slow erosion. Fortunately, the focus of her nature tends to be home decoration, where she is (I confess) usually right.
About a year ago, we were in progress on buying this, our first house. I vowed when I moved in not to spend a lot of time or money redecorating/renovating right away, until I knew what was most important. I think I kept to that goal. We did some big structural things (hello insulation!), we renovated the baby’s room, but in terms of decoration? We’re still using some things we found on sidewalks 6 years ago.
I’m not really sure how this happened, but my mother-in-law got me started on the living room. Now, my living room is rather bland. It has a wood floor, white paneling, beige leather couches, a white carpet, white curtains and a wood ceiling. So there are three main colors: brownish neutral, white and kid’s toys. All in all, it was a rather bland room. I think her introductory drug was some throw pillows for the couches to spice it up. Then there was the chair cushions for the chairs in the dining room (same color scheme, but brown wooden paneling). The new lamp shades were really quite necessary since the old ones truly were broken. She reorganized the top of the hutch to pull out the blue accent color we’d opted for. The throws were needed to replace rather tattered ones we were given for our wedding. (Makes me feel old — that wedding gifts are old enough to need replacing. 8 years!)
Picture of the living room as it was
First, she helped me settle on a color. I thought I had settled on a color — a sort of steel blue. She said it would be a very cold color during long New England winters. I suspect she is right. So instead we went with a sort of sage or celadon with blue accents. We used some sheets as tablecloths to give big splashes of color in the dining and living rooms. We pulled it into the downstairs bathroom and kitchen with towels, rugs and potholders. Finally (and here’s the expensive part!) we have ordered new curtains (living room — may be extended to the dining room later) and carpets (dining room and living room) to complete the ensemble. We also picked out new dishes, which I’m giving a trial run before purchasing enough of.
I’ll post final pictures when the final elements arrive, but here’s how it is so far: Throw pillows are more expensive than I would've guessed, even at Target. We got a nice washable canvas tub for the toys under the tv.
You know those TLC programs where people come into your house, tell you what’s wrong in amusing language and fix it over two days with little sleeping? I get that when my mother in law comes to visit. But man, is she right! I’m very excited about a downstairs with, you know, color!
As I mentioned previously, we bought our first house a little under a year ago. There are many great things about this house. The bones are very solid. (The house is listed as being built in 1900, which is shorthand for no one knows when it was built, but probably between 1890 and 1910). The layout of the house is excellent. I love the view from the back and the town. And it’s really a pretty large house — certainly big enough for our needs.
Every room in the house is perfectly usable for what it is. Other than a sewer pipe ready to disintigrate at the slightest touch, the house really was in move in condition.
But every room in the house could also stand an update. The first two stories of the house are entirely wood-panelled with drop ceilings. Every. Single. Room. (Or was when we moved in.) Better yet, each room has a DIFFERENT drop ceiling and DIFFERENT panelling. Basically, the house was more or less redone around the time I was born. And it’s been well-maintained since, but the decor is what you might call dated.
We painted a bit when we moved in (our office and Grey’s room — beige is no color for a little boy’s room!) We actually offered on the house when I was pregnant — the same weekend we made the offer I discovered this fact. I ended up miscarrying that child, but the house was purchased with the expectation that there would be four of us living there. The second floor has three bedrooms. Our room is ok (shag carpet and white panelling!), Grey’s room we painted over the panelling. But the nursery was by far the worst and smallest of the rooms. Here’s a picture from the first time we visited the house:
A blast from the '70sAnother view -- love that closet door! It's the details that really make a room
Now, it is not true that it would be impossible to put a child in that room. However, that is not a room that speaks to me of the nurture and warmth needed for a new baby. That is a room that speaks to me of, uh, a middle aged couple putting in a den in about 1975. (It was one of four tv viewing areas in the house as they had it set up.)
So I wanted to redo it.
The easy option would’ve been a coat of paint. There’s a lot to be said of a coat of paint. Grey’s room looks really good with the coat of paint over the panelling. But the drop ceiling wasn’t in good shape. The panelling was buckling in spots. And that carpet! Carpet is really not meant to be there for 30 years, even if the room has been lightly used. Did I really want my precious little spawn learning to crawl on that carpet? No, I did not. Also, the closet door was a sin against God and man. And I wanted an overhead fan.
So you start with removing the panelling. If you remove the panelling, you MUST remove the drop ceiling, as the drop ceiling is attached to the panelling. But you need to remove the drop ceiling ANYWAY because it turns out the light fixture was held up ONLY by the drop ceiling and that’s not going to work for a ceiling fan. So we need to put up a new ceiling. But there are wires that ran under the drop ceiling, so we can’t just go back the the layer above the drop ceiling — we need to add a new layer. (Actually, we ended up removing two layers — the drop ceiling and the water damaged ceiling tiles above that. And by we I mean my husband because pregnant women do not belong on ladders doing demo in rooms that may contain lead.) And so we removed two layers of ceiling and panelling to discover the badly damaged horsehair plaster walls that were original to the house.
The room at this stage was rather amusing in it’s hideousness. But here’s the thing. There were some big holes in that plaster wall. There’s wallpaper on all of it, which is probably good since paint from the same era would likely be lead paint. This is not a wall you can work with. We need to put new drywall in the entire room. That’s not actually the bad part. The bad part is that makes the room 1 inch smaller in every dimension (.5 inch drywall on all the walls). Unless you have redrywalled a room, you may never look at the trim in a room — inside and around the windows and doors and on the baseboard.
Thank heavens my husband got laid off about this time. (He got another job right away — but ended up with 2 weeks off.) He did what software engineers do when confronted with a hardware problem: he ordered about 8 books off Amazon, googled each problem and basically did a crash course in drywalling, painting and trim. He did an amazing, astounding job.
First, the ceiling. He added firring strips (strips of wood) to the ceiling, cursing roundly because the studs were elusive and had a tendency to disappear halfway through the ceiling. This was to create room to run the wires under the new ceiling. Then he and a friend and a rented contraption attached the new drywall on the ceiling to the firring strips. He cut a hole where the light fixture was to go. (Yeah, to add to the fun, lighting was an issue for the entire first half of the project — right from demo!)
Then we had a debacle getting the right drywall for the walls. This resulted in a whole heap of re-measuring and recutting. The studs in the walls were no more cooperative in their locations, once we had the drywall in place, either. Then taping and mudding. Remember — this includes the ceiling. Then priming. (I finally get to start helping around this point.) Finally, we get to paint the whole thing — ceiling and walls and closet. You start to feel like you’re almost done.
You are laughably wrong. The hardest part is yet ahead. But wait! You can’t do it yet. Because you need to put the new carpet in before you put the new trim in, or it won’t work measurement-wise. The room lived in this state for many a week before the carpet went in. (Lowe’s did the installation — we have no complaints with that whole process. It wasn’t nearly as expensive as I expected, either.)
New carpet, painted walls, light fixture in place… done, right?
No, there is yet the trim.
Did you know each window has 8 pieces of trim? (4 on the inside and 4 on the outside?) And moreover, each piece of trim has to be exactly the right length? Ambitious people even mitre it so they have nice angles. AHHAHAHAHAH!
We spent like 2 hours in the hardware store attempting to transform our careful window measurements into lengths of wood we should buy, considering all the variables like “Will it fit in our car”. Hours more went into measuring three times before sawing once, hammering into place, praying like fury, and caulking the inevitable shortcomings. Working together, it took two of us five hours to do one window. And that was without mishap. And it was the easy window.
The trim took a long time, and it was hard to do, but we perservered! And finally, after trimming, touching up, installing closet doors, trying not to get any paint on the new carpet and using so much caulk that the room would likely float if placed in water, I declared it done and ready to recieve a baby. Or at least baby furniture.
And here it is … a room for the next 30 years.
Needless to say, we are very proud of ourselves. Not bad for a pair of knowledge workers!
So A. and I are attempting to have a garden for the first time ever. We planted it with vegetables we would like to eat in March. Needless to say, we planted it again in late April. We have had more than our share of failures, and some few successes.
Not too long ago, we harvested the products of our vermicomposting experiment to enrich the soil of our vegetable garden — hoping to need no other kind of fertilizer. We spread the rich dark soil around the garden. I put some under the dahlias I was planting. We put it in the furrows between optimistically planted rows. And we proceeded to agonize over our surviving tomatos and the cucumber plant.
It rained, and then the sun shone strong and welcoming for a week. I went out one day and lo! There were squash seedlings all over the place! Now, we had planted yellow squash, zucchini and cucumber throughout our garden. None had really deigned to grow more than one or two pale seedling. And now, I surmised, my wicked, evil nemesis Mr. Squirrel had wrough havoc on my garden by stealing my seeds by night, and then hiding them in the ground. Little did Mr. Squirrel know that removing them from their designated location and planting them in another did not prevent them from growing! And gazing at the riot of seedlings skirting my dahlias, figured that Mr. Squirrel, in addition to being evil, was also lazy. He preferred ground that had recently been disturbed. And I went throughout my week cursing the name of Squirrel.
The next weekend, I was weeding the garden, and I decided to move some of the squash plants. There were too many too close together, and looking rather sad around my dahlia. I pulled one up, and prepared to replace it in the ground. There, at it’s base, was a seed. It was not a zucchini seed. It was not a cucumber seed. It was not a yellow squash seed. No, my brethren, it was… a pumpkin seed.
We had planted no pumpkins.
And then the light went off over my head. Mr. Squirrel, while a vile perpetrator of many evils, was not responsible for this one. No. I was. It had not occurred to me that my wormies, in turning food garbage into rich black earth, might leave untouched the seeds of the leavings I had given them. All these plants strewn about my garden sprouted from seeds remaining in the vermicompost.
The best part about this, from my perspective — watching the squashes grow — is that I have no idea what is growing, other than that it will be tasty. We have put into our worm bin butternut squash, pumpkins, cucumbers and yellow squash. We may have put in other sqaush remnants that I don’t remember. Each plant may be a different kind of squash, or they may all be the same. The plants are vigorous (they are well fertilized, recall!), and will likely at some point in the summer reward me with fruit. And only then will I know what it is I inadvertantly planted in my garden.
And that is the exact kind of surprise I like best.
My Truant Pen 