mereilin

I just remembered I don't have to get up tomorrow morning FOR ANY REASON WHATSOEVER and I am SO UTTERLY HAPPY ABOUT THIS FACT.

Subbed as a backup singer in a friend's band tonight. Sort of kind of learned to play the tambourine for the occasion. Had fun.

Colored the gray out of my hair and splurged on a flat iron. For the first time in my life I have the straight, shiny hair that I have always dreamed of. I've kept it straight now for... oh, today is a week. I suppose I should give it a rest (although I've only used the flat iron 3 times in that week). I don't really want heat damage, but I feel foolishly happy when I look in the mirror. It's kind of fun.

Huh. Fun and happy? And I'm writing in LJ?

Yesterday for a couple of glorious hours I had the house ALL TO MYSELF. My husband went out with his siblings to finish cleaning out their late father's apartment, Sadie went to a friend's house for a movie date, and Dan left for a bike ride. I should of course have spent that time getting a jump on my Tuesday deadline, but the sun was shining and the house was quiet and I just couldn't force myself to do it.

Then Dan came home from his ride, and his friend Lindsey came with him, and the two of them spent the entire afternoon watching videos together on the Chromebook. Just before Sadie came home, her friend Jenny (Lindsey's sister) showed up on her bike, and from the time Sadie got home at 5:00 there were four of them in the living room watching videos.

Around suppertime I texted the girls' parents to ask if they wouldn't come and hang out for the evening since we already had their kids; they had some stuff they needed to finish before Monday but came over to drop off pizzas and drinks... and the kids hung out together and had pizza and microwave mug brownies until 9:30 when Jon finally got home with the car.

So yeah... I really should have used that time in the morning. But I think the fact that I didn't was the main reason I didn't mind the noise and disorder of the two extra kids all evening.

I've been mostly working this morning, and I do have this evening and all day tomorrow, so it should be okay.

In an hour or so we're all driving down to visit Jon's mother. I haven't had occasion to mention to her that I'm studying Japanese (she's a native speaker). More than trying to speak, I'm interested in having her look at my kana scribblings to see if they're actually recognizable to anyone besides myself.

And I splurged and ordered a book online called Remembering the Kanji. It got mixed reviews; some people said it was a silly parlor trick that didn't help anyone learn the language, and other people said it was the most brilliant thing they'd ever seen. I was sold when I read the preview chapter online. The premise is that if you can learn to recognize the pictures independently of learning the vocabulary -- by assigning them an English meaning that's similar in concept to the Japanese reading -- then when you encounter them again with the appropriate vocabulary you can just substitute the reading. The author noted that native Chinese speakers would do this as a matter of course, as the kanji are really Chinese characters to begin with. They just have to learn to read them differently.

So. The book should be here next week; I guess I'll be finding out for myself!

Last night I dreamed I was hugely pregnant with a baby that seemed to be actively trying to claw its way out of me. It was incredibly vivid. Perhaps this is why I hesitated to use the word "contraction" in its grammatical sense when Sadie was singing "How'm I gonna get home" at the dinner table. "Know why I said how'm, mommy?"

In other news, we had an amazing thunderstorm tear through town this afternoon just when it was time for Danny to get off the school bus. I raced up the hill in the van to find him huddled, dripping, under the overhanging roof of the kindergarten. Angel, the fifth grader who lives at the Chinese restaurant up the street, was there with him and I called them both into the van. The rain was sheeting down almost horizonally at that point, and the storm drains couldn't handle the sheer volume of water cascading down the street so it was flooded at both curbs.

A few minutes later Angel's mom arrived, dripping wet despite the umbrella she carried, and I called her into the van too and drove them both up the hill to the restaurant. It was still pouring when we headed back to the kindergarten to pick up Sadie, but it slacked off a few minutes later.

Half an hour later the sun was shining, but baseball practice was canceled anyway.

In still other news, I found a beautiful sheet of punched aluminum at the hardware store and a sheet of drywall at the lumber yard downtown, so I think I now have everything I need to do over the downstairs bathroom (except possibly the nerve, but I'll work that up shortly -- people are coming to the house on Sunday and we must have that bathroom). Everything we've done so far has basically opened can after can of worms, so it's probably understandable that I'm a bit nervous about pulling down the dropped ceiling and knocking down a wall -- not to mention finally disconnecting the ancient toilet. At the moment I'm optimistic.

I'm also ignoring a deadline, so I'd better do something about that. I'll do the bathroom tomorrow.

Or as Sadie says, "tomorrow after tomorrow."

Current Mood: procrastinatory (if it isn't a real word it should be)

I just saw my nephew's prom picture and was struck by how much he reminds me of his uncle -- the guy who 25 years ago was my first "serious" boyfriend. There's something weird about that.

In other news, I ripped up the vinyl on the bathroom floor to discover that the subfloor appears to be a 1/4 in. sheet of luaun plywood nailed right onto the existing hardwood flooring and carefully pieced around the base of the toilet bowl. This means, folks, that it's extremely likely that this toilet has been sitting on this exact spot for 75 years without so much as a bolt being removed.

I'm no longer surprised by the oddities that passed for improvements in the minds of the previous owners. Sure, there was some shock when we realized they'd removed a loadbearing wall in the living room and replaced it with a decorative sytrofoam beam. We were dismayed when we realized they'd chosen to line the shower stall with wallcovering that wasn't actually waterproof, compounding the disaster by perforating it with the nails they used to install it. This floor? So not a surprise.

It is a little exhausting, though.

Aside from that it's been a pretty unproductive day. I'm feeling the weight of the clutter again, to the point where I don't even know where to begin. I found a website that talks about how to manage clutter, and it says to begin by determining what kind of clutter-personality you're dealing with. Are you a hoarder, sure you'll never be able to replace your STUFF if you get rid of it? Or are you sentimental, and can't bear to part with it? Maybe you're the kind of person who just wants to deal with things later (whenever "later" actually comes, which is totally negotiable). Or perhaps you're a rebel, determined to live like a slob because BY GOD YOU CAN because it's YOUR HOUSE.

I'm not one of those.

I'm THREE of those, and so by God is my husband. On top of that, this week I am in PMS hell, which is contributing to the "why bother" mentality. (I suspect PMS hell is also when I notice the clutter most, which is sadly ironic.)

Oh, well, Maybe noticing it is the first step to doing something about it.

Right now, I have a bus to meet.

Current Mood: rushed

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週末

Sometimes the best you can do is to keep things from getting worse.

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December 2018

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