The List of Humble

1.  Still can't figure out the furnace.  But at least I've turned off the thing that was interfering with my mastery of "manual."
2.  Don't know what at least 5 of my light switches do. If anything.
3. Can't figure out why half the lights in the bedroom work, and the other half don't.  Just now made the brilliant deduction to look closely at the ones that work, then see if the ones that don't work are similarly set up.  Nearly destroyed my laptop screen when this investigation led to one of the light boxes flying off the track and crashing on to the bed, where, natch, my computer sat. 
4. Learned to close computer screen before trying to figure out lights.
5. Tried to install a storm window.  It doesn't fit.  I know it's the right storm window, but I don't know if it needs to be sanded, or pounded in with a rubber mallet.  I did however purchase the correct butterfly fasteners.
6. After hesitating to put a nail or screw up anywhere, and in light of both the cold and the disturbing view of my criminal neighbour hotfooting it through my backyard, NAILED UP some blackout material over the window.  Fuck it.
7. Moved cat litterbox to what I hope will be its permanent location, with no accidents from Tallulah.  Promptly spilled juice/Perrier mix on cream carpet.

Basically, it's time to call Rent-A-Husband.  Or borrow someone else's. 

Begging the question, Will I Ever Sleep Again?

So when it's 2:46 a.m. and you hear BASH! run run run run run scuffle THUD-- and so on -- and you know it's human and you know it's your backyard...

I flicked on the motion detector light and after a suitable second of delay it glared on, and still there's scuffle THUD THUD--

and what I see, or what I can see since I don't have glasses on, is one, then two guys scrambling over the fence - the THUD is them landing on the "wood shed" on my North fence - into the yard next door and entering what I believe is the basement apartment with great speed and alacrity. 

It was like watching big human racoons for a second, messing around in the trees in the back.  There was that moment of "Omigosh Look - even though they are pests they are still Wild Animals in the City and kinda Cool to Behold."

But see, there is a perfectly good entrance that leads to that door to that apartment.  And then there was the speed. 

So I'm pretty much concluding that my immediate neighbour is a criminal. 

Hoo fucking rah.

Also, the furnace is still after me.  It's dropped to 13 degrees.  There is ice forming on the inside of the window.

My Furnace is Trying to Kill Me

I gave some good morning time - the kind where your brain is fresh and you feel alert - to reading the manual that comes with my top-of-the-line-from-Italy-don'tcha-know furnace today.  And I successfully programmed the time, and the day of the week.

Then it all went to hell when I tried to program the "comfort" and "economy" zones.  At one point I was whacking away at buttons like Homer Simpson trying to avert a nucular disaster. 

Since then nothing has worked.  Even good old reliable manual override seems to have crapped out on me.  And although I believe I have programmed the entire week, so that the furnace goes on at 6:30 a.m. and turns off at a certain time, and then does the same thing later in the day, automatically turning itself off at night when I expect to be snuggling into bed... well, all I know is the temperature now reads 16.7 celsius and it's falling.

And I didn't program that.

The word of the day is "slog"

When I was shitcanned off a job this summer, I bought myself a present with my last per diem payment.  Blew most of the wad on a beautiful ring which is kinda hard to describe, but here goes:

The ring is quite wide.  Within its top and bottom borders are four "rings" which move.  You can twist each ring separately or en masse.  On each revolving ring is the alphabet.  So you can play with the four revolving rings and make words.  Or the ring comes up with words on its own, whenever you care to look for them.

(The picture is super-blurry but might help aid you in the visualization.)  (plus it really spells slog!)

I often check for a word, and when I've found one I see if there are any others.  These become the word/s of the day - my "i ching," basically.  The day I put the bid on the house, I checked the ring after - it said "Leap."

Pretty good, right?

So today's word is "slog."  I checked for the word after I got off the phone with my ex-husband (technically not Ex, as we haven't done the divorce yet, but that's another post).  Anyhow, he still doesn't have the money he owes me for the matrimonial house.  Oh, he'll definitely have it in mid-January.  Definitely.  But this time he doesn't have it because he is waiting for his Notices of Assessment.  Which he was (years) late filing.  Which I swear he told me he had a month or so ago.  But now he doesn't.  And he can't get a mortgage without them.  Although I could have.  And other self-employed people can.  But he can't.  I guess because the bank heard how he promised to pay me the money at the end of July, SIX MONTHS AGO, and he didn't, so clearly he is a credit risk.

So that's the slog.  Part of it.  Because the other part is I'm dropping off our daughter at the Hell House in the country tomorrow afternoon, and his Not-A-Girlfriend will probably be there.  So I have to ask him about when I'm going to get my money while HorseFace is there.  Standing in my house (until he buys me out).  Which I'd happily sell to her, since she spends more time there than I do.  (And she gets to sleep over.  Which I don't.  Because it makes him feel weird.)

(Fuck, if I didn't hate that house so much I'd stay over tomorrow night just to fuck him up.)

It's weird but I feel like the supplicant here.  Somehow, he's got the power because I want the money he owes me and I have to keep going to him, over and over, asking when I'm going to get it.  And he promises he'll get it, and he never does.  It's just like being married, where he swore he'd change and I believed him and nothing ever happened.

So why do I keep believing him?

I feel like I've got no choice.  If I go the lawyer route, he doesn't have the money anyhow, although it would possibly force him to sell the Hell House - but I think I'd end up with less, because I doubt the house is worth now what it was accessed for four years ago, and it could end up taking just as long.

Christ, this is the lament of a loser.

This is a slog.

Now when you find the word of the day it has to be spelled out, no mistake - but once you've got that word locked, you get to look for other words, and if it requires a little wiggle to get a second word, or even a third, that's OK, because they are branches off the first.  The second word of the day didn't need a wiggle today, though.  To go along with slog, today we have "ibex."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpine_Ibex

It's a fancy word for mountain goat.

So here's my "i ching" read.  I am in the middle of another laborious mucky walk, but i'm built for it, baby.  I am an excellent climber and my foraging skills can't be beat.  Although we ibexes have approached extinction, we're (stamp) still (head butt) here (horn clash). 

But just for the record, tonight, my ex-husband is a dick.

Clutter and Not-clutter

My parent's home feels like a hulking lesson in what not to do.  Primarily, DO NOT HOLD ON TO THINGS.

There are things and things and things everywhere.  Although they have every "make your life easier" device known to mankind, none of them are easy to use because you have to negotiate your way past THINGS to use the device thingys.

And the basement.  Oh, the basement.  The thing that threatens to become my inheritance. The thing that makes me hope I go before they do.

I think it's gotta be 1400 square feet, at least, of stuff.  And things.  Boxes and shelves and cupboards and storage containers full of the past.  You could crush an army with this stuff.

(I think, as I write that, that they have crushed their own spirits with the very weight of it all.)

Example.  Maya wants to make an elf hat, yesterday, for handing out the Christmas presents, today.  So I knew, from previous expeditions, of a dresser that contains fabric, some of it going back to the 60s.  Pretty sure there was some Christmas fabric, even, from when Mom made stockings.

So we went downstairs, and rifled through drawers, and found fabric, and marched upstairs with it, to clear with Mom what we might use to make the elf hat.  And she was very glad when we took a pass on some lime-greenish fabric because "she still might do something with it."

The drawers in that dresser are filled with cut-out patterns.  Butterick patterns pinned to fabric, ready to go under the needle.  It's never going to happen.  But there's my Mom, thinking it might.  Thinking she better hold on, because you never know - she just might need it.

Now maybe that's hopeful.  I guess it is.  But it's a kind of madness too, to hold on to this ages-old stuff and think that it might be useful one day.  Unlike, say, in the last 39 years.

And just so it doesn't look like it's only Mom's thang, in the second drawer down I found a collection of ties.  Now I have a project that I've been saving material for... oh God, the irony - for about ten years now, I guess - I have this notion that I want to make a quilt out of ties, because I once saw a picture of a quilt made out of ties and it was bee-yoo-tee-ful.

Oh my.  How this post is biting me in the ass right now.

So I ask my Dad, can I have these ties for my quilt project?  And his very first convulsive gesture is to say No.  To hold on.  And I ridicule him a little, as I am wont to do, hopefully in fun though some days I wonder if it is simply my variation on what my mother does, which is a metastasized expression of contempt, and oh I hope that's not what I'm doing...

He does know that it's silly to hold on to these ties...  I ask why he wants to, and he says they might come back in fashion, and that's the joke that hides the truth which is that they are his past, and he wore them when he was young, and to throw them away is to throw away his very youth, and who can do that?

But he lets me take them.  Except for three.  None of them distinguishable in any way, to me, but meaningful to him.  When I ask Why these three, he has nothing specific.  Just that he liked them.  And he'll put them back in a drawer and never look at them again.  But he has to hold on.

So his stuff will become my stuff which I will hold on to with this notion that I might make a quilt one day, just as my mother might use that 39-year-old material to make an outfit for Maya.

Jesus.   I have got to go home and start throwing out more shit.

But not the ties.

I'm in... I'm out

I had just moved into my new house when the guy I'd been dating for a month broke up with me by email.

He is 47 years old. 

By. E. Mail.

47 years old, with kids.  A successful business owner and performer on the side, but this is how he handles a romance that ain't working.

In the meantime, I'd moved into the house.  A house I'd bid on, closed on, and moved into in a head-rushing 32 days.  About the same amount of time I'd been dating him.

Of course now I wonder if I've made the same error of judgement about the house that I did about him.