WoolGatherer

Consider yourself at home

The first movie I ever saw in the theater was Oliver, the 1968 musical version of Dickens' Oliver Twist. I've had a song from that film running through my head for the two weeks since I moved into the townhouse I'm renting: Consider Yourself at Home.

That's what I'm trying to do--somehow find a way to think of this strange new space as my home. It hasn't been easy so far. It's finally starting to feel familar, but there's a long ways to go before it will feel homey. (Hudson has his own misgivings, but he's starting to settling in.) To be honest, I still feel depressed and lonely each time I drive up to the house, but I think that's fading a bit.

For the first few days I kind of hated it here. But now that I've got my snazzy new home theater set up and some pictures on the walls, it's pleasant enough. Tonight I ordered an electic fireplace to add a bit of cheer and heat. I'm seriously lacking in windows, and the ones I have are drafty. Hudson will be happy to have a warm place to nap again, too.

As much as I don't feel at home here, the old house no longer feels "right" to me either. In the two weeks since Darren moved back in, I've been over there a couple times to pick up stuff. (I only go over when he's at work.) He's bought new furniture, changed the pictures on the walls. It feels and (even smells) like a stranger's home. And I suppose it is.

So if my old home is lost to me, the only option is to make this place my home.

I realized that one of my problems is that I have no happy memories in this new house yet. I need to work on changing that.

For now, Hudson and I will just snuggle on the couch, and try to consider ourselves at home.

The first of the "firsts"

Hi there. So, Thanksgiving is behind us. I had two lovely days with my family: the first on Thursday, when nearly my whole family gathered to celebrate and gorge ourselves, and then, on Sunday, when I enjoyed a second round of Thanksgiving with my sister's family.

Much as I did at the first Thanksgiving after my mom passed away in 2004, I shed quite a few tears over the holiday weekend. I couldn't help but think back to last year, when I was still so happy with Darren, even though I know now he wasn't happy with me, and the end was rushing towards us.

Probably the hardest part of the weekend was being alone while checking into a dumpy motel in my hometown on Thanksgiving night. It was a dumpy place when I stayed there last time with Darren, but at least then we had fun laughing about it before snuggling up together.

This year Darren couldn't even bring himself to reply to the email I sent him wishing him a happy Thanksgiving. I can't blame him, after some of the things I've said. But it still hurt.

I honestly did have great time with my family, but every few minutes I'd be hit by a hollow feeling, the same feeling I've had almost contantly since Darren left. I'd see everyone laughing, having a good time, and I'd ache with loss.

I know. Look forward, not back. Everyone tells me that. My family, my friends, my therapist. I tell myself that. But the holidays are loaded with memories and nostalgia. It's impossible not to look back.

Christmas is next, and that's "the big show." I'm melancholy at Christmas at the best of times, and these are definitely not the best of times.

I'm forcing myself to go through the motions, to decorate the house, at least the parts where I spend my time. I still feel hollow inside, but the lights are cheery, and I think I deserve some cheer. It turned out okay, even if I'm at 30% power.

I'm working on filling my December with events to keep myself busy and distracted. This coming Sunday I'm taking my nephews to see A Christmas Carol at the Guthrie Theater. It's probably the sixth or seventh time I've seen the play performed there, but I think it will take on fresh life for me as I watch Ian and Gavin enjoy it. I look forward to buying them cookies and hot chocolate and the intermission, outrageously expsensive as those items will be.

Looking for a new place to live is also taking up a lot of my time and attention. It's a stressful and unpleasant process. (Yes, exciting new starts, all that crap. I'm not there--it just plain sucks to leave my house.) Finding a place that isn't a complete shithole, isn't 20 miles from work, is affordable AND accepts dogs is a daunting task at best. I've come close a couple times, but in each case the home was rented before I could apply. Keep your fingers crossed.

Meanwhile, I'd really like to spend the night with a handsome man.

Falling in love again, never wanted to...

In the last week I've gone back to playing Wii an hour or more every night. That's something of a surprise. I thought my Wii fever had broken for good (apart from last year's intense 8-week obsession with LEGO Star Wars). I really hadn't played a Wii game in ages.

But then I started seeing commercials for the new Motion Plus controller's, along with other ads for EA Grand Slam Tennis.

In the last few days I've played against Pete Sampras, Andy Roddick, and Venus Williams. And I've been Roger Federer, Stefan Edberg, Björn Borg, and--best of all--Martina Navratilova! (Though I must confess, I switched her to playing righty. I can't even play fake tennis with my left hand!)

It's pretty damn cool.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have a match starting on Centre Court, Wimbledon...

An exemplary weekend

Here are a few highlights of a really enjoyable weekend.

Great times with friends

We hosted a really fun, small cocktail party on Friday night. Tasty treats, strong cocktails, and great conversation. Every week should end that way.

Too bad Hudson woke me up at 5:30, even though I didn't get to bed until 2:00 in the morning. Silly little creature...

Roger Federer finally wins the French Open

Fine--he didn't beat Nadal, but that's just how things go. The main thing is that he finally archived what Pete Sampras never could, winning the men's championship at Roland Garros.

No question can remain--he's the best ever. (And yes I cried when he won.)

I also loved watching him slip deftly between English and French during his post match comments to the crowd. Mmmm, sexy Swiss style...

Can he pull of a Wimbledon victory in a month? My feeling is yes.

A magical transformation

The once shabby little Korean restaurant near our house has been completely remodeled, taking it from being grimy but bearable place for a tasty meal to boasting a bright, clean and charming decor that makes it one of the nicest Korean restaurants I've seen. (I foresee a marked increase in my intake of pickled stinky cabbage.Consider yourselves warned...)

Anyway, it was a truly splendid weekemd.

One more day of work and then off to Chicago for a few last days with my German pals.

What's my deal, anyway??

I truly despise folding laundry.

Seriously, just thinking about it makes me angry.

I'm angry right now.

Damn angry.

I know that I'm being irrational. Few people enjoy folding clothes. (I'd say "no one" does but the web has shown as that there's every imaginable sort of sicko out there). But in the last six months I've developed some sort of new pathological aversion to creating order from the chaos of jumbled socks, towels, and undies. (Shirts I take out of the dryer while still damp and hang them up. They're the least of my worries.)

I don't mind washing the clothes. That part feels satisfyingly productive. I'm not just watching TV--I'm watching TV and washing clothes.

"Yes, but you can fold clothes while watching TV!" some might say.

Yeah, well "Some" better watch their step, or they're headed for a beat-down.

Baskets of clean laundry sit forlorn in our living room, and our neighbors, should they be inclined to peer through our windows in the wee morning hours, might at times see grown men, nakedly pawing through slowly emptying laundry baskets looking for underwear.

No one said life in the 'burbs is pretty.

Fate is forcing my hand tonight. We have guests arriving Sunday afternoon, and we're leaving Friday afternoon for two days in Wisconsin. This is my just about my last chance--I have two full baskets of laundry gazing balefully at me right now.

There is also a load in the washer, with two more to follow.

I'll be folding laundry like a motherf*cker until 11:00 tonight.

I'm going mad, I tell you.

B to the R to the U to the N to the etc.

My week is about one thing. Brunch for 60 at my house this Saturday. Expect little writing here as I scurry about preparing to make rather merry.

The tree is half trimmed. I ran out of steam about 9:00 last night.

Love it, praise it, crave it.

More from me (but not much more) anon.

Home sweet home

It was four years ago today that Darren and I moved into our house. It's the second house we've owned together, and we've been extremely happy here.

It's no mansion, but I never dreamed back when I was a Princeton grad student making $8000 a year that I would ever have a home like this.

The weird thing is that I still think of this as "the new house," even though we've lived here almost as long as we lived in our house in south Minneapolis.

We loved the liberal, slightly quirky neighborhood we lived in, just a ten minute walk from Lake Harriet, and our story-and-a-half cottage was cute and cozy.

It was also nearly 100 years old, and like all old houses, it was a case study in entropy and decline. There was something that always needed to be fixed, reattached, patched, or creatively concealed. We aren't handy in the least, and sadly, owning house didn't spur us to develop new skills in home repair.

Hudson enjoyed having a fenced yard to race about in, but Darren and I were about as keen on yard-work as we were skilled at plumbing. (Fortunately, none of neighbors really tended their lawns very well, either, so we weren't "those lazy homos with the bad yard.")

When we decided that wanted a larger newer house, staying in Minneapolis wasn't an option (unless we won the lottery), so we moved to the suburbs. The usual story, I know.

Apart from the greater prevalence of hated W stickers on SUV's, I didn't mind the change that much. It wasn't as if Darren and I had left some gritty, edgy urban existence--mostly we went to work and came home to little Hudson. On the weekends, we went out places.

That hasn't really changed. Instead of a ten minute drive to reach downtown Minneapolis, it now takes twenty minutes or a little more, and downtown St. Paul is even closer. I can deal with that to have an additional 1200 square feet and REAL closets in every bedroom.

Since we moved to a townhouse, we also eliminated the detested yard work. Ooh, and shoveling--can't forget shoveling snow when you living in Minnesota!

The week we moved into this house was incredibly stressful. Moving is always hellish, but to compound things exponentially, while we were ubpacking boxes, my mother's health was rapidly failing, and over the last weeks of August I got increasingly frequent and every more grim calls from my father about her condition.

It makes me sad that she never got to visit the house, but she did see pictures, and one our last conversations was was about whether I should buy a taller Christmas tree to take advantage of the two story ceiling in the living room. (I did, and she would have loved it.)

One of Darren's and my favorite features of the house is its location on the water. We love sitting out on the deck and watching the geese and ducks paddle past. There are often turtles, deer, and other interesting critters that stroll by to drive Hudson into bouts of insane barking.

Here's the view from our back deck. I love all the green, but I especially love the pond.

You'd hardly know we live just off a very busy four-lane street, nestled up against the interstate.

And here's the lord of the manner, wondering why Daddy is taking pictures of the house when he should be providing an expansive lap to sleep on.

The four years have really flown by, and we have loved every minute of the time we've spent here. I can't imagine why we would ever leave this house.

On the other hand... lately we have been hearing the siren call of the urban lofts along the Mississippi...

Maybe when Hudson starts college.

Why does my house smell like a pine forest?

I came home from work yesterday, exhausted and cranky, and opened the back door. 

Suddenly, I was transported to a fairytale pine forest, someplace far, far away.  Someplace with, you know, a lot of pine trees.

What the hell?

Then it hit me--that's the smell of a clean house!  The phrase "Pine-Sol Fresh" worked its way to the top of my weary brain.

My house is REALLY clean.  As in, I could cry with joy it's so clean.

It's if someone walked into my house, stole all of my dust, and left behind a Christmas-like freshness and clean surfaces as far as the eye can see. 

Not only is the dust gone, but things are so amazingly tidy.  Even Hudson's dog toys are arranged in neat little rows, and the cologne bottles on my dresser are displayed as though my bedroom was the men's department at Bloomingdales.  I'm getting a little choked up just describing it.

I did my best to sit motionless on the couch until Darren got home from work to see how well our money had been spent.  The last thing  I wanted to do was mar the perfection in any way.

Oh yeah, WG is going to like this.

~WG

Shhhh, I'm hunting wabbits!

After years of back and forth over whether or not we should hire help to clean our house, sanity and sloth (i.e. my side of the dispute) have won out, and our new cleaning woman starts this morning.

I am beyond ecstatic about this development. 

Seriously, you have no idea.

It's not that Darren was dead-set against hiring someone to tidy the many dusty corners we studiously ignore.  His argument was fundamentally sound: "There's no reason why two grown men [with no kids, I might add] can't keep a house clean." 

I agreed completely.

Unfortunately we were the two men in question. 

You see, we just don't clean.

Well, let me clarify.  We pick up after ourselves very well (no need to imagine heaps of dirty dishes in the sink, for example), but we've never done a particularly good job of removing dirt and grime that we or Hudson didn't create. 

Instead, we largely rely on having social gatherings that force us to get the house clean. Lucky for us we're damn good hosts and people adore me, so it's easy to get guests to come over. 

So, if nothing else, the public areas of our house get cleaned fairly often, if still not often enough.  It's shoddy housekeeping, but it's still win-win: we see our friends, and for a short time before and after our get-together, the house looks neat and tidy.

Our master bedroom and bathroom, on the other hand, where guests rarely tread, are a testament to the slow and steady accumulation of grunge. And don't even get me started on the thick shag carpet of dust and dog hair under and behind our bed.  (Gross, I know, but we're all friends here, right? Judge me if you must, but let him who is without grunge under his bed cast the first stone.)

In fact, the sorry state of our private quarters is such that I spent an hour yesterday erasing the evidence of our lackluster domestic hygiene. Many a dust bunny met its long-overdue demise under the lackluster suction of my under-used Eureka vacuum.

While I know that nothing in our house could possibly shock a professional cleaner, shame dictated that I slay dust bunnies before she arrives this morning.

On a completely unrelated note, the largest rabbits (hares?) I have EVER seen were loping about in a large grassy field that demarcated the Czech/Austria border.  It was 1988, and I was on a bus full of college students returning to Vienna after a long weekend in Prague.  As we waited at the border for the guards to inspect our passports and search our luggage for contraband, we noticed fifteen to twenty truly enormous rabbits watching us serenely as they ate grass and passed hraka.  They were perhaps fifty yards from our bus, so our sense of scale was quite clear.

I swear to God that these creatures were the size of Golden Retrievers.  Everyone in the bus was awestruck and horrified by the size of these "bunnies." 

My shock was such that I lacked the presence of mind to take pictures, but I promise you, I'm not exaggerating when I say a toddler could easily have ridden one of these critters like a pony at a county fair.

To this day, Darren claims I'm exaggerating when I tell this tale, but if there's anyone out there who was on that bus with me in May twenty years ago, please back me up. 

Those mofos were like something from Night of the Lepus.

Yeah, that's what we had under our bed.  Not dust bunnies.  Dust Lepuses.  (Dust Lepi?)

Well, whatever they were, they're gone.  GONE!

And they'll never be back!  HAHAHAHAHAHAAAAA!

Pleased with himself,

~WG

Undecking the halls

Well, we got the dreaded job done yesterday.  Mostly done, anyway.  The inside of our house is now 90% de-Christmased.  The dining room table is still a jumble of presents, cards, and holiday serving platters, but the tree, ornaments, candles, and other cheery Christmas sundries are safely packed away downstairs.

I was drenched with sweat by the time we had the last of the boxes stacked up in our "Christmas closet," one of my greatest luxuries.  I've lived in dorm rooms that were only slightly larger than the closet we have reserved solely for Christmas decorations.  (I miss our  old south Minneapolis neighborhood, but the little story-and-a-half cottage we lived in had almost no storage space for clothes, much less wreaths.)

There's still the outside lights to take down, but they can wait a bit longer.  January is a grim month, and a little extra light is nice as we head into the true Minnesota deep freeze.  Speaking of which, it was all of five degrees outside yesterday, and I wasn't up to losing my fingers  to frostbite while taking down strings of lights, many of which are buried under large piles of snow.

When I was growing up, undecorating the house was a job my mom always got stuck with.  (Like so many other unpleasant tasks around the house.)  Even when I was a little kid, I usually managed to be playing at friend's house when the day arrived for the house to be stripped of its cheer.  I would return home a few hours later and try to ignore the sad site of the brittle, dried out tree lying curbside to be picked up with the rest of the garbage.

During college and grad school, I always was home to pick out the tree, but by the time it came down again, I was back at Macalester or Princeton, where all I had to do was take down a few strings of lights in my dorm room.  Five minutes of work, and it was all over.

It wasn't until my last year of graduate school, in 1996, that I had my own Christmas tree, and that's when I first had to deal with the post-holiday reality of "what goes up must come down."  I didn't much care for it then, and I like it even less now that I have a big house full of decorations to stash away.

That said, it is nice to have all my furniture back where it belongs, and now Hudson can chase his wiffle ball without knocking ornaments off the tree.

The next arduous job: shedding the five pounds I've gained since Thanksgiving.  That will take more than a morning of work.  Ugh.

~WG