| Doing and undoing |
[Jul. 12th, 2004|08:11 am]
Just me.
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One of the weird things about living on my own again is the slow realization that I can do whatever I want with the house now without consulting anyone. On the surface, this is obvious, but there's a precedent for "we always did it that way" that's hard to replace with "I want to put my cell phone charger in the kitchen, and now it doesn't matter that he hated it there". A lot of the memories of the arranging and re-arranging we did to put 2 people's stuff in a house we both moved into at the same time still remain; when his stuff left, there wasn't a "before" to return to, just empty spaces of gone-ness to fill up. One room that was primarily his stuff still is fairly barren; I haven't yet figured out what "goes" in there, other than the paintings he hated that had been stored instead of displayed.
Since he worked fewer hours than I did, he took a lot of initiative to fix and improve stuff while I was at work. I miss that a lot, and since he left, I've felt un-industrious because of all the little projects I've let slide. But this weekend, I got a lot of them done. I finally fixed the wobbling towel rack in the bathroom (broken since I bought the house in May 2003), cleared out the carpet (ripped out in August 2003 or so) that had been stored in rolls outside under a tarp, replaced the pulls* on the dresser I got off the neighbor's curb, made more progress in cleaning up/out the garage, bought reflective house number stickers for the mailbox (since "the house with the giant robot and boat in the front yard" doesn't fit well on an envelope) and sold away some unwanted CDs and LPs. And I watched a bunch of DVDs and saw Spiderman 2 as well! Lawn still ain't mowed, but hey, I'll get to that next weekend.
The dangerous thing I'm trying to control is I really want to jump into a new project (painting the bedroom is high up there) even though I haven't finished CD-ing the garage, filling in the top level of the backyard with dirt, planting flowers in the boat, or the continual find-and-replace work on my artcar. My rational voice says "paint walls in winter, go do outdoor stuff NOW while we still have summer", but then I keep eying the paint swatches when I'm at the Home Despot. I'm also tempted to take off some vacation time at work during the week and get some of this knocked out and use more of my weekend for social stuff, but Burning Man is gonna take a huge enough chunk already that I'm skitish about squandering too much at once. I'm sure I'll regret this timidity in November when I still haven't completed any of the outdoor projects AND it's another 6 months until the cold and rain go away and I can start up again.
In other news, Elzar's chewing is getting a little better. The casualties in the last week and a half are only the toilet brush (new and as yet unused) handle, the plastic vacuum cleaner attachment for corners/edges, a piece of firewood, and the drawer pull. Also, he's more comfortable being crated while I'm at work and hasn't peed in the crate in like 3 weeks. I feel we may be achieving some sort of detante.
*replaced all but the one Elzar chewed a piece out of in the 2 minutes between when I put it on the floor and left the room to answer the phone. I think it's glue-able after the slobber dries (it's wooden). |
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