Sunny

I've been feeling that little blackness on the edge of my consciousness that means if I'm not careful, a period of depression might be just around the corner. Basically, I think I'm waking up to the reality of the irresponsible hash I've made of my life. 31 with a really expensive education but no saleable skills or experience. I'm really afraid that no one will ever hire me for anything. What I need is one of my more responsible and ambitious friends to get really powerful and hire me for something. Anything. Anyway. That's all I'm going to say about that. I'm trying really hard to avoid spinning out and for the most part I'm succeeding in the only way I know how, denial. It's my most potent coping mechanism and I'm employing it rather effectively so far. There's no crying. I'm not eating inordinate amounts of sugar. I've even been going to yoga and for walks on a regular basis. I'm fine. So. Lots of online games with Zach, lots of bread baking, lots of IMing rage and hate and fear at the election with Stephanie, tea and toast on a tray in bed every morning with the online newspapers while I wait for the house to warm up to 50 degrees.

And in really really excellent news, my mom will be here tonight! Falling gas prices and all sorts of rationalizations about things (I don't really need) that she would be saving postage costs on by bringing me herself have justified an extra trip this fall before the snow flies. I'm so excited! I know she was just here, but there were SO MANY other people here at the same time. This time I get to have her all to myself for a few days and I'm ridiculously excited. The weather is supposed to be fabulous most of the time she's here, into the 60s and everything! (Into the 20s at night, but still, 60s!)

EW

Remember how I was all proud of myself for putting up with mouse poop to install insulation in a crawl space, thinking it was the grossest thing I'd done? Oh the grossness just keeps going. Yesterday, on a whim, I decided to replace some nasty looking insulation above the dormer windows in my loft. It had obviously been there for 20+ years, and no one had gotten around to putting sheetrock over it, so it was pretty dusty and I just thought, you know, let's put some nice clean white stuff there. In addition to choking on dust and ancient insulation when I pulled it down, I screamed like a little girl and literally FELL OFF A LADDER when I saw at least thirty yellow jackets and half again as many flies CRAWLING on the wall where the insulation had been, daylight streaming from the seams between the siding. EW!!!! I'm still recovering from the grossness and horror of that moment.

On a much happier note, I've ascended one giant step up the ladder from trash to just plain poor with the removal of those junked cars. Someone came to take them away yesterday and it made me just plain giddy. There's still a trashy tarp-covered pen that needs to be pulled down, but I am moving on up as the Jeffersons might say.

Well, That Was Quick

Fall appears to be over for now, and winter has arrived. It hasn't gotten out of the 30s in the last couple of days, and there was even a skiff of snow on the ground when I woke up Thursday. The first few days I have to admit I was bitter. This is an unusually early cold snap, and I'm not really emotionally or physically prepared for it. Winter isn't that bad. It's just . . . I didn't think I'd still be here. I thought I would have found a real job by now, but that's not working out. (I know, I'm not exactly shocked either.) And I'm finally flat broke and busted. Remember how I was cold all last winter because I didn't get all the wood I ordered and had to be uber conscious of how much I used? Well, this winter, I didn't even order as much as I received last winter. So. I will be putting to good use all those wool socks I packed away in July. Which, you know, whatever. I still have my little spa job and that nets me enough to cover the essentials, like my Tivo and Netflix subscriptions and plenty of dried legumes and cat food. (The latter is for the cats, I promise!) This is all my own fault for being self indulgent and, let's be honest, lazy.

But before you think I'm feeling sorry for myself, I'm really not. Truth be told, it's all kind of exciting. The world economy is getting stripped down, and so is mine. I was talking to Zach about it the other day, about how I feel like I should be depressed, or anxious, but I'm not. He said he wasn't surprised, that my D.C. malaise made perfect sense, and this almost thrill in my currently reduced circumstances does as well. It's true. This is an opportunity to revel in my essential nordic-ness. To exercise frugality and simplicity and to make-do. I've got tea and books. I hand sewed a draft stopper using this fabulous and insanely cheap green houndstooth upholstery fabric I've had socked away forever. I'm embroidering gingham that I'll turn into an apron eventually. I'm poring over my expenditures, seeing where I can save. I'm looking forward to taking a thermos of tea and my snowshoes and spending hours wandering the hills around my house when winter really comes. I'm living like it's 1932. (Except for the Tivo and internet and Netflix - some of which should probably go away.) And it's all deeply pleasurable.

I've never really been able to accomplish anything until I was pushed to the wall and simply had to or the consequences would be too dire to live with. That is not an admirable trait by any means, and it's one I wish I didn't have. But, it's there. It's one of my strongest and least likely to be overcome personality traits. And it, along with my truly remarkable powers of denial and selective memory have gotten me this far in life relatively unscathed. I'm really, honestly, curious to see what happens next.

So Long Indian Summer

This weekend the reality of fall arrived. Cold, rainy, a low dark sky. For the most part my uncle and I hunkered in the living room watching DVDs. We watched the first season of Monarch of the Glen (which totally made me want to move to a castle in Scotland, until yesterday when I read this hilarious article about a family . . . who moved to a castle in Scotland), and when we ran out of that I introduced him to The West Wing. Can you believe he'd never even HEARD of The West Wing?!?! Well, I fixed that right quick.

But yesterday we did venture out for a short walk between rain storms. Isn't fall pretty?



[Sorry, for some reason blogger won't post my links, I'll try again later.]

In Which I Feel Like a Superhero for Braving a Little Mouse Poop

So remember when I said that my mom managed to get the insulation in half of the ceiling of the crawlspace beneath my dining room? You did all realize that meant that she'd left half of it for me to do, right?

A little background that I'm sure I've already mentioned, but it's easier to re-type then find a link. Originally there was a greenhouse attached to the cabin's kitchen. Due to harsh winters and complete neglect it sort of fell apart and a prior renter sort of turned it into a dining room on the cheap. I mean really cheap. The greenhouse had been dug into the ground a little bit, so to have the dining room floor match the kitchen floor, the renter left a fairly sizeable (though not sizeable enough to stand up in) storage space beneath the dining room. A storage space that is accessed by a door sawed in half. A storage space containing ZERO insulation. So, in our continuing effort to make this house more comfortable, we decided that a priority would be putting some insulation between the floor joists of the dining room. Which required spending time in the sort of storage space. Which is full of mouse poop and dust and spiders and ancient cobwebs and holy hell is it unpleasant down there. But I did it. Yesterday I donned full protective gear (including mask) and spent two hours squatting on mouse poop covered dirt floors and stapling insulation above my head.

Aren't you impressed?

I mean, I know there are worse tasks. In fact, I seem too remember my dad, about this time last year, spending a week emptying a septic tank with a shovel and a bucket in the 90 degree heat of Belize. So yes, all ickiness is relative. But this is the ickiest thing I've done in quite a while.