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  • Aging is for the weak, and everyone else
  • More short cuts
  • Smol Ketchups
  • What’s the opposite of green juice and deep breathing
  • Living through it all online
  • The Change
  • 18
  • Ok but ALSO:
  • Midlife POV
  • Influence and Dooce
  • Horse therapy
  • You can’t go home again
  • Obsolescence
  • Before and after
  • A cringe confession on friendship

Archives from 2002-2006

The fact that it’s actually dusk-dark out at 4:30 PM now instead of pitch black gives me hope that eventually these short, cold days will come to an end and once again we’ll be able to go for walks around the neighborhood and visit playgrounds and sit in the backyard and I don’t know, do anything other than rattle around our house during the post-dinner, pre-bedtime zone each day. Just about every evening there comes a time when Riley is running around yelling and Dylan is crawling around whining and everyone is kind of bored and cooped-up but there’s really nowhere to go and our house feels cramped and annoyingly full of clutter and I find myself thinking what a grind this all is, WOE.

Then eventually there are bedtimes and goodnight kisses and almost immediately my little battery light starts going booooooooop! on its way back to full charge. It is brief, my daily moment of anti-zen, but it has surely become a regular 6 PM occurrence, and I’m convinced the weather plays no small part in this shameful fleeing desire to jump in the car, abandon my family, and set up a new life in Cabo San Lucas.

I got a welcome taste of sunlight earlier when I met Ashley and her kids at Cougar Mountain Park, which is situated at a high enough elevation that the cloud cover spread all around us. It was like peering out the window of a plane:

Riley managed to trip and fall facefirst into the dirt about a thousand times while we were hiking around and spent the majority of the outing howling and/or whining, but despite his lack of enjoyment for the fresh air and blue skies it was a nice break from the unrelenting Januaryness of January.

So I’ve been mildly obsessed with this website that has archived the last statements of prisoners executed in Texas. What? Oh, don’t look at me like that, at least it’s not dolphin porn.

In those transcripts some people ask for forgiveness. Some people declare their innocence, right down to the bitter end (those are the most disturbing ones to read, because the possibility that they might not be lying? Yeesh). Most people do a sort of shout-out to God, like they’re hoping for a Get Out Of Hell Free card.

It got me thinking what I might possibly say if I were faced with imminent death and given the opportunity to grace the planet with one last statement. I suppose I’d tell my family I loved them, what else would there be to say? Well, other than “Does anyone have a kleenex? Because I just shit my pants.” Or “Don’t mess with Texas. SERIOUSLY.”

My favorite of all the final words in that macabre little collection, by the way, is this: “Okay I’ve been hanging around this popsicle stand way too long.  Before I leave, I want to tell you all.  When I die, bury me deep, lay two speakers at my feet, put some headphones on my head and rock and roll me when I’m dead.”

If you’ll pardon the lack of any sort of sensible segue from death row statements to The Remodel, I thought I’d bore the shit out of you with some photos of how it has all turned out so far, now that we’ve finally (mostly) wrapped up the other rooms.

This is our front room now, it wasn’t part of the remodel but we rearranged a bunch of stuff when we moved the TV into the new room. I can’t seem to find a good picture of how it was laid out before, but here’s one view.

We got our coffee table back out of storage, although I’m sure we’ll banish it once again when Smalltopus is at the head-bashing stage. That little blue kid’s table/chair combo came from Fred Meyer, it was cheap as hell and Riley loves it. WIN.

Here’s the dining room area now, with new IKEA bookshelf (the LINNARP model, if you’re interested) (also: LINNARP! LINNARP! Oh, it’s fun to say). That cutout into the kitchen looks sort of weird in this photo, it’s not so blatantly Testrisy in real life.

View from the kitchen into the front room.

The new living room, or family room, or den, or whatever it’s called. The room that actually has insulation and therefore isn’t freezing all winter long, that’s how I think of it. We got the sectional from Levitz; JB made that side table (he’s both handy AND profane, and that’s why I love him so).

Here’s another view from the new living room with the office entryway visible.

This is the office, which I can’t seem to photograph without making it look about three feet wide. It’s small, but not quite as small as it appears here.

One of the office windows, which looks into the background. With all its mounds of reeking dogshit lovely fall foliage.

Here’s the entire addition as viewed from the outside of the house. Not shown: the port-a-potty that is mysteriously STILL HERE.

And here’s a really crappy comparison of how the place looked when we first got it, and how it looks today. To date we have added a garage, remodeled/expanded the master bath and bedroom, added an office and a living room on the west side of the house, and remodeled/expanded the kitchen. AND NOW WE ARE DONE FOREVER AND EVER AND EVER AMEN.

We could have made do with the house as it was, but this is now a place we can easily stay in for any length of time, and believe it or not it was cheaper than buying a bigger place. We now have more storage, and we have room for both kids to have their own room while still retaining an office space. If our most recent appraisal is to be believed, the whole venture has been a success from an investment standpoint—so keep on climbing to increasingly horrifying and unrealistic medians, Seattle housing market! I hate you but I love you.

At this point, the only thing we have left to do is transform our old office into Riley’s new bedroom. So this:

. . . has to become something a little more toddler-friendly. The upside-down tables probably need to go.

But other than that, WE’RE DONE. No more contractors in the house! No more refrigerators in the front room! No more Mystery Lube! The Great Remodel Bitchfest of 2006-2007 has reached its conclusion, thank you for allowing me to complain so vigorously and annoyingly for so very very long.

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