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This is a thoroughly boring post. It’s mostly to vent without having to bombard Sparky. He tries to respond, but when I’m on a roll like this, he doesn’t stand a chance. Mostly he gives me more ammunition. He’s at the orthodontist right now and quite frankly, he is much happier there,having his teeth pushed and pulled than being here with me. Just skip this post. Really.
So I’m on this, i dunno how to describe it… mission? to get all the household crap done and out of the way. We’ve lived here five years now and there is a ton of stuff that needed to be finished 4.5 years ago that never got addressed. Let me re-phrase that. Sparky has had a honey-do list for 4.5 years, i just got tired of reminding him.
Now, five years later, there is that list plus all the maintenance crap that needs to be done. I’ve made my master list, my wish list if you will, of all the projects I want completed right now. I do mean RIGHT NOW. Within that list I have a realistic list of what can actually, realistically get done.
For example, i need the kitchen cabinets repaired. I’ve been waiting over a year. I will wait no longer. On the other hand, i want the laundry room outfitted with lockable cabinets in preparation for I don’t know, A BABY, perhaps. I want that room baby proofed. this is not likely to happen because of budgetary reasons. However, i need to put this on the master list and attempt to get it done in order for things like the kitchen cabinets to get a priority.
The realistic list is not noted anywhere except in my brain because I have found that if Sparky gets a hold of a list, he’ll whittle it down and if he whittles anything it will not be my realistic list. Have I lost you?
Anyway, one of the items was to have the grout in the bathroom repaired and the silicon around the shower repaired. What was that? Grout and silicon? Two different substances? Oh yeah, because we have a marble floor and a glass shower. The marble floor requires grout. Grout that matches the other grout.
Now I may know more about household maintenance than Sparky, but I shouldn’t know more about it than the stone guy who came to fix it.
My very, very VERY expensive cream colored marble bathroom looks like it got hit with a discount silicon gun. Rather than using grout on the marble, he used silicon. Rather than scraping the old grout out, he applied a large amount of silicon to hide the old grout ALL OVER the entire bathroom.
I am sick over this. Positively sick.
Herr Silicon Fingers said he would come back and fix it. He’ll call today to make that appointment, but you know what? It doesn’t make me feel at all better. I’m not sure he can fix it. If he didn’t use a special, specific for marble silicon, it will have etched the stone. All I can do is wait and see.
He knows the correct way. He knew what he was doing. He does this all the freakin’ time. He just wanted to get in and get out.
And you know what? I hate that I don’t speak German well enough to make my wants and needs clear. I’m mad at him, but I’m furious with myself. No, actually, I’m furious with him. I’m furious with all the craft people who come in my gorgeous clean house and attempt to destroy it with sub par service and then charge me an outrageous amount to come back out and fix their fuck-ups.
And you know what else? I’m pissed that my Audi R8 driving neighbor parks said R8 diagonally using three parking spaces when 1. there is a parking shortage and 2. he has his OWN TWO CAR GARAGE. WTF man? I might be too old and too mature to key that car, but I’ve thought about it with wild eyes and an itchy, itchy finger.
I’m pissed that I have yet to be paid from a previous client and I’m actually going to have to sue. Called the lawyer today.
I’m pissed that every time I go to sleep I stare up at ceiling lights that were installed incorrectly and that the only way to fix it is to open the ceiling and redo the whole thing.
I’m pissed that my hardwood floors were waxed rather than sealed to make repair easier, yet the floor people repair it is so badly that we have been advised by neighbors to live with the problems, yet the machine everyone uses to re-wax the floors leaves them dull.
I’m pissed that my TV goes on and off by itself all the time. I’m pissed that my brand new external hard drive had a “mechanical malfunction” and I lost my entire iTunes library plus all my Barcelona pictures. I’m pissed that my iPod is corrupted and has to be sent in. I’m pissed that every single electrical item I touch some how fizzles, pops and goes kaput.
I’m pissed that I can’t take a bath in our bathtub because now that I’ve lost weight, I slip to the center. I’m pissed that I never sat in the bathtub before we purchased it, but then again, the 200 pounds I’ve lost did make a difference.
I’m pissed that we have marble with chalky water.
I’m pissed that I can’t have a cigarette or rather that “I don’t want a cigarette because I want to be healthy”. Fuck that, man. I’m pissed that I can’t even allow myself one because I’m in the middle of my anger-inducing hormone cycle and I don’t want to chance it. These injections are like tequila to my system. They make me want to fuck or fight and you never know which it’s going to be until the jar of peanut butter is flying towards your head. Sparky has learned to duck fast.
I’m going to go eat chocolate.
Seriously, you have to love the Bay Area. I’m not registered in San Francisco or I would so vote for this and give money to change the sign. Well worth it.
In other news around Heisse Scheisse Central, not much is going on. I spent a day on the Martha Stewart website. Then I spent three more days feeling completely inadequate. I simply do not have enough storage space to store ribbon tied guest towels. And really, do any of you have guest rooms set up like this?
Miranda is coming to stay next week and if there is anyone who would appreciate ribbon tied guest towels, it’s Mim. Maybe I could leave her bundle on her blow-up mattress in the guest room that doesn’t have an actual door.
On a more positive note, I did my 2008 treasure map last week with Tatiana.
After reviewing last year’s map, I accomplished all my goals save lose 50 more pounds. I only lost 20, but hey, I’m not complaining especially since I have quit smoking. Yeah, I know. The things i give up to have a kid. Let me tell you, I had better get pregnant soon, because I have a list as long as my arm as to what I’ve had to do for a kid and I have every intention of using said list as the kid grows up. “I gave up cigarettes, for you. Don’t you think you could put your clothes away?” If he doesn’t want me adding to it, he had better make an appearance soon.
Olli shows us that he doesn’t need orthodontics.
Today is Miss Miranda’s 21st birthday.
She’s in Barcelona with her dad and on her way to tour Scandinavia. The beast will collect six more countries and lead in our country count game. Therefore she forfeits a birthday present.
Mim will be here in Krautland in July and she and I will celebrate then, but since I’m no longer drinking and obviously not smoking, She’ll have to wait until she’s back in the states and get her drunk on with Jeff.
Just kidding.
Mim is the good kid in the family. She’s not all that interested in the alcohol part of her birthday. She’s more interested in the computer she got or the crumpler bag I’ve promised her.
I was drinking champagne and doing lines of coke at 9 am for my 21st. Jeff? I seem to recall bringing half a liquor store to his place on his 21st.
Jeff and I are kind of afraid of taking her out to bars now because she’ll actually see how “not good” in the conventional way he and I are. Oh, we are good friends with the bartenders and I have made some “good” friends and occasionally we are catagorized as “good fun!”, but we do tend to get into trouble. That will be an interesting night.
So here’s to you little sister. I love you and am so proud of the person you have become. Have a great day with your dad and know you are the most loved little sister in the world.
You know, I hate it when I fall into cliched stereotypes, but alas, what is a girl to do when the plumber happens to be incredibly hot. Like a poor man’s Viggo which I will take any day of the week. And he’s way hot in a completely different way than the incredibly hot electrician.
Unfortunately, the plumber happens to be wearing a belt.
Phew. I think the Doctor’s wife needs a cool drink. A tall drink of water…
Sigh.
Sparky, you’re a dead man!
If I can remind you, dear readers, of a non-mammalian family member here at the House of Flying Cats named Lt. Commander Evans. The Commander is a Roomba. He lives in the living room.
The Commander is awesome in almost every way. I can vacuum while I type, I can vacuum one room while vacuuming another. I can vacuum while watching the commander do his thing. This happens more than I’ll ever admit. But The Commander needs supervision when doing his thing in the living room. You know, the room in which he lives. I need to prepare the room, move the chair, move the curtains, pickup the kitchen rug because he gets caught on it. Not a problem at all if you don’t have to actually vacuum.
Remember when I was using the Roomba as a form of wake up torture?
Well, Sparky has gotten his revenge. He’s been programming the Commander to run every time he’s gone.
BEEEP beep. BEEEEP beep. Over and over because he’s stuck. The Roomba, not Sparky.
I have no idea when Sparky has time to do it. I can’t find that stupid remote. For the last three weeks, the commander has been going off just as I lay down for my secret mid-morning nap or for my secret afternoon nap.
Damn it.
Sparky asked what was going on. I flew past him, well not exactly “flew” since I over did it at the gym and can barely lift my feet. I was moving at a semi accelerated pace with chemicals in hand. I figured it was pretty obvious.
I needed to de-scale the toilet. Let me just say, my toilets have never been so clean. The water is so sparkling, the white so white… Sparky could drink out of it. Someone should and it sure as hell is not going to be me. I cleaned it. I guess the cats could if Sparky’s not up for it. But after that cleaning job, drinking is the only thing those toilets are good for now.
So, other than that the window of hard core chemical use is hopefully coming to a close shortly, I realized that this is the first time I have been home, in my house, for more than two consecutive weeks in a row since last August. August 2007.
That’s a long freakin’ time. There was a serious dust buildup on the kick boards, let me tell you.
Then there might have been the little matter of losing my wedding ring and searching the house from top to bottom to find it. I have no idea when I lost it. Perhaps it was Hamburg, perhaps it was Paris. Didn’t have it in Barcelona, that’s fur shur.
I have distinct memory of picking it up and putting it into something safe and reminding myself that I was doing that in Hamburg.
Then I forgot.
I’ve looked for it for almost a month before I told Sparky. Told, hell, I had to confess, drawing it our like taffy, every word killing me. It was awful. After the bracelet and everything else I’ve broken lately. To make it worse, he was really nice about it, the jerk. He wasn’t mad or anything. Usually he’s really uptight about things like that, but he wasn’t and it made me feel horrible. I hate it when he’s magnanimous.
Then I found it. The very next day. No where near anything I could have stuck it in and reminded myself about. If only I had waited one more day. ONE MORE DAY and I wouldn’t have had to tell him anything. Now he has one on me. You know what I’m talking about. It shifts the balance of power and let me tell you, the whole world topples a bit when he’s in the power seat. I’ll just have to look harder for him to do something wrong.
So I’ve been MIA for a while. I’m finding it harder and harder to get up enough enthusiasm these days to blog. As life in the real world becomes more complicated, I tend to hide from all worlds.
I was in Spain and had a blast with my little sister. I found that my German inproved greatly when trying to speak my university Spanish with the Catalans who speak Catalan. In fact, my German has never been better than the morning I woke up to one of Mim’s roommates slamming the pots and pans in the kitchen at 6 am. The only Spanish I could come up with was “Dos cervesas, por favor.” Without even trying, I spoke in perfect German. I probably could have discussed Goethe and his influence on Germany and the world at that moment.
I was also in Barcelona when I figured out I was pregnant. It started with the weirdest side effect, fear of heights.
I was with Gaudi on a Thursday evening, up on the roof of Casa Mila in awe of his talent and creativity when I noticed I was a little woozy. Woozy in the “afraid of heights” kind of woozy. It wasn’t a big deal, just that I wasn’t very comfortable up on the fenced in roof top as I would normally be. The panic attack up on top of La Sagrada Familia is what allowed me to see that Jeff and Mim weren’t in fact being big babies and should just put on their big girl pants and suck it up when faced with a castle wall or open floor plan in a hotel. I could not stop shaking.
I’m not afraid of heights. At all. Never have been. I have done very stupid things in very high places because I’ve never seen height as a factor. The wondertwins are,not me.
I tried not to think about being pregnant, but I kept getting smacked with it. From the gorgeous rack I quickly developed and that I had not seen since I was 19 to my liebhaber, coffee, making me horribly sick to extreme tiredness to just “knowing”. However, I was not going to think about it as a real possibility until the blood test. I refused to even take a pee test because it would jinx it.
I flew home on a Thursday night and had a blood test on Friday. Confirmed pregnancy.
I miscarried late last week.
This is where I have to thank Carol.
I had a total freak out a few days after the blood test. A freak out of the “What the hell am I doing being pregnant or even thinking I should have a kid. I’m too selfish, I’m too old, I’m too crazy, I’ll never get to Tel Aviv, let me re-evaluate my marriage” type of freakout.
I woke Sparky up at 4 am one morning to share the freakout. He, strangely, was not freaking out. Sparky was happy, elated, glowing and happy.
Carol talked me off that ledge. I really honestly do not know what I would have done without Carol. I was so out of my head about making a huge mistake and then hating myself for even thinking that because I’ve wanted kids for so long and I’m going to extraordinary lengths to have kids. I felt that I had no right at all to feel that way, especially since my risk of miscarriage was/is so incredibly high. How dare I have those feelings?
Carol had me skype her, at 2 am her time on her anniversary, to talk to me. And I felt so much better after. I had no idea that those could be normal feelings. I didn’t even think about hormones. She helped me get perspective. And look at her kids. How do I make sure I have kids like that and not kids like Sparky and I? We’ve complained about shitty kids so often we are sure to have them.
Then I miscarried.
I have a lot of feelings about it, but none of the guilt I thought I would have and I have Carol to thank for that.
And that freakout and that miscarriage gave me solid foundation of knowledge that perhaps I won’t get to Tel Aviv, but I do want a family and now that I have been pregnant, have had the freakout and then miscarried, I’m thankful. I can make these decisions with that unique perspective and hopefully when I’m pregnant again, the freakout can be supplemented with the real knowledge that this is what I want.
