Happy Independence Day

I was going to write something witty, something incredibly relevant to connect the idea of freedom being costly, but a cost not of lives, but of giving up our chains.

Watching it, words failed me, and I realized I didn’t have to.  This video says more than I could ever hope to.

Let freedom ring.

Moving Bookshelves and Living Large

Having read a short book on organization over the weekend, I thought I’d get a jump on things. Get to work 15 minutes early and sit, with a cup of coffee, pondering my day, prioritizing my tasks, and getting a hell of a lot done.

The universe was laughing.

As I unlocked my office, my purse and my lunchbag and my ever-present bookbag full of house papers,  the door stuck. I couldn’t open it more than half a foot.  Peering around the door, I saw that my office looked to have been vandalized.

Not a work of vandals, but one of mystery. Once I had forced my door open, I discovered that my wall shelves had fallen, bounced off the corner wall breaking a hanging file, onto my desk to disturb my computer monitor and my printer, break another thing or two, and land on the floor, right where my chair had been.

It didn’t fall straight down. I have a bookshelf right below it, with junk scattered about.  No, no, the bookshelf was untouched.

Strange, that, the whole scene.  I stared at first, unbelieving.  You could see the path of destruction, and it had done the duck and weave far better than Muhammad Ali ever had.

So strange.

So I spent the entire shift reorganizing, throwing away stuff I didn’t need, delivering other stuff my people needed and I had no clue that I had.

Eight months at the job, and I finally feel like it’s my office, even if I had to leave my desk untouched.

“You must be living all sorts of right,” someone said to me. “As much as you’re at your desk, what are the chances it dropped when you weren’t around?”

That was a sobering thought, especially when it was pointed out to me that it landed exactly where I sat.

A charmed life.

It’s been exactly one week since I won the bid for the house.  Last week, I didn’t get anything done because I was gushing, gushing, gushing.

This week isn’t off to such a stellar start either.

I’m probably about 4 weeks out from moving in, and I’m ecstatic.

I can’t believe so much of what’s been going on, fabulous, fabulous.

Wait, there I go again, saying I can’t believe it.

Rephrase: I am so immeasurably blessed lately, and it keeps going and going.

I can’t wait to see what comes next.

Yesssssssss!!!!

It’s Six AM, Do You Know Where Your House Is?

I’ve officially discovered the tummy-twisting joy of a six year old who still believes in Santa Claus.

The day began with a brutally hot house-hunting errand,  looking at a short sale, thinking it would be a nice consolation prize, if I could get it really inexpensively.  I took my dad with me because, well, my dad’s the one who knows what to look for when it comes to stuff going wrong.

After looking at the disclosure report and seeing that the couple who are leaving the house check “no” for no hurricane damage even while replacing the roof in 2005 (hmmm, Katrina coincidence?), my mom discovered that the kitchen cabinets were ruined.  They examined the refrigerator, the dishwasher, and finally, a trash pile outside.

I didn’t understand the mechanics of the flood, but water has apparently backed up into the house. It doesn’t flood, per se, but it was trapped under vinyl and the particle board that separates the vinyl from the house’s 2X4’s is rotted.

My dad stuck his fingers in it, wiggled them around, and came out with multi-stained splinters.

Ewww boy.

We left as someone else pulled up, papers in hand, and I wanted to tell them to look under the house’s edges, but my dad said no.

“You don’t mess with someone’s business like that.”

Considering my agent (last weekend with her is still a nightmare untold) isn’t representing the house, it wouldn’t have been “messing with her business,” but that’s neither here nor there.  “The inspector will catch it,” the agent said confidently.

My mom and dad looked at each other and said nothing.

Afterwards, I called my HUD guy and raised my bid on the house that I love.

Mr. HUD is someone I could spend hours on the phone with. He has an amazingly lovely voice, and I associate it with good memories since he sounds very much like someone I used to know.  A lovely, lovely voice, and as excited and enthusiastic as a child.

He called me back within five minutes to let me know that my bid has been accepted.  I put in bids last week, three over one day, and all of them had been rejected as too low.  This one had been accepted, so it’s progress if nothing else. If no one bids above me, that house could be mine. I’m supposed to find out at 10 am this morning.

And I couldn’t sleep. I lay in bed, fully awake, dreaming of the most mundane stuff.  Cutting the grass.  Cleaning up the house. Soaking in my bathtub with a book. Washing dishes.

When I did fall asleep, I woke up on the hour, just like I did when I was a kid, checking to see if Santa had come.

12:00, 1:00, 2:00, and the strange 3:15.

But now I have to get ready for work and try to get something accomplished since they’re sort of paying me and stuff.

And if I manage to win the bid, get something accomplished after.

Instead of going home sick, I may have to go home happy.

My stomach is in knots. I know I’ll be okay if I don’t get it, but I wouldn’t trade this for the world, right now.

It’s good to be a kid again.

Maybe Brahnamin will get a linky picture tonight

Bomb Diggity

It’s one of my favorite words these days.

Despite  appearances, it’s a single word. A compound word. An adjective, an expletive.

Compoundly.

It’s something vaguely Quagmireish, perhaps a bit more than vaguely so, but there it is, nonetheless.

Bomb diggity.

I started this post after a get-together a couple of months ago.   A man I knew vaguely as someone who doesn’t live here but has a fish camp here and comes to visit a couple of times a year had invited me out  –had been inviting me out for several years, actually. I finally went and had a fabulous time.  Funny how people come and go from your life.  In a part of Mississippi I had never been to, in the house of someone I had never met, I found a familiar face. A woman I worked with when I was 16 was there.

Funny these little occurrences.

I left the party with my hair expertly braided, a mass of good memories attached to faces (since there were far too many names to remember), a taste for chocolate mint liquor in dark chocolate shells, and a new appreciation for Firefly aficionados.

And so the draft sat, waiting for enough bomb diggity’s to get it all together.

I have fallen in love with another house. Not that I’m all that fickle, mind you, but the first simply wasn’t available. That sort of limits productive dreaming.  Hard to play “what ifs” when the house you want is off the market.

My house is still on the market.

Hear You Later

Koko Taylor passed away this week.  The lightning-holder and the earth-shaker, the woman who cut stone with a pen.

“Queen? Queen! No way,” my dad said, pointing to Aretha as the Queen of Everything Musical.

I didn’t argue the nuances of genres of music or the ease of labels and titles or the unimportance of them all.

Instead, I simply listened to Aretha while thinking about Koko.

To compliment one in no way takes away from the other, but it’s Koko I’m celebrating now.

A Woman’s Woman, I think, no Kate Chopin or Hillary Clinton. But a feminist nonetheless.

I think “Wang Dang Doodle” is unofficially her signature song.  But it was “I’m a Woman,” that influenced my thinking on the feminine perspective. It is, and should be, many women’s anthem.

She is, to me, the quintessential woman. In her song, “I’m a Woman, ” she presents herself as the ideal woman although I doubt that she would have ever thought that, roughly 30 years after the release of Earthshaker, the record on which “I’m a Woman” first appears, a woman so apparently different from her,  would ever consider her to be the “ideal woman.”

Cat-Nooking It

If ever there were a perfect house for me, this would be it. It’s a HUD repo, and despite all of its superficial damages, I just felt home the moment I walked into it.

Thankfully, it was the camera’s operator that needed a little bit of levelling, and not the house itself.

This house has been, and forever will be, known as TheCatNookHouse.  Until I find another TheCatNookHouse, anyway.

The little window, up the staircase, has a little ledge with it. The moment I saw it, I knew that the cats would be fighting over who would first be able to decorate my window.  It had been on the market for almost a year. It was in dire need of some TLC and redecorating.  It had a fairly respectable asking price, and I thought I could negotiate it down to make it highly affordable. It was my house.

Reconnect/Disconnect

I stayed up way past my bedtime last night talking with The Ex.

Funny how, after all this time, I still consider him The Ex with the capital letters. I even say Tee-the Eee-ex in my head, as if I were capitalizing it there, too.  Maybe because, since I’ve met him, he’s the only significant ex I’ve had (including my husband, oddly) since The Great Ex went away to Germany in 1993.

I miss him. The Ex, I mean. Not so much the other. Not now.

What began as a celebratory message: “I have a phone!” turned into rehashing and, eventually, bitter silence.  Not that different from the way it used to be a lot, I suppose. The post-break-up “what could have been’s” are the worst part of a relationship, I think.  Feelings and emotions are involved, and it’s not a clean break.

He’s in a relationship with someone with whom he has been monogamous.  He’s proud of this fact and, honestly, I’m proud of it, too. It’s been an issue with him in the past. I figure she must be a better match for him; after all, he’s been able to be faithful to her whereas he wasn’t able to for me.

I don’t think I’m past the “What does that say about me?” syndrome quite yet.

Diving for Pearls

If my toilet had a voice, it would have melodiously and, with breathless lyrics, expressed this exact image:

I read once, perhaps a short story, of tribal folks who dive for pearls.  It’s a manly profession, this pearl diving, requiring great lung capacity and patience.  The smart people grab the oysters, shuck them open, eat the meat and sell the pearls to capitalistic fools who think that little bits of calcium carbonate  formed by irritants are things of great value.

I could have used a pair of them Sunday.

All of my cell phones, from the first one I ever had in 2003 up till my super-duper-I-wanna-marry-this-Blackberry-Pearl, have all ad an unnatural attraction to wet stuff.  One lept from my hand into my cup full of sweet iced tea; another escaped into the swamp of the Tuxachanie hiking trail.

My latest one lacked the dignity of a naturefuck.  There was no passionate sweat involved, no ooohing and aaahing over dragonflies or lotus, no sighing over the speck of sunlight at the surface of the water.  There was no sweet tooth involved, no diabetic phone longing for stabilization. No thoughts of nirvana, and no wishes for a better life.

This one went straight in the crapper.

Redux and Reflux: Cure Fear Now

It was Wednesday, I think, as I was falling asleep that I hunkered down with a contented smile and realized that I am exactly where I am supposed to be.

I’m house hunting which is exciting, but confusing, too. The market has seemed to open up and there are so many options to choose from. Trying to find the right one for me seems a mere matter of wittling away the ones that aren’t.

Keeping them straight is the huge P.S. to the letter of my intent.

I’ve stopped stubbing my toe so much lately, a thing for which my brain and my poor wee toes are most grateful.

Does this mean the anger has subsided?

Somewhere, somehow, a chorus of a thousand fools are chuckling.

My brain is traveling in willy-nilly directions.

I remembered standing, pacing in the Writing Center, my hair all afluff, my fingers raking through it while simultaneously grasping with werewolf claws my poorly receptive cell phone and taking names because I would not let this pass me by. I would not be silent.  I would  not take this, as the colloquial goes, laying down.

I would be graduating Magna Cum Laude.

Funny how I’ve always chosen the wrong battles.