and it’s not the 5:10 train.
We have just about finished the window trim and are beginning to move furniture from where it has been piled (in any large empty space in the house—scratch that: any place void of furniture. We have, since November blackout, had furniture out of place, rooms nearly emptied, furniture piled in the kitchen, with paths to get to the pantry, to the back door, to the kitchen, wherever. You walk past, brush some broom leaning against some box and three boxes fall, spilling contents. We are so frayed and tired—at one point there was only one place each to sit in the living room, and the rest literally piled with furniture. We pass the tv control to whoever is sitting with a clear shot at the good spot to communicate with the set.
Now—we clean up, dust, rearrange, tidy up, and our house begins to look like other than a warehouse for lost boxes.
As laissez faire as I am about housekeeping, I must admit there’s a lot to be said for everything being ship shape and Bristol fashion. One needs to keep chaos at bay. I’m glad you now have the opportunity to sort things back out again. The environmental commotion is very telling on the psyche.
I must say, I have a high degree of anticipatory empathy for you. My time, and new windows, are coming in August. In order for them to be able to put new windows in my apartment, I have to clear a 3-foot space in front of each window. With as much furniture as I have in 649 square feet, it’s going to be like one of those little plastic sliding puzzles ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sliding_puzzle ) with a large dollop of solid geometry thrown in. The big window in the living room and the window in my “office” are not going to be a problem, but there’s a sideboard in front of the dining room window, and both it and my dining room table are going to have to be shifted 3 feet west, and I’m going to have to disassemble my bed in order for them to be able to access my bedroom window. Still, the new windows will make the place cheaper to heat and cool, I’ll have screened windows I can actually open, and I won’t be having to dust with a shovel.
I have a theory that each of us has a threshold beyond which household unkemptness and disorder, etc., reache a point beyond which one can no longer tolerate it and one goes on a housekeeping bender to sort things out again. I refer to this threshold as “critical mess.” When things reach “critical mess” you WILL get them sorted if it harelips the governor, because if you don’t, it will drive you nuts until you do. Some of us have higher threshholds than others (mine is much higher than my mom’s, but then she is a Virgo’s Virgo. What can I say?)
I also have a theory that when life feels out of control, exercising control over the things you can control makes you feel better, and the best way to do this is to go on a housecleaning bender.
When you do get it all sorted, you should take a couple of days and just vegetate. Sleep late, indulge your bodies in nice things like soaks in bath salts and what-not, and otherwise just generally do the cat thing in the spot of sunshine (or a reasonable Washington facsimile of sunlight. . .) and recharge the old batteries.
O yes, I can get behind the concept of ‘critical mess’! I have a relatively high tolerance of disorder and will go a couple of weeks or longer without vacuuming or cleaning the living room, but there does indeed come a time when something sets you off and you can’t take the chaos any more. Then woe betide the spiders!
Is the weather at least pleasant enough that anyone going on a cleaning bender can open the windows to air out the house while you create dust clouds to rival a Martian sandstorm?
My new electric pole saw is a wonder. All the stroobly unkempt branches I would have had to climb onto a ladder to trim now can be dealt with from the ground in a fraction of the time.
Lol—you may note, I am a Virgo, and Jane is a Scorpio, a perfectionist when it comes to carpentry or painting. ‘Critical mess’. I love that.
Some years ago I had a major house painting done-kitchen, dining and livingroom. I had one accessible chair in the livingroom to picnic in. My painter would arrive cover it and do tiddlywinks … and managed to get it shifted behind the moved out bookcases all tidily dropclothed. For 3 days I ate sitting on the staircase!
It was worth it though.
Oh I can relate. . . I’m in the process of moving, but I’m taking my time… I’ve got 2 storage units packed full of STUFF that was tossed into boxes by the cleaning people with NO sorting or culling. I’m NOT looking forward to sorting that mess… I swear my insurance paid for them to train a handful of high-school kids, but they forgot to teach them to PACK so its a nightmare.
Insurance paid to have all my stuff boxed up and hauled off to ‘clean’ (boxes left overnight in a sealed room with ozone, I think) the smoke smell out so I had them put the boxes into the storage unit for me because I knew I wasn’t going back to the old place. Year and a half of camping out in a friend’s mansion on the beach made for a nice break, but mansion is sold so its time to move on.
Renting is going to be quite an adjustment… Sigh…
My post-tax-season treat to myself this year was a Neato Robotics vacuum that New Egg had on sale a couple of weeks ago. We have a cleaning service that comes every 2 weeks, but that’s not often enough to keep the floors “barefoot” clean. So far it’s working pretty well, but the little guy does have to be rescued from time to time when he gets hung up under a piece of furniture. And I can concentrate on other housekeeping chores, and may be able to let the cleaners go and save that money for other things.
When you throw your hands up and collapse at critical mess, try a good B complex. I have bounced off that wall a few times. I was recently reminded to take B12 by my doctor. One drug causes it to go low and there goes the energy.
I am so critical mess, I will weed rather than clean. I will tackle it a small bit at a time as I pull out Summer clothes.
I had the Windows done prior to critical mess that and the new furnace last fall! What a difference!
Speaking of B vitamins, I had Riboflavin, B2, recommended to me for migraines (fortunately just aura). Anybody with experience there?
Not for migraines but for energy and general health. Even with a good diet, some of us don’t get enough of the critical ones.
My reward for spending six weeks in Australia:
[URL=http://s223.photobucket.com/user/azurline/media/IMG_20160412_093428.jpg.html][IMG]http://i223.photobucket.com/albums/dd258/azurline/IMG_20160412_093428.jpg[/IMG][/URL]
http://i223.photobucket.com/albums/dd258/azurline/IMG_20160412_093428.jpg%5B/IMG%5D
Yay!! Kidling!!
Cute grandbaby! Is everything well with your daughter and her wife, and with the baby?
Ah, I found myself thinking of you, your family and “grandchild-to-be” a couple days ago and realized we hadn’t heard from you for quite a while. Great to know that all are well (after what sounds like a strenuous few first weeks) and delightful to know there is a new child in the world!
They are well! My Darling Daughter-In-Law was most vilely ill for the first two weeks that the grandson was home, and he had to have a tongue tie cut,but other than that, all is well! The gray in the background is me!
Oh, excellent baby! COngrats!
The right-wing Sad and Rabid Puppies have tried to hijack the Hugo Awards again this year.
http://www.latimes.com/books/jacketcopy/la-et-jc-john-scalzi-hugo-award-nominations-20160426-story.html
Sad and Rabid Puppies – another good article on the subject:
The Hugo Awards: George RR Martin, Vox Day and Alastair Reynolds on the prize’s future
What does right- and left-wing have to do with the Hugos? This isn’t government……just asking……
Right- and left wing doesn’t only relate to politics, but to conservative and liberal views in general.
Certainly this shouldn’t be an issue for the Hugos, because SF has traditionally covered the whole spectrum of views. Unfortunately, some groups feel that the awards should only go to books that suit their particular view. Specifically they disapprove of what they see as ‘left-wing’ books.
The Sad Puppies are less rabid. They started out with author Larry Correia unashamedly trying to promote his own books, which he characterizes as “unabashed pulp action” and seems to have evolved to support any less literary and thoughtful fiction, particularly if it features straight white male heroes.
The Rabid Puppies are led Theodore Beale, alias Vox Day, who says that marital rape is an oxymoron because “marriage grants consent on an ongoing basis”, who doesn’t think that women have the should have the right to vote (“the women of America would do well to consider whether their much-cherished gains of the right to vote, work, murder and freely fornicate are worth destroying marriage, children, civilised western society and little girls”), and who has often been accused of racism and homophobia, which he doesn’t seem to deny.
George R.R. Martin has a good response: “Throughout the history of SF there has always been a dialogue that’s been expressed through stories. If you take Robert Heinlein’s book Starship Troopers, that’s a very conservative novel. Harry Harrison wrote Bill the Galactic Hero as a direct response to Heinlein’s views. And later, Joe Haldeman wrote his own response in The Forever War … but Heinlein loved it. That’s how the science fiction community should tackle its differences, not through name-calling and personal attacks – through writing.”
Funny, I always thought it was he need to work, and the right to get paid for it…
Just sayin’. Respect for ideas. Questioning what is and what might be. These people, though outnumbered and voted down resoundingly, are trying to impose their version of political correctness and their ‘favor’ is unwanted by the people they nominate. Let’s hope the KC worldcon delivers them a definitive answer.
There’s nothing stopping them from setting up their own awards for the kind of books they like. They don’t have a right to game the system and try to overrule the majority of SF fans.
SF has always been a wild tennis match of opposing ideas. If you have an opinion, write a book in opposition to the idea you oppose: work it out in the lab of a novel or short story plot. Then sit back and expect someone else to fire back in the same way. This whole notion of trying to stop this exchange is repugnant. And if they think the awards, rather than the books, are the important thing, they have really missed it.
I can see this also as a ‘passed the course on A/is truly adept at doing A, but has never had the course’ dichotomy.
Your description of all the piles of furniture and general exhaustion reminds me very much of a particularly trying move I had a few years ago, which went past awful into drunk tired whimsy.
Or as I wrote at the time,
Congrats on the window trim progress. I hope your process of settling back in and repotting yourselves proves satisfying, and full of many small unexpected delights of reacquaintance.
Actually, if a book is no good people will not buy it. Readers are not stupid – we can read – and if the awards for SF are spurious then we will look elsewhere.
After all, I use my money to purchase the books I want to read.
I read Theodore Beale once and my initial thought was, what is this guy so afraid of. His diatribes against women sound like someone trying to come to terms with trauma in a vocal, hostile manner.
“Brothers arrested for shooting dead parents”
I’m pretty sure that’s not a crime.
Unless you file it under ‘desecration of a corpse’.
Smartcat, from what I know of the gent, I’m sorry you can’t get that time back.
It saddens me that people are trying to ruin the SF community the same way they’re trying to ruin seemingly every other facet of our society. But it doesn’t surprise me – which fact also saddens me.
I’m truly terrified that we’re going end up living some of the horrific stories I’ve read in the past. I’m struggling with some very personal, woman issues right now – and where I live, the laws are written with a viewpoint that I do not have the native intelligence to decide what to do with my own body, *because* I am female. It’s bloody infuriating. I go to battle once more today, in about half an hour…
On a much nicer note – I’m so glad the chaos is almost over for you! I am amazed and impressed by how much you’ve undertaken. It puts heart in me, and makes me feel up to tackling the massive projects I have before me. And whilst all this is going on around your ears you STILL succeed in crafting amazing, wonderful novels for us fans – truly astounding!
Enormous hugs from out in my neck of the woods *HUG*
PS: I finally got my husband to read Foreigner! I am anticipating that he too will be hooked soon!
Well, here you go:
http://www.adweek.com/adfreak/temptations-made-collar-finally-gives-your-cat-human-voice-so-it-can-talk-you-171123
Reminds me of the dog from Up. I suspect that for our cats, they will need to have a voiceover that says “Attend me, human!!” “Where’s my food?” and “Stop bothering me.”
Lord, my sound is down because my headset is flat, but I’ve got to hear this one!