Enchanting Juno

Forms of transformation.

Well, I'm a big ball of sweat.

This weekend was all about the slow transformation of my basement.  I expect the next week will be as well, as slow seems to be the operative word.

The TV/reading/knitting space in my house is a finished basement, sorta - the house is built into a slope, so street side ground floor is back yard second story.  The downstairs is a pretty good space, nice and coolish in the summer (comparatively speaking) but the only natural light comes from sliding door into the little back yard.

If you were here you could walk down the steps into the couch/tv area  and then, if you wanted to, cross the room into the desk/book/possible fiber studio area that looks out through the glass doors into the desk.  Except in practice, the desk/book/fiber studio area is an afterthought space because you come down into the tv space and sorta stop and the fiber studio has remained potential.  This study or whathaveyou is a forgotten zone (where junk accumulates) and a pathway to the door out.   And the path has become a divider - books on the left - four cases of them and this huge old desk that belonged to my great grandfather on the right.  But no unity of space.

(Old book cases on left, desk on right.  Yarn covered chaise and boxes of fiber free floating in the middle looking for  new home.)

So after 7 years here, last month I am standing in between the two rooms holding some yarn - there's always yarn and it tends to collect on the chaise that resides on the border between these two spaces - and I have a doh moment.  These rooms should be switched.  The books should be on cases along the wall where the couch lives and the desk should be where the TV is now.  The TV should be where the desk lives and the couch where the books are.  So simple

Natural light near sitting area?  Good.
Sitting and tv space in the slightly smaller space, leading to coziness?  Good.
Bookcases installed along the longest wall?  Good.
Library area leading to sitting area bringing two disparate spaces into a cohesive living area?  Good.
The fact that it took me 7 years to think of this?  Less Good.

Once I got the color thing more or less sorted (I'm worried its too sunshiney now, but I'm committed) I painted the long wall and spent the weekend installing the thousand feet of hanging shelves and moving books.

This may be the first time in my life I have more shelf than I have reading material, though come to think of it there are more books to be gathered up and put away.
Once I dig them out from behind the furniture I have shoved over against the desk.

I tried to draw you a picture but not so much the paint program skills.  I made a home for the drum carder though.

 

Anyway, I should totally have been able to paint the whole thing by now, but there is just Too Much Stuff down here and there will be until Monday night, when I can put the old shelves, a table and two chairs out to be hauled away. In the meantime, I think I could probably spend some useful time bagging and storing yarn.  Man does that stuff creep.

But I wasn't kidding about the big ball of sweat thing, so a shower first.

OK, I bagged the yarn and now I'm confused.  Tidier, but confused.

Because I think I might like the couch in front of the bookcases.  And maybe the space where the books used to be should be a fiber studio after all.  Huh.

Oh, also.  If you drop a box of shelves on the floor and you try to break the fall with your foot because the shelves are like, expensive and you don't want to dent them before they ever make it onto the wall brackets?  This is what your toe will look like:

I don't recommend it as a solution really.  Ow.  Saved the shelves though.

Sin palabras

The problem I'm having these days is that - I'm rather happy.  Good mood.  Angst has more words in it.  Now I'm all like, I have extra joy today, would you care for some?  Maybe that's just this week, but I dunno, feels like a possible cosmic shift.

I've been in therapy a long time, y'all know that, right?  I started going after my dad died and kept at it because it seemed like the first actually effective method I had ever found for genuinely generating change and self awareness, which are like, my favorite things.  Anyway, I was having a little bit of an obsessive brood this weekend about some topic whose grooves are well worn in my head - I'm not trying to be deliberately oblique or anything, or maybe I am.  The topic is to do with not believing what other people say or do when it comes into fundamental conflict with my own self doubt, but the details I must leave partially behind the curtain. 

Anyway.

I was feeling self-effacing and under-confident in a friendship and wrote an email - one of those ones where you want to ask a question but think maybe you are too much or too pushy or are overstepping the bounds and so you couch it in indirect terms in a way that really, if you saw a friend doing the same thing, would make you yell at them? I did that and I got back this completely normal email where the friend, like answered the question, no fuss.  It was an incomplete answer, because there did not yet exist a final one, but it was an answer from a person clearly UNoffended by the question.

And for some reason I actually noticed this, it caught my attention and having been noticed drew my attention backwards, connect the dots style, to the fact that my assumption that I was imposing in some way was - um.  Not consistent with the facts, let us say.  And in fact, maybe it was a bit contrary to the facts.  And always had been, historically.   And that maybe the delusion I was experiencing was getting in the way of a few things.  And had always done so. Um. Yeah. 

And though these moldy old ideas have a way of coming back in cycles, this feels like one of those emotionally chiropractic moments, the therapeutic Doh, from which life proceeds quantum-ly altered.   I love therapy. 

Also, I have turned the heel on sock two.  But I'm not knitting much.  It is 12 million degrees and also, I am moving all my shit around.  I tend to embark rather suddenly on long contemplated projects.   They cook in my head - I have a notebook with color samples and room measurements and pictures of furniture, it lives in the car.  And one day I wake up, look at my living room wall and think, I'm going to paint you orange, where's that paint chip and my car keys.
Why a blazingly hot June seemed like the moment...well, actually I know why.  Company next month.  Always a good time to motivate one's self. 

Other News:

For the first time in about 4 months the number of unread knitting posts in Newsgator is under a hundred.  That's both cool and alarming - there's been something comforting about knowing I always have something to read (because the 150 unread books in my house are Not Enough) but now that they begin to run out, I am facing the unhappy thought of actually getting some work done.  Botheration.

Did you know there are perfume blogs?  Just as devoted and obsessed as fiber dorks.  Read this and see.  Yes, I'm still on that kick, but have branched out into niche perfume houses and industry classics and a little of this and that of all kinds.  The Perfumed Court has taken many of my dollars in exchange for dozens of wee vials of mysterious potions.  I have learned that - and this will stagger you, I know - that I like odd things.  Bring the smoke, bring the funk, bring the weirdly floral, the cooking smells, the middle eastern spice market and the salt of living things.    Keep your Joy and Chanel 5 WAY over there - they smell like boarding school to me, like privileged lives, like beloved aunts drinking coffee after dinner.  In demitasse cups.  Brought in by the maid.  Beautiful, comforting, yet cloistered in a kind of limiting way.
Today I smell like a field of hay in the summer (never mind that if I recall, hay isn't baled until the fall, this is alchemy) with a barn on the far side of it,  a barn with an unusual selection of animals in it.   Dzing!   Delicious.   

And I have had some paint sampling woes.  My basement - which walks out, townhouse - was a boring white room and I had been hesitating over the blue/green I THOUGHT I was going to paint it for two years and then I saw a wall at Mamacate's I liked, light but rich.  This is a light poor space, so light but rich was ideal.  She wrote down the color and then the store I went to didn't carry it. 

But I wanted to ACT NOW, so I picked out a sample I thought was a close match.  Dude mixed it, I went home and I get about half way through the sample and go -- no, this is way too yellow. What was I thinking?
So I drive to another store and buy a sample of the actual color and begin to paint over the mustard.  But it is too light - what looks rich in a sunny room looks barely non-white in my basement.
And I FINALLY think to get out the color card for paint 1 - turns out the mixing dude made a fairly large mistake reading the formula.*  Color THREE on the left, is the one I chose in the first place.  Top cream yellow with a teeny bit of violet in it, it looks rich but bright in low light and dirty-sunny illuminated.  Perfect for my basement cave.

Yellow is a way tricky color, yo. 

I am presently obsessed with apples and peanut butter, which also makes me think of boarding school, but in a better way than Joy.  Though these days the peanut butter is natural and supplemented with flax seeds.  Which are odd, but strangely good as an addition.

*(He was having a DAY, which he told me about at the time.  So not a huge surprise.  I find I'm very interested in people's stories these days - what does what she's wearing say about how she sees herself for example, or his distraction, what does it mean.  And you know, if you look people in the eye and say hello like you mean it, offer a bit of your own story - they'll tell you the world.)

Proof of Sock

The internet is slow today - it is as hot and cross as I am, as everyone is.  I'm at work alone because I told everyone to leave when they hit their personal heat limit. They made it to 10, which I thought was good, really good in fact.

The chocolates that live on my desk are not quite melted but neither are they quite solid.  A delicious texture in fact, except that the environment that created this state is the one we all have to sit in and semi-solid people are less delicious. Which is to say the air conditioner done broke, and this is a building built in a technologically dependent age.   No airflow. 

And even so, it is a million degrees out.  Airflow would only make the poaching well ventilated and breezy.  My ear keeps waiting for the shimmering vibration of cicadas, which I associate with this temperature on some kind of visceral level.  It must not be a cicada season, though I swear they were all cicada summers when I was small.

The nice man is out sweating behind the building.  I brought him some ice water in a cup - which was weird, I'm so used to bottles but a cup is what I had.  It felt old fashioned, bringing the repairman some water in a cup.  I wish it had been a beer, but I don't keep beer at work.

Yesterday I went medieval on my kitchen - someone asked me how my house can be the mess I always talk about, with just me and the cat (who totally does her share of mess creating, little shedding beast).  The truth is I hate house work AND I never learned to do it well and efficiently.   There is an art to it, or a knack at least, and a discipline:  I am the daughter of a born-again slob who was the daughter of a dyed-in-the-fucking-wool psychotic neat freak (related items, I think) and I am not saying this is my mom's fault because am 39 and take care of my own business.  But I am sort of realizing that since I did not learn these habits at my mama's knee I have to teach them to myself and that the cat hair is not going to vacuum itself, no matter how much I wish it would.

Typically I do the bare minimum to keep it civilized.  But I think my minimum standard for civilization is changing and I'm tired of feeling like I have to clean up for company.  I like clean, it makes the house feel calm and good and me too.  So my choices seem to be get over myself, or dust more and I am aiming for both - if I could average out my mother and grandmother I might turn out have a fairly balanced approach, in this one area at least.  But to get there, there has to be a higher level of clean attained.  A new baseline.

Plus, I want to paint everything in my house and thatgoes way better when you start without a layer of weird, sticky baseboard dust.  Not that these were conscious decisions - I woke up yesterday and went down to make some breakfast and accidentally scrubbed the baseboards and vacuumed the screens and and washed the windows inside and out and stuff, for oh, like 10 hours.   I went behind the cookbooks, people.   With a vacuum and THEN a dust rag, and did all that odd chore stuff too, like polishing the silver fork wind chime, and taking down the brackets for the blinds I deep-sixed 4 years ago and removing the holder for the paper towels I don't use. 
The kitchen looks a million times better with the screens down and the glass clean - LIGHT!  VIEW!   It's kinda crazy nice.  Satisfying. 

I think the trick is, clean the shit out of one room, then the next day, clean it again (which only takes 10 seconds because it is already good) THEN clean the shit out of the next room.  Day 3 do rooms A and B, then clean the shit out of C.    And eventually you can keep the whole thing going on a hour a day (A thought both horrifying and appealing.  But I think the Internet can probably spare me a hour a day, right?).  Except I am going out of town Wednesday and when I get home?   Brace yourself for home improvement: I had one of those spasms I get sometimes and 1050 linear feet of new book shelf are on the way here. 

Tonight I corral yarn and hang up the laundry.  Maybe a bit of dusting.  We'll see what happens to 'a higher level of basic civilization' over the rest of the summer.  The whole thing would be simpler if I just shaved the cat though.  Well, simpler except for the plastic surgery to repair the damage.

Oh god, I blogged about housework, didn't I? 

It is the heat, forgive me.

 

I HAVE started the second one.  But it goes really slowly when you spend a weekend with a brush attachment in one hand and a dust rag in the other.

Oh PS.  I talked to my brother yesterday and every two seconds he had to go pry his two year old daughter off of something she wasn't supposed to be into or renegotiate the terms of some thing or another.  She's a twinkling, button-pushing, ferociously stubborn pack of trouble that one, and it makes me incredibly happy because a) she's a riot and b) so was he, the rat, 35 years ago and serious big sister was target no. 1.  Also hearing my brother repeat as his calming mantra "well behaved women seldom make history" was like, the best thing ever. 

(he's an awesome dad, just so you know.)

Unlooked-for things

I had this whole thing I wrote and then stared at for days about Massachusetts, and in the end, I scrapped it, wrote a letter to friend containing the essential wonder of it all and then came back and stared at the amputated post some more.

The problem I am experiencing is that I have been so extraordinarily lucky as to make some really real friends through the blog, friends I love not because we have blogging in common, but because blogging shortened the distance between two remote points such that we met.  And they are real people whose lives move and inspire me, and that's personal and delicate and what I think about it is not something I can write about here, because you know C and K and C and J and L and M and L and M and J and C and S and all in some way, and so it can feel like betrayal not revelation.  You may have noticed I don't take many people pictures for the blog anymore.  All related. 

I know, I think too much.  And am weirdly private for someone who writes about her life on the Internet, and who appears social and gregarious when spotted in the wild.   As I said to someone a few months ago in an admittedly different context, I'm a complicated woman. 

Let me just say that I had the best weekend I have had I a long time, and I AM a total sneak, running off to Cummington, though you will find if you look back, no mention was made of Massachusetts in the discussion of things to be adjured.  That was a deliberate omission, y'all.

I got just enough of a sunburn to know I spent time outside in sunlight but not enough to be sorry, I ate waffles three days in a row, tasted 12 different beers with a table of friends, ate some really tremendous chili cheese fries (those I might have a picture of, come to think of it.  But NO camera cable), had the same waitress at two different restaurants 30 miles apart on consecutive evenings (that was really weird, particularly when she proved she remembered us by reeling off the previous nights orders).  I bought 11 eggs.  And a hat (not at the same time).  I discovered that the absolute proof of collective and fundamental geekery is to ask a friend for hand cream by demanding "Moisturize Me"* and have everyone in earshot fall down laughing.  I held my hand on the belly of a newly pregnant friend and hugged people I do not hug nearly enough.  I got to see people relax from the crazy that is life and be transparent and free for a minute. I hope everyone felt what I did, saw the little unexpected moments.

The fiber was lovely, but really, genuinely, secondary.

My thought for the week is that more and more I believe the real business of life is to know ourselves well enough to be internally still, to know ourselves well enough to know when to tell our stories and when to let others speak, to know ourselves well enough to let others exist in our sphere.  To work and listen and examine until you can see people, see the flickering bits of their exposed vessels with tenderness, hold them lightly so they can be, just for a minute sometimes, sometimes for hours or days.

Sometimes the gratitude I feel for the life I have now and the people in it rises up behind my eyeballs until I can hardly contain it.

 

I planted these from a patch I dug up at my mom's when I moved into my house in 2001.  They sorta sat there not quite doing badly, but certainly not doing well until last summer, when they made one (1) flower and perked up a bit.

When I got home from Mass, this was what I saw:

* Dr. Who, Season 1, Episode 2.  As if you didn't know.