Lessons learned today

Learned today: The vodka, it is not your friend.

Yesterday, the large vodka martini our host at a Memorial Day cookout offered me was a delightful old pal I hadn't seen in quite some time. It was a beautiful sunny day and we were at a party - why not? I hardly ever drink, but when I do, I must admit that I enjoy martinis. Neat, dry, gin-based, vodka-based, with a twist, without a twist, you name it - that is pretty much my drink of choice. The one that was plunked into my hand yesterday was GIGANTIC. And oh, it was good.

But alas, once again I had to learn that drinking a bit too much the evening before you go back to work = quite a bad idea. Spent the night in a rather pleasant state of insomnia -- the kind where you don't even mind you can't sleep because you're in a good mood and the middle of the night can be a quite interesting time to be awake and people like your husband can be interesting to watch when they sleep. However, this was followed, inevitably, with a slight but persistant hangover that made the return to work after a long holiday weekend extremely unpleasant.

Dear self - a few points to remember:

• You're getting to be too old to drink too much, even if it's only a couple times a year.
  
• You're definitely too old to do so and go to work the next day.
  
• It is not true what they say about vodka producing no hangover.
  
• Job satisfaction and hangovers are exclusionary items - can't have one in the presence of the other.
  
• Your massage therapist may be psychic; she spent a strange amount of time telling me to visualize my kidneys during today's chair massage. How'd she know?

Long weekend report

I should have posted more over this long weekend, but the truth is I've been enjoying myself too much to do so.

Saturday may have been the most perfect day ever - gorgeous, 85 degree sun, impromptu softball game with the neighbors and their kids, barbecue at the park, a large impromptu party around the ice cream truck (I have not bought ice cream from an ice cream truck in something like thirty years, until this weekend), and then a few hours spent enjoying our amazing backyard. It's like a secret garden back there -- all enclosed in tall ivy walls, so private and lush.

Here's a pair of pictures I call "How to spend a saturday":



The whole rest of the weekend has involved a lot of hanging out on the front stoop talking to people, long phone calls (finally caught up with my sister, who's been out of communication for a while), walks around the neighborhood, visiting nearby open houses (a new hobby), reading books, and taking naps.

Perfect.

Here's what we didn't do - although perhaps we should have:

• Work on the old house
• Pack anything - although we did unpack the last three boxes
• Exercise much - oh well
• Think about work
• Stress out

Man, I love long weekends.

Next week, Brett's family rolls into town for a visit, and the weekend after that we begin the countdown to my parents moving to town, with all the attendant work on the old house that must be accomplished before that happens. We're throwing one large housewarming party and going on two camping trips between now and their arrival on July 1st. Work deadlines from the last three years will come to a head on July 8th.

Life is about to speed up again. At least for a moment it slowed down.

Up close

Canterbury Bells

Plant facts

Came home tonight to an empty house - a rarity these days, since our chimney repair guy has been here nearly every night for the last three weeks. Brett was out too, so I got to lounge around in silence and read for a while, after checking the water level in all my pots and greeting each cat individually.

At the moment, I'm reading probably five different books, but tonight's was 100 Flowers and How They Got Their Names, by Diane Wells. I've been buying a lot of books lately on gardening folklore. It's interesting, and I find folklore a rich source of ideas for short stories or for images or motifs that later work their way into other pieces of writing.

Here are three facts I did not know before tonight about plants in my yard:

• Dahlia tubers used to be eaten and were investigated as an alternative to the potato, although the Victorians pronounced them "disgustingly peppery and revolting to man and beast."
  
• Dogwood was reportedly used to build the Trojan Horse.
  
• Dogwood bark contains trace amounts of quinine, can cure fevers, and makes good, if primitive, toothbrushes.

Now I know where to go if I'm hungry, my antibodies need a boost, my teeth need cleaning, or I need to invade the neighbor's house.

My day in brief

Boy, it's been such the forgettable day. Let's see:

• Woke up late, deliberately, having once again forgot that I have a 9:00 meeting on Thursdays and thinking I had time to kill. Sat around reading the paper until 8:15, and then suddenly remembered that I DID have something to do and needed to get on the road NOW, whether my hair was combed or not. Ran out the door. Combed hair in traffic. Did not wreck car.
  
• Spent an hour and twenty minutes in traffic. My commute is normally about 30 minutes, max. Twenty minutes of today's drive I spent waiting to get off the exit nearest where I work, in clear sight of my building, as eight -- count 'em, eight -- green lights came and went. Remind me to personally thank the Bellevue City Planners who recently decided to put a concrete barrier in the bus-lane-which-also-doubles-as-the-right-turn-lane, blocking long lines of traffic from getting over and moving through this light more efficiently. Morons.
  
• Of course, missed my breakfast meeting.
  
• Developed crashing, vice-like headache that would prove impermeable to modern pharmaceuticals, diet soda, caffeine, and nutrition. Nurture said headache for the rest of the day, letting it grow stronger and more self-expressive.
  
• Attend a work gathering for someone's birthday in which I am so tired that I literally can think of nothing to say to the friends and coworkers I'm hanging around with. Finally, lamely say "I'm sorry, I'm just too tired to think of anything to say today..." and flee room clutching a piece of cake.
  
• Exercised neck muscles while hiding copious yawns in important business meeting.
  
• Check web app fifteen or so times to ensure that no, I definitely do not have enough vacation time accrued yet to take tomorrow off and make it a four day weekend. Fantasize about sleeping in I could be doing tomorrow. (Sleep debt, thy name is me.) Resign myself to coming in to work again tomorrow. Check web app again. No change.

I did get a little work done in between all of these things, but good lord, I'm tired. I think the whole Europetrip-jetlag-bighugehousemove-projectdeadlinesatwork express train that's been running through my life for the last six weeks has just about burned out all of my remaining neurons.

Must. Sleep.

New category of bad dreams

Last night, in between other much more interesting dreams, I kept dreaming that I was standing in front of this big closet with a box, and I kept packing and packing and packing things out of that closet, but I would never get to the end of it. It wasn't a nightmare, exactly, or an anxiety dream - it was more that it was just tedious. And unending. And tiring.

I'm never moving again.

Things I have realized recently

A few small things I've learned recently:

1. Purple irises will stain your windowsills and walls, permanently, if they lean against them while going from fresh to not-so-fresh cut flowers. Number of walls with blue streaks I can't get off: two. Number of irises I'm likely to bring inside again: none.

Corollary 1a: There is almost nothing ickier-looking than an iris about two seconds after it passes that point of freshness. How do they go from nice to rotting so, so, so quickly?

2. The surest way to make anticipated guests arrive is to think, "Oh, I have time to just pop in and use the bathroom before they get here." Instantly, the doorbell will ring. This never fails.

Corollary 2a: This only works if your husband is out of hearing range of the doorbell.

3. Read labels carefully. The little tin pot of lip balm I bought in France and was using throughout the weekend? Not lip balm. It's solid perfume, designed to be lightly dabbed on the pulse points -- not slathered onto your lips every couple of hours. I briefly became the dreaded Woman With Too Much Perfume on before I figured this out.

More on roses

From my friend Beth, another great site for reading about or buying great roses - another Oregon company, so it's close by for PNW gardeners (short shipping time): http://uncommonrose.biz/r/index.html

I was happy to find one of the more unusual roses I've inherited at the new place listed there - I've only seen a few entries about Gruss an Aachen on the Web, and learned more about it here than I did on any of them.

And because lists are fun, here are the roses I'm currently growing - those in bloom at the moment have a star (*)

New house:

• Gruss an Aachen *
• Golden Showers (expecting all sorts of interesting google hits on this one) *
• Queen Elizabeth *
• Orogold - one of the few not on Heirloom's site, but I found a pic halfway down this page
• Unidentified light pink climber growing through a tree
• Abraham Darby
• Another creamy white rose in the front I don't know the name of*
• Cecile Brunner shrub rose *
• A red climber that's growing through the Brunner * - is this on purpose? I don't know.

Old house:

• Peace * - my mother grew these. Ok, so did everyone else in the world, but still, I like them.
• Queen Elizabeth
• Portlandia - the Charlie Brown christmas tree of my roses; last year it barely survived after planting and this year it's just one little stick, straight up, with a gigantic bud on top. I hope it makes it!
• Scepter'd Isle
• Heritage
• Glamis Castle *
• Kiss of Desire climbing rose *

All these, and still I'm digging through a rose catalog circling things I wish I had somewhere to add in. Particularly because not a single one of these is red. Doesn't that seem like an egregious oversight?

Alas, I'm really out of rose space.

Colors

A few pictures from the other house.

One of the last of the old dutch tulips I planted:



Kiss of Desire rose that's climbing up the side of the porch:

Christmas morning

It's been like Christmas around here today - presents all day long. Actually not presents - it's just that everything we ordered for the house a while back ended up getting delivered today.

We were awakened by the Sears folks, dropping off the split box spring for the downstairs guest room. (Regular box springs can't fit down the stairs.)

Then the stove guy showed up to hook up our fabulous gas cooktop, which took an hour and a half of sawing and hammering and muttering, but it's in now and it's great.

And then, finally, Crate and Barrel showed up with the slipcover chair and ottoman I ordered something like the very weekend we first bought the house.

I now find myself half listening for the doorbell, to see who might be bringing me something next.

Hitting the rose jackpot

I went to the local addiction center - I mean Swanson's Nursery, of course - after work tonight determined to find one pink rose to put in across the street at the old house in the gap that's emerged in my lavender hedge.

Two years ago the existing lavender hedge expired, and I ripped it out and started a new one with five Munstead Lavender starts and a pink Scepter'd Isle rose on one end (at left, picture from White Flower Farms, as I seem to have taken no pictures of mine in bloom. Doh.)

Four of the lavenders did great and are now two feet high and really forming a hedge, and one of them died. I replaced it. It died again. Hrm. The rose, was and is beautiful, dripping with lazy pink, cupped flowers that drop their petals at the slightest hint of a breeze and smell slightly of myrrh. I love that rosebush.

So, because I liked this combination so much - the dim purple of the lilacs and the light pink rose, I decided to just add another rosebush in the dead spot instead of trying again with another lavender plant which will always be too small for its neighbors. And, being intently nuts, I couldn't get it out of my head that if I didn't get it soon all the good roses might be gone. Paranoia and obsession, the little talked about elements of successful gardening.

And so off I went to my favorite local dealer. Still a good selection - not quite as much as a few weeks back when I picked up the Glamis Castle (heartbreakingly beautiful and in full bloom now across the street) and the Abraham Darby (in bud over here at the new place and eagerly anticipated), but still a wide selection containing a few unusual selections. I finally selected the one I did based almost entirely on the fact that it smells of lemons -- something called a Heritage rose.

Came home and looked it up on the Heirloom Roses site, best place to buy mail order roses bar none, and was pleased to read that I'd hit the jackpot -- and I quote:

"As I sit here trying to describe `Heritage', what keeps coming to my mind is "Here is a near perfect rose." Its classically shaped, old-fashioned rose blooms are a lovely, soft pink, which is perfect for this delicate, cup-shaped beauty. One of the most outstanding of the English Roses. Its medium sized blooms are true perfection in form and fragrance, which is strong and heady with a touch of lemon. A vigorous, bushy plant with few thorns. Excellent repeat blooming
characteristics. Performs well in partial shade. Only have room for one rose? This is it."

Holy schmoly. :) I got a good one...

Click here to order one for your yourself. :)

House and self

I'm finally reading (more like devouring) a book I bought last summer entitled "House as a Mirror of Self: Exploring the Deeper Meaning of Home," by Clare Cooper Marcus. Somehow it just seemed like the appropriate time to be reading it -- I can't imagine why.

Fascinating stuff - so interesting that I actually grabbed a pen and have been underlining, which I don't often do these days. A few excerpts:

"As we change and grow throughout our lives, our psychological development is punctuated not only by meaningful emotional relationships with people, but also by close, affective ties with a number of significant physical environments, beginning in childhood. That these person-place relationships have been relatively ignored is partly due to the ways in which we have chosen to "slice up" and study the world."

-and-

"In the course of our lives, other people enter, and sometimes leave, the field of our psychic awareness. We pay attention to some, invest deep emotion in some, and selectively pay little attention to others. This seems so obvious; we know we could not survive without this selectivity. The world is too populated and too complex.

What is less obvious is that the same thing happens, I believe, with the objects and places in our lives. We selectively pay attention and invest them with emotion as it serves the deeper, largely unconscious process of individuation, or becoming who we truly are. Objects, like people, come in and out of our lives and awareness not in some random, meaningless pattern ordained by fate, but in a clearly patterned framework that sets the stage for greater and greater self-understanding.

The key seems to be in the personalization of space: More and more, I found in the stories I heard that it is the movable objets in the home, rather than the physical fabric itself, that are the symbols of self. Even the prisoner, shut away by society because of a crime, is permitted to bring into prison certain effects that are personally meaningful (posters, pinups, family pictures). Even when stripped of all symbols of self-hood, all possibilities of choice, we do conceded that the personalization of place is an inalienable right. Conversely, when society wishes to mold a group of individuals into a whole (military personnel), or the attention of the group is deliberately focused away from personal needs (religious orders), the personalization of space is consistently precluded."

So perhaps my obsession with the new place, and particularly the five square feet of space that makes up my desk and back window, is actually Jungian in nature and not just about pretty paint and a few plants.

Buddha desk

The continuing evolution of the perfect workspace and view now includes a small olive tree in a washpot, a rosemary topiary, and a buddha garden ornament I brought over from the herb garden across the street.

Marriage conversations

Two different, but connected, conversations over the weekend that seemed relevant to the evolution of a marriage.

While discussing the fact that I have no access to cash right now because of an ATM card screwup:

Him: Here, I'll give you some money.
Me: Are you sure you don't mind?
Him: Y'know, this whole your money and my money thing is becoming less and less important. It's our money. (hands me a wad of cash)

While discussing the marital distribution of ice cream:

Him: I have to ask you something. Tell me the truth.
Me: What?
Him: Did you eat some of the ice cream?
Me: Yeah, I did, just now.
Him: ARG! It's MINE! You had your own pint.
Me: But you could have had some of it.
Him: But I didn't!
Me: So, let me get this straight. The money is now ours, but the ice cream is yours?
Him: Exactly. (snatches back his pint of ice cream)

:)

Top ten things I'm really enjoying about the new house:

1. Never have to stop and figure out whether you actually can find an unoccupied the bathroom when you need to go.

2. Room upstairs and in basement to lay out a yoga mat and stretchy styrofoam things and work out without having to move tables or chairs.

3. Heated bathroom floor. Especially nice on day your husband leaves for work before you're awake and you wake up to discover he left it on for you.

4. Now have enough roses growing in my yard to go out and pick bouquets of them once or twice a week to put on the dining room table.


5. Warm yellow walls downstairs.

6. Doing dishes in your first dishwasher you've ever had in your whole entire life is actually fun. And so is doing laundry. And so is cleaning the kitchen sink. Here we pause to wonder how long this honeymoon infatuation with doing chores in the new house will last.

7. Being left to unpack the kitchen yourself means that it's FINALLY organized the way I'd like it to be.

8. Have two yards to pick from when making floral arrangements, since we still own the place across the street.

9. Cooking on a gas stove, finally.

10. Having our own offices, of course. You knew that had to be on here, if you've been reading this at all...

The new Indiana

Remember the story of Indiana Jones, our intrepid kitty visitor who not only came in and stole our food but made himself at home on our mattress in the middle of the night? He moved away after grousing his way into our hearts, and in spite of ourselves we missed him.

Well... I think we have a new Indiana on our hands. The new neighbor cat, Trooper, has been in our house almost constantly since we moved in. And like his predecessor, he's not one of these namby pamby scaredy cats who hightails it out the cat door the moment you make a noise or notice that they're there. No, he saunters into the living room and investigates the chair you're sitting in. He rolls on the carpet in front of the four other cats, who watch him resignedly. They've been through this before.

Here he is in our backyard this morning:

New yard (mostly an excuse to post some pictures I took this morning)

This yard is full of plants I have not grown before because I thought I didn't really care for them -- like irises, for example. They're big, they're showy, and they've never been to my taste. But I never examined them closely before either until I suddenly had scores of them in my front yard -- so I never noticed how they turn from a bud into this tightly wrapped, perfect little square of purple silk:



Which then unfurls a little as it approaches its more familiar form:


They're still showy. But that first purple square with its sharp corners was a surprise to me. I didn't know they did such a thing. I think maybe we've come to an understanding.

I've also never been such a big fan of the big orange poppies, either - and I think I've got about twenty of them here, each just monstrously big. I even took a couple out last week to make room for something - but they still dominate the plantings edging the front of the yard. And, I must admit, they're growing on me.

They do look nice with all the blue and purple around them (one foxglove, one big huge blue lupine, and Spanish lavender):


And I like how they look next to the soft fuzz of love-in-a-mist:

(The purple heliotropes behind them in this picture were my recent addition - I just can't not have heliotropes, with their crazy bubble gum smell and their five month bloom cycle.)

Max with moving box

"You folks are nuts."

Alphabet of plants

Borrowing slightly on a meme I saw on Garden Gift, I spent a few minutes today trying first to list out a plant for every letter of the alphabet, and then modified it to only plants I've personally grown.

And then I quickly became both obsessed with finding one for every letter and completely blank-brained and unable to remember the names of even plants I know extremely well. Which led me to dig through my gardening journal and, in a few cases, through the index of the best gardening book in the universe.

But finally - here it is. I've never grown a plant beginning with the letter "x", but everything else is accounted for:

• antirrhinum majus (snapdragons)
• borage
• cosmos
• dianthus
• echinacea
• foxglove
• geranium
• heliotrope
• iris
• joe pye weed (eupatorium maculatum)
• kale, ornamental
• lupine
• monarda
• nicotiana
• oregano
• papaver
• queen elizabeth rose (cheating slightly to get a 'q' in here by using the varietal name)
• rock rose
• sweet cicely
• tomato
• umbrella plant
• valerian
• woodruff
• x - nothing. zero. zilch.
• yarrow
• zinnia

Some letters are easier than others, obviously. Q, K, and X were really tough. Some letters I could list dozens for.

Making themselves at home

Phoenix and Cassie sacking out approvingly on the new bed.

Office nirvana

First let me refer you to the last paragraph of this post I made in March. And then let me show you this picture, of my office in the back of the new house.



Leafy green walls, check!
Geraniums in the window box -- check!
Desk with a lovely view of the backyard - check!

And although you can't see the rest of it from this picture, my own bookcases and my silly sky blue closet are all there too. And there is no stereo. And there are botanical prints. And there are cats.

Mission accomplished. Ahhhhhhhhhh. :)

(Actually the geraniums are from this post - but more on that later.)

And we're in

Movers came Friday morning at 8:30, and by 11:30 they were done. Funny guys - they were telling us stories about how awful it is to move people going through divorces, and told Brett stories about moving a dominatrix's dungeon. They did a fast and thorough job, even managing to get Brett's grandmother's big, round, drum-shaped desk up the stairs into the back nook.

This left us the rest of the day to unpack things, haul remaining detritus out of the house, go pick up the new lawn mower we now need, etc. By evening, the new house actually looks like a home - boxes, yes, but the living room and dining room are approaching being cleared out, and the upstairs is set up for living. And... maybe it's just me, but our STUFF looks better in here. Like it's as happy as we are to have some room to spread out and breathe a little.

Day one for the cats went pretty well. Phoenix and Cassie, veterans of many moves, did fine - spent the day exploring all three floors and choosing nap locations. They are low maintenance kitties when it comes to this kind of thing - "Oh, we're moving? Where's the food now? Okay."

Max and Maddie, on the other hand, aren't too happy. We locked them both in the house with us last night but ended up getting up at three to let Maddie, who was basically standing above our heads on the pillows wailing, out. We haven't seen her since. Max has been in and out - he knows where the food is, and that's good enough for him -- but he doesn't seem very comfortable yet. In time, though, I'm sure we'll have all four of them hanging out in this yard instead of across the street.

And waking up this morning in our lovely new house was an extremely pleasant way to start the weekend.

Update

Not posting a lot these days -- hrm, why would that be? Could it be because I'm spending every single waking hour during which I'm not at work PACKING AND HAULING AND CARRYING AND UNPACKING AND HAULING AND CARRYING AND PACKING AND HAULING AND CARRYING AND...

Yeah, that must be it.

Here's what I'd forgotten: moving sucks. Even nice, cushy moves like this where you're just moving across the street. Yes, it's nicer in many ways that real moves where you have to pack everything and load a truck, but it's no less heavy to carry all that stuff, and you end up carrying each and every piece of it yourself.

Well, not every piece - just the boxes you'd normally have the movers load up and heft into the new house for you. We did hire burly moving men to come move our furniture on Friday morning, but we've been trying to get everything else moved ourselves in advance of that.

Pro: it's starting to look like a home over there, and it feels really good to be moving in, and I can't wait to sleep there on Friday.

Con: I'm rillyrilly tired of walking across the street with boxes I can't see over the top of.

The neighborhood cats are very curious about this whole process. At least three cats that don't belong to us are hanging out in the bushes over at the new place, on the front stoop, and sometimes, when we leave the door open, in the house itself. For eight or nine days now they've been watching this endless parade and bustle between these two houses.

Cat1: What are these crazy humans up to?
Cat2: I don't know, but it looks cool. Let's go see.
Cat1: Okay, you first.
Cat3: Hey, they've got a basement. Follow me.


Meanwhile, friends like Pagooey and Mike are posting witty, interesting, erudite things on their blogs, and all I can talk about is househousehouse, movemovemove. My higher brain functions have been hijacked by both excitement and exhaustion. My neuralhoozits are no longer firing. When people talk to me about complicated things at work my head fills with static and it's all I can do not to stare blankly. Sometimes I do just that.

I will return to more interesting posting somewhere around... oh... Saturday. After waking up for the very first time in our new house.

So. Tired.

It's Sunday night. Over the course of the last three days we've painted five rooms in the new house (with help - more on that in a moment), assembled a bunch of large bookcases and shelving units, carried about five hundred boxes across the street, assembled about half of the new kitchen, and hauled several metric tons of plants and heavy pots and gardening tools across the street in my brand new FoldIt cart. Oh, and bought and planted tomatoes, but that's another story.

We are now about half moved in. And we are completely, totally, ultra-mega-super exhausted. Exhausted to the point where you get into bed at night and you feel like your limbs are floating. Exhausted to the point where you're too tired to speak. Exhausted to the point where you get to Sunday night and think, "I have to go to WORK tomorrow? After all this?"

Thank god for painting help. Mike, Erica, and Jacki came over today to help me tackle the big painting projects - I'd already done my office, but the living room-dining room space and the main portion of the basement needed to be done. On my own, this would have taken me about three days. With them, we got it done in about five hours -- cutting in, two coats, and all.

And, to my delight, everyone played along with another of my favorite house rituals - I like to write things on the walls in the new paint before rolling the first coat, so that only I know it's there beneath the color. I almost always do this when I paint a room. Sayings, pictures, names - something meaningful.

In the new house, we all signed our names, and I painted a few figures - a heart near my name and Brett's, a sun over the fireplace. Now I can sit in my new house in the not-so-far-away future in our fully furnished living room and know that the walls are covered with mementos of friends.