Homesick

It's been bad. I want to go home. Get out of this town. Away from all these people. Outside doesn't feel good like it does in the town I grew up in. Dogs and kids can't get out and run like they could where I grew up. The air isn't the same, the pace is entirely different and you can't see the stars for all the apartment lights here. I hate it.

Sometimes it feels like I'm being crushed. Squashed by life in a place I don't belong. And I certainly don't belong here. I need the trees, the sun, the crickets...a garden. The quiet rest of the country. Home. I need to go home. I've been ten years living in a place where 30,000 people drive past our street every day and I'm suffocating. Collapsing in on myself. I'm just not meant for life like this. I love pizza delivery. I like grocery stores only two miles away. I like the closeness to school. But life here is detrimental to me. It hinders my ability to be happy.

I have this fantasy that's been building in my mind for months now. My pop is in the process of fixing his mother's house to move into. I have dreams of selling our house and taking the money to pay his off, adding a room or two and staying there with my pop. Pop could use the help, we would love pop's company, and I would finally be home. My heart would be happy - my spirit content.

My husband just don't realize when he says "there's no way we could fit in there" how much happier I would be. When we first met I was a girl from the country, a small place like that, though not that town and not one quite so small, but smaller than here. Slower than here.

It's been so bad that even my neighbor keeps telling me, has been telling me for years, how much happier I'd be if I made it back home. And I am convinced she's right. We'd live next door to my cousin and her three boys, we'd still be close to school, Leirin wouldn't even have to change schools. There's room for a garden, room even to have a horse, and we could have goats. I could spend evenings sitting in the swing on the porch again. I could have a workshop in the building out back, the kids could actually ride bikes there like I did when we were growing up.

I'm so afraid of living out my life here in this place. Stuck between two or three thousand people I don't know all living within walking distance. Having my kids live their lives in a neighborhood with nothing but drunken college kids driving at high speeds by our front door. I want out.

I've wondered if this has been the underlying motivation for all the work I do on the house. Maybe I'm convinced that if I can make this house the perfect place for our family that I can be happy here. Maybe that would be true of any house. I'm not sure. Whatever the reason for it, I could pack up and leave this place in the space of a heartbeat and never look back. Other than the fact that this is where we've raised our children so far, I have no connection to this place, nothing that binds me to it. I still long to go home and it gets worse and worse every day.

I may make it home one day. I hope.

Until I do I'm stuck here and I hate that that is how I feel about this place, our real home. Home shouldn't feel like a trap you're caught in, but it does to me. My only hope is that living in this town will become so annoying to even my husband, we will leave. I'm not sure that will ever happen. He's moved a lot and is highly adaptable. And since he spends most all of his time at work anyway, he is weighted by work responsibilities and is seldom touched by home life.
Maybe that fact makes it seem more like being trapped here. He's never going to _want_ to leave and I want nothing more.

end big whine.

For the second day in a row I overslept and woke the girls up late. Yesterday I was just too tired that's all. Antihistamines and up too late, umm...working were to blame. No such good excuse today. I remember shutting off the alarm and thinking it was a weekend. Not my fault. The husband surprised me by showing up here before 2:30 yesterday with a night off work. That NEVER happens. So last night we piled into the car and went to dinner (Mexican, yummm) and it made it feel like a weekend. Thank goodness this is the last day of school before Thanksgiving holidays or no telling what kind of rushed hell I'd put them through for the last 3 days of the week.

Today I'm tiling my front porch (stoop according to all my yankee friends - here in the south anything attached to the house but not inside of it is a porch). I am definitely taking before and after pictures. Usually I forget to do that. Bad me. I have a mixture of natural slate, clay and tumbled marble. Looks great on paper, well technically laid out in a dry run on the livingroom foor. Hope it turns out looking that cool once it's cemented in place with no chance of a "do over". Wish me luck. I'm hoping the temperature warms up enough to let me get it done. I'm pushing my luck with temps in the 30's at night and 50's in the day but it's stone...it lives in the cold cold ground anyway. I'm hoping I'll be alright. If all goes well I'll have the coolest porch/stoop in the world to go with my nicely painted house. Yay me.

If I could just get the inside cleaned up I'd be doing pretty good.

It's been a busy day of trying to fit all of school in after getting a very late start. We've managed though, somehow. Jake is learning to read a thermometer and darn if he didn't get it right his first try. Right now he's sitting in the floor with the hiccups and they're about to get the best of him. He's had them for about an hour now and we just can't get rid of them.
I was reading Linda's blog earlier today when I was waiting on a call from the hospital. I remember the Mac Davis song and now I'm not only singing that one in my head, I keep hearing the song "Put another log on the fire" too. Thanks for the reminder, Linda.

My grandma is home from the hospital now. None of her test revealed anything that could be the cause of her problems. She has to stay hooked to a heart monitor until tomorrow then go to a different hospital to have the results read and see what they decide to do.

I hope they will be able to find (and fix) whatever the problem is.

And now it is almost time to start my housework. Jake and I are doing projects in school the rest of this week and next. We're learning measurements so we're going to be making soap, baking up some goodies for Thanksgiving and building a shelf over the stove with built in spice racks and some other cool things for my husband. If he don't know measurement by the time we're done, we'll build something else :)

My uncle called this morning to let me know that they were taking my grandma to the hospital. She was being put in the ambulance as we spoke. She was just in the hospital a little over a week ago. Diagnosis...congestive heart failure.

So I sit here waiting on word from those of my family that are at the hospital waiting for test results. And I worry.

I understand that I'm the worrying type. Shoot, my mom's nickname for years was worry-wart, so I guess I come by it honest. But this is my Ma Ma, my kids great-grandma. The heart and soul of our family.

It's hard to remember her age. She can outwork any 20 year old around. She still rakes her leaves. She loves to garden and could probably grow flowers straight out of the side of her house if she was ever to be given reason to try. She is always smiling, LOVES a good joke even though it's liable to make her laugh hard enough to pee her pants, and she can take a joke. She cracks herself up.

She has rocked 14 grand-children and 17 great-grandchildren, and taught each of them to sew or crochet if they are old enough. She digs flowers from her yard to send to those of us with homes and yards of our own. She dresses up on Halloween and laughs hysterically at the sight of herself and everyone who comes to visit her.

My Uncle Tony loves to get her a gag gift every year. One time it was a bit bottle of vodka. Ok it was a big vodka bottle filled with water and she had a great old time posing for pictures chugging from her jug. Another time it was a cup shaped like a boob. We have pictures of that too.

I owe her the worry, I feel. I'm 35 years old and she's called me first thing every day since I've been sick to see how I'm feeling and to offer to run errands I may not feel up to yet. She's sat with my kids when one had an appointment. She's cleaned my house before I got back. She's called to check up on my husband to see if he's ever going to get a day off work. She pinches off snips of flowers I manage to grow in my yard and sticks them in the ground at her house.

She lives her life like a child. Full of wonder at everything. She stops and sniffs out mysterious good smells in my yard and takes a pinch of whatever might be making it. She talks to her cat and to babies just like they know what she's talking about. She loves coffee, and peanut butter fudge and makes the world's best hot chow-chow.

She lives off of less than 700.00 a month and she will drop her last penny in the collection plate for a family she doesn't know, or drive to do a favor for someone when her car is running on fumes. She suffers more over the pain of others than to have to shoulder that burden herself.

She is love made flesh. She completes us.

There is not a soul in our family that doesn't realize that. There's not a single one of us that don't stop to realize that one day - maybe not this day, but one day we won't have her anymore. And we won't be complete.

So I sit here and worry.

Timing

It's just as well that I had planned a weekend of complete vegging because after being taken down late Saturday with what feels like the flu, it's all I've done. Everything was going along just as planned, I was spending very little time working and very much time nano-ing. Then about 10:00 Saturday night when I got up to switch laundry (I had to do laundry at least) it hit me like a load of bricks and I've been trying to pick my way clear of them since.

Whatever it is, it seems that it will not last for too long. I woke up this morning with my stomach sound enough for one cup of coffee. Probably a bit too much for me to take on considering that buffalo rock ginger ale and broth had been the only thing I could stomach for more than twenty four hours, but I wanted coffee and I took that as a good sign. I've been up since before 4am. Another sign, I thought, considering I've slept a good 24 of the last 30 hours.

I woke up ready to write - yet another sign. My fingers aren't so stiff they resist any movement this morning and that alone makes me feel infinitely better. I brushed my hair first thing because my head could now stand the weight of the brush being pulled through my hair. Thank goodness...I was getting plumb scary.

I still feel pretty yucky - don't think I could eat a bite and my head swims occasionally but I appear to be on the upswing of it all. Whatever this nasty stuff is.
It's like a hangover, and a nasty one at that, minus the fun.

With less than nimble fingers I've managed almost 600 words this morning and that makes me pretty happy even though I'm moving at a snail's pace compared to most others I nano with. And so today I'll sit here typing until I have to lay down for a nap. I'll work on laundry if my arms will fold it and maybe I'll get the bed made, or at least straightened before I have to climb back in it.

WOO HOO it's finally finished!

Well...almost. The entire house except for one small area that had a lot of caulking to be done is painted. Done.
I have had a bath. My painting clothes are in the washer. I'm sitting here now dressed in my nano shirt and my most comfy pj pants (and who knew? they match!) and that's exactly how I'll look come bath time tomorrow. Well, hopefully my hair will have settled down a bit by then...no conditioner. WOW it's scary.

If all goes according to plan.

I don't figure I'll move more than 20 steps to the bathroom or kitchen all day. If the wind lets up I may go sit on my newly painted and rearranged screened porch, but that's about it. Tomorrow I veg and write. Write and veg. Or maybe just veg if my body totally gives up like it has been wanting to. Either way, I can't wait!

The house is great. There is one small strip of gutter to be painted still that is above the bay window but wind was too high today to even attempt climbing up there. That's not my job though. Six feet off the ground and I can hear it calling to me. Pulling me even. My dad thinks I have vertigo. But while I'm up on a ladder I'm thinking more like downigo. No matter what you call it, it ends with splat. And I know that even if I splat I'm still responsible for cleaning everything up around here so I can do without it.

In other news tonight was the last night to look through book order forms (the school ones) and turn them in tomorrow. I should never have looked because they had some good sales and we ended up getting 22 books. Most were sold in sets and the price ended up just over 2.50 a book, even for hardcovers. Great deals. The teacher is going to love us. Leirin is going to hate carrying them home. I did order her a set of heartland books just because she'll have to. My nice mom thing of the month.

So I'm sitting here typing up this blog and Jake comes to me.
It seems Jake has a problem. He says "Mom, I want to be six things when I grow up and there are 5 things I want to do while I'm a children." He walks over to the washing machine and starts pacing in front of it in stressed out man mode. "I'm worried," he said, "that I won't have enough money to pay for my job because I mostly have change. I've spent all my dollars."
"Jake, your job pays you. It's where you earn your money." I said
His eyes lit up.
He hadn't given me his job list yet so I asked, "What kind of jobs do you want to do, buddy?"
"I want to be a garbage man. A firefighter. A dog trainer, yeah, a wild animal dog trainer." he said, pacing faster in the walking circle he had created, and kept right on talking. "I want to be an acrobat, and a painter, and a weather man - so you can see me on TV, and a gardener. Yeah, I can be a gardener and plant my own seeds and grow you flowers."
His list had grown quite long and he looked at me, breathless from rattling off such a list with a horribly stuffy nose.
"There's one more job I want to have"
"Another one? What job is that?"
He grinned and shrugged his shoulders up high and looked at the ground. "A father." he said, "I want to be a father for kids like me."

I love that boy.

Wide open

As is usually the case when I'm involved in completing a project of any size, I've been running wide open for over a week now. The rain delay last week left me a little time to catch up in the house (of course, you can't tell it now) and then we were back to the great outdoors and high walls of the house. It's looking really great, such a difference! I've learned a lot about painting - and our house.

One - we really need new windows.
Two - the people who originally lived here and did a lot of the adding on and rennovation were putzes. Nothing they did was done completely right or very well.
Three - Six feet off the ground on the ladder truly is my limit. The ground wants me back and I can feel it pulling at me.

It's been fun, and well worth it though my arms doth protest. Actually it's just my right arm, the one I've used to brush paint the entire bottom level with a 4 inch brush. It's the basement level so it's concrete block. Rough concrete block that was easier to do well with a brush. My poor arm.

Today will be a race against the wind. We're under advisory starting later this afternoon so we have to get on the ball and get the second story windows and the gutter repairs done quickly because even though it's not me up on the 30 foot ladder, it freaks me out. I don't want the ground dragging my uncle off of it either.

Also, as with any big project I do, it has given birth to numerous other projects in the process. I have plans for a tool storage shed, a potting bench and a car port. And since I had to go to Home Depot for another gallon of paint the other night, I also bought lumber. So I not only have project ideas, I have lumber. Somebody stop me!

Jake is over the chicken pox but now has a whopper of a case of poison ivy. He just can't give it a rest. His allergies are also giving him fits and he's stuffy. Big time stuffy.
The pollen still rains down here in this fall that seems to be taking it's sweet time about giving way to winter. I'm not complaining, but my nose (and Jakey's) is.

My start to nano has been slow but I've managed to hit over 8,000 words. I may be close to 9k now but I haven't typed up the last of what I had written so I'm not sure. I don't know that I will come close to hitting 50k by the end of the month but I can see myself writing regularly. And that's way better than hitting a word count. I've had fun. I just wish I'd have had more time for fun. Hopefully by the weekend I will be ready to add a lot more nano time to my to do list.

It's very strange. Last night I had a dream that we were in a tornado. I don't know what place we were in but it was kind of like a school, there was a stadium out back with many rows of seats but the inside of the place was like a house. The rooms had furniture so it was more like an apartment complex than a school I guess. It just reminds me of the kids old school the way it was arranged. The tornado was coming and we could hear people talking about where we needed to go. We moved outside down this sidewalk to go to a different place to wait it out and there it was, just off in the distance - a huge swirling gray bunch of clouds with things spinning around wildly on the outside edge. There was a big white van painted up Scooby gang style with huge flowers and a burning tree (spinning in the tornado, not painted on the van). Pieces of the fire flew from the swirling clouds and landed all over. Emily's (the only one of my kids that was with me) sleeve caught on fire. Just a small one, I patted it out with my hand.

This morning, my hand is burned. All the way across the base of my palm is red, puffy and stinging and it looks like I've been burned. How weird is that?

For Angela

It seems Angela might have missed me, or she's bored and has nothing else to read. Either way, I thank you for making me think you might have missed me, Angela. I've been busy since Friday because that was Halloween and Jake still had the chicken pox and couldn't be taken out to expose everybody in the world. though he wanted to know why not and when I tried to explain that we try not to make people sick he said "Well Leirin made me sick and somebody made Leirin sick. " and then there was the very sweet and sad "Little kids should have big bags of candy on Halloween."

And so we did.

I went managed to get my hands on candy, marshmallows, glow in the dark sticks, necklaces and bracelets and on Friday night after dark, we built a fire in the back yard and roasted marshmallows. And we ate candy. And then I had a piece of boston cream pie. And Saturday morning I woke up with one of those hangovers that Shelley was talking about. Luckily, I remembered the old hangover advice someone told me back in high school, and used the old "hair of the dog that bit ya" cure. I had a few mini snickers for breakfast and everything was hunkey dorey after that.

I also started painting my house Friday. The outside. My uncle is a painter and he needs a new painting van. I have a wrecked one with minor damage and whatever caused it to do that speeding up on it's own thing that caused the wreck, and he has a son that works at a repair and body shop. Diagnostic computers and car working on tools at his disposal. I'm sure my uncle can get it fixed and be safe, and he wants it. He has no money and I have a house in bad need of painting.

The deal is I buy the materials, he paints the top half and I paint what I can reach from the ground or a 6 foot ladder (as long as I don't have to look up or hang off of it in any way). Gotta love the barter system.

So the front of the house is darn near done at this point. Today I painted the trim on the other front door, one window and part of the boxing. It wasn't much because it rained most of the morning and I had to let it dry out and clear up a bit. Hopefully tomorrow will see the rest of the front trimmed out and finished. It looks fabulous! And it's darn near about to kill me in the process. 8 hours on a ladder is rough.

Because it is the way it has to be, because the outside of my house is getting whipped into shape the inside is looking like someone set off explosives. It's that balance thing. I wonder if it would be so bad if I hadn't been born a Libra. Who knows.

And Saturday was the start of nano. I've got just over 4,000 words so far and after my shower in a short little bit I'll be sitting down to spend the rest of the night writing. I can't say for sure any of it's worth a crap but hey it's 4,000 more words than I've ever had on paper. Or screen. And I get to make up exactly what I want and it's kind of fun even if I do suck at it. Maybe by the time I get out 46,000 more words I'll have gotten better at it. One can only hope.