Home at Last

Drew and I returned home late last night. We're both fighting the requisite traveler's head cold and dealing with mild general irritation from all of the hustle and bustle of the last ten days without Daddy. And I'm trying to dig myself out of a bad mood after dealing with the DDJ for the past three days in Colorado (yeah, not sure if I made that clear: Drew and I went from Chicago to Denver on Sunday for my monthly trip back to the DDJ, which was bumped up to this week within an hour of my planning my bereavement leave for last week).

So, here's hoping that next week will bring the much-needed return of normalcy so we can actually get on with settling into our new house.

Random Observations During (But Not Necessarily Connected to) the Upheaval

1. I figured out fanfiction. But it took a fanvid for me to do so. The problem with fanfiction is that I get caught up in the conventions of story and, thus, the concept of "playing in someone else's sandbox" completely confounds me. If I'm writing a story, I like to have all the control, and that means create my own backstory, tweak the characters, spin plots to the extent that what is left is only a kernel of something I found interesting in another series or show. And that kernel is usually a character arc or a juicy bit of conflict I wanted to insert into my own universe.

Somehow watching a House/Wilson fanvid on YouTube set to the musical restylings of Clay Aiken made me figure out in a way that stuck that fanfiction isn't about story at all. It's about call and answer. The call is the work of art itself: the show, the book, the car wreck that is a celebrity's tabloid-infested life. The viewer or reader or rubber necker has a response from that call, and they feel compelled to answer. I can understand this in a video medium because film is not my thing. I wouldn't feel compelled to put a story to my response--or, rather, the story wouldn't be my purpose but would be something Other that I might add for fun. So I get taking pits and pieces of clips from a show and putting them together to a song in a fashion that shares what the call is evoking in you. And in the case of the above it is that House and Wilson relationship is rife with sexual tension. The answer was crafted in a fashion that demonstrated what the viewer saw to get that response.

I can thus understand fanfiction. Still can't write it because writing for me is all about story, even if the impetus for writing something was a response to someone else's work. My need to tell a story very quickly overrides my need to answer the call I felt in another piece of art. Hence why I ran out of steam on my short story that was very, very loosely based on Shakespeare's The Tempest.

2. About a month or so ago, I questioned why I still watched Battlestar Gallactica and why I still seemed to enjoy it. I realized why after the "season" premiere last week: Helo and Athena. Damn near cried at the beginning last week. If only we had more of them and less of the nauseating Starbuck and Apollo tug of war.

3. It seems like every big move creates a vortex in which precisely one box is lost and never seen again. Now, we still have a couple of boxes to go, but our hopes of finding the box in question are dwindling. This box was a random assortment of books, knick knacks, a lamp, a serving dish, and a shower curtain. I have a need for each of the last three items it seems once a day. Here's hoping one of the last few boxes is this missing box.

4. Hanging up pictures, even two small ones, can turn a room into something infinitely more like "home" than it was before.

5. There are worse things than living ten minutes from your mother. Try living within a few blocks of not only your parents and sibs, but also your husband's parents and sibs. Yeah, I met one of my neighbors and she mentioned that just about her entire family and her husband's entire family has moved or will be moving into this development. She thinks it great. I can't even imagine the insanity.

6. The one benefit to Drewbie getting sick this week is that I had ample time to read while he was sprawled on me. I finished Scalzi's Old Man's War and Bear's Carnival. I enjoyed both very much, in very different ways. It was strange reading OMW after a year or so of reading Scalzi's blog, particularly when it came to how the main character's wife was portrayed and that her name began with a K. Whenever the main character would start on about his wife, I often got the sense that I was reading a blog post in which Scalzi was talking about his wife. That's just a peril of reading the daily bits of someone's life and then also reading a novel by that same someone. You get confused, most likely through no fault of the writer. More likely due to an inability to realize that, though a blogger is sharing a great deal of their lives with you, you really don't "know" them or the folks they talk about in any real sense.

7. When trying to figure out which book to start next, I thought I'd like something "up." But Tambo's latest, Valley of the Soul, was burning a hole in my bookshelf, and the only other book I knew to be "up" was a novel that had a fun, snarky main character but conflict and tension that was resolved in cloyingly sweet ways just about as soon as it was introduced. I've been about two-thirds through that book for the past three months, and I don't see myself finishing it. I hate books that set you up for a good character struggle and then don't deliver. I'm betting the write flinched. It's hard to write that stuff.

8. Working from home isn't as wonderful as it's made out to be. The Drew Monster gets confused because he sees me home and wants to play but I keep turning him away to get work done. Very often days go by where I try to compromise and end up feeling like I'm failing both at my job and in giving Drew what he needs. I'm waiting to see what happens when the boxes are all unpacked, the pictures are up on the walls, and the feeling of novelty shifts into a feeling of normalcy. I've been working from home for over three months, but have yet to actually be settled in my home or my own skin for that length of time. Probably the source of my issue right there.

Update the Fourth

The pile of rock "magically" moved from the street in front of our house into our backyard with a neighbor's friend's piece of heavy machinery. This cost us some cash, but seeing as how Mark was sick for several days last week and I was watching the Drew Monster, the money was well spent to get that damn pile of rock out of the way.

There are now only eight boxes left to unpack in the garage, and most of those are either books or photos/wall art.

We have a fully functional guest bedroom.

I have a fully functional office, though there are still Things to be Done before I am content with the space as "finished." Though it feels settled enough that I wrote for the first time in eighteen days last night and will be getting back to the writing tonight as soon as I post this.

Hell broke loose last week at the DDJ and may yet prove itself uncontained this week as well. There is discussion of having me fly back to Colorado not once but twice in February--yes, February, the shortest month of the year.

And, because all our cake needs right now is more icing, our car is in the shop for the fourth time in less than three months, this time for funky ignition problems, a busted central computer, and a cracked radiator. All part of the "normal wear and tear," we're told. Color us reassured.

Hopefully I'll be able to get back into the swing of regular blogging sometime this week. Ish.

Update the Third

We have a pile of rock in front of our house and have only managed to transport and rake out a small portion of it into our backyard. This week is going to be painful.

Right now I'm waiting for the washing machine's first run to finish (it's been telling me there's only 1 minute left (estimated) for about the past fifteen or twenty minutes--that I've been looking, anyway).

Drew has discovered the joys of climbing on boxes and furniture and is helping us out by moving chairs and the like around whenever he thinks to do so.

Hopefully some semblance of sanity will return in the near future. I wouldn't put any money on it, thought.

Update the Second

All of our junk (minus the usual bag/box of stragglers) is in the house. Or, rather, the garage. Drewbie's room is basically the most settled, with ours being a close second (unless you look in the dresser, armoire, and walk-in closet). And there's even enough room in the garage for our car (if we re-arrange a few boxes). Now, excuse me while I abscond to the master bedroom suite with a bottle of wine and some fancy cheese. It be time to celebrate. (Or at least toast the new house before we pass out from severe exhaustion.)

Update

We have acheived internettage.

And the family room, living room, and the Drew Monster's room has been painted.

On tap tonight: paint the master bedroom, laundry, and writing room, time permitting.

By the way, it's supposed to be a high of 42 degrees here tomorrow, just in time for the major move in. The weather hates us.

Our First Home: Buying the Paint

On Saturday, Mark and I did our own walk through of the new house. He's not going to be there for the official walk through tomorrow, and I wanted to make sure his eagle eyes had inspected everything as well. More on that next week.

On Saturday, we also bought all of our paint and painting supplies. We also bought our washing machine (my mom's giving us her old dryer). We are so very excited. We'll be painting the night of the 11th and the night of the 12th. Hopefully we'll get it finished those two nights, maybe bleeding out onto the night of the 13th.

Let me just take a moment to note the colors we picked: Dried Chervil (a lovely green for our bedroom), Endless Sky (a great blue for Drew's room), Comforting (a "comforting" brown for the family room), and Baked Biscotti (a sliverish beige cream for our formal living room, which will feature our cool space prints). And we're nabbing the extra paint my mom had after they painted their house (lavender for my writing room and a quirky magenta for the laundry closet). I'm curious to see how they'll turn out. I'm also curious to see how long it takes me to despise painting, as I'm told that's the usual reaction. I'm just too excited about personalizing a house in this way.

One last thing to note about our paint purchasing excursion was how Drewbie helped us shop. The poor guy was quite restless so we were letting him wander through the show floor and the appliance area. He happened to find the rack of heating elements and burner trays. Wanting to participate in the experience, the Drew Monster picked up a heating element, toddled his way back to our cart, and hurled that sucker into the cart. He repeated this four times. We didn't have the heart to tell Drew that our new stove is one of those electric surface jobs, so we didn't need heating elements. We just quietly removed the elements from the cart and returned them to the rack.