Living With Loose Ends

Lately, I’ve had trouble getting much done aside from working on my half-marathon training (5 and a half weeks to go!) and keeping up with this blog. I live with a lot of loose ends, including a lot of projects I’ve written about here, but failed to finish off the last little bit of the project. Tired from training, lacking inspiration, I decided to look at my loose ends and see what can be done to feel some sense of accomplishment with minimal effort.

First off, I can’t seem to finish off my project to eradicate the nut moths. I did have a few solid moments of eradication, but there are still one or two a day flying around. After getting rid of virtually all the nuts in the house, we saw a huge reduction in moths. Later, resurgences led me to look for further sources of their food and I did find an infestation in an open bag of cereal. Out to the bin it went and there were no moths for a while. Then they came back. I found a bag of ballpark peanuts, still in the shell, that had been infested…off to the garbage it went. After that, we saw maybe one moth a day…and so it has continued. I need to find their last hiding space.

Then there are the de-cluttering projects centered around getting rid of old clothes. I have been a bit (ok a lot) anal about documenting all of my charitable donations so that I get the appropriate tax deduction. I do realize, finally, that the financial payoff on this strategy is decidedly minimal. I have boxes and boxes of kids clothes to donate and I hereby put myself on record to donate them with or without an itemized listing for tax purposes.

I’ve done some plaster repairs which have gone quite well. I patched some holes in the stairwell, the spot where the back door was slamming into the wall (added a built-in doorstop to prevent recurrence), and a hole in my bathroom wall when I had an electrician move a wall sconce. The problem is that I never painted over the patches. Time to dig out some drywall sanding material and a couple of buckets of paint. These are small jobs that I should have done long ago.

I’ve been intending to repot the orchids I won at a bridal shower. The blooms lasted quite a while before they started falling off, one by one. I finally looked up online how to care for them and discovered that I shouldn’t have been watering them. Now, a couple months later, they are still green and healthy…and a few spikes are growing where I assume future flowers will blossom. Time to repot them and see if I can coax them into blooming.

Time for me to bloom too…I’ve been growing out my bangs, but don’t know what to do with my hair now. I had my torn earlobes surgically repaired, but I’ve been putting off getting them re-pierced. I’ve lost some weight, but need to complete that journey. Ultimately, I need to figure out what my natural style is…I had a lot of style before I had kids, but that all has gone by the wayside over the years. As I dig through my closet to clean it out, I see what my style was, but it’s not my style anymore.

So many projects, big and small, to get over the finish line…and so many new projects on my to-do list. It’s time to stop living with so many loose ends and tie a few of them off.

Find the Joy in the Journey and the satisfaction of a job, finally, well done!

The Girls’ Weekend That Was…But Not For Me

For only the second time in my life, I was invited to a “girls’ weekend”. I was looking forward to this time to reconnect with one of my oldest friends…having been thrown together on our first day of work over 22 years ago. I was looking forward to getting to know a newer friend, the hostess of the weekend, better…we were matched up at work almost two years ago. And I was also looking forward to getting to know two German colleagues whom I’d just met, who are in town on business for a couple of weeks. We were to explore the local wine country (or perhaps, wine county is more fitting?) together and just hang out and get to know each other.

About a week before the big weekend, my husband was asked to be on the other side of the country for meetings on Thursday and Friday before the weekend and Monday through Wednesday after the big weekend. He was also asked to be in Europe from Thursday through the following week. He managed to carve out a few days in between business trips, but still would be gone over the girls’ weekend.

Now, he would have taken a red-eye home on Friday night and another back to work on Sunday night…effectively allowing me to attend the girls’ weekend with only one night with our own girls home alone…But that seemed too much for me to ask of everyone, husband and daughters alike. So, I spent the weekend at home with my girls, as usual. My husband, on the other hand, with a free weekend out of town, signed up for a half-marathon. Afterward, he declared it “fun” with “killer hills”. (Oh, I have so much to learn from him about the joys of physical fitness!)

I decided that if I was going to be home, spouseless, for a weekend, I may as well give myself a huge to-do list and have at it! So go the plans of mice and men…but I did accomplish some things, if not very inspiring. On Friday night, I took the girls for flu shots. What a disaster! My insurance covers the shots at a doctor’s office or at a pharmacy and we were off to the pharmacy for easy, unscheduled flu shots, just like we got the year before at the same store. Not to be. I called my insurance company and they assured me that I could get the shot right where I was, the pharmacy just had to code it properly. Again, a failure. Then the pharmacist called and came back to tell me that my insurance would only cover the shots if given at a doctor’s office. Total flu shot failure times three. Fortunately, I was able to get into the pediatrician on Saturday morning, so at least the girls got their shots.

Saturday, after the flu shots and a workout, I decided to put on a third coat of paint to the upstairs hallway ceiling. This was something that had been bothering me for weeks. As I wrote in Watching Paint Dry—Part II: The Ceiling, I’d painted it over two months ago…and subsequently added a coat. Even so, a shiny underlayer showed through in numerous places. Yes, yes, I am now a firm believer in primers…even if the current paint is white and the new paint is white. It felt really good to get the ceiling looking “right” finally. This also sets me up to complete the project of fixing up and painting the hall and stairway walls.

Then, on Sunday, I got back on the treadmill and showered in time for church. The girls and I walked over and spent an hour and a half together. I find it a personal triumph that my younger daughter pays attention and only infrequently tries to engage me in conversation during service. She has come a long way in the “pay attention” department. I do empathize with her, however, as I know that her mind never stops working and her mouth is hardwired to her brain! Once when she was three and nursery school was unexpectedly closed, I took her with me to church and I spent the whole time trying to corral her and keep her quiet (quite a hopeless pursuit in both cases). Needless to say, I was not spiritually enriched on that particular Sunday.

After church, we ended up at the grocery store, engaged in several conversations about food, diet, and deciphering food labels. We planned our meals for the next few days and worked together to get the right groceries, get through the checkout, and back home again. Once home, my older daughter cleaned out the refrigerator and freezer, making our future meal preparations easier.

Then, my younger daughter ran across the street to play and my older daughter got out her homework…leaving me some time for writing, bill paying, and other sundry tasks. I can’t say I’m sorry about how the weekend progressed; it was rather typical for me. I love the opportunities I get to spend with my girls and helping to shape them into the young women they are becoming. I appreciate the time to work on my writing and to advance my home projects. But, I miss spending time with my husband and I miss the even rarer opportunity to bond with my peers.

Find the Joy in the Journey, even when it takes some unexpected turns.

Watching Paint Dry–Part II: The Ceiling

Well, it’s the weekend, so it must be time for the next phase of my stairway and hallway painting project; the trim work is done and it’s time to move on to the ceiling. This posed a few challenges, but I managed to overcome them. First, was washing the ceiling. I soon realized that there were places in the stairwell that I couldn’t reach. I handled it by throwing the damp rag at everything that looked like a bit of cobweb until they fell off…good enough! I didn’t really think most of the ceiling needed washing, but I dragged out the ladder and scrubbed away. It did seem to make a difference so I felt like I was making progress already.

Next, I tried to put painters tape around the light fixtures and smoke alarms. That proved impossible. The tape just wouldn’t stick to the slick surfaces of polished metal and the plastic alarm covers. So, I got out my handy-dandy edger, purchased expressly for the occasion. Back up the ladder, I edged the entire hallway and around all the lights and smoke alarms. Up and down, up and down, move the ladder, move the tarp, and move the ladder back, up and down, up and down. Geez, I should be getting bonus fitness points for this!

When I got to the stairwell, I was ready to give up…I hadn’t figured out how to get up into the stairwells yet. So, I got a roller and rolled the hallway ceiling. Same exercise as edging, up and down, up and down, move the ladder, move the tarp, move the ladder back, up and down, up and down…repeat several times. At that time, my husband got back from his run and suggested I use one of the extension handles for the roller. Oh. Good idea. I had looked and looked for them, but now I recalled my difficulty in finding the flashlights in the power outage and headed for the basement and found them behind the water heater…right next to the shelf with the old flashlights!

I managed to figure out how the edger works at the end of a big stick…a bit tricky! I did have to climb the ladder one more time to hand-edge around the light fixture, but other than that I managed to edge and roll the entire stairwell ceiling with my feet firmly planted on the floor. Since the ceiling had been painted, just not all with ceiling paint, I decided that one coat was enough, with a bit of touch-up where I could see the need.

So, the ceiling is drying and I’m one more step closer to the glamorous part of painting…the walls! Of course, the walls need a lot of pre-work first. They are the worse for wear for having been ignored all these years since we moved back in. Fingerprints and smudges need to be removed, gouges need to be filled-in, bumps need to be sanded down, and a couple of seams need to be re-taped and mudded. But, with the moldings and ceiling done, I’m that much closer!

As I washed and edged and painted, I thought about where I am in my journey and where I am in my life. It seems odd to be in my late 40’s and, having bought my house 19 years ago, still to be painting walls and to have mostly hand-me down furniture in most rooms. But then, I’ve always been a late bloomer and there are advantages to that. I mean, I‘m glad I didn’t peak in high school! I’m glad that I picked a house we could grow into, though it would have been nice to have “finished” it before the kids started leaving home. I like the few pieces of furniture I have bought, and I look forward to decorating and hanging pictures after the walls are done.

So, just as I look forward to fixing up the walls, I look forward to fixing up my life. A little filling in here, a little sanding away there, a little re-doing, and a little rehabbing. And when I’m further along, I look forward to the decorating!

Slowly, but surely, I will get there, and I plan to enjoy it along the way! Find the Joy in the Journey!

Watching Paint Dry–Part I: The Trim

I was kind of washed –out on Saturday; still trying to catch-up on my sleep from my super-quick trip to Mexico. The day started off slowly. I read the local paper online. I posted my every-other-day blog. I got on the treadmill and bumped my speed a notch to 4.2 mph. I took a shower and checked facebook. Yawn. I would have liked to have gone back to bed, but by then it was noon! I knew what I should be doing, but I was procrastinating.

A couple of weeks ago, I bought some painting supplies with the idea that I’d paint the stairwell and upstairs hallway. They’ve never been painted and we moved back into the house 5 and a half years ago! I really loved how my linen-closet project worked out and it had even inspired me with a color choice for the hall. Sigh.

The thing is, that this type of project quickly mushrooms out of control and I really wanted to get started and keep on going even if it took a few weekends. I was certainly right on the mushrooming. First, I tried to secure a bit of loose molding. I could see where there had been some nails and I really don’t know why they were removed. I headed to the basement and quickly found a hammer. Finding the finish nails was another thing…but eventually I located them. I started hammering the nails into the spots where the old nails had been.

This wasn’t too hard, although I must admit I’m not very good with a hammer. I soon saw that the nails were not doing the trick; the holes were too big for the tiny finish nailheads to do any good. So, I tried to put a nail in a new location. Dang! This pre-primed molding, whatever it’s made of, is hard as nails! I pounded away to little avail except for waking my teenaged daughter from her one shot at sleep in the last three days (home from a five week design school). Oops! She was gracious though, and taking the hammer from me, managed to get that darned nail in good and tight.

I forged ahead, washing the molding in the stair landing, taping the floor, getting out the bucket of trim paint, and starting to paint. I put on three coats, then proceeded upstairs. Hmm…I considered doing everything in the stairwell first…but I realized that the ceiling in the stairwell needed painting and I decided to continue with the trim paint in the hallway and then tackle the ceiling.  I chose another defined area, this one near the linen closet (which I’d noticed during that project didn’t have paint on the doorframe molding). I put three coats on that second area and moved onto a third area.

As I worked my way along, I covered up a multitude of carpentry sins, most of which I’d never noticed before. I also saw so many flaws in the walls that will have to be corrected before I can paint them. This is definitely a multi-weekend project. I also noticed that either some of the door moldings and doors were painted with flat paint, or are in their original pre-primed state…so although I got all the floor moldings and the linen closet door molding painted with three coats, I may have to get up Sunday and do door frames and doors…

As I worked through about 5 hours of painting, I had a lot of time to think. I wondered if de-cluttering or painting were more rewarding. I see the merits of both, but painting is rather mindless, so at least allows time for thinking and also has the advantage of not forcing choices of what to keep and what to discard. The downside is the temptation to brood about why I’m in a situation to have to do all my own painting rather than having the cash to hire it out…in other words, thinking about how my neighbor ruined our renovation project, our piece of mind, and our finances. I never violated any building codes (and I have the building permit to prove it), but still he and his political connections were able to obfuscate the truth to our ruination. Ironic that I can clearly see that he is renovating his basement sans permit. But, I’m a bit surprised to find that I don’t care what he’s doing; I’m just pleased to finally be making progress on my own project.

Find the Joy in the Journey…and maybe you won’t care about the [insert expletive here] next-door neighbors!

The Wasp That Inspired A Linen Closet Makeover

When my husband came home from a run with a wasp sting in his bicep, I rushed for the first aid supplies. Ugh, what a mess. I keep them in the linen closet which has long been on my de-clutter list and long been avoided. Eventually I found both oral and topical Benedryl and anti-histamines, and my husband, fortunately, didn’t have too bad a reaction from the sting. But, I did feel that it is time to tackle the linen closet. Here is what it looks like before and after I spent 45 minutes to empty it:

The door doesn’t work, so it’s always open, showing off its messy interior. I know that the interior is not painted, the main reason I put off de-cluttering it. When we moved back into the house after renovating, we had all of the finish work to do ourselves. That seemed like such a responsible and economical way to go!  However, years later we still haven’t finished the finish work! And for the most part, we were anxious to put stuff away so we hung shelves in closets without bothering to paint them first. In the case of the linen closet, I remembered that we tore the drywall in the process as well; another one of those tasks within a task.

Four hours of painting later (closets are the worst), the inside of the closet is a pale blue. The paint is left over from repainting our son’s room after his ceiling fell-in a few weeks ago and I was wondering how it would look to paint the hallway (never painted) the same color. Now I’m thinking a light brown might work better since it will have to continue down the stairs and look appropriate with light golden yellow as well as red.

I am not very good at throwing things away, so I enlisted my younger daughter to help me with all the medications and first aid supplies. Besides, she can read the expiration dates on things and I need my reading glasses to do so. She was soon chucking tubes and packets of things into the trash with great abandon. The bottles and boxes, we set aside to figure out a recycling strategy.

Next came the towels. I had been holding off getting rid of our oldest towels until I had time to re-organize the entire linen closet, so now was the time. This was made vastly easier because my older daughter had taken several to camp with her and my younger daughter had likewise packed a few for her upcoming camp. Just before we started our renovation, I had found such a good deal on towels at the local warehouse store that I’d stocked up on enough white towels for all the bathrooms. They are somewhere in the attic. I did manage to find the few sets that my husband had taken with him when he moved for his job and then brought back when he moved back home. So, for now I put those in the linen closet. I also found a box of beach towels and they fit neatly in the bottom of the linen closet now.

Sheets were next. I pared it down to one extra set of sheets per bed, but that left an awful lot more that I don’t need. I also knew that I had even more sheet sets and blankets in the attic. I need to go through them all sooner rather than later so that I don’t have that hanging over my head. In the end, I kept an extra set of sheets for my son’s bed because it will be used as a guest room when he’s off at college. This set has never been used, yet it was a wedding present (i.e. I’ve had them for 25 years and never used them!). I also kept a few extra sets of twin sheets because the girls use them when they have sleepovers.

As for the rest, I’m giving the ragged towels to the humane society and the nice sheets and towels to St. Vincent de Paul. That leaves only a little left for the trash bin.

When it came to the medicines and first aid supplies, I decided that less is more. Most of what I had wasn’t really first aid; it was just nice to have on hand if someone got sick. I’ll still keep small quantities of pain reliever, decongestant, allergy medicines, etc. but no more bulk buys for me! As for real first aid supplies, I checked the CDC website to see what to keep in a First Aid Kit and was pleased to discover that most of it is non-perishable. So, it’s now on my to-do list to assemble all the necessary items. They recommend keeping it all in a toolbox or tackle box so that it’s portable.

Here is my linen closet now. There’s room for a few more things, like blankets that we use in the winter that are stored up in the attic.  Now I just need to fix that door!

Find the Joy in the Journey!

Sleep

Sleep, or lack thereof, can have an impact on your weight. If you don’t get at least 7.5 hours of good sleep a night, your metabolism slows down due to an imbalance of two hormones, grehlin and leptin. Guess which one tells you to eat? Yup, that evil sounding grehlin, and when you are sleep deprived, you have more grehlin and less leptin, the hormone that tells you to stop eating. There’s a good explanation of it in the WebMD story, Coping with Excessive Sleepiness.

Even a short stint of sleep deprivation can throw your body into a pre-diabetic funk as well. Studies, such as this one published in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism, demonstrate that in as little as two weeks, a person who stops exercising and eats what they want is resilient if they get over 8 hours of sleep, but if they get fewer than 6 hours a night, they start exhibiting symptoms of Type 2 Diabetes. It’s a stress trifecta designed to destroy your health…You’re under stress so you sleep less and skip exercising in order to catch up with your work and in the process, you eat more to try to boost your energy.

Wow, that’s a double whammy! I’ve been affected in both ways. I don’t sleep very well and often not long enough. I’ve also approached the “pre-diabetic” mark which caused me to do some research on Type 2 Diabetes. The bottom line is that if you develop Type 2 Diabetes, there’s no going back. Type 2 Diabetes is one of the most common diseases in the US and it’s also one of the most preventable.

So, how does one go about getting more and higher quality sleep? Turns out I’ve been doing some things already that should help, namely moving non-sleep activities out of my bedroom. But there’s more (a lot more) and here’s a link to a plethora of ideas: How to Sleep Better. One thing I need to work on is making my room darker at night. Mostly that’s under my control, but I don’t have blinds in my windows, so in the summer, when the sun rises before I choose to, I am at a disadvantage.

Before I can put blinds on my windows, however, I need to finish painting the window frames. Sigh. There’s always a task before a task around here! I practiced by painting the mudroom window (recall, that went on my task list while I was de-cluttering) so at least I now have the mechanics down pat…but I have four, larger windows in my bedroom, so this is a bigger task.

Here, I’ve finally finished. The worst of it is actually getting the tape off…it’s not anywhere as simple as the commercials imply. The paint forms a film which extends on top of the tape and if you simply pull off the tape, a portion of the paint will tear right off of the freshly-painted surface. So, I use a razor blade to cut the paint film at the edge of the tape before pulling off the tape. I have an area or two that didn’t turn out 100%, but hopefully I’m the only one who would notice.

Now, I look at the curtains and decide I may as well wash them while they’re down. After all, the whole point of having washable curtains is to help my allergies by eliminating dust from my bedroom through regular washings. (hah!) But once they are washed and re-hung, they are awfully wrinkled. I don’t much feel like ironing them…my whole adulthood has been about avoiding the iron!

So, now I contemplate if I want to measure for blinds, go to the store and have blinds custom cut, buy them, get out a drill and hang the hardware for the blinds…OR…buy new curtains with blackout properties. Well, that’s a no-brainer! I went a bit on the cheap…cheaper than buying blinds. They claim to block 99% of the light, and maybe they do…maybe 99% isn’t enough! But, this picture was taken at 8 o’clock in the morning.  I think this will work fine for sleeping in on occasion because although light does come through, it’s softer, more diffused than with my old curtains. Another bonus is that the curtains are also designed to reduce energy loss through the window. Theoretically, they also block sound, but I clearly heard the train whistle at 4 a.m. this morning when it passed by half a mile away. I’m guessing that the next time my neighbors throw a party, I will hear it just as clearly as ever.

Here is the result:

Sleep well and find the Joy in the Journey!