Valentine's Day

Surprise! I'm still here!

I was a little shocked this morning to look at my old blog and discover it had been three days shy of a year since I last posted. Time flies, or something.

Since Valentine's Day has come around again, here are a few thoughts on the holiday:

I give my kids gifts on Valentine's Day. This year the gifts included Starbucks gift cards, games, books, and, for my granddaughter, a little figurine of a baby dragon breaking out of its shell. My husband got a card. I might get one, too, if he has time to swing through a card shop before the day ends.

For some reason this day for us has always been about kids rather than romance. Partly, I guess, we get all the romance we need in our day-to-day. But there's also the feeling that the most romantic thing we've done has been to produce and raise these kids. They're us, projected into the future.

I suspect Valentine's Day makes more people unhappy than happy. As I see it, there are four kinds of people: first there are the newly-in-love who adore the whole concept - a tiny segment of the population of which I have little if any firsthand knowledge. Then there are the ones in a stable relationship who don't do much by way of celebration because, after all, Christmas was just the other day, and who needs another reason to spend money and gain weight? Next up are the people in a relationship - whether happy or not - whose expectations regarding this day are never quite met. And finally, we have the people who aren't in a relationship and who wish they were. For them, this is a day to contemplate their failure to thrive in the world of romance. Sad, and not a good way to spend a day at any time, much less deep in the doldrums of February.

On the other hand, it's a very good day for people who sell cards, candy, and flowers. So there's that.

I don't know if this is a made-up holiday, or if there was an actual person named Valentine who was so spiritually inspired and inspiring that he was sanctified by the Catholic Church. Kevin Bacon played a terrific Valentine in the movie Tremors, though.

I'd love to spend Valentine's Day every year cocooned in front of a crackling fire with a good book and a bottomless pot of hot soup. I suppose it goes back to that 'February doldrums' business. In fact, if it weren't for the money to be made by the romance-merchants, I'd think this holiday was invented to lighten people's spirits in that dark space before spring begins to make itself felt. As a spirit lightener, of course, it's a bit of flop - review long paragraph above. Still, the decorations are red and white. That's gotta count for something.

All rightie, then. I've gone on long enough in this vein. If you're in the right frame of mind to enjoy this day then, by all means, have a Happy Valentine's Day. If you're not, my condolences. Next up will be Saint Paddy's Day and green beer and leprechauns, all of which I enjoy, and none of which are likely to inspire another soul-searching ramble like this one. So take heart.

All rightie, then.

I installed a chunk of the redwood border with the help of my husband, and I cooked that beef and served it Monday night with polenta, veggies, and a tossed green salad. (What veggies? Hm. Wait a minute, let me think. I believe I steamed a mix of broccoli, cauliflower, carrots, and corn.) As for the high shelves - the cleaning ladies fear them for a reason. Let's not go there.

I was looking at the picture I posted of Youngest Daughter and me at the Poppy Preserve, noticing that seven years ago she was still shorter than I am, and I got to thinking. The very next year, in the pictures we took in Italy, we were the same height:



Now, of course, the situation has become simply ridiculous:



(Yes, she's the tall one in back on the right, and she's hunched down a bit so she can put her chin on her brother's shoulder. Don't ask about the funny hat. It's there for a reason...)

But way back at the beginning she was little. When we'd go to the grocery store, she would always step on the rung at the back of the cart, hold onto the handle, and lean against me. I'd push with my arms around her. This went on from the time she got too big for the seat in the cart (maybe when she was three?) until she was so tall I had to hitch my head over to the side to see around her. She must have been seven or eight. At last I told her that she was too big, and she couldn't ride there anymore. She said, "You mean never again?"

It still makes me laugh to think of that. I said, "Yeah, that's about it, honey. You aren't going to get any shorter. People grow in just the one direction: up."

On abandoning a blog

Yeah, that's what I did and not once, but twice, having also abandoned my highly grumpy and often inappropriate political blog. I didn't abandon my pair of blog-babies for the same set of reasons. Oh, sure, in both cases time got short and I got overwhelmed; but there's more to it than that.

I'll blog about the politics over there, but my reasons for not posting here are complicated and have to do with a recurrent suspicion that I really don't know a damn thing about raising kids and that there are better things for me to do than inflict my meanderings on the Internets. I could, for example, work on one of my books. I could dust the high shelves where the cleaning ladies fear to go. I could do some yoga, or even better, some tai chi. I could thaw that good slab of beef, cut it in chunks, and cook it Tuscan-style with red wine, peppercorns, and garlic. I could dig a little trench in front of the roses for the nine-inch-high redwood border I bought last spring.

My youngest daughter - the recalcitrant teen - is barreling headlong into adulthood. My eldest daughter is being dragged inexorably towards middle age. My middle kid will soon be Doctor Dave. And although all of these brilliant people spend a large amount of their time here, I'm feeling very empty-nesty, which, coming on the heels of forty years of parenthood, is a bit of an adjustment. In that light, I have found it easier to ignore this blog.



Yeah. Easier, and less threatening. Nobody's perfect. Every parent makes mistakes and it's painful to look back and admit them. You find yourself caught between kicking yourself and grieving for what might have been if only you'd been wiser, more experienced, more patient, more generous. Ack, you think. Let's just move on.

On the other hand, chronicling the lessons-learned might make a difference, if not for other parents going forward, then at least for my kids looking back. And there are the laugh-out-loud-funny moments we all shared.

So maybe I will still post here. Maybe. First, though, I really need to get that redwood border installed.

Friday dog-blog

Here's Roxy, sleeping with her toy on her nose.

I'd blog the cat, but she went outside and refuses to come back in. She's mad because Roxy waltzed into the bedroom where she was sleeping. Worse, poor kitty was subjected to a giant brown Roxy-nose sniffing her tummy. Bad scene all around.



What Roxy's really doing in this picture is waiting for someone to try to steal the toy away so that somebody will have to chase somebody else. Her preference, of course, is that when it all settles out, she'll be the one being chased. I'll be the one running after her.

The kitchen is a wrap

Here's what we started with:





And this, along with an empty savings account and a few more gray hairs, is what we have now:




Yeah. It was worth it.

It's a new year

and let's hope it's a better one than the last. Here are ten of my fondest wishes:

1. Newspapers recover. Twenty-four-hour news outlets fail.

2. It rains in California. It stops raining in Iowa.

3. California calls for a constitutional convention and produces a new constitution which requires a two-thirds majority to amend the constitution and a 50%+1 majority to pass a budget and to raise taxes. Lowering taxes requires a 60% majority. Heh.

4. The Supreme Court decides that money does not, in fact, constitute political speech and caps corporate political spending.

5. The FCC decides that nudity is not scary, that the word 'fuck' will not harm future generations, and that freedom of speech is not threatened by banning ads which contain demonstrable falsehoods.

6. The FDA bans commercials touting prescription drugs.

7. Genetically modified foods are found to taste awful. Monsanto gives up its GMA programs and devotes itself to promoting organic gardening.

8. No Child Left Behind is amended to require a.) national testing standards and b.) an increase in funding for all schools which fail to meet yearly progress goals.

9. Roman Polanski goes to prison.

10. Health care reform becomes law, and includes caps on profits by insurance companies and for-profit health-care providers.

On to the new year

and good riddance to the old. I have no idea why 2009 was so awful - it just was. The partisanship from the right which crippled Congress; the hatred and racism spewed over the airwaves by the likes of Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, and Rush Limbaugh; the idiocy from the left when it became clear that President Obama was only a very smart man and not the magic liberal fairy-godfather they thought they'd elected; and the continuing pressures of recession, high unemployment, and climate change all combined to make everybody in the world crabby, intolerant, and out of sorts.

On the bright side are these: George W. Bush is no longer president. We are not dealing with the worldwide economic depression that seemed inevitable a little more than a year ago. Our troops are leaving Iraq; and although Afghanistan is ramping up, there's a time line in place for our involvement there to end as well. Guantanamo is slowly being shut down. We are finally taking climate change seriously. Our government is re-establishing diplomatic ties around the world. Health care reform bills were passed in both the House and the Senate, and need only to be reconciled for at least some of the horrible inequities in our health care system to be addressed.

So let's ring in the New Year with hope in our hearts and a renewed will to work to make our world the secure and happy place it can still be.

Why I haven't blogged in a long, long time

I don't really know. Words fail me.

Here are some other things I haven't been doing:

- Exercising. Really. Not at all. As a result, things that were sagging a bit before now appear to be melting into puddles around my ass and thighs.

- Unpacking the last of my kitchen things and storing them in the new cupboards. They don't look like they'll fit and I don't want to deal with the overflow.

- Gardening. The tomato vines are drooping in my garden like lost souls.

- Removing spots from my carpet. Including two dog-puke stains and three coffee spills. I avert my eyes.

- Writing books. Again, words fail me.

- Feeling Christmas-y. Though I did decorate, and I've been listening to Christmas music almost exclusively, the anticipation and the wonder elude me.

- Watching the news. I can't bear it - all the yammering from talking heads, the spin from so-called journalists, the chasing after stupid stories while the real stuff happens in the shadows. (Really, who - other than his wife - cares if Tiger Woods is a hound-dog instead of a Disney hero? Let's have a comprehensive story on the use of filibusters by the minority in Congress. Contrast and compare with the previous Congress. And if your story shows objectively that one party is more hypocritical and obstructive than the other, don't add some irrelevant nonsense to water your conclusion down.)

So. There you have it. I'm not blogging because I'm in a really, really bad mood.

Thanksgiving in the Kitchen

We got this far:





Everything was in place for Thanksgiving, except the tiled backsplash and the range hood. We'd been waiting to take delivery of the accent tile which arrived yesterday. Still on order are three bronze decorative tiles to go above the range, and a panel for the side of the island. Once those come in and are duly installed, we'll really, truly be finished. Our contractor was fabulous!

Update

We're really close, but there was a sad glitch yesterday. First, the good stuff that's finished:





With the cabinets in and the first appliances installed, it was time for granite. And that's when it happened:





Yes. The granite broke. That was yesterday. Today the granite guy is back with a new slab and as I type, he's installing again. This time no one can bear to watch. We're hiding in the rec room, waiting for the all-clear.

Tomorrow (knock wood) the plumber hooks up the sink and dishwasher. Sometime in the next few days, when the tile arrives, my husband will install the tile and then the range hood will go in. It's unlikely that those two things will happen before Thanksgiving, but as long as I have an oven and a sink, I'll be thankful enough.

Starting to look pretty

Now, just imagine it with black granite countertops, some kind of pretty tile backsplash, and white appliances.

Moving ahead

More cupboard pix:





We're still choosing tile. I got as far as placing an order at a local tile distributor, but I canceled it the next morning when I realized that the granite was thicker than I'd taken into account. Luckily, I'd asked them not to put it through until I called. The salesman was unhappy, but that's life. He asked me to come back in and choose something else, but I declined, saying I wanted to wait until the granite was installed.

So. By early next week the cabinets will be complete and the granite will be in. More pix to follow.

Oh, look. It might turn into a kitchen soon!

The floors are in,








the paint's dry,









and here come the first cabinets!

Walls, and Our First Hiccup

Finally, someone made a mistake! It was easily corrected two days later, but still. It's like the first dent in a brand new car - the pressure's off. We're normal. We had a problem.

Here it is, pictorially:


See it? That texture? It was applied to all the walls in the kitchen and extended into the family room in places, where it shared a space with our other, far less textured walls and screamed, "Look at me! I'm not the same!"

So our contractor, who really is wonderful, came over to take a look, shook his head sadly, and said of the plasterer, "You'd think he'd have noticed that it didn't match, wouldn't you?"

The next morning two guys showed up with buckets and scrapers, and within about three hours the walls were smooth again. By the end of the day, the kitchen had a coat of paint. It's hard to reproduce the color in a photo, but it's a nice grayish brown with a little green that shows up in sunlight. My daughter-in-law chose it and it looks good.



Next up, the new floor, still in cartons here but soon to make its appearance. Once the floor's in, the contractor says, things will go pretty fast. They should have the cabinets in before the weekend. (Unless we have another hiccup. What? It could happen.)

Look at me! I'm cat-blogging!

But only because Amelie agreed to sleep on the cushions on the rec-room sectional all afternoon, which is something she rarely does. She usually prefers the roof or the balcony to any indoor location.

Pictures of progress

The holes in the walls created by demolition have been repaired.








We have a new ceiling, complete with cans for light fixtures.









The old wallpaper is gone, and the wall has been extended to make room for a pantry-sized cabinet.




All the rough electrical and plumbing is complete, inspected, and approved.

See that pipe at the bottom of the wall? That's the gas line for the new stove.



We've chosen our flooring - 3/4" solid maple. Now we just have to finalize our decisions on paint, tile, under-cabinet lighting, and carpet (for the rest of the house, which will be installed as soon as the kitchen is complete.)




Today the plasterer is applying texture to the formerly papered walls and the ceiling, and then they'll be painted (so, I guess I'd better concentrate on those paint chips shown above...) The flooring will be delivered on Thursday, and will be installed at the end of this weekend, or the beginning of next. Cabinets are to be installed late next week.

I thought this would be harder

The remodel, I mean. Except for needing to pour copious amounts of money into the thing, it's going very smoothly. Here's what we've done so far:




We packed up everything in the kitchen and stored it in other parts of the house. Here you see the living room with the kitchen table and three of our thirty-some boxes of kitchen stuff.

This is my favorite shot of the empty kitchen.

We made a makeshift kitchen in the rec room downstairs, where I cook sitting in a secretary's chair because leaning over to table-height to chop and stir would most likely leave me crippled.






Meanwhile, upstairs, a crew demolished the old kitchen










and we filled the garage with new appliances and cabinets.






Already, the rough electrical and plumbing are done, the walls are patched, and we've passed our first inspection. Today I'm listening to a lot of thumping and banging as the plasterers put in my new ceiling. I keep thinking, Where's the drama? And then I think, Excellent, we have none. So far, so good.

A Brief History of (our) Cats

Before we had Roxy, we were cat people. We brought a cat with us from the Midwest when we moved to California, and there has been only one catless period in our lives since, during the three years when we lived in a house too close to the Angeles National Forest to keep our cats from becoming dinner for coyotes.

I know there are people who really, really don't like cats - usually because they're either allergic to them (and who can love an animal that makes your eyes swell and your sinuses clog?), or they don't understand them. For the cat haters out there, here's the key to understanding: cats aren't sneaky, they're a unique combination of predator and prey. There aren't a lot of animals in that class, but imagine the caution that drives a prey animal (think deer) and the grace and precision of a predator (think wolf). Roll those personalities together, wrap them in silky fur, decorate them with a throaty purr, and you've got a cat.

Then there are people who don't like cats because they catch birds. I really don't know what to say to that. My cats have all been in-and-out cats. They've caught some birds, some mice, some rats, some lizards, some grasshoppers, and the occasional moth in their time. It's in their nature and it doesn't bother me, because, as my mother (and probably yours) used to say: I didn't make the world. I just live in it.

So. Here's our list so far:

Alice came with us from Iowa. She was white with big splotches of pastel orange. She was absolutely trusting - when she had her (only) litter, during a cold Iowa winter, she stacked them (so new they were still blind and trembly) on my stomach one night to keep them warm.

Alice was succeeded by Susie and Sheila. Susie sported orange and black polka dots on a field of white. She was our dumbest cat ever, a little nut who liked to nibble on your fingers or your buttons or your shirt or whatever she could get her mouth on. We tried to get her to stop by gently rapping her on the head but she would just put her ears back and go on chewing. Sheila was a gray tabby with a white belly who didn't need anyone to pet her; she'd wriggle the length of her body under any convenient hand over and over again, petting herself.

For a very short time - measured in months, I think - Susie and Sheila shared the house with a half-wild silvery-gray tabby named Max. He learned to tolerate us and even seemed to enjoy being petted on occasion, but when we bought a new house, the change proved too much for him. On moving day, as we brought the cats in, Max streaked out the back door and down the driveway to the street where he turned left and trotted away, never to be seen again.

Next came Daisy and Gizmo. Daisy was an extravagantly pretty calico with half-a-black-mustache splashed on her face. She had a bad habit of napping in cars parked on our street with their windows down. One day she disappeared, and we always suspected that she accidentally hitched a ride to a new life in one of those cars. Gizmo was a tortoiseshell, black with swirls and flecks of brown and white. She liked to flop down on her side and sleep in the sun. When Eldest Daughter put up a picture of a sleeping Giz in her college dorm room, her friends nicknamed her the roadkill cat.

Eventually Giz went to her reward and was replaced by a giant brown tabby named Ratty. He got the name because he was such a sad, ratty-looking thing when we first brought him home; he grew to be a big, lazy lap-cat who purred like an engine and drooled when he was petted. He liked to sleep inside Middle Kid's shirt - with MK still in it - both heads poking out the neck so they looked like some kind of weird two-headed monster.

Ratty was joined by a companion cat, Cleo, an eleven-year-old black female who had briefly shared an apartment with ED. Cleo was sweet as she could be, but she had such terrible breath that Tom built a cathouse (I know, I know) for her on the deck. (And yes, Phoebe, we took her to the vet. He said her teeth had so much plaque that the only way to clean them would be to anesthetize her, and at her age, it was too risky.) Cleo and Ratty liked to bat at each other through the french doors that separate the deck from the rest of the house. When Cleo died at the ripe old age of fourteen, Ratty sat by the door for days, waiting for her to come back.

After Ratty we took in two kittens - Mia, a brown tabby, and Amelie, a gray-brown tabby with a white belly and legs. Mia never lost her kitten voice and, at seven, still mews as though she were two months old. MK borrowed her one day and never gave her back, so now she lives in Irvine and imagines she's at home there. Amelie is shy and skittish. The only person who can get her to come reliably is Youngest Daughter, although I've found that if I pour food in her bowl she'll hear me from wherever she is in the world, and will be waiting at the door when I go to look for her. It's poor, nervous Amelie who's had to learn to deal with Roxy; she's done it, but she still lets us know it wasn't her choice.

I have no idea who our next cat will be. If I could, I'd take one of my dear-departeds back. But the world doesn't work that way, (see above), so all I can say for sure is that there will be another cat, and it will be as individual as its predecessors.

Maybe I should make it a point to open EVERY cupboard once in a while

because this guy was in the cupboard above the stove which was occupied by the hood vent. The vent itself never fit right and got knocked out of place at some point in the past, so this poor guy must have gotten into the attic and then flew down into that cupboard and got stuck. We never heard or smelled anything, so we have no idea how long he'd been there.

Yeah. Yikes. What might we find under the sink?

Who knew remodeling one room would affect all the others?

Before you remodel, you have to get ready to remodel. During the summer we did the shopping part - shopping for contractors, appliances, cabinets, floor coverings, light fixtures, countertops, and even paint. Now the big items are about to be delivered, and we've had to make room for them. We started with the garage.

Our garage was a mess. (Parts of it are still a mess, but that's neither here nor there.) We aren't tidy-garage-type-people. We tell our kids we're going to stay in this house until we die of old age because to sell it, we'd have to empty the garage. We haven't parked a car inside the garage in at least three years - and that was only after an incomprehensible fit of tidying which we got over before we had room for the second car.

Sadly, with the coming remodel, we have to make room not only for a refrigerator, a range, a dishwasher, a sink, and a garbage disposer; we also have to make room for a terrifying number of pre-made cabinets, along with their attendant doors and trim pieces. We started at the beginning of August by donating some furniture to a rummage sale to benefit a family in our town. We stalled after that, but three weeks ago my husband got inspired by the calendar. After days of sorting and lifting and shifting and moving, countless trips to the curb with junk, plus more trips to Goodwill with usable junk, he has made space for most (we hope) of what will start being delivered tomorrow. So that's good.

Inside, I began work on the problems of emptying the kitchen and creating a cookable space somewhere else. The makeshift kitchen will be in our rec room downstairs. In order to achieve that, I had to reclaim Youngest Daughter's craft table, which meant I had to sort through the craft cabinets to make space for the supplies she keeps on her craft table. After days of sorting and discarding, and some necessary furniture rearranging, it's done. I've got a table to put my hot plate, coffee pot, and toaster oven on.

To cook, of course, we'll need water. We could use the bathrooms, but none of them has a sink that will easily admit a pot to be filled and my back isn't crazy about the idea of using a bathtub for routine cooking chores, so my husband moved a utility sink from the garage into the laundry room. (Of course, I had to make room in the laundry room for the sink...you see how this goes, right?)

Now, to empty the kitchen. First problem - get that big shelving unit out of the breakfast room. (Why it was there is a whole 'nother discussion, and you really don't want to know anyway.) The only place the shelf will fit is in the family room, and then only if we move YD's computer station to her bedroom. This means we have to move the student desk out of her bedroom, which requires days of emptying and sorting and (as usual) throwing stuff away. Last weekend we got the old desk out and the new desk in, and by yesterday we had the books back on the shelves and the pictures back on the walls in her room.

Also yesterday I got the shelving unit emptied, moved, and refilled in the family room. The breakfast room suddenly looks huge, which is a comfort. Now all I have to do is put the contents of the kitchen into boxes and move them to my husband's office to be stored until the kitchen is done. To make room in his office, we had to move the weight bench to the deck. To make room for the weight bench, we finally got rid of the last bulky Playskool toys. They'd been outside forever, so I had to scrub them first - a process which involved several close encounters with wildlife of the black-widow-spider variety. But it's done, the toys have been donated, and the weight bench is sitting under the macadamia tree.

I bought ten packing boxes at Staples, having told my husband with breezy (and misplaced) confidence, that I thought thirty would do it in the end. Assembled the first box, opened the first cabinet, filled the box with the contents of the first shelf (after throwing a bunch of stuff away), and thought, Oh, shit.

So. If I hadn't already spent so much money on appliances and cabinets, I'd be rethinking my position on remodeling. Seriously.