glitches

Our house rocks

After all sorts of frustration, my computer is back online.  With a real connection, not some crazy antennae transmitting signal from the freaking ski basin.  Because we live in town, y'all.  I don't think I have ever been so happy to live in town.

Sweets and I keep thinking of new reasons why our house rocks.  During the snow storm, there were many reasons.  Our house rocks because I can walk to the store to buy hot chocolate mix.  Our house rocks because we have these great bay windows in our kitchen nook so we can sit and drink hot chocolate and watch the snow fall.  Our house rocks because it takes five minutes to drive to our friend's house, instead of 25 minutes.  Our house rocks because we get cable.  Our house rocks because we can have pizza delivered here, instead of having to drive 50 minutes to get one and bring it home.  Our house rocks because we all have bedrooms, and we're not smacked up against each other.  Our house rocks because we have the best living room ever, and our couch and loveseat fit perfectly.  Our house rocks because our rugs now fit without issue, instead of being smashed up against the wall on one side because the room is neither square nor rectagular.  (What's that word?  rhombus? trapezoid?)  Our house rocks because we have a pantry.  and a utility room.  Our house rocks because we have a garage.  We played a neat game this morning while driving to the old house- it's called, "which people have garages?"  It was fun because we were smug and dry, watching all these people driving past with snow obscuring their view and soaking through their clothes.  Heh.

Our house rocks, and it's only been two nights.  Can you imagine our houselove after 5 years?

Goodness, gracious

I'm so sad that I missed a day yesterday.  The move, it was amazing.  All sorts of people came to help us, the house was full of love and friendship and happiness.  It was incredible.  Only a few of the friends who were here knew about the pregnancy, so they protected me from overdoing it with boxes and lifting.  Everyone was so generous with their time and energy, and we can't think of how to pay them back.  It was a great Christmas story.  After all the boxes were offloaded and the roast beast eaten, a small group of the original gang stuck around and helped unpack a few boxes, shore up a few household issues (most notably, the kitchen cabinets were about to fall off the wall!  zoiks!) and generally celebrate the new house with us.

But I missed a day of posting here, and with holidailies, that's a crime.  Sigh.  But given the circumstances, I think it's okay.

The boy just woke from his nap.  criminy.

It's all good

Boy, I can't slip anything past y'all, can I?  Yup, knocked up.  I found out on Saturday when I couldn't sleep for the obsession.  Those pee-sticks are dangerous, you know?  (and if you're a regular dish and spooner, you can see a photo of the pee-stick for yourself).

I'm hesitant to tell the world about it, just because I hate to think of what I would do if this was one of the 1/3 of the pregnancies that ends in miscarriage.  So I'm going to ask you to think positive, healthy baby thoughts my way for the time being.  And if you know me in person, let's just keep this on the DL until the second trimester.  I'm just saying.

Today we gained possession of our house.  It was a nightmare.  We were supposed to do the final walk-through at 8:00, but the owner wasn't out yet so we had to reschedule for 11:30.  11:30 came along and the woman was still working away, her friends were working away, and her realtor was in her sweats, trying to clean the house out.  It was a mess.  There was garbage all over the driveway, beaten-up cars and trucks trolling around taking loads of crap to the dump and to Salvation Army and to her new residence.  We did a quick walk through and agreed that we couldn't release the funding with the house in that condition.  So we arranged to do another walk-through at 3:30.  3:30 was the last possible minute we could release the funding today which meant it was either do or postpone longer.  At 3:30 the house was empty, but the Clampetts were still carting loads of garbage out on their 1920's jalopies.  It was bad.  We finally released the money and got the keys, then sweets and I drove off and waited half a mile away until we saw the parade of ancient trucks and the RV sputter away from the house.

I understand that it's difficult to say goodbye to something as important to someone as a home, but it was pretty painful for us to have to wait all day to say hello.  In the end, we finally got into the house at 5:00, only to find that the water had been turned off.  By then it was too late to go to the water company, so we're currently out of water and a little irritated.  But at least we have a house.  And tomorrow, save for the worst blizzard New Mexico has ever seen, we're moving in.

So much good this December.  So much good.

The big move

We're deep in the move-planning now.  Not a lot of boxing, due mostly to the fact that anything we box up the lentil unboxes and instantly begins playing with.  Very difficult to pack with a two and a half-year old in the house.  Why did the montessori school decide to take this particular week off??!  Sigh.  But we have been having very heated discussions about how to pack.  This is typical of sweets and I.  We're both logistically-minded people, and when we get into it there is sometimes no way out but down, down, down.

The situation:  We have two locations to move- a storage unit and my dad's house.  Everything at the storage unit is boxed up and labeled and hasn't seen the light of day since July.  If it was food, I would have thrown it out a long time ago.  But it's our stuff, and I can't for the life of me remember all the crap we have in there.  We have 10 feet by 10 feet's worth of stuff, so there's gotta be something important in those there boxes.  My dad's house is largely unpacked daily items, most of which we can't seem to box up because it either is instantly unpacked or it is necessary for our daily lives.  Stuff like my knitting needles.  Cooking things.  a full set of little golden books.  Crucial, needed for daily living stuff.

More of the situation:  We have somewhere around 8 people, mostly healthy men, who have volunteered to help us.  They all drive trucks.  It's supposed to snow the day we want to move.

Oh, yeah.  Did I mention it's supposed to snow on Tuesday?  Great!  The day we told everyone to take off work?  The day that we have babysitting lined up?  That day.  Right.  I'm hoping it's not a hugie storm and we can work (and drive) through the snow.  True blizzards are rare in this part of New Mexico, so hopefully all the men will be challenged by the snow but not intimidated by it.  Or, um, put in danger because of it.  There's that too.

So my thought is that we have all these people who are lined up to help us, so why don't we get as much of the work done that day that we can.  Considering the timing and the weather, this may be our window for most of the move before Christmas.  If we want more stuff, it might have to wait until after the holidays.  Sweets wants us to be out of our storage unit by January 1st.  The problem with my plan is that it requires all our friends to really bust ass.  But I sort of figure, they all volunteered to help us, and they all know that moving is hard work.  It's not like we're moving down three flights of narrow stairs in a thunderstorm.  (did that.  check!)  It's a relatively simple move, and we're all friends so there's potential for it to actually be fun.

Sweets is more of the thought that the friends help us with the big stuff, but that we just can't get organized enough between now and then to get everything out of here.  Instead, he wants to use them for a few hours then thank them and be left with half of the work still to do.  Since we're not paying for the space we use at my dad's house, he wants to leave that stuff for last and deal with it when we can. 

I feel like not taking full advantage of my friends is foolish.  Especially considering my delicate condition, I'm not in a position to be hefting huge boxes of books all over the city.  I'm just saying. 

So, we spent most of dinner last night going over everything and I think we have a plan.  We'll get people here and we'll move the stuff.  We'll do as much as we can and when our friends start to fade we'll release them.  If I know my friends, they can work all night if need be, just because they're good people.  I'm not worried.  My bet is that we'll have a garage full of our belongings and little to clean up after the fact come Tuesday night.

Assuming we don't get a freak blizzard. 

Compromise and Limbo

The lentil is going through this incredibly contrary phase.  He spent most of lunch insisting that his little tow-headed friend had black eyes.  Not blue!  He also insisted that he had Blue Eyes!  Not Black! and this wouldn't be a problem save for the fact that his little friend didn't understand that he wasn't trying to be hurtful and got all offended.  Trying to have a lunch date with two two-year-olds is, well, trying.

We're in this place now where so much is in limbo.  Our house closes in a week, so we're not making huge efforts to clean or keep our lives organized.  Christmas mayhem is already descending upon us, acting as disincentive to do anything other than work on Christmas.  The lentil hates everything, except when it was his idea, which makes it easier for us to "compromise" than to force an issue.  Case in point- for the past few weeks, the lentil has made it habit to wear his pyjamas all day.  Because we like to keep him warm, we usually dress him in two layers of pyjamas every night.  Layer one is a pair of cotton pyjamas, layer two is usually a footed microfleece body suit with a full-length zipper.  We can usually convince him to shed the footed body suit, but getting him out of the cotton layer is akin to full on torture for both parent and child.  What do we do?  We just slap a pair of pants and a hoody over the pj's and send him to school.  He rarely wears those big-boy underwear he was so proud of, just because it's nearly impossible to get him out of his pyjama bottoms long enough to get the underwear on him.  The compromise?  I keep my hearing, you keep your dirty pyjamas on another 12 dirty, toddler hours.

What has my parenting come to that I feel like an accomplished, fulfilled woman when I can get my child dressed in the morning in an outfit that does not contain at least one item from the night before?

So, limbo.  The point here is that we're not putting a lot of energy into the small things because we just don't have that kind of energy to spare.  Between the babymaking efforts, the work and dissertation (total failure as a student, by the way) and family obligations, we can barely get ourselves out of our pyjamas in the morning.  In a week we're going to have all our friends arrive with big trucks and trailers and I hope to high heaven we'll have enough stuff in boxes to make it all worthwhile.  We move in 10 days, nothing is packed.  not a thing.  it's all just laying around, waiting to be put away, somewhere.

Cast-offs

We move into our new home in 16 days. 

When we lived in New Haven, I had this fantasy that we would move in with my dad and it would be perfect.  The house would expand to fit all our stuff, we could get a dog who would be best friends with our beloved cat, my dad would jump at the opportunity to be a hands-on kind of guiding force for his only grandson.  Sweets would fall in love with the rural-ish life, the new by-pass would make the commute into town short and sweet.  We would have family dinners every night, we would slowly make changes to the house to improve it until it was a dream house.  We would plant a garden in the spring and have the pleasures of building up the hen house for fresh eggs year round. 

Instead, we have the opposite.  My dad has been the biggest disappointment.  True to his character, he's taken this opportunity to shirk any responsibility for his grandson whatsoever.  Although we definitely benefit from his daily presence, he's definitely decided to go out of his way to avoid actually interacting with my son except when necessary.  My cat was eaten by coyotes.  My dog got the plague because the house is overrun by rodents.  (okay, that's an exagerration- she doesn't have the plague after all.  She has Tularemia.  sorry for dissapointing anyone...)  The garden is so choked by weeds, I couldn't even start to think of tilling it in preparation for the spring.  My dad's new girlfriend is frighteningly boring.  The other fantasies- the house upgrading and the henhouse and the wonderful, multigenerational living situation- these are all gone in a puff of smoke.  The house is a wreck, a messy, rodent-infested, disaster.  Sweets is so ready to jump, I think he'd live in a trailer in Espanola sooner than move back in with my dad after this experience. 

Disaster.  All around.

But the good part is that we're now buying our first house.  It's our dream house- seriously.  We close on Dec 15th, move in on the 18th.  In anticipation, we've been amassing the things people need when they don't live with their parents.  Namely, furniture and appliances.  Priority one was appliances- we went shopping on black friday and were able to get satisfactory deals on the things we needed.  But since we spent all our money on efficient, attractive home appliances, we're now out of cash for furniture. 

When we moved from New Haven, we were desperately trying to liquidate our furniture.  We didn't want to pay to move crappy furniture when my dad has passable furniture, and that fantasy was still burning strong in the days up to our move.  We got rid of our couch, our rugs, our chairs, our everything.  We have a functional but small kitchen table.  We have a shredded but beloved antique chair that belonged to sweets' grandfather.  We have a few shelving units, an entertainment center, a few uncomfortable antique chairs that sweets inherited from his grandmother, and we have bookshelves.  Leave it to an academic couple to bring all the bookshelves but overlook the fact that they need someplace to sit. 

Last weekend I found a couch and loveseat on Craig's List for $350.00.  the photo was passable, so we went to the cash machine and then showed up the next morning to buy them.  Reasonable price, reasonable looking furniture.  The photos didn't show the part about the two ferrets and the massive amount of pee a couch and loveseat can absorb.  unfortunately, the cushion covers also disguised this fact, so we weren't aware of the problem until we got home and removed all the covers to wash them.  Holy cow- one of the cushions was still wet with pee!  But they were already purchased, and passable, so we decided to air them out and hope for the best.

Today we went to Albuquerque to look in my Father-in-Law's storage unit at the "nice" furniture he was giving us.  A kitchen table and chairs.  I don't want to sound picky, but have you seen the furniture people are selling these days?  A new table and chairs can easily cost a cool grand!  No thanks.  So I bit my snobbishness and agreed to take the table and chairs.  And the coffee table (described as "dutch modern" but really more "garage sale contemporary") was thrown in as part of the deal.  great!

I had this fantasy that we would move into our new home and it would come fully furnished, straight out of a design magazine.  This is the person who spent the last two years taking her son to Ikea on cold cold and hot hot days, just as a place to go out of the elements that wasn't home.  I'm sorry to say, there's something appealing about clean skandinavian lines and understated decorating.  I've been brainwashed.  And here we are, moving into our first home, and it's going to be so much closer to yard sale chic than shabby chic.  Shabby chic costs money, did you know that?  Fuck.

I'm not disappointed, I'm just tired of college home decorating.  I'm tired of making do with cast off furniture with cracked wood and barely functioning drawers.  I am impatient to start in this new life of new stuff and embarassingly houseproud home tours.  I am so shallow, I can't be happy with the fact that we're getting a new house, our dream house.

This is the part where I talk about how excited I am to re-upholster the new chairs and paint the kitchen table.  This is where I can't wait to find great but neglected furniture and rebirth it to something so cool you won't believe it was ever thrown away.  And seriously, I am sort of excited for this.  But I think that since I've spent my whole life living with other people's garbage, I just wanted something new.  Something new, something mine.  Something from Crate and Barrel.  (just kidding.  sort of.)

Earnest Money

A few months back sweets announced that he thought we needed to move out.  I wasn't that into the idea at first, but after spending the last few weeks cleaning up after my dad and the gnat, I came to the realization that he was right.  We need our own space.  We can't try to fit our ideals about extended family into the reality of our situation.  So we called a realtor and started looking.

She was very good, and had us drive around a million neighborhoods to get a sense of what we wanted and how much we wanted to spend.  It has been fun doing this- making the transition from daydreaming and fantasizing about owning a home to actually going through the motions.  A big part of me has been struggling to accept that this means we will be buying an actual house.  Far and above the largest purchase we will ever make, it's so bizarre to be looking at houses with the lens of an owner. 

When you look at a house as a renter, you look at things that might be irritating but not really a big deal.  Can you put up with that ugly wallpaper.  Can you deal with the awkward layout.  Will you be able to make the house seem like yours while doing as little as possible to disrupt the landlord's property.  But looking at a home as a buyer, it's all different.  Instead of asking whether I can deal with one thing or another, I'm asking whether I can rip out this or build on that.  Can we move the dishwasher.  Will the placement of the living room make us happy or will we have to knock out a wall? 

We've seen about 11 homes so far.  While walking around in them, I feel a bit like a sim.  Like I have this little meter that reads a certain amount depending on how content I am with my home.  There have been houses that I liked, but I got the sense that my little meter would never be completely happy.  Unfortunately, most of the houses we looked at were variations of the unhappy meter.  There were also houses that we liked, but just couldn't see working.  We need an office, and most of the homes in our price range have only three bedrooms.  We like to have space, both through light and windows and with overhead room.  Sweets is tall, and he needs room to walk around.  I need open space.  Tract homes don't have a lot of open space. 

We figured out in our search that money buys a few important details.  You can have the same square footage, but layout varies greatly.  The less money, the more chance you have a bunch of little boxes stacked together with a long hallway connecting them.  The less money, the more it looks like a trailer home.  Money also buys things like dramatic entryways.  We like open space, and when you don't put a lot in you get a space with closed off entries, or a door opening into a hallway.

We found our perfect house right away.  In fact, it was the first home we saw.  It was on the higher end of our budget, but it's such a nice house I don't see why we couldn't make it work.  It has new windows and open space and a backyard full of apple trees.  It has clean lines, a fireplace, and a great big closet.  The closet is actually really cool- it separates the master bedroom from the master bath and has sliding mirrored doors on either side.  The lentil loved that he could open the doors on one side and someone could open doors on the other side and he could peek through the clothes on the racks to see the other person.  He left all sorts of handprints on those doors, and the sellers were kind enough to leave the handprints there for us to see when we returned.  The house is on a corner, on a cul-de-sac.  There's a two car garage.  The living room is open and spacious with a high, beamed ceiling and skylights to let in more of my beloved New Mexico sunshine.  It's in a great school district.  (0r at least as good as we could afford.)

Some of the other homes we looked at were so bad they had us in hysterics.  There was the house that needed "a little TLC" but didn't mention that it was a pit and was in desperate need of a bulldozer.  There was the house that had a great entryway, but someone had added a second story somewhere along the line and the second story decent.  The problem was that the owners must have been wierd little hobbits, with tiny feet and long legs, but very short torsos- the stairway was almost inpassable.  The stairs were really shallow, but tall.  The overhead clearance was such that even I had to bend over to get through.  I felt like I was trying to tour through a midieval castle.  And the washer and dryer was in the master bedroom.  Who thought that was a good idea? 

So we made an offer on the dream house.  I am so nervous now- they have until tomorrow morning to decide or to make a counter offer.  Our agent is very optimistic, but I can't help but be nervous.  If you're on dishandspoon, I put a link on the homebuying thread.  If you're not, comment and I will find a way to add you to the happy dishandspoon community.

So wish us luck!

hello, irritation

A few years ago my dad was in the midst of a sticky divorce and there was concern that he'd lose his home.  He approached sweets and I and asked us if we wanted to buy it from him, in order to protect it.  It is pretty important that he keeps his house because his studio is on the property.  That, and about seven billion tons of scrap steel from his sculptures.  Anyway, the divorce settlement was reached and we didn't buy the property and everyone walked away happy.  But in that discussion we all decided that when we moved to Santa Fe, we'd live with him. 

A mere two months before we were to move in, his new girlfriend of a month moved in.  Get it?  He dates her for a month, she moves in (it's not clear that she wasn't living here before then, but the official move in date was supposedly in May), then we move in.  We had never discussed what we would do in the unlikely event of a third party.  In our logical lives, you didn't move in with a partner a month after meeting.  Maybe that was something that happened when you were in your twenties, but not after a few relationships and a little life slapping you in the face.  It just wouldn't be the smartest thing to do, you know? 

Oh, but wait.  She's 26 years old.  I mean, she just turned 26.  I mean, she's 7 years younger than me.  I was in gradeschool with she was born.  Or more to the point, my dad was already a successful artist with two kids in grade school and a wife when his future girlfriend was born.  So when you're 26, you make decisions like that.  At least, I suppose you do.  I didn't, but I'm generally more cautious than most.

This is the entry where I trip out on my dad's girlfriend.  I don't normally write about this sort of thing, just because I wouldn't want them to find it.  But I can't help myself.  This woman is driving me bananas.

I don't know if it's that she's so young, or that she's so damn lazy, or that she's just ignorant, but she's starting to grate on my every last nerve.  She talks constantly about being an artist and how she has to create and how she can't think when she's carving, yet she rarely puts chisel to stone.  Most of the time she's riding around in my dad's truck while he conducts his business.  Or she's taking swimming lessons.  Or she's off on a bike ride, with my dad.  I know, I'm one to talk- but fuck! at least I have a master's degree from Yale.  I must be doing some sort of work, you know?

She can't clean to save her life, and when she does the dishes she only washes half of them.  She leaves her crap all over the house, then bitches when the dog eats it.  She tells me what to do and where to put things in the house I was raised in.  I have had moments where I needed to silently count to ten in order to keep from insulting her.  Yet, she's surprisingly easy to insult.

I want to ask her what she's getting out of this relationship.  I mean, other than the free rent and free access to a studio's worth of tools.  And the distant glamour of being associated with a semi-famous/notorious arteest.  But I know my dad, and I know he's crap about reciprocating when it comes to relationships.

Oh, crap.  She's wanting to use our internet connection and she doesn't have wireless.  I can't bitch anymore because she's in our office.  great.  hello, irritation.

The desert is a cruel animal.

In case you haven't heard, the southwest has been in a terrible, damaging drought for the past few years.  People have been fighting over water they hope will fall from the sky.  Water that is being fed to another part of the country, passing through our skies with less than a hello to remind us of the thirsty plants dying in the ground.

And in the midst of this is the wettest year on record.  It has rained almost every single day since we left.  Flip back a few months and you'll see me longing for the desert so I can escape the wet wet wet northeast.  Ha Ha!  The river is running, the arroyos have run almost weekly, and there's a standing puddle in our driveway.  It's almost unreal how wet it's been.  One of the glorious side effects of rain is the wildlife that is sprouting up like crazy.  The wildflowers are amazing and prolific, the fields that are usually brown are bright yellow with dramatic yellow flowers.  And a few weeks ago we heard a sound we haven't heard in years: frogs!

When I was a kid I remember hearing frogs croaking away in the late summer after the rains.  We would walk down to the frog pond and watch the tadpoles swimming around like crazy.  My mom tells me that one year we even grew a few tadpoles, until they started eating each other.  If you were to visit our home in June of this year, you wouldn't have believed that we would have a seasonal pond just an hour's walk from our house.  In fact, it was such a distant memory, it took a few nights of hearing the frogs to remind me that we had such a thing so close to our house.  To me, frog ponds are the stuff of midwestern childhoods, places where it's always green and rain isn't celebrated.

Today I was out on my mountain bike when I got a phone call. Yes, I'm a dork and I carry my cell phone with me when I'm mountain biking.  At least I stop riding to answer the phone.  Anyway, I was riding along and the phone rang and I answered, but the reception was really bad.  So I pulled my bike off the trail and ran up a little hill to try to improve the reception.  I sort of recognized where I was from my childhood, but I was more focused on getting this silly call than anything else.  After I finished with my call ("no, I'm not interested in attending some stranger's wedding on behalf of the family.") I looked down and saw that my little hill was overlooking the old frog pond site.  The pond was dry, except for a black patch in the middle.  The black patch was sputtering and making some interesting noises so I crept down to investigate further.  At first I just thought it was the soil, letting off air as the water evaporated off.  But as I got closer, taking care not to step in the raccoon footprints (raccoon footprints?  what is this, wisconsin?!!), I could see that the black mass was actually a big bunch of tadpoles, gasping for breath.  It was really a silver mass, as their backs were facing down and their silvery bellies were up to reflect off the sun's light.  Oh no!  The tadpoles are dying!

All of a sudden I was ten again, and very worried about the fate of these poor little babies.  I ran back to my bike and grabbed my water bottle.  Then I poured about 3/4s of the water in my bottle on the tadpoles.  They wiggled in delight with the little moisture I provided.  Happy to see that they still had a little spirit in them, I scooped up about 20 tadpoles into my waterbottle.  Then I rode home, trying hard to remind myself not to take a quick swig from the waterbottle.  because that would be disgusting. 

Hooray!  I have a waterbottle full of tadpoles!  I called my mom and she told me to be sure I fed them, so they don't start eating each other.  Sometimes I wonder how I survived.

In other Santa Fe news... The other day I was at the library checking out some books for the lentil and myself and I happened to glance at the recent returns book.  On the shelf, I saw that someone had checked out a well-loved copy of "Idiot's Guide to.... Being Psychic".  I had to laugh.  When I told sweets, he observed that whoever needs that book isn't a very good psychic.

Oh, if you've been lurking at dishandspoon.com and you're finding that nobody is updating anymore, it's because I had to move us over to a password-protected site.  Leave me a comment and I will send you the new URL. 

Hooray for Tadpoles!

wasting and wanting

This is starting to seem very real.  We're figuring out places to stay along our trip.  We're getting letters notarized and backing up our files.  We're packing up all the dishes and only eating take-out.  We're going a little nuts.  We're dropping boxes on our feet and desperately trying to sell our possessions on craig's list.  I've stopped blow-drying my hair.  It's the real deal, my friends.

I never realized how much I rely on to-do lists.  Today's list includes closing my bank account, going to return books at the bookstore, finishing up some charting (ha! that will never end!) going to the day care to deliver toys, calling the new day care to make sure we're on the schedule for the fall, and going to the mechanic to get the car serviced.  It's a busy day.  All I really want to do is curl up on the couch and read books, but that's not really allowed.  And the couch needs to be sold, so it's not really going to get much more attention lest I grow too attached.  I already made the mistake of naming the couch (Grandfather's Favorite Couch), pretty soon I'm going to be dragging it around behind me on a frayed little snatch of string.

What do you do with all the odd and ends that float about?  Sweets today tried to give away three of those long necked lighters that you use for lighting fires and long-stemmed things.  Who wants three lighters?  They were very useful for lighting the furnace all winter whenever it went out, but not so much that anyone else would need three of them.  But you don't really want to throw them away, you know?  Nor do you want to take them on a trip across the country.  But when I bought them, it was such a great price if I bought two sets of two instead of just buying the one set.  How could I resist?

What about the perfectly good shoes that just don't do it for me anymore?  I would like to sell them, but I can't get near the cost I paid for them.  Will these end up going with us, just because I can't see donating them to salvy just yet?  What a waste.

I am getting a good lesson on how wasteful I am.  It's pretty shocking and sobering.  I spend money out of convenience, and that's a bad way to go about one's life.  Instead of living with being uncomfortable, I will buy whatever I need to be comfortable in that moment.  It might be a soft pair of shoes mid-way through a weekend vacation that requires more walking than I packed for, or it's a long-sleeve sweater because I didn't think it would be so cold whever I was going.  Now I'm overwhelmed with three pairs of mary jane shoes because I sort of like the style, and fifteen hoodies.  I have a lot of decent walking shoes, but nothing I'm in love with.  I'm a wasteful person.  I might as well just shred my money and use it for compost- at least then I'd be getting something for my time.  Instead I buy into the whole machine and end up spitting out waste in the end.  blech.

Well, I need to get on with my day.  I will go waste a little more, and then sit at starbucks and be wasteful there.  I'm good at it, because I have a lot of practice.  Have a great day, my friends!