I am still alive.

Ok, so, it's been a while. You think the lack of updating has been bad, you should see my mailbox. I've not managed to actually READ anything in months. At most I could sit in the chair and delete mail I knew I'd never read once I started reading my mail again (sales and other such "junk" that doesn't quite fall into the "spam" sector).

That should be changing now that my husband has bought me a shiny little laptop all of my very own. It somehow seemed easier for him to open a Best Buy credit card and charge what he did for this thing than it was for him to spend 1/4 of the amount on a decent chair and have to rearrange the living room again. The logic went something like "we could get the chair, but you'll still want a laptop and I'll end up buying both in the long run anyway. This way we'll have the Best Buy credit already established for appliance buying later when we need it and when we get a house we can buy furniture we like, not just settle for something because it's cheap now". Or something like that.

Then, lo, then there was a laptop in my hands and wee! I am a happy girl.

So. Catching up.

K.'s birthday went well. We had fun. There was mommy-made cake and home-made pizza and there were lots of presents. She made out like a bandit and was happy.

I kicked off November by having something that wanted to be the plague. After many hours of sleeping, I started feeling human again. I made the mistake, however, of thinking I was "fine" and started pushing myself to get things done again. It didn't last long. I've been on a roller coaster ever since. Right now I'm in a low spot, with a sore throat and violently swinging body temperatures. And I've not been sleeping again. Wee.

My birthday!! SURPRISE!!! I GOT A PARTY!!! It was a week early (he wanted my it to overshadow Thanksgiving, not the other way around) but there was cake (that I didn't order or bake or even know about!!) and food (ditto) and presents (that I didn't know about, let alone purchased and wrapped!). I was a happy girl. My mom scored me some of the writer's reference books I'd been hogging from the public library (you know it's time to buy the book when you've checked it out 13 times in the past 6 months), my brother got me a season of Airwolf on DVD, A. got me the entire Robin of Sherwood series on DVD, K. got me (with her own money, no less) on DVD, and K. and A. got me the original Highlander movie on DVD. This past weekend A. brought in the mail and there was a card from his dad for me. He sent me money with instructions to go buy me something for myself. He even underlined "yourself". Part of me wants to go buy a Christmas tree, part of me wants to put it towards this lap top, part of me wants to stash it in my savings account (4.5% interest! WOOHOO!!) and part of me wants to go to Bath & Body Works and the closest book store for a little retail therapy. For now, the money sits on my dresser in the card. I'll figure out what to do with it once my head clears.

Thanksgiving. It was... different. Instead of everyone in the family going to my grandparents', Mom and I shared cooking duties and had a buffet-style lunch over at her place while one of my aunts hosted dinner at her house. We hung out at Mom's all day while my grandparents went (were taken?) to a city an hour or so away to my aunt's. I still haven't heard from my grandparents. I've called a few times but no one answers the phone and I've stopped leaving messages because no one returns them.

Update on the apartment. The bathtub faucet still leaks, but at least it's a faucet and not a pipe. The bathroom no longer leaks and it drains now, too. There are still a lot of little minor things, but I'm not up to having them here to fix them, especially while I'm gearing up for Christmas.

The house hunting has been going slow. Molasses in winter slow. It's the time of year when the market is always slow, though. The real-estate agent that's been showing us houses... I don't think she understands us or our desires and/or needs. Yes, I still want to see houses, but don't send me emails telling me you hope I feel better indicating that you know I'm sick, then a few days later send me an email wishing me a blessed Thanksgiving and in that same email get all passive-aggressive with the need for reassurance. Truly. I'm not up to dealing with it at this time of year when I'm also sick. Also, I'm not looking at ANY house on a holiday weekend. Especially Thanksgiving or Christmas or New Year's. Or Easter. Or Valentine's Day. Or Mother's Day or Father's Day. Those are off limits, as are birthday weekends. So, yes, send information on houses and when there's one that I want to visit, I'll let you know. But I'm not going to look at houses in an area of town I don't want to live in. There's no point. And by the way, learn my daughter's name.

And I guess that's about it for today. Or at least, for now. I'm still trying to recover from Thanksgiving and get my apartment back in order and have a lot of chores to catch up on, and it's getting close to that time when I start pulling boxes out of the closet to decorate. Decorating is going to be a challenge this year because our "Christmas tree corner" now has my desk in it and I don't know where I'm going to put the tree. I'll... think of something. Probably after a nap.

Playing catch up

I'm feeling... better. I've had a killer headache and been all sorts of cranky and irritable since I got up yesterday morning, but I'm keeping food in my stomach. I count this as making progress.

Well, no, not since I got up yesterday morning. Since one of the cabinet guys knocked on my door at 850am then started moving my refrigerator and oven around because he had to "fix" stuff. Again.

Ok, so honestly I may have been a bit on the irritable side before then (like, days before) but I'm going to stick with blaming the cabinet guy. It's more satisfying than admitting that I'm just strung out and overly tired from being sick and stuff.

And no, nothing is really... fixed. Not really. Yes, there is some sort of base wrap around the bottom of the cabinets, but K. and I could have done a better job on our own. The gashes in the door frame were covered with a completely different shade of white paint. The range hood is now anchored by more screws, but it's crooked enough that when the maintenance supervisor was here yesterday he noticed it. The pipe in the bathroom is still... there. And so on and so forth.

Anyway... I'm tired of all my entries being about the mess it's become at the hands of the "professionals" that were forced upon us to make... improvements... that, for some reason unknown to us, couldn't wait until the middle of 2008 when we plan on moving.

But I do appreciate more than words can adequately express the emails and comments of support and reassurance that this too shall pass. And you're right. Eventually this ordeal will be over. Thank you for your concern and caring.

So! Onward. Upward.

A. is coming home early. A day early, but early nonetheless. The plane he'll be on lands tonight at 920pm (edt)... which means I'll miss the season premiere of CSI. I'm considering making him walk home. (Not really. Sort of.) Next week he'll be working in another city, but he'll be expensing a car and driving back and forth every day. We consider this a good thing. He'll be home for dinner (if we have dinner a bit later than usual) and I'll still have my car in case of an emergency or in case I just want to get out of this apartment. (Stop laughing! It happens... once in a while...)

K. is... well, she's doing well in school as far as I know. She's got a couple of friends she's wanting to drag with us to the zoo's Halloween thing this year, as well as wanting to go other places with them. It's got me a little twitchy 'cause of the money, but A. pointed out that she's been doing very well in school, been doing (most of) her chores without having to be coerced, and she's generally a good kid that deserves a chance to hang out with her friends... something that's not always been possible in the past. I agree. It's just... weird... for me, though I am glad to see her wanting to socialize. And maybe I'm seeing dollar signs where normally I wouldn't because the whole apartment ordeal has impacted me the most (with me being here 24/7) and has me spinning off-balance.

Also, K.'s birthday is fast approaching and I'm not sure what we want to do this year. She said she really didn't want to try and have another party that no one could attend because of the Halloween conflict, so we're thinking about a dinner. Last year we surprised her with a family dinner/party. She, A., and I were out running errands and decided to have dinner out because it was "getting late", she picked the restaurant, and SURPRISE!! there was a cake and balloons and presents and family waiting for us! She was completely surprised. I don't think I'll be able to pull that off again this year; the kid learns.

And me? I'm contemplating participating in NaNoWriMo this year. Yes, I've gone insane. I think it's from thinking about the upcoming holidays and the money I would normally spend during the last quarter of the year... and then thinking about how that money would be better spent if we put it towards some of the expenses that come with buying a house. And the thought that, for the first time in more than 20 years, I probably won't have a christmas tree. I know in my heart I will have one, even if I have to get a small fake table-top tree like I did one year when K. was tiny and we were broke. It didn't bother me then so much because she was entirely too young to notice or care, but she's much older now. Besides, I like having my home filled with the scent of the tree and it makes me smile to have one set up.

Speaking of the holidays...

Laura Williams is having a little giveaway in her blog for a Christmas Planner made by Marcia Francois. It's a dandy "13 pages of organizational wonderment that will get your rear in gear for the upcoming holiday season" according to Laura, and should be quite helpful.

Also, over at Overwhelmed with Joy! there's the 2nd Annual Holiday Cooking, Blogger Style Recipe Exchange coming up. Instructions and Mr. Linky go up on October 5, 2007, and from what I've read there were a lot of great recipes passed around last year and should be well worth the look.

And glancing over at everyone's favorite Organizing Junkie I find a few links for planning Christmas. Also, I see that she's gearing up to do another Organizing Challenge. Specific details are still under consideration last time I checked, but keep an eye on her. She'll announce it soon enough.

There's really not much else to say today. I'm itching to do some crafts, but almost all of my supplies are boxed up and stored away, and I don't want to spend the money to buy anything for a new project. I'm devouring what books are left on the bookshelves and clearing them out. I should be researching or plotting or something for any of the writing projects I have in progress or lurking about the edges of my brain, but I'm not and I'm at a loss as to why I can't bring myself to do so. Maybe I just need to leave this apartment for a while. Go out and walk around the mall or the park. Or something. Anything...

Update on Life

I'm having a hard time getting motivated today. Possibly because everything is just... chaotic. Everything is a mess, there's still stuff all over my dining room table where we were just too drained to put it all away last night, because there's stuff covering the dining room table (and chairs) there's no place for me to eat or sit down and write out my to do list and thoughts I have while I nurse a cup of tea like I usually do every morning, and on and on and on.

I have managed to get a few things done this morning. The FlyLady talks all the time about how anyone can do anything for 15 minutes. I haven't had to use my timer like she recommends in quite a while but I've fallen back on that hard this morning. I work for 15 minutes, then I lose it for 15 minutes. Or maybe that should be "I lose it for 15 minutes then pull myself together and get some work done for 15 minutes because the FlyLady says anyone can do anything for 15 minutes and I can hold it together for 15 solid minutes". Either way, there it is.

So, let's see if I can clear some of this stuff out of my head so I can stop falling apart every other 15 minutes and maybe actually accomplish something today... if it's nothing more than rewriting a chapter.

Just to be clear, all these pictures were taken yesterday. These are not old pictures. The color is off in some of these, but not that off.

So, this is that pipe in my bathtub that I keep talking about. This morning, it still looks like this.


These next few pictures were taken sometime between 10.30 and 11.30am yesterday while the cabinet guys were... missing. I don't know where they were, they just left and were gone for just over an hour. I'm assuming they went to go get the power tools and stuff they had when they got back.

This is my water heater. Normally, one cannot see it because it lives in the corner under/behind cabinets. There's no pan or anything under it. It sits on raw concrete and is not accessible in any way unless you take out the kitchen cabinets... which is fun when it springs a leak or needs to be cleaned or worked on or something. Take note of the undamaged door frame. Just to the left of the doorknob. That's going to be important shortly.


The... old... cabinets. On my front "lawn".


These next pictures were taken... later. They came back just before noon (I thought it was 1130, but checking my cell phone log I realize it was 1146am when A. called me to find out what I wanted from Subway since I couldn't fix myself lunch with the kitchen as it was and they showed back up about 10 minutes later) and worked until about 4.30pm. Then left. My kitchen was... a mess, and that's putting it not only politely but mildly.

The new cabinets don't... quite... fit into the space of the old cabinets. Also, I might add, the cabinet there over the sink is taller than the old one was, therefore, they jammed it into the space and mounted it directly atop the light fixture thus ensuring that they not only broke the fixture but that the cover -- or rather, a new cover since they also broke the old one -- will not fit over the light bulb again. There's nothing quite like having a bare fluorescent light bulb shining just above eye level every time you stand in front of the sink.


This is the lovely space where the spacer board between the dishwasher and the wall... stops. Four inches short of the floor. It's just... a hole. Hopefully I can keep the cats from shoving their paws in there. And keep whatever might be in there...in.


And my floor...






And, for some reason, they took the plate off this outlet. It was there when I took the first round of pictures while they were missing, so sometime after they got back it vanished. We don't know why. Or where it went. But as of this morning, it's still just like this.


I can't get a picture of it because it... sort of... looks ok, just a little... crooked... which is why I noticed it, but when they remounted the range hood they only bothered to do so with the two front screws. They just... jammed... the back into place. It's sort of sitting at an angle where the back is trying hard to fall.

There are a lot of other little things -- like the adhesive all over my floor and the unbraced sink and the drip under the sink that I can't find the source of and the seriously messed up dead space in the corner (not blind space that's hard to reach but DEAD space, as in, they BLOCKED OFF that corner so that it's completely unusable) where I used to keep all my rarely used cooking utensils (like the waffle maker, little food processor, certain mixing bowls only used at the holidays, etc.) -- but nothing I could really capture with a photograph.

They left my apartment a mess, but before they left they stacked all the crap in front of my apartment all nice and neat. Glancing out the window this morning at a little after 11am (edt), yup, it's still there. Only now it's soggy because it rained quite a bit last night.


Oh, and remember I said to take note of the undamaged door frame earlier? This is what it looked like when they left.


I suppose, though, that I should be grateful. They were supposed to do three units in this complex yesterday. The maintenance guy that came by after A. turned in my typed list of complaints said that the people in the other two units got home and called the office. Their cabinets were sitting in their dining rooms. I'm soooo thankful I told the manager that I wanted to be the first apartment of the day. I can't begin to imagine how pissed A. would have been (not to mention how pissed I would have been) if they'd not gotten to us at all yesterday and everything that was in the kitchen had to sit under and on the dining room table while we ate fast food again.

My mom told me that at least it's better than before, and I'm not so sure I agree (sorry Mom). Before, it was one cabinet under the sink that was completely rotted out and unusable. No one saw it and as long as I kept the cabinet doors blocked the cats stayed out of it and it was ignored. Now, everything is theoretically usable (I'm still not sure I trust that hood over my oven or the light over my sink and I've not run the dishwasher yet) but the entire kitchen looks like something out of the ghetto. Except for the pretty new white cabinets and dusky rose colored counter tops.

Sure, a reasonable landlord would see to fixing these complaints and fixing the damage that was done by the work crew they hired. I think under different circumstances these items would be taken care of to our satisfaction within 48 hours. But circumstances aren't different. I honestly think they're overwhelmed and trying to take care of too many issues at once. I don't think they're being able to devote any real attention to things that come up, especially emergencies, but at the same time they're trying to make improvements, possibly to keep the current tenants happy, and not being able to do any of the jobs RIGHT.

Why do I think that? Today at 930am marked the official time that it's been three full weeks from the day my bathroom was gutted (it was gutted the morning of August 30, 2007 between 830 and 930am) and my bathtub STILL looks like it does in the above picture. Three weeks of having a pipe sticking out of my tub wall. They say it takes 21 days for a habit to form. I'm not sure what bothers me most at this point, that I still have a pipe sticking out of my bathtub wall or the fact that we're getting used to it.

In other news... well, there's not much else.

K. is doing well at school. She and her father have some big science fair meeting to go to tonight (A. told me I could stay home and cook dinner instead). The official progress report she brought home yesterday has her pulling in A's in Honors Reading, Social Studies/Geography, and Honors Math. She's pulling in a B in Honors Science. For some reason she's pulling a C in Honors Language Arts. It seems to be grammar related but it was hard to tell with the information on the sheet that went back to school today. All her teachers seem to think she's a delightful child and her conduct grades are all "satisfactory".

A. is doing work stuff. He has some travel plans soon, but they're slipping my mind at the moment.

And me? A. let me borrow his lap top the other night and set it up for me in the bedroom. I sat on the bed and wrote without distraction while A. and K. watched tv and/or played x-box in the living room. I... accomplished... something, and it felt good. Last night I accomplished nothing. A. set me up in the bedroom again and I dozed more than I typed. After the previous night's accomplishment, last night was a huge blow that I'm feeling especially hard this morning. Except for the other night, I haven't written in over a month. With no crafts to do (supplies are in boxes somewhere, probably in storage again) writing is my only creative outlet... and not being able to write is tearing me apart, especially this past week as I'm just starting to hear some of my characters again (they all went missing for a while). I'm tired. And I'm frustrated. But I need to push on through the day, so I guess I'll close this, set my timer again, and get on with it.

Thus beings Day Eight...

I'm just so very tired of not having a fully functional and safe bathroom, and now they've started in on my kitchen.

This is what they've left my kitchen looking like... keeping in mind that they were just going to leave huge gaping holes between and under the doors until I threw a fit about it being completely unacceptable because of the cats.





I can't handle much more of this. I can't exercise with them here because they're back and forth all over my living room. I can't write because I'm in their way when I sit at the computer. I'm not eating or drinking much because I'm afraid to use the bathroom when they're not here (if it's usable) because they just walk in without knocking or I have to wait until A. gets home with the car so I can go to some store or another to pee or wait until they've decided to stop working on our bathroom for the day which often isn't until somewhere between 6pm and 8pm.

I'm so very tired, so very drained, so very... on the verge of losing it.

I think I'll reread the book of Job today then lock myself in my bedroom with the felines and take a nap.