Boxes and piles

What the hell is going on?  Where am I?  Who are you?

Life has been a chaotic blur since a large truck pulled up in front last week and unloaded the things -- ALL the things -- into my house --

Our lives are now boxes and piles, piles and boxes.  Every box I open reveals a plethora of things I didn't remember until that very second but no longer want one second more.  It's an endless cycle of excitement and despair --

"Ooh!  What's in this shiny box?  I can't wait to see... oh dammit, that thing?  It was a piece of crap before we left for France and now it's even worse.  What am I going to do with it?  I am a loser for buying that thing in the first place.  I have poor judgment.  I hate myself..... Ooh!  What's in this shiny box....?" 

and so on and so forth.

I'm sorting things into three piles: things I want to get rid of this very second, things I want to get rid of yesterday, and things that have to go "somewhere else" in the house.  That last one is a mystical pile indeed.

There is also an "I have to recycle this old electronic thing to be a decent human being but have no idea how to do that" pile.  That's my least favorite pile; I try not to look at it too much.

 The packing material sneaks up on the children.  They will not see it coming.

We moved in and Banister Abbey was immediately part of the family. We celebrated by riding bikes through the entry hall and breakdancing in the kitchen.  The oak floors are already traumatized and seeing a therapist.  There are several million boxes and piles and loud voices echo even more loudly in an empty house, but we're happy.  We finally, finally have a home.

...a home with a temporary banister so we don't fall off our stairs

We lured some friends over with pizza and booze and razzle dazzle so they would help us all day Saturday.  They dismantled our swingset at our old house and re-assembled it in The Abbey's side yard.  They also went to the storage unit in Bellevue (where I likely left Hemingway Guy shuffling around) and cleared out all the furniture.  We may not find the bedsheets or coffee maker for many months, but at least we have a dining room table.

 The men of Banister Abbey

the contents of a storage unit

a swingset in the city

a dining room table

This neighborhood is full of characters.  I've met many of them but have the feeling I've barely scratched the surface.  My favorite people in the neighborhood are thus far the artists next door, of course, who are so environmentally conscious they don't turn on lights after dark.  I like to imagine the artists running into each other in the hallways at night.  It makes me smile.

There's also the man who works at the large building down the street so walks in front of our house twice a day.  He swears Coco is a boy.  When I tell him no, really, she's my daughter, he says, "Honey, that ain't no girl," looks at me like I'm crazy and shakes his head as he walks away.  There's no persuading him.  Coco doesn't care, just continues to play in the mud in her Nirvana t-shirt and torn jeans.

My least favorite neighbors are the ones directly behind us on whom I've already called 911 for detonating what sounded to be a stick of dynamite in their kitchen.  I went over to check on them after I called 911 and they were like, "Nope, explosion didn't happen here *cough cough* *billowing smoke*"

The nice firemen who showed up told me the sound was likely an M-80, a very illegal firework.  That was a firework?  It sounded more like a cannon firing next to my ear, or a transformer blowing, or perhaps a meth lab exploding?  The Fourth of July is not likely to be a quiet one this year.

Banister Abbey gets an immense volume of foot traffic in front all day long.  All I have to do is sit on the front steps and within five minutes I've made a new friend.  The previous owner, Mr. Cool, has five thousand cousins, some of whom don't realize Mr. Cool sold the house when they pull up front with the intent to visit him.  When they see me, the confused cousins call out things to each other like, "Hey Reggie, who is that small white woman sitting on Mr. Cool's porch?"  One guy even rubbed his eyes then looked at me again.  I was still there.  I was not a small white woman mirage.

When they find out I'm the new owner of The Abbey, the cousins are shocked at first but then shake my hand warmly and tell me tales of hide-and-seek in the attic of the house as kids and large family dinners in the dining room.  I've invited them back to play hide-and-seek with us anytime.  I've also invited them back to cook me a large dinner.  Those are my favorite moments so far in the new neighborhood.

Many neighbors stop by to express their relief Banister Abbey wasn't bought by a developer.  That's what was assumed would happen when it went up for sale.  It happens often to the big old houses of the C.D. -- they get torn down for townhouses or broken up into individual apartments.  It's a damn shame.

But when we put that swingset in the side yard, the neighborhood realized it was us, it was a single family intent on living here, and came out to greet us joyfully.  Banister Abbey lives on huzzah!

I have to go unpack more boxes and shuffle more crap around. I don't have a lot of writing time these days but I will certainly be back to tell you tales of copper thievery and possible meth labs and my neighbors who are all colors of the rainbow and speak many strange languages.  There are also many people with blue hair and tattoos pushing babies in strollers.  It's the C.D. baby.

Home!
MJ

YBNormal?

We are still hoping to own The Goddamn House someday, but have decided to buy everything else in the city in the meantime.  We're looking at both investment properties and back-up homes for The Goddamn House, so we've been studying listings, obsessing over houses, and writing offers all over the place. 

One investment property has recently fallen through -- another short sale because we apparently hate ourselves -- and just last night we wrote an offer for an old Victorian that makes The Goddamn House look like pristine clean perfection.  There are currently 26 offers on the Victorian, so perhaps our only chance of getting it is to seduce the seller, which is a bank, so that may be uncomfortable.


I know what you're thinking -- "But MJ, with all that going on, how can you possibly have time to blog?"  The answer is I don't have time, and am risking my life crashing and burning around me as I write this.  Blogging is a compulsion, and it's sick. 

Alex just emailed me one sentence: "We need normal lives."  Good point, my man.  Because besides the intense housing situation, there are other strange things afoot.  For instance, I spent my morning with a man in a storage facility in Bellevue, a man who bears an uncanny resemblance to Earnest Hemingway.  We were there to switch ownership of a storage unit from him to me.  It's a long story, so just take it at that.

I've met Hemingway Guy before;  he's always been a vibrant, energetic, funny man.  In fact, it was Hemingway Guy who spun his dance partner into the dessert table at the wedding we all attended in Provence a few years back.

But something's changed for Hemingway Guy, something I noticed right away at the Bellevue storage unit.  It appears H.G. is going senile  Or maybe he was drunk.  Or stoned.  He insisted my name was "Nikki" and shuffled slowly when he walked, usually in the wrong direction.  I had to jump in front of him a few times to turn him around.  When I asked if he'd brought the key for the storage unit, he said, "I think so," pulled handfuls of tiny keys from his jacket pockets and dumped them all on the front desk.  I said "Hmm....that's not good"  and the man behind the desk laughed into his hands.

We walked to the storage unit and tried all the tiny keys.  None of them worked.  Mr. Chuckles behind the front desk said he'd be happy to cut the lock off, but he was out of grinding discs, so could I come back tomorrow?  I'm almost certain I'll find Hemingway Guy still roaming the corridors when I return.

Another strange thing happened, too.  I dropped Seattle Mom and her three kids off at the train station early Saturday morning so they could catch a train to Portland.  I drove them in Seattle Mom's minivan, which used to be my minivan until she bought it from me when we moved to Paris but that's not important right now. 

On my drive home from the train station, a man ran a red light at high speed -- really ran it, as my light had been green for a long time -- and came straight at me.  I saw Red Runner coming and braked as hard as my body could brake.  Red Runner careened past, the nose of Seattle Mom's van grazing the side of his car and peeling the trim off like one of them tasty Fruit by the Foot snacks.

Red Runner didn't stop, just took off into the still-dark early morning.  I pulled over to inspect the damage to Seattle Mom's van and was relieved to find there wasn't any, just some dark paint smudged on the front and Red Runner's trim curled up like a handlebar mustache in the lower grill.  I broke it off before driving home but in retrospect should have left it there because oh my gosh, so silly and curly!  While inspecting the car, several kind Seattleites ran over and congratulated me on my cheetah-like reflexes.

   Nice try, Red Runner, you asshat

Alex and I took the kids to the YMCA when I got home because there's no better way to celebrate narrowly avoiding a major traffic accident than by running around an empty gymnasium with your family and yelling. 

"Let's play dodgeball!" said Alex to the kids.  "It'll be me and your mother against you two."  Initially excited to play a new game with Mommy and Daddy, their enthusiasm evaporated when we fired those balls at their tiny bodies.  Al and I won in five seconds so the kids have to buy our beers this weekend.

victory is sweet

 

We put the kids in the Y's childcare for a bit so we could exercise for real.  I headed for the elliptical machines, the cool ones with TVs attached to them.  Everyone around me watched news or sports but I threw caution to the wind -- let them judge me! -- and watched The Golden Girls.  It was the episode where Dorothy sleeps with her ex-husband, Stan, and then considers getting back together with him.  "Don't do it, Dorothy," I cried,  "He cheated on you with that bimbo Krissy, remember?"  The guy next to me startled a bit when I laughed out loud but I couldn't help myself -- that Sophia is such a pistol.

When I wandered over to visit Alex at the free weights, he made fun of me.  "The Golden Girls?  Really?  At the gym?"  I replied, "You can only dream of knowing friendship like theirs, Al,"  It was a total Golden Girls burn, and he felt it, and cried for hours.

Lucien's school had a multicultural night last week.  Each class did a song or dance from a fancy exotic culture somewhere in the world.  Lucien's class did a Japanese dance with fans, which we all agreed was culturally enlightening.  The audience was perplexed, however, when the next class did a Hank Williams song.  Ahh, yes... the mysterious, exotic culture of Hank. 

I so badly want to blog twice a week.  There are many things to put on the record, many tales I want to remember for all time.  But life is at goddamn warp speed over here suddenly -- calendar full, responsibilities numerous, homelessness imminent.  I will be here when I can, but for the foreseeable future I'm going to be a once-a-week blogger.  I never wanted to be that person, and therefore feel like a failure.

Thank you for being a friend,
MJ