here in my head

The weather outside of late has been amazing. Warm, sunny, positively springlike. Not at all like March. Exactly as I would like every March to be… As a result I’ve been spending a lot of time outside, which has had an amazing affect on my mood. Walking is an excellent balm for the soul – I don’t know why I seem to have trouble remembering that…

Today’s walk gave me the chance to explore a new area near my neighbourhood I hadn’t discovered before – this little touch of paradise tucked away in the middle of the city. I never knew these little offshoot creeks from the river existed, these quaint wooden bridges passing over. Picturesque parks. Bliss. Peace.

I will never regret moving downtown. This is the life I hoped for, the lifestyle I wanted.

I can’t find my stopwatch.

It’s not a big deal really – it’s not a fancy watch or anything, but it does the trick of keeping track of time. Something useful as my walks start getting longer. Mike bought it for me a few years ago for Christmas or my birthday – either way, Dec. 25th. I was starting training for my first half-marathon walk and it was my constant companion on those walks. He bought it because it was purple and he knew that would make me smile. And I need it.

But I can’t find it. That watch is one of a growing list of things that I can’t find since the move; things that include my passport, my birth certificate, and the paperwork for the guarantee for my wedding rings. There are many others like them, needed in the moment and then left unfound for now. We still have boxes upon boxes in our basement, in Mike’s parents’ basement, in my parents’ garage. Things that I would be tempted to say we don’t need if we haven’t needed them since October, except that there are things we do need. Things that I can’t find. Because as much as we are home in this new house, we are not settled. We unpacked really only the essentials when we first moved in because we were getting the house rewired, and so why unpack a bunch of stuff when it would all get dusty and dirty and need to be repacked to give the electricians room to punch holes in walls and pull wires everywhere. So our boxes remained unopened. And then it was Christmas. And then it was the new year, and water was rushing through the wall between our dining room and kitchen and more holes were being punched in walls and here we are, almost five months since we moved in, with countless unpacked boxes in three locations, and unfinished renovations.

I can’t wait until we can finally have everything in it’s place…

Lazy sunday bullet-y goodness:

• We have a partially-functioning kitchen again – huzzah! The renos aren’t finished, but we are on hold until the new countertops arrive (the lovely, smooth, shiny black granite countertops…I never thought I could be so excited about stones or a kitchen. I am getting old…) Hopefully by this time next month, we will have our kitchen completely back to rights. In order to carve out a bit of serenity amidst the chaos, we cleaned up what we could of the kitchen on Saturday and then Mike made bacon, eggs and homemade hashbrowns to celebrate that we could, once again, cook at home. I then spent the rest of Saturday turning out bedroom inside out and tossing out all the clothes that are too big/too ugly/too ‘what the hell was I thinking’ and now I have closet space once again. Which I will attempt to not fill with more clothes that in a year or so will fall into one of the too big/too ugly/too ‘what the hell was I thinking’ categories.
• I need a lesson in goal-setting and prioritization. Also, time management. If someone could also tell me what the perfect career for me would be, that would be swell.
• Today was a near-perfect day. We went to a friend’s farm in Cantley, Quebec and I proceeded to hang out in front of the wood stove in their gigantic kitchen for pretty nearly the whole day while Mike went to the ski hill to tackle black diamond runs. I also learned how to make delicious chocolate pudding from scratch and was amazed by my friend Jen who simply whipped up a lunch for 20plus people in the course of a morning. I would like to find somewhere where I feel so at home like she does just puttering in her kitchen.
• I may be the last person on earth to be watching this, but my in-laws are out of town so I finally got to commandeer their TMN on Demand on Friday night to start making my way through Season 4 of Dexter, and can I just say that John Lithgow is one terrifying SOB? Seriously creepy. And brilliant. I may never sleep again…
• Can you do me a favour? Keep your fingers crossed for me – the signs are pointing to something that I’m hoping for might actually work out and if you could just send me some good thoughts to help this along, that would be swell…Thanks.
• Finally, I leave you with a song that has been running around in my head for a few weeks now, ever since my latte buddy (the other) Mike posted it on his blog…

I wish I had more talent in interior design. I wish I was better at picking paint colours and visualizing what a little paint chip will look like when it’s fully on my wall. I wish granite countertops weren’t so expensive. I wish Mike and I had more similar tastes so it didn’t take so long for us to come to a consensus on what we want for the house. I wish renovations didn’t cause so much dust, and didn’t take so long. I really wish my contractor was actually a fairy godmother and could just wave a magic wand and make my house perfect again. I wish our pipes hadn’t leaked. I wish my kitchen wasn’t torn apart making cooking difficult. I wish, I wish, I wish.

I know that once this is done, we will be even happier with the kitchen than we were when we first bought this place. I know that once this is complete, it will be worth it. I know that once this is done, I will have a space that is my own, not just inherited from someone else’s tastes. I know that once this is done, we will have shiny black granite countertops. We will have the simple, crisp, white subway tile back-splash I love so much. I know that once this is done, and my house is once again in order, I will not feel so much in upheaval. I know that this will not last forever. I know that it will be done soon. I know that it will be worth it. I know, I know, I know.

But still. It would be grand if it didn’t have to be torn down to be built back up. It would be grand if we didn’t have to have chaos in order to have peace. And it would have been good had we not picked such a stupid colour for our dining room wall…

So, me? I am no Julia Child. I’m not even a Julie Powell. I have never been much for cooking. Except now I have my dream kitchen (I didn’t even know I had a dream kitchen to have, having given kitchens very little thought, until we found this house, with this kitchen that is exactly everything I could want in a kitchen. Except, it lacks a broom cupboard…) and I’m also trying to take more responsibility for my health, and also I really want to make sure that the food I’m eating is gluten-free (which is easier to do when you cook for yourself). I also just finished reading Julie & Julia and I may or may not have been inspired somewhat by that (although, I will certainly not be attempting my own journey through Julia’s cookbook – killing lobsters and scraping out bone marrow are not high on my ‘must do someday’ list.) And so (short story long) I’m attempting to learn how to cook…

I also am doing a strength training course half way across the city, which means that most Mondays and Wednesdays I’m not home until at least 8 p.m. Mike usually cooks on these nights (and, let’s be honest, most other nights…) but tonight he was out with his friends and thus I came home to a empty and dinner-less house. Normally, that would mean calling a restaurant that does both gluten-free and delivery, but, like I said, I’m trying to learn how to cook. So instead, I decided I would try my best Julia Child/Juile Powell impersonation and make my own dinner. A simple shrimp in garlic butter white wine reduction over sautéed spinach.

Which would have been fine, but I crushed a little too much garlic, and I didn’t listen to Julia when she said I should use both butter AND olive oil in the pan (really? Both? The woman has no fear of fats, does she?) and we lack dried parsley. And then I might have ground a little more fresh pepper than was necessary. (I thought there was no such thing as too much pepper. I stand corrected.) And then maybe, maybe added a bit too much wine (to the glass I was sipping or to the pan, or both)…

This is why I tend to turn to the telephone to order in when I’m left to my own devices. But I’ll keep trying. I need to live up to this dream kitchen of mine, you know…

So, it’s been quite the week.

As mentioned a few days ago, on Tuesday, we found a leak in our basement. The more senior plumber who came out on Wednesday replaced the part that failed and we no longer have leaking – Hurray! But the walls that were damaged by the leaking now have to be fixed and the news from the contractors the insurance company sent over isn’t great… With a few days now to digest this news I am no longer quite in the panic I was on Friday when they first started describing how they might have to rip out a wall or part of the ceiling…

This house has not turned into the dream move-in-and-enjoy house we had hoped for. But it is still exactly what we were looking for, save for these few headaches. In the long run, the house will be better for these changes. In the short term, however…the stress is not fun. I keep reminding myself it could be much worse. We still have a roof over our heads. We’ll find the money some where to pay for this. And while having our house torn apart will be less than awesome, when it’s put back together the house will be good as new (knock on wood). (So not the post I would have written yesterday or Friday – it’s amazing what a good night’s sleep after a few vodka gimlets and a surprisingly fun night out with your in laws can do for your perspective…)

I’m getting tired of having strange men in my house putting holes in my walls. First we had the electricians who tore my house apart for two weeks, taking out all the old, uninsurable knob and tube wiring from the entire house and replacing it with new, up-to-date, yes-we’ll-give-you-homeowners-insurance wiring, leaving many, many holes in almost every room in my beautiful, new-to-me home. Then it was the idiot workmen sent to us by the company where we bought the in-wall speakers Mike so desperately craved. Who cut holes without measuring and tried to force the speakers into spots where they clearly wouldn’t fit. Two new workmen and four upgraded speakers later, the company made up for the initial blundering fools, but we still had much patching to fix the original mistakes. Then there were the weeks of dusting up the never-ending construction silt that settled on every available surface and clogged my sinuses. But really, it was a small price to pay for up-to-code electricity and delicious sound on the main floor.

And then we come to last night, when Mike, trying hard to hide the tremor of slight panic in his voice with little success, called up from the basement: “Um, honey. We have a leak…”

It turns out that Ottawa has some very good, very friendly, plumbers that will come to your house at 10:30 p.m. to check out why, all of a sudden, you have water dripping from the ceiling in your basement. And will scare you silly with words like “full pipe replacement” and “this looks like it’s been happening for a while” and “how long have you owned this house? Three months? Yikes.” Luckily, in the fresh light of day, when another plumber had the chance to really take a close look at what was going on (by punching new, big, fancy holes in my recently patched walls, and a few new holes in my previously untouched kitchen ceiling…) it was not a full pipe replacement that was needed, no, but rather just the replacement of the part that connects the tub drain to the main drain pipe. That was what had malfunctioned. But, while the “full pipe replacement” words turned out to be wrong, sadly the “this looks like it’s been happening for a while” words were confirmed. It looks like more holes will have to be made, once more. Whole walls may need to be replaced, in fact.

I guess I can be glad we didn’t get around to painting yet. Ah yes, the brightside…

In other news, I have discovered Vodka Gimlets. This couldn’t have happened at a better time.