Burlap Soul

As I write this, I am sitting in our new (considerably more open) office area that looks out on our back deck and into the woods and stream beyond. We are in. We've been living in the new house since Wednesday night (2/27). To say that it's been a challenging experience could well be understatement of the year. The move itself has been relatively painless as we only moved about 5 minutes away from our old condo. It's the house that's been working against us. No, wait, scratch that. It's the previous owners that have been making our lives hell working against us. Apparently these people not only neglected A) any type of cleaning, but also B) any type of home maintenance, B) any type of home security or basic safety and C) anything and everything related to proper plumbing and water drainage. I've completely lost count of all the various valves and pipes that we've had to add shut-off valves to, and we've woken up to find nearly 4 inches of water in our garage twice in one 24 hour period due to - you guessed it - leaking valves.

I understand that some people just don't take care of their houses. Really, I get that. But if I didn't know any better, I'd swear that the previous owners were deliberately trying not to make the house work. It's just so damned odd, the things that we're finding. I've seen houses where people have nailed doors shut because they were paranoid schizophrenics and were afraid of someone getting in, but this house? It's almost like they were trying to keep themselves from getting out. We've had to repair every. single. door. just to get them to open/shut/lock properly. Not to mention the whole constantly-fighting-water battle that could've easily been avoided had anyone done any type of basic maintenance. We wanted a fixer upper and this house certainly qualifies, but starting from scratch is almost always easier than fixing someone else's fuck-ups. However, that's exactly what we're doing, only we're taking the time to do it right. This is our first home and a place that we are incredibly proud to call ours, so we want to be sure that it reflects that feeling.

The hardest part of all this is watching the cats get settled in and knowing that we will never see Guinness sprawled out in the new awesome sunbeams with the others. We still cry when we think of what she's missing here - the hardest part being that we bought this house for the comfort of our animals and now they're not all here to enjoy it with us. It kills us and it probably always will - and that's what hurts most of all. We'd give anything to have her back and we continue to feel short-changed and shocked over it all. But knowing that we can't change it, knowing that she didn't get to come to this new joyous place with us... God, I can't tell you how hard that is to live with every day. We received her ashes and they are still in the mail package because we can't bring ourselves to open it. Life is just so busy lately that we don't want to open them only to have to shove them back in a box somewhere. We want to be able to mourn her properly, but we also don't want to mourn her at all. We want her here, we want her with us and we still can't accept that she is gone. Yesterday, I was looking under the bed (always Guinness' favorite spot) and noticed that J. had put the package containing her ashes under the end of the bed right where she would've lain. It touched me and somehow made me feel at home. Knowing that we cannot mourn her properly right now in all this chaos, but still knowing that what we have of her physically is right where she would want to be - well, it may not seem totally sane to you, but it certainly made all the difference to me.

We are less than four months from the wedding now, my mother is fresh off off a knee replacement surgery and we are in our new fixer-upper home. Lightness is something that we need in our lives right now so badly. We want to focus on the good, on the wonderful, on the happy. It's hard when one of our favorite babies is not here with us, but by that same token, her love was so unabashed and loud and lively that living our lives in a dark cloud would only do her a great dishonor. If we could love each other half as much as she loved being with us, then we would be blissful forever. I know that she is with us, I see her in my dreams every night actually - she flops on the floor and rubs my feet while talking to me loudly in the sunbeam. I know that she will be there on our wedding day and I know that she follows us up our new stairs in her new ghostly form now - knowing all the while how much we continue to love her and how she will never be forgotten. Oh, how we absolutely love her so. I smile when I imagine her watching inquisitively as the love that she gave us pours outward and onward into everything we do now and for all our days beneath her wonderfully wide, innocent, and watchful eyes. Life is a wheel and I cannot wait until we come around and see her again.

In the past 48 hours, I have:

-- lost my Maid of Honor three months before the wedding because as she puts it, "I don't think I can get off work that day. Sorry." She's known about our wedding date for over a year and no, she is not an incredibly important CIA agent, but rather works in a restaurant. She also had no idea what day our wedding was actually on (so how in the hell could she have asked for it off? Exactly.)
-- possibly lost my best friend of 20 years - see above.
-- woke up to a house that was 47 degrees because our furnace suddenly died
-- had furnace fixed after 20 minutes of work and a couple hundred dollars
-- dealt with hosting issues because my blog was suddenly gone and no one had informed me that my payment was not automatically being deducted for the past 6 months as I had been told it would be
-- sat in the emergency room twice for a grand total of 6 hours
-- drove at severely illegal speeds while crying to said emergency room because 1 week after having a total knee replacement, my mother fell down the stairs while going to the bathroom on crutches and was found unconscious and bleeding at the bottom of the staircase.
-- watched helplessly as my semi-conscious mother laid in the ER while nurses pumped her full of morphine and tried desperately to remove the vast amount of dried blood from her mouth so that she could try to speak
-- basically carried my limp and heavily drugged mother to the car and then into her house, where she laid her head in my lap and cried and cried endlessly because the bruises and cuts on her face, back and neck hurt so bad
-- applied endless ice packs to my mother's swollen blood-filled eye and entirely purple face
-- stopped at our favorite church where I just sat in empty pews and cried loudly for a good half hour and lit candles hoping to God that someone was listening
-- gone to work, which is its own chaotic mindless eternity
-- received our beloved Guinness' ashes, along with a memorial paw print in clay - and then tried desperately not to process or feel anything because I thought I might break if I did
-- received text messages from Rasee that made me laugh and smile for the first time in days and learned again what a real friend is made of
-- visited my mother again, where it was obvious that she was in more pain than when she'd left the hospital earlier
-- sat with my mother in a dark bedroom and held her while she cried and shook uncontrollably from the pain and begged me to just "make the pounding stop"
-- helped her put her shoes back on and get back in the car for a second trip to the emergency room
-- waited for nearly 3 hours in the ER waiting room while my mother hid under vast coats and blankets in a wheelchair trying to keep warm while escaping the constant light and noise and begging for pain relief
-- slept in a chair with my face on a doorknob while waiting for the worst ER staff I've ever seen come in once an hour to be incredibly apathetic and rude while telling us nothing
-- watched for 2 more hours while they finally gave my mother more morphine, ran x-rays that they had "forgotten to do earlier," and gave her migraine and anti-nausea medication intravenously
-- made sure my mother was home and resting before coming home myself at 4am
-- crashed horribly into bed for an entirely dark and dreamless sleep
-- sent an email to all family members giving them updates and attaching pictures of my mom
-- sent the same email to Maid of Honor just as a nice "Your selfish shit does not matter to me right now and this is why you should feel like the ass that you are" gesture
-- considered getting breakfast, but realized that it's nearly 1pm and the rest of the world was not at the emergency room until 4am and does not feel like it's morning
-- blogged instead
-- desperately hoped that the next 48 hours will be infinitely better and that I can relax and smile with my mother again

My mom was taken back to the ER for the third time in as many days early this morning. Her headache pain returned worse than ever, but now she was unable to see out of her bruised and blackened eye. What she could see was double vision and she had no depth of field. This time, there was much better staff on duty and they did another CAT scan. She has a fractured eye socket (orbital bone) and it can only be repaired with surgery. This will be the 5th surgery my mom has had in less than a year. She has cried and cried all day. She is less than 10 days out from her knee replacement, she can't walk or begin physical therapy and now she is stuck on the couch with an eye patch, her leg in a machine, her head covered in icepacks and now she is unable to read or watch tv. She is completely helpless and now she must see both an eye surgeon and a plastic surgeon within the next 48 hours. Oh, and she is not allowed to sneeze. (w.t.f.? Like you plan that?)

By the time that I left her house tonight, she was laughing a little and talking to family on the phone helped lots. She's decided that she's going to get a giant charm to hang around her neck that says "Lucky."

Meanwhile, we finally have the washer and dryer hooked up, but the dryer refuses to work because the circuitry in our house is insane the housing gods are plotting against us. We're doing our laundry at the local laundromat down the street Who's Who of Mental Instability Headquarters. I still have no best friend maid of honor. My glands are swollen and my throat is sore.... and well, this list just seems to make me cringe just writing it go on and on and on.

Keep us in your thoughts everyone.. please? I'd prefer that the next week was a much smoother ride.

A picture for you, just because. I figure we could all use some brightness today - and I think this certainly qualifies. I just hope I can grow my nails back out long enough to do it justice.

I had my second dress fitting today. With all the undergarments and the awesome shoes, I had the 40s look in the bag, baby. For the first time I felt like my dress was mine and I felt awesome in it. That was pretty much all I needed to remember why we're doing all of this crazy planning. Since the seamstress is so close to the ceremony site, we stopped and looked at it again. Imagining my dress shining in the sun with my handsome fiance in this beautiful place, well that was a much needed lift to my spirits.

Plus, our dryer is running! After a week of wanting to throw the damn thing in the river, it's finally running and we can do laundry and have some semblance of normal life in our house now. Another awesome thing.

I sent an email to my Maid of Honor the other day. I was nice and civil, but I basically told her that if she wasn't at my wedding, don't expect me listen to her cry on my shoulder anymore or bust my ass to be her friend while getting nothing in return. It may sound harsh to you, but this has been coming for years and this crap with the wedding was just the last straw for me. It's a long convoluted entry for another day, but for now, I'm just choosing not to deal with it. Those who love me will be there, those who don't won't.

However, I have two other bridesmaids that are fitted and happy with their dresses. Plus, they've both been better friends to me in the past two months than Pasty has been in the past 20 years. I'm realizing that taking care of everyone else and giving my all to shitty friendships is just not worth it anymore. There will never be some grand payoff. None of them are ever going to wake up and stop being selfish jackasses someday. So that's it. I'm done. From now on, if you only think of yourself and only call me when you have a problem (without ever asking me how I am), forget it. Don't call me. Have a nice life. I don't give a shit anymore.

We've cooked two or three meals now in our new home. We got our first wedding gift the other day (from J.'s boss - an awesome set of steak knives that we had registered for - these could kill somebody people). We are now 98 days from the wedding. I cannot believe it. Yet still, I cannot wait. Somebody play me some Glenn Miller and start the Zoot Suit Riot. We are so ready.

Odd how the Cycle of Life goes around so quickly and is always so constant, no matter how you may try to stop it or push it along. We lost our beloved chocolate kitty not quite a month ago and yesterday my aunt brings a visitor while coming to see my mom. Lo and behold, my mom now has her very own chocolate baby.

Of course he's squirmy as shit and gives his 1-year older crazy Jack-Russell brother a run for his money (which we thought was impossible), but so far he's doing well. He'll never replace her previous Mexican girl, but at least she finally got to have one of the chihuahua babies that she lost not so long ago.

I should add that with this addition, it's official. I am no longer the person in our family that has the most animals. Mwahahahahaaaaaaaa! Suckers!

My dad and aunt V. came up this weekend to help us with the house. It's amazing what you can get done with more than two people. We finally got drainage holes in the driveway retaining wall and J. got to use a big loud auger with a giant masonry bit. (cue the cave man grunts here.) We finally got that back fence gate fixed (somewhat) and we now have all that we need to move our outside waterhose connection to a more convenient usable spot. It was literally sandwiched between a rock and a hard place so you couldn't even turn the spout. Nice. Today though was spent in neck and back agony as we finally (finally!) painted the upstairs bedroom ceiling. The wall color up there is such an offensive and dark and nasty and yucky shade of yellow that we thought the ceiling color was beige next to it. Oh no, no, no, boys and girls. Not in this house. It was brown people. The yellow was so dark and nasty that a brown ceiling looked beige. I honestly do not know what the previous owners of this place were thinking. "Oooh, ugly and dirty! Let's do that color!" *sigh* I just cannot figure it out.

However, now our bedroom ceiling is all Behr's Ultra Pure White and bright as hell. Awesome. Plus, we took off the old dingy disgusting recessed lighting covers/trim and let those lights shine out everywhere. With the nasty yellow that's still on the walls, it's like a fucked up department store up there right now, all bright and offensive. But still, it's bright and fresh and nice and I can't wait to have that yellow off the walls and see how beautiful it turns out when we're all done with the painting. You can definitely anticipate pictures. :-)

Home ownership - such a wild ride. Sometimes I still can't believe it.

Some of you know the issues I've been having with my best friend/Maid of Honor. Today, it's hit a crucial head.

I've posted entries at the Photolog for privacy reasons and I could use some serious advice. Read both entries (starting with the most recent entry on top and scrolling down) and let me know what you think in the comments over there or via email. I honestly want to know what you think of all this, as I'm upset and need some other opinions in my head.

TEN YEARS AGO...

1.) How old were you? 19
2.) Where did you go to school? Transitioned from Community College to 4-year College
3.) Where did you work? grocery store cashier
4.) Where did you live? Just moved to Cincinnati
5.) Where did you hang out? Wherever the theatre majors were as that's what I was
6.) Did you wear glasses? Nope
7.) Who was your best friend? No one really, I was friends with everybody
8.) How many tattoos did you have? None
9.) How many piercings did you have? None
10) What did you drive? One of many different Ford Escorts
11.) Had you been to a real party yet? Yeah
12.) Had you had you heart broken? Hell yes.
13.) Single/Taken/Married/Divorced/Bitter: Probably the only time in my life I really "dated casually" whomever I wanted
14.) Who was your crush? Fox Mulder

FIVE YEARS AGO...
1.)How old were you? 24
2.) Where did you go to school? Same 4-year College
3.) Where did you work? Nowhere
4.) Where did you live? Cincinnati
5.) Where did you hang out? Our old rented house in the suburbs with J. and the animals
6.) Did you wear glasses? nope
7.) Who was your best friend? J.
8.) Who was your crush? No one.
9.) How many tattoos did you have? none
10.) How many piercings did you have? none
11) What car did you drive? The Neon - was just getting ready to buy our current black beauty
12.) Had you had your heart broken? Oh yes.
13.) Single/Taken/Married/Divorced/Bitter: Taken

**February '07**
1.) How old are you? 29
2.) Where do you work? Small Cubicle of a Big Company
3.) Where do you live? Northern Kentucky (so long Buckeyes)
4.) Do you wear glasses? nope
5.) Who are your best friends? My animals, J., some online friends, myself
6.) Do you talk to your old friends? Yes
7.) How many piercings do you have? none
8.) How many tattoos? none
09.) What kind of car do you have? 2000 Oldsmobile Alero (a.k.a. "Bella Nera")
10.) Had your heart broken? Not in a long while, finally.
11.) Single/Taken/Married/Divorced/Bitter? Engaged. :-)