Month: June 2016

Chaos!

It’s been a rough month.

First, our youngest comes down with a life-threatening asthma attack. Out of the blue. Never had asthma before. And while we’re dealing with his health, we’re trying to figure out the source of his problem.

One thing came to mind pretty quick – our house is under construction, and we’ve been living with plywood floors, and our son’s room happens to have some pretty big gaps where the awful air from under the house seeps through.

It’s heart-wrenching to realize that our living conditions were making him ill.

So floors. Picked some gorgeous wide-plank oak stained a beautiful gray. Had to get it ordered, acclimated, then schedule installers. Check. Meanwhile, the poor kid is staying next door at my mom’s (thank GOD my mom lives next door!), but he feels seriously displaced. We took everything out of his room and washed it. Scrubbed the walls and ceilings. Check.

So we have this awful old kitchen. Our plan is to move it to a different place in the house, and we’ve already got the new kitchen plumbed and wired and layed out. We’ve been trying to pay cash for everything and do a little at a time. But as the installers are laying out the new wood floor, they run right into the old kitchen island. We can cut off all the planks here, they say. But it will mess up the pattern of the floor.

So we decide to gut the old kitchen. Without having a new kitchen, mind you. We’ve been here before. In one of our previous homes, I lived without a kitchen for eight months as my husband built it in his spare time. We washed dishes in the tub or with garden hose. Not fun.

We tried to save the old Corian countertop and sink, with the idea of using it temporarily in the new space so we wouldn’t be without a sink. No dice. The old counters snapped into pieces. We thought we could just put a garbage disposal on the sink we have out on the patio – but, no, the sink hole is too small for a disposal. We thought we could replace that sink…but the previous owners grouted it in place, and now our patio kitchen needs new countertops.

And I still don’t have a proper sink. But what does it matter when I can’t cook?

And THEN…you know, since we went ahead and gutted the old kitchen, and our plan is to turn it into a library with a fireplace and board up a door and add new windows…the old door and windows had to go, right? I have gaping holes in the exterior walls of our house, and of course it had to be the hottest day of the year…110 degrees. With the heat billowing in, and the air conditioning being sucked right out…and man, does taking out windows surrounded by stucco create a lot of dust. If my child didn’t have asthma before this, he most certainly would have had it after.

The good news is, the kid’s bedroom is done. Clean with a brand new HEPA filter. Beautiful floors. He moved back in two days ago and is happy as a clam, with no breathing issues for a week. And beautiful floors throughout the house that I can actually sweep and mop properly!

Almost throughout the house, I should say. They’re still working on the new kitchen area. We have boxes of dishes and appliances and food all over the house. And did I mention the dust? But we’re getting there. Slowly but surely.

Once upon a time we had a dream. Patiently remodel our home. Take on no debt and pay for it as we go. Be smart. Only start projects we can finish.

That dream just got blown to hell. Okay, we haven’t succumbed to the Home Depot credit card yet, but I can feel it coming. I’m too old to live without a kitchen sink.

Political Rants Comin’ This Way

I host the Orange County Satellite for IWOSC, the Independent Writers of Southern California. As a group, we’ve been working on professionalism, taking our careers seriously and viewing our writing as just that – as a career, and not as a single writing project. And as part of that, we’ve been working on branding ourselves and figuring out how we want to present ourselves and be perceived.

So we were talking tonight about blogging, providing valuable content, and a question came up about politics: do we dare to go there?

And the answer from our PR maven was…yes. Go there. Better to be controversial – as long as it’s done in a professional way – than to go unrecognized.

I struggle with this. Ninety-five percent of the blogs I want to write, and several of the books on my writing to-do list, are political in nature. I love to challenge myself to make a logical, coherent argument. I’ve been blogging so infrequently since I started my new website because I’ve been censoring myself, afraid to ruffle feathers. I don’t like actors who blurt out political rants, so why should I tolerate it with writers?

Well…I’m a political animal. I have opinions. And since I’m a writer, I think I can at least present my thoughts logically. You might not agree with them, and that’s great – disagree away! I want to learn new things, and I want to hear the other side. Make me see the world in a different way, open my mind, and I will try to do the same for you.

So I’m going there. I hope you’ll go with me.