Cues

Inspirational song: Learn to Fly (Foo Fighters)

I've always been struck by that saying, "Start as you mean to go on." I try to be very upfront with people about who I am and what my motivations and personal limits are, so that no one is caught off guard when I suddenly stop and say, "Nope. I'm not doing that. You need to back off." I know how hard it is to live down first impressions as well. I've had people who hated me for years for things I never knew I did on the first meeting. So I try very hard to make the first meetings and new beginnings be as true to life as they can be, and I try to set myself up like I think I want to live. I'm doing that with this house at every opportunity, and so far, it all feels right. Just right.

At the Park, I started out with a guest bedroom and an office, and when I chose them, I chose wrong. I don't remember how we realized that the rooms were backwards, but three or four months in, I decided to move the guest bedroom one door closer to the master, and to decorate it exactly how I had started with the first version. That's how I ended up with two rooms painted sky blue, until the last year I was there, when I turned the office into "the aqua bedroom." When I started redecorating to make the blue bedroom, arranging furniture and putting pictures of my beloved ancestors on the walls, I felt like I was less decorating a new bedroom than uncovering the one that was always supposed to be there. I loved the process of making it, and I loved it when it was done. That room became special to me, as the room of transitions. When new animals came into that house, they stayed there first, and when the few unfortunate ones left me, they died in that room, all except for Torden. I hated taking it apart.

I'm starting to have a few epiphanies about decorating this house, much as I did putting together the transition room. I'm trying to go a new direction here and there, as with the purple paint idea, but I'm listening and taking heed when the house tells me no. I really tried with the purple. I can't do it. It doesn't match anything I own. I remembered halfway through the day today that I planned on decorating the piano bar around a certain abstract painting that my stepfather gave me for my last birthday, called Carillon. I found the box where it was packed, and set it out under the paint samples on the wall. No way, no purple. Then I remembered my friend in Oklahoma had suggested a dark gray door and my BFF-landlady gave me a gallon of mis-tinted pewter colored paint. It's the right color for the door, and when I painted a sample next to the purples, I had an epiphany. I'm going to do the door full strength. Then I'm going to make an accent wall with it slightly diluted with white. Then I'm going to do the rest of the piano bar and dining room with it faded out even further, to pale gray. Problem solved. It's like the house suggested it to me as I sat and waited for the answer to hit me. Just as it should be.

More things are falling into place. We have cleared the last of the debris from the apartment, and scrubbed and mopped it completely. That chapter has ended. We have two of the three doors converted to new handles and locks, all keyed the same, to keys that no one who ever rented this house ever owned. I have unpacked most of the dishes and glassware, and we enjoyed our first bottle of wine here. After a long, tiring day, I cooked my first meal here, the exact one I had planned the first time I realized that big bushy thing in the garden was kale. I made boerenkool stamppot, a sausage, kale, potato, bacon, and cream stew, that as it turns out, goes Very Well with that aforementioned wine, a cabernet sauvignon. And best of all, when I pulled up in the driveway tonight, Mr S-P was chatting with our new neighbor, who seems to be really cool. He bought his house the same week we bought this one. I'm seeing good days ahead.

Feels Like Home

Inspirational song: Smells Like Teen Spirit (Nirvana)

And just like that, this house is starting to turn into a home. Most of our belongings are still piled in the garage, nothing has been painted, no art has been hung on the walls, and I still have every bit as much crap piled on top of the cooktop as the day we moved in. But the dining room table is assembled and the chairs loosely gathered around it. We ate lunch there today, surrounded by cats who were ecstatic to have their cushy chairs back. It took two days to remember to bring the power drill over, so we could reassemble the bed frame that Mr S-P custom built when we upgraded to a king sized bed at the original Park (all the better to fit two humans and a hundred cats, or however many we keep at any given moment). Since he loaded up the truck in Charleston, we have been squeezed together on the double bed that fits on the antique frame I swiped from my grandparents' old cabin in Oklahoma. It's a cute bed, but it's too small to house us and the random assortment of cats who wander by during a night. And while this basement guest room is wonderfully cool, dark, and quiet for sleeping, I'm ready to move into my new master suite. Maybe tomorrow, once I figure out where we packed the sheets. But as it is, slowly, this place is starting to look like us, and more importantly for our and the cats' well-being, it is starting to smell like us. It's more comforting to all of us, and we like it.

Yesterday was crazy busy, so we took it easy this morning. Only a few things have been pushed vaguely into place. We moved the big armoire that my father-in-law built many decades ago (the one we use as a liquor cabinet, ironically, since I was told he was a big teetotaler) against a wall to see how well we like it, and I was surprised to discover that the upstairs living room is actually really big. Empty I really couldn't tell, and after the frenzy of truck-unloading that left big pieces in the middle of the floor, it just felt crowded everywhere. We have made the decision on who gets which closet, and how we will arrange several things. We haven't gotten the last of the stuff from the apartment, and I was far too sore everywhere to do much cleaning. We still have to go back for one last round, and to mop and clean the kitchen and bathroom out there. I'm not looking forward to that. I wanted to spend tomorrow arranging this house, but we have an obligation to turn the apartment back to our bestie-slash-landlady in move-in condition, especially since she has it rented as of August 1.

We are to that point in the move where we end up at stores like Lowe's twice in one day. This morning we just went to get a few pieces of aluminum channel, so that we could make screens for the apartments and some window-stops for this place (to keep Zoe in more than intruders out). We left with four new plants (clearance plus a rose I needed like I need air to breathe), three vaguely purple-gray paint samples, aqua paint for the bathroom, and another couple bags of supplies. But by the end of the day, before we had even made it home to unload the first trip from the truck, we swung by a different Lowe's for a shelf over the laundry equipment and electric supply notions. And what happens when you go to your favorite store tired and emotionally vulnerable? You end up with a kitschy pineapple solar light. Yes, yes you do. It's the perfect symbol of welcome to my new-old home.

Day One

Inspirational song: The Best of Times (Styx)

One day later, and perhaps eighty percent of our belongings are on the premises somewhere. There isn't a hard and fast reason for the rush, except we have waited for this moment in time for so long, we are ready to get on with it. We still don't know, and can never know with any real certainty, whether this is the Forever House. It could be. There isn't a deadline attached to our time here. We don't know that it is three-years-and-move as with other situations. I might find us a little five acre plot somewhere two years from now, and we build on it and move. We might decide to restore an old Victorian house on a half acre, and stay there until we die. Or this could be The One. It's really nice knowing that for the first time in twenty years, that choice is completely ours again.

Yesterday we made three big trips with a Uhaul trailer, the pickup, and my little car. We had assistance for some of the move from our daughter and several of her manly-men friends. It made a huge difference in how quickly and relatively painlessly yesterday went, until everyone went home and we stayed far too late at the apartment packing up the bed and everything else we could fit in the trailer before I demanded to be allowed to stop and sleep. The man was back at it freakishly early this morning, racing down to meet an old friend of ours from before we moved away from Boulder, to pick up an even bigger Uhaul, and work on emptying the rest of the apartment and the bulk of the storage unit. Old friend one had to leave partway through the day, but another old friend came by with his teenaged son, to help unload the seven thousand pounds of stuff into the house and garage. (For the record, we weighed it, so yes, seven thousand and eighty pounds. Lifted into the truck and out of the truck in one day.) It will be days before enough rooms are unpacked and arranged to the point where I can do a full photo spread of the house. I can't even guess how long until I paint.

We have already had trying times with the cats. When we came home last night, arriving just before 12:30, we went into the soon-to-be master bedroom, and I noticed one blade of the mini-blinds was bent. I walked over to straighten it, and I saw that the screen was pushed out on one corner. It didn't take me long to put those pieces together. I went around counting noses, and came up with three. We ran back outside, and in no time heard Zoe screaming from the new neighbors' roof. They moved in on Sunday, so we have not had a chance to introduce ourselves yet. Setting up a ladder next to their house after midnight was not how I wanted to say hello. Thankfully, Zoe went running back for the garden shed she used as a springboard, and came down without the ladder. I still couldn't find Rabbit for another half an hour. Just as she did the day before we left the apartment, she was so well hidden that I was convinced she had run off and was gone forever. In reality, she was wedged behind my dresser in the second bedroom, and was looking terrified and pitiful. The cats were vaguely attentive while we tried to sleep last night, but first thing this morning, Zoe was back at it. She got out three more times before staying gone until almost six this evening. I did not need this stress. Just stick around, little Zoe Pajamas, and trust me that your daddy (whom you love more than me) is going to live here too. We are all here to stay for a good long while. And now that all of our stuff is here, the feline wing of the family seems much more content to stick it out and wait for the good times to roll.

Park West

Inspirational song: Starting Over (John Lennon)

I am too tired to write. I'm going to do it anyway, but don't say I didn't warn you. I just had to throw a tantrum and say NO several times in a row to convince the Mister to stop loading out the apartment into the trailer so we can go to bed. In an hour. Or two. I stopped having the ability to adult about 30 minutes ago, but it wasn't until I pointed at the clock and said, "It's 11:41. We won't be at the house until 12:30, and we still have to unload the bed and all this crap before we can sleep." He started to capitulate, and then he looked at our temporary shelving system in the apartment kitchen, with about 40 total items still on it, and said, "Can you finish clearing that so I can load it up and we will go?" NO. I refused. I put two small skillets into the dish drying rack, put a pack of paper towels on it, grabbed my purse, and walked out to sit in the truck and wait, my stack of random loose crap settled on my lap. No more moving tonight. Except the part where we empty the trailer we just filled before constructing the guest bed and sleeping in that.

Today was so huge, driving to the closing felt almost anti-climactic. I was exhausted by the time we got to that part. I said that I wanted to just have them say to me, "Yeah?" And I would answer back, "Yeah." And then they would take a thermal scan of my thumbprint and it would be over. But by 4:30 this afternoon, I had signed my name so many times that I forgot how to do it, and the seller's agent handed me a key. We raced back to the apartment to grab a few essentials that we hadn't already loaded into the trailer (like cats and dogs), and went to the house. The whole way there I listened to my favorite song, sung in five-part harmony. The lyrics change, but this time it went something like, "Car sucks! Car sucks balls! I don't want to be here! Why are we being tortured? I hate mom!"

Tomorrow I will show off all the pictures from today of very upset kitties and car drama. I will tell all the stories, complete with backstory to explain why today's car drama wasn't a curse but rather a blessing of good luck on our move. Tonight I am too tired to wait for photos to transfer on a mobile network. I have one beautiful picture to show, that our younger daughter took, of sunset through the rain while we were broken down on the side of the road. It seemed to be a good metaphor for finding the joy in a comically difficult situation. We excel at that. It's all going to be fine, kids. This is standard operating procedure, and we thrive on it.

CAN'd Aid

Inspirational song: My Window Faces the South (Willie Nelson)

Unless you won the lottery tonight, or you just married your true love, I can say with 99% certainty that I had a better night than you. I have proof. I took pictures.

Saturday, while we were leaving the liquor store where we bought the host's present for the birthday party, I noticed a poster on the wall and I stopped dead in my tracks. Dinner and a show with the Steep Çanyon Rangers, and it was for two days hence. We didn't think there was a chance there were any tickets left, but lo and behold, we bought them with no difficulty. The venue was an Oscar Blues brewery and restaurant in Lyons, and the whole event was in support of CAN'd Aid, the philanthropic foundation run by the brewery. When the big floods came two years ago, and wiped out an alarming amount of the town of Lyons, as well as many homes and businesses up the canyon which have yet to fully recover, this foundation helped get $750,000 to support flood victims. We were all too happy to participate in this little hootenanny, and listen to some fine bluegrass for a good cause.

I've seen the Steep Canyon Rangers twice before with Steve Martin (and one of those times with Edie Brickell) but this was the first time I've seen them solo. They were every bit as wonderful as I had known they would be, no A-list celebrity needed to boost their appeal. The opening act was a wonderful find. They were a talented local band called Bonnie and the Clydes, fronted by a pretty little redhead with the voice of a spitfire. When the venue got too hot, Mr S-P went outside on the patio and ended up chatting with the Clydes, and discovered they will by playing again in Longmont this Friday. I think I know what we will be doing once we are done unpacking for the day on Friday. He made an observation, before he ducked outside, while he watched all those scruffy bearded hippies grooving to the music. He realized that this funky bluegrass sound mirrored the Grateful Dead he grew up loving, epitomized by his beloved Workingman's Dead. I agreed it had a lot of the same vibe, without the mellow weight to the noodling. This had much more energy. Even I, the NON-dancer, couldn't keep still.

The day was stressful, with the deal in jeopardy over choosing a roofing contractor, and with Zoe breaking out of the apartment through a torn screen, and Rabbit hiding so well I thought she had escaped too. But it ended so well, I cannot stay mad at anyone who upset me this morning. The concert was out of this world, the venue small and intimate, and I got to totally be a fan girl for one of my favorite bands, with whom we rubbed elbows all night. Tomorrow is closing day, and I need my sleep. At least I will fall asleep humming to the bluegrass still ringing in my head.