Mary: March 2009 Archives

Yesterday was the spring equinox, celebrated as Ostara, or Eostre. Yesterday was a day of balance; today light won out over darkness. It's all about fertility--color eggs and hide them.

Must. Post. I told a friend and reader that I'd post yesterday, after he emailed asking what was up with the blog. Then I didn't--sorry Lee! It's not that I don't have anything to say. It's just hard to get started again after neglecting it for so long. Here are a bunch of entries that I could have posted recently:

Hurray for Daylight Savings Time.
I love Daylight Savings; I love long evenings. Going on DST every year feels like coming out of a dark tunnel. I feel like I have a life when I come home from work and there are still hours of daylight left. I play outside with the dog every evening, I sit on the porch.

The Devil's Chore.
I spent a couple of hours pulling ivy yesterday. English ivy has metastasized in my yard--it's everywhere. Pulling it out is backbreaking work. Bend, pull, bend, pull, bend, pull, pull, pull so hard that when it gives way I stagger backward. Then bend, pull some more. I filled four large lawn bags and if you don't know where to look you wouldn't know I'd done anything.

Deja vu all over again
Those of you who have been reading this blog for at least a year will know that this time last year I was in Prescott, Arizona, staying with my mother, who had just had hip surgery. Sometime within the next few weeks I'll be going back out there for the same reason. Same surgery, same hip. The joint became infected. They had to go back in, take out the prosthetics, clean it out, and put in new prosthetics. Poor woman! I don't know when, exactly, I'll be going. My mother is in a "rest home" (a lower level of care than is provided in a "nursing home", apparently) getting physical therapy. I'll go out there when they send her home. So, I'll be spending another couple of weeks sitting with my laptop, watching DVDs of movies about brave dogs finding their way back home. The only cool thing about this whole episode? The place she's in right now, the therapy she's getting, they call it "rehab". I get a kick out of telling my son "Grandma's back in rehab."

Ugh--remodeling
I'm having some long-postponed work done on the house. I'm not talking about adding an addition or a gourmet kitchen or a marble bath here; I'm talking about pulling out 18-year-old carpet in the basement family room, and the vinyl tile under it, and the asbestos tile under that, sealing a drain in the floor (!?) properly, and putting in a "floating" engineered hardwood floor. The basement has never flooded, but before I had the backyard graded a couple of years ago the carpet became wet several times during heavy rains. And then we got a puppy, and, well, you get the picture. It was downright unhealthy. The basement is really more of a "downstairs" than a basement, since the house is on a slight hill and you walk out from the basement into the garage. The downstairs family room is where the TV and computer are, so it's where we spend most of our time.

Remodeling, cont.
And, at the same time, I'm finally getting the kitchen remodeled. The main portion of this house was built in 1950, when houses were divided into small rooms. This house had a small square kitchen and a small square dining room. At some point, probably in 1965 when an addition was built that added a new living room and dining area, the wall between the kitchen and the old dining room was taken out (mostly). The two rooms still had separate flooring (more 18-year-old carpet in the dining room), and in no way looked like one "big" kitchen. Now it will. It's not a major remodel--all the appliances will stay where they are, but the floor and cabinets will be new.

Formica makes some nice-looking laminate countertops
Let this forever be remembered as the Formica economy, as opposed to the granite economy of the past decade. Which brings me to...

Retirement? What's that?
*sigh* Back in March of 2000 it looked like I'd be able to retire by the time I was 60. Today, I have less than half the retirement savings I had then, not bothering to account for inflation, even, and I'm nine years closer to 60. Today, I can't foresee a time when I'll be able to retire. There are things I want to do: meditation retreats, volunteer tourism, riding camels in the desert, and so on. I decided this year that I'd have to find a way to do it all while I'm still employed, which means saving up the leave that I accrue at a rate of 24 days a year. The company I work for doesn't have sick leave or family leave or any of that--we get "comprehensive leave" which is supposed to cover it all. So 24 days may sound like a lot but it doesn't feel like much; I mostly use it up a day at a time for this and that. I made a New Year's resolution to save up leave until I had a month, then I'd go to Africa and volunteer at one of these places. Then my mother had hip surgery again. I have 11 days of leave accrued right now, and I'll spend 10 days of it with her. So it goes.