More Whining

More snow.

There are women who, when faced with a house crammed with chaos, roll up their sleeves, organize a livable arrangement out of the mess, never let the dust settle, and carry on with strength and confidence.  I am not one of these women.  And there are women who have great visions of how a room should be—who can pick colors of paint and carpet and figure out where to put the furniture, and design the heck out of every little detail.  I’m not one of them, either.

Instead, I curl up in the corner of the couch, feeling like there’s all this stuff I have to do, and not having the faintest idea how to do any of it.  This has not been my best day.

I wrote a bunch of essays last weekend, meaning to post them this week.  But they’re long and wordy and probably stupid.  And there should be pictures, except I’d have to find my desk to pull them together, and I’m not sure I can do that.

There’s just all this stuff that’s been in process for the last five months.  All out of my control, really – but how can a mom who is used to bossing the universe stand by and wait?  And then these other stupid things happen.  I haven’t written about these huge things we’ve been trying to pull off, because I’m not sure they’d interest anybody else, and because they’re too big, and too complicated.  Like this:

1. When the house across the street from them went up for short sale, C and L decided to buy it.  That was last summer.  After presenting about four offers over a period of five months (the selling agent was about as lousy an agent as I have EVER come across), they were told that the thing was under contract and there was no chance for them.  So they found another house a couple of blocks away, and made an offer on that.  (The magic part of the story is that they seriously wanted to stay in the area – near us.  That’s the part I need to remember through all this.)  Then the first house came available again.

It began to come clear that the people who were living in the house hadn’t been paying the bank anything for months, and were dragging their feet as long as they could, living rent free.

2. C and L needed to sell their house, and Chaz wanted it.  So another pile of paperwork started building.  Two kids trying to qualify for loans in a death-bed-repentance credit market, and two sales depending on each other for success.  Two sets of underwriting and inspections and appraisals—with the wild card of the Reluctant Sellers thrown in.  And nothing I could do about any of it.

3.  The addition to the house ran into some snarls.  It was supposed to take about six weeks, but I swear I’ve been sleeping on those couches now for six months, and I don’t know where my clothes are, or basically, where anything is.  But I did pay our business property tax on time, after I spent three hours trying to find the forms.

4.  My bones aren’t dense enough.

5. On one of those supposed-to-be peaceful and restful Sunday afternoons two weeks ago, Rachel and her whole family (that’s seven kids and a beautiful husband) were almost killed when a nebbish in a double cab, metal-flaked, chrome roll-barred truck came off the freeway, changed his mind and pulled a U to get back on again, right in front of their Suburban.  The Suburban is dead.  The family is alive.  But we weren’t sure all their parts were there until we’d spent several hours in the emergency room.

6. I hadn’t been home from that little party for ten minutes, when our CO/natural gas alarm went off.  Which led to our sitting outside for over an hour, waiting for the gas tech to come and find the problem or the house to blow up, whichever came first.  The guy turned out to be a neighbor from down the way and stayed to chat for a few hours, which pretty much put eight hours of peaceful and restful in a drawer till another day.

7. Tuesday, my sis from Texas came a-visiting, and we were heading up to the outlet stores in Park City for some fun.  This was the day when C and L were finally supposed to be closing on their house.  We stopped at their place on the way, only to find out that there was some brou-ha-ha about funds and documentation that I actually could do something about.  Which I did.  Then we left for our fun.

Cam was working, so the whole load of tension and work to make the thing happened was pretty much on L’s shoulders.  So there we were, driving selfishly away from her – an hour on our way through pretty terrible traffic, when my iPhone starts ringing, only it’s playing a song I NEVER put on that thing.  And then the car started making this soft doorbell noise.  And I was trying to talk Kev through answering an iPhone, which can be daunting if you’ve never done it, while at the same time trying not to get us dead on that crowded freeway.

I had stolen L’s iPhone.  In the middle of EVERYTHING, I make a mistake like that – sticking it in my bag as we left her house.  Like, why would I assume that the iPhone on her counter was mine?  And why on THAT INSANE CRUX OF A DAY?   In the end, Cam sent a runner down to her with HIS iPHone, and we answered hers all day, directing all the calls to Cam’s number –

And that is why I am curled up on the couch, waiting for all of this to be over.  I’m trying not to think how long it will take me to get a back hoe in here to clean out the dust and the mounds of misplaced furniture.  Or how many little projects are going to spin off of this room building business – like doing tile in the front hall to hide the spot where the puppies ate the old Congolium, and in the bathroom that’s presently raw sheetrock and exposed subfloor.

Have I explained now why I haven’t answered comments or seen any human beings in the last long time? Is my life any stupider than anybody else’s?  I really do want to write about all this other stuff, but I think I’ve lost my confidence.

Oh – I have another word for you – for the six of you who read this thing.  Another safety word:

Forkdort.

Please define it. Please.  I think it might hold the key to understanding the universe.