In Which We Update!

Wow, you guys! It's been forever! Life has been chugging along, we finally got around to having a garage sale last weekend, and we'll be having one this coming weekend, too, at my mom's house. We managed to somehow clear out an entire household worth of junk and are still drowning in it, so the status quo is protected.

Big happenings! Um . . . so Hooper (our huge dog) has been sick and barfed all over my master bedroom carpet. He's been grounded to his crate at night until I'm sure he's done being sick. The carpet necessitated a massive steam cleaning and enzyme treatment. I'm back to school this semester and taking two actual face-to-face classes which is a huge change for me. I'm back to being a Literature major which is awesome and more comfortable, but the whole actually GOING to class kind of sucks. The driving and parking and sitting in a room for three hours, then still having reading and homework and papers to do is just a lot. What else, what else . . . Oh.

We're not moving to Maine.

I KNOW!!!! I know. We're still working towards a goal, but that goal is to get into a cheaper, smaller house locally, and then buy a vacation home/cabin in Maine. That frees us up to not worry about schools or jobs and focus on just finding a place that we love.

Here's how it all broke down: I started doing a lot of research into the economy of Maine. It's pretty abysmal outside of the larger city areas of Portland and to a far lesser degree, Bangor. The coast is primarily high-priced vacation homes, while inland is mostly destitute. Their economy was pretty reliant on logging and paper, so when the factories shut down, so did the towns. The smaller towns don't have enough of a tax base to support a school system so they end up closing or merging with another town. There's a huge disparity in income, most people who live there are either struggling or are incredibly wealthy. The struggling part leads to the usual problems that come with poverty, a high instance of drug use, mostly heroin and opioids. There is also a bit of a tendency towards distrust of outsiders or anything new. Native Mainers tend to dislike those "from away" who show up with shiny new ideas about how to fix everything when the natives really just want their factory jobs back. The state can't keep their young people there, most college graduates move out of state. The aging community needs care. That's really one of the only viable job markets, hospitals and elder care.

I still want to be in Maine every chance I get, and am still working towards that goal, but as of now, the end result is going to look a little bit different than what I originally pictured.

In Which There are Memories and Squee

The Plan is inching forward. There has been much discussion about schools and areas and finalizing of how we want to handle living arrangements. At this point it all boils down to financials and getting rid of our albatross of a house, which just takes time. So, we'll continue dreaming and planning and doing what we can to get our house in sell-able condition. Here are the things I'd like to do to get it ready:

1. Floors: We have lots of carpet that needs to be changed to laminate or wood or tile
2. Paint: Every interior surface (including the ceilings) of our home is the same awful, bland, Caucasian-flesh-colored beige. Yuck.
3. Kitchen: Our microwave is installed with a tilt to the front, and our stove/oven is a different color than the other appliances. I hate the counter tops, they're a sickly beige as well (who does that??). But that is too expensive to change just to sell.

Until we can do that, I'm just going to work on trying to keep my house from devolving further into madness. Thank goodness my husband is as helpful with it as he is, otherwise it would be a real shit show. I went on a mad google-spree trying to find helpful tips on cleaning and organization, but kept running into things like, "Just start!" and "The most important thing is actually DOING it!" so I dropped that like a hot rock.

ANYWHO! I'm mega-geeked about all the fun stuff coming up! SQUEEEEE!

The air show is this weekend!! I know it's weird, but I flipping love the air show. Several years ago we had the best day watching it so now I just have super positive memory association. The day was gorgeous, cool enough that we needed jackets. The sun was so bright and clear that everything looked like it had an instagram filter on it. There were cookies and hot dogs, the boys ran around like maniacs, and the jets flew right over our heads. It was before my kids had iPads, and it was just us and our buddy Jeff. It was just such a nice, simple, relaxing day and one that I will always remember. There was this rare feeling of being nostalgic for a moment that is actively happening that I can't quite explain. Somehow, I knew it was so good and so sweet that I already didn't want it to end. I'm hoping to recapture a bit of it tomorrow.

Halloween Film Festival is coming up quickly, too! It's the 28th-30th. If you don't already know, I have a great friend who hosts a 3 day film festival at his house every Halloween, this is the 19th year! There's always great snacks and food and people and movies. It's my favorite part of my favorite holiday, and I cannot wait for it. The boys are spending the night with their cousin on Saturday, so Ralph and I will get to attend together, something that has been rare in the past few years. When I was a free-wheeling singleton I used to be there for breakfast on both days, and stayed for every movie. Great memories. This year the boys are coming with us to an early showing of the movie "Super 8" because it's kid friendly and early in the day. I'm hoping they'll behave with bribes of snacks offered and won't be too freaked out by some of the Halloween decorations. I'm pretty stoked for them to have their first official Rugerian Halloween Film Festival experience. I think the first one I ever attended was the 3rd year, so it's definitely an important tradition for me.

There's also basketball x2 tomorrow as per ushe, and the League City Harvest Festival which sounds like fun, and I don't think I've seen my mom in real life for over two weeks, so I'll probably end up hanging out with her at some point, too. My favorite kind of weekend, so much awesome stuff to do, and such a great time of year for it. Sorry for being a starry-eyed Pollyanna about it, but it's kind of how I go. I love you guys, all of you. I hope everyone enjoys this gorgeous weekend.

In Which There is Much Crap

Real life keeps getting in the way of my dreams, you guys. And I've come to a stunning realization. I've just got too much danged stuff. TOO MUCH STUFF!! How have I spent the past few weeks clearing out crap and it seems like my house is still covered in crap?? I joked about needing an adult previously, but I might really just need someone to help me organize this endeavor. I'll be honest, mostly it feels like there's crap everywhere because I never actually pick up the crap. If I gave half a rat's ass about cleaning my house it might be tolerable. It's just that in the brief moments when I'm not actively doing something there are so many Frozen bricks to break on my phone, y'all. I've got three seasons of Supernatural to catch up on. Ken Bone did possibly the best Reddit AMA ever yesterday. So many things to distract me! It's getting really bad at the house, though. Trevor told me this morning that his bathroom smells like feet. Barf. He then told me I might need to call our old housekeeper.

On the real life news front, you're reading the work of a newly designated Psychology major. Who'd a thunk it? I'd like to say that seeing a psychologist and benefiting from it immensely and wanting to also help others is what made me do it, but that would be an enormous lie. Basically because I've taken so many psych classes as electives and because English classes count as electives for a psych degree, I can graduate earlier and not have to take any more foreign language. Sounds like a "fuck yeah!" to me. I'm still planning on being a Librarian someday, and maybe teaching elementary school at some point. So that life plan is still on track.

On the subject of The Plan, we're still working on the clearing out the house portion. It feels like a Sisyphean task, like we will forever be clearing out and it will never be cleared out completely. Pushing a rock, pushing a rock. At this point I'm half convinced that trying to have a garage sale is a horrible idea. Just dropping the whole mess off at Goodwill sounds much easier. I've also had a stunning realization about The Plan. While trying to figure out exactly what I hope to gain by moving over 2,000 miles away, I've decided that aside from the change in weather what I really want is simplicity. I think it's actually what I was hoping for when we moved from Deer Park to League City. We talked about wanting a smaller house and the lower bills that would come with it, but ended up in much the same situation we were in before. It's an awesome house, but it's just too big. We don't use it efficiently and it's just full of crap. Maybe the solution to being a messy-mess is to just have way less stuff with which to mess up my house. I will say, the getting rid of stuff so far has been far less traumatic than I feared it might be.

Now I'm off to peruse simple living blogs, to explore minimalism. Shit. Next I'll be wanting a tiny house. Me and fucking Thoreau, running of to live simply in Maine. Yeesh. I crack myself up.

In Which We Address the Bangs

THE PLAN
I'm going to start with the important stuff. The library closet is DONE, man! It took almost all day Sunday, and it's still not totally finished, but that cavernous, useless space is almost empty. I threw away hundreds of gift bags, birthday cards, sewing supplies, and so much junk. I bagged up three huge bags of things to sell or donate: old purses, toys, picture frames, craft stuff. So much stuff, you guys. I found enough reusable grocery bags to support several families and their monthly shopping. I emptied at least six full-sized moving boxes.

BANGS AND ALL THEY IMPLY
I read somewhere that often pregnant women will drastically change their hair style at some point during their pregnancy because they feel that they are not in control of their body and cutting their hair makes them feel in control of something about their appearance. I've also read that women will make big hair changes after a breakup, or to get out of a rut in their life. I'm in none of those situations, but made the spontaneous decision to cut bangs onto myself this weekend. BOOM:



I'm going to say it's because the weather is a little cooler and therefore it's easier to actually fix my hair without becoming a puddle of sweat and frizz. Also, I love change. I've been letting my hair grow for over a year, and haven't colored it in longer than that, so I just had to do SOMETHING. I'm sure I'll regret it soon.

SOURCES OF JOY
I've been searching out a lot of Maine-related things on social media and the internet in general. More than before. I know, hard to believe. I've found many amazing things. The Maine Show Podcast, Bill Green's Maine, Brett Willis on the Maine Today website, with his articles about how to survive Maine winters. I'm legitimately scared of our first winter there. Here in Texas, winter is just the few weeks in January and February that it doesn't get up to 80°. In Maine, you can die from winter. Just like in Texas you can die from summer. There will be much research of surviving winters in Maine.

The one thing I keep coming across, to my delight, is this theme of people moving away from Maine and coming back when they realize how amazing it is. Or people from away moving to Maine and loving it. I find these stories over and over again, I hear or read about the slower pace, the focus on conservation, and how the appreciation for the beauty never gets old. I actually worried about that. The first time I saw Camden Harbor in October of 2006, I got tears in my eyes, I was so moved by it. I asked a waitress at Cappy's Chowder House, "Does it ever get old? Every time you walk out of your door to go to work, do you see those mountains and this harbor and still love it? How do you get anything done?" She answered that she was born and raised in Maine, and every single day she loves it. She mentioned "mud season" which is what they call spring, when all the snow melts and it seems like the mud will never go away, and that the tourists can get abrasive sometimes, with their traffic and rowdiness, but I could tell she was talking about it in the way I talk about my kids when they misbehave. She loves Maine, every day, despite the mud and the tourists and the black flies,

AUTUMN IN TEXAS
We don't really have a true autumn here. Right now people are just excited because the temperature is staying below 90° for the most part and the humidity is under 70%. It feels positively brisk at moments. This past weekend it got down into the 60's (Whaaaaaaaat? I know!) in the early morning and we embraced it all the way. We sat outside and had coffee, the boys busted out their jackets, and we talked of how this would be a summer day in Maine. We reminisced about wearing jackets in June on our last trip there this past summer, and how we would spend a fortune on a true winter wardrobe when we moved. We talked about these things the way expectant parents talk of how things will be when their first baby arrives. Much like that, I'm sure there's no amount of preparation that will truly make us ready for this, and I'm also sure that it will be nothing like I imagine. It will be far more difficult and better than I can know right now.

In Which We Are Back to Dick and Fart Jokes

I took the day off of work today to take the boys to their dentist appointments, and they also happened to be off for a teacher work day. I had loads of school work to catch up on, but Trevor was begging to go spend some of his birthday money, so we did stop at GameStop. Before the dentist we went to eat breakfast with my mom (they call her Granny). Trevor started complaining on the way to breakfast that his stomach and head hurt, but he was reading in the car so I assumed it was car sickness. It was not. He didn't eat any breakfast except toast. He changed his mind on birthday shopping and then slept for two hours when we got home. He slowly woke up and moved from our bed which he then proceeded to vomit all over. I felt kind of bad for picking on him about reading in the car. He also kept telling me that it was his day off and he just wanted to go home and sit on the couch. I told him to stop being lazy that it was a beautiful day and he should go play outside. I'm a jerk. I guess that's why I got to clean up the barf.

Something momentous happened before the barfening! I shit you negative, we cleared out the stuffed animals. I told them that we were going to go through all of their stuffed animals and they could decide which ones to keep and which ones to get rid of. I promised myself that I would allow them agency over their own toys, and stick to their decisions. Which I mostly did. We managed to mostly fill a black trash bag with unloved toys. My library is starting to look like trash-henge. That's like Stonehenge but for trash bags. Jokes are so much funnier when you have to explain them. Back to unloved stuffed animals. When I told them we were doing this, and it was not the first time we talked about it, Grayson disintegrated into a puddle of tears. He wept like I told him I was going to drop him off at the fire station forever. I mean, it was rough. He was absolutely heart broken and instantly started naming the animals he wanted to keep: "But what about Daniel Tiger? If I keep him can I still keep Hobbs? I don't want to throw away Blue Puppy or Dino-Thor!"

I was very proud of myself, though. I stayed strong and really made some significant cuts. It was hard, but I did it. Trevor mostly rolled on his bed claiming he didn't feel good while I forced him to make decisions about his stuffed animals like the class-A mom I am. Maybe I should try to work in some more emotional trauma before bed. I'm sure I could get a really good conversation going about the intricacies of a good dick or fart joke. Like there are bad dick and fart jokes. We calmed Grayson down, Trevor bald-faced lied to him and said we weren't throwing them away, just putting them in storage, and I explained that he didn't have to get rid of anything he liked, only stuff he didn't play with. Now I wonder if Trevor really thinks they're going into storage . . . Conversation for another day.

In summation it was a productive day, both on The Plan and on the home front. There was breakfast, two dentist appointments (during which Grayson actually farted multiple times so badly that I had to apologize to the office staff), GameStop, clearing of no-longer-beloved stuffed animals, fierce and furious reading of Dante's Inferno, we helped catch an escaped neighborhood dog (Scrappy), Trevor napped for two hours and then puked on my bed, I then washed my bedclothes, did this week's school writing assignments, made soup for Trevor, typed up this fascinating expose' into the daily life of a 40-year-old suburban mom, and might now hang out with my husband and play some Frozen Free-Fall. Good evening, dear readers.

In Which There is Angst

Have you ever wondered if there was really something wrong with you? I mean, I know there are things wrong with me, I'm prone to anxiety, I'm an awful procrastinator, I cuss too much, I'm easily distracted. I have all manner of shortcomings that I'm aware of. But I wonder what I'm missing. Here's the deal. I mentioned previously that we somehow forgot to actually tell our two kids that we're planning to move to Maine. They're aged 8 and 5, so I'm not sure how much they would be able to understand, but we probably should have talked to them about it. That's not the part that gave me pause, though.

They're both totally on board. I had separate conversations with them and asked how they'd feel about living in Maine. We talked about how far away it is and how it would be really hard not getting to see all of our family and friends as often, and how they would have to start a new school and we'd have a different house. They both seem to be super excited and okay about it. Grayson, the 5 year old nearly peed his pants in excitement about snow. To them, snow is a mystical, imaginary thing. It's just as likely that candy would fall from our sky.

I know that they can't comprehend how difficult and how different it will be. I remember when my family moved from Beaumont to Baton Rouge when I was about Trevor's age. My dad was transferred with his job, so we didn't really have a choice. My Aunt Debbie and my mom just cried and hugged each other for what felt like forever while I was super impatient to get to our huge new house and my new room. I asked my Aunt Debbie why she was so sad and she said, "I'm just going to miss you so much!" I told her that we would still visit, and she said it just wasn't the same. At 8 years old my psyche just wasn't capable of handling how hard it was for my Aunt to say goodbye to us. It was something I didn't understand until I moved away briefly at the age of 26 and had to say goodbye to my niece Jenna, who I love like she is my own. It was one of the hardest things I ever did to drive away from her little two year old self. Both of those times, the distance was about four hours away. Easily driven there and back in a weekend. Maine is a 32 hour drive each way, if you don't stop to sleep. A six hour flight.

My children are excited and enthusiastically looking forward to moving. That is making me stop and think. Somehow, I found myself bringing up things like how sad it would be not to see their grandparents every weekend or how much they would miss getting to swim at their cousin's house, how we would miss a lot of birthday parties. I managed to stop before I made them (and me) cry, and then realized that their unbridled acceptance of the future move was harder for me to deal with than if they were scared or unsure. If they were uncertain or had questions, I could reassure them, which would in turn reassure me. If they wanted to know whether it would be hard starting another new school or finding new friends I would tell them that it might be, but that it would be an adventure we would all have together. For now I just worry that they are like me at 8 and will never understand until they are adults just how hard this kind of thing is. This thing I am doing by choice.

I tell myself that in this internet age I won't miss much, my kids will know their cousins via XBox live and their tiny phones that can hold the sum of all human knowledge. I have friends who live in other states, other countries, and we don't see each other often enough, but we are still actively friends. I tell myself that we will keep in touch and visit and people will visit us and all of that is true. But the reality that is also true is that it will be sad and scary and really, really challenging.

So, why am I more worried that they are happy with it? Why would I have been more confident in this decision if they had been less so? Am I seeing myself at 8 all naive and starry-eyed, not able to understand the larger implications? Do I need to reassure myself that I'm doing a good thing? That it will be worth it? Is my stubborn, contrary nature so deeply ingrained that I need resistance in order to feel validated? Or is it just the act of comforting and reassuring them makes me feel better? Like the concept of "fake it till you make it?" If I comfort and reassure them then eventually I will also be calmed and confident from believing my own encouragement?

I'm not sure of the answer there, but I hope that it means that I've raised a couple of confident and adventurous kids.

In Which Things Progress

Today at breakfast I mentioned that my new "Moving to Maine" book showed up and that I really wanted to take it to work but that I would be really busy (and if I was going to read anything at work it should be Dante's Inferno for my Medieval/Renaissance Humanities class) and for some reason, Trevor laser-focused on the phrase "moving to Maine." He asked, "Wait. So we're moving to Maine?!" about seventeen times. I gave Ralph a "baroo?" dog-head-tilt look and asked if we had somehow not actually told our kids about this yet. Ralph says, "Where has he been the past two weeks?" But really, I don't think we've formally told them about The Plan. We might need to have a family meeting tonight.

The takeaway from that is that my new book arrived!! And it has a lovely picture of Camden Harbor on the front, which is the place we usually visit and that inspired my love affair with the state. There's a little mountain called Mount Battie right above the town and when you're on top of it, you look down into the most perfect postcard picture of the harbor. It is breathtaking:

                                          

What you can't see there is that the town is also built over a flipping waterfall. It runs under the businesses on Main St. and then out into the harbor. It is magical. Someday I'm going to make live videos of me walking around town so you can all see it. Don't even get me started on the library.

The Plan is marching along nicely, I've pretty much completed clearing out my clothes, except I'll be adding more progressively, as I find things I don't want anymore. Just because I'm a glutton for punishment I might go ahead and do stuffed animals. I may need some moral support if anyone wants to come assist me with discarding the memories of my children and the people who love them. {SOBS}

The spending freeze is fucking difficult. There are too many cute t-shirts and Halloween decorations and fall activities. Froberg's corn maze opened this week along with their new bakery. Soon there are going to be pumpkin patches everywhere. I'm considering not doing my annual pumpkin baking day. Maybe instead we'll just have a mini-movie fest or scale it back a little bit. I've been trying to think up a reason to show my kids "Monster Sqad" and this might be it.  Every time I get a little sad about not being able to buy things I just try to remind myself of a life that doesn't require air condition. Bliss.