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.