Sarah Wynde's Blog, page 21
May 26, 2020
Memorial Day Work
I’m a little sad that I neglected to take a true Before photo, but on Sunday morning, Suzanne’s storage shed (known as Dale’s house) was so stuffed with boxes and crates and buckets and miscellany that not only was there no way to get inside to find anything, there was no way to put anything more inside. Objects were piled on top of one another, and when we needed to stow some painting gear inside because it was going to rain, we had to lean against the door to close it. There’s still one box stored under the bed in Serendipity (aka my tiny house) because it was simply not possible to make room for it in the shed.
By Sunday afternoon, Dale’s house was empty, swept, and the wasp nest discovered in the corner was dead and gone.
By Monday afternoon, it was organized. In this case, a picture or two is worth a thousand words, I suspect.
[image error]
[image error]
All of the objects in the front of both images (that big open gray bin and the crates next to it) are going to eventually get listed on eBay and sent off to live in someone else’s storage area or closet. Meanwhile, I’m pretty darn satisfied with our work. I had the impulse this morning to go take another picture, just because those organized shelves are so gratifying to me. I didn’t quite alphabetize the paint cans, but I was tempted. In the crate of comics, all items are organized by name and number. Every remaining box could have a single label on it specifying exactly what it contains — no “miscellaneous desk” or “junk drawer” boxes left. Satisfaction!
Meanwhile Suzanne is resolved that today — which is her official day off — is going to include only fun things, so I’m also looking forward to a fun, and rather more relaxing day. Time to get started with it!
May 22, 2020
Arcata Marsh
Sorry for the empty emails this morning, oh-email-readers! I was trying to post to the blog from my phone & the Kindle app: it’s one of those things that I’ve meant to learn how to do for a long time and was always too busy to get around to when I was traveling. Unfortunately, I obviously didn’t figure it out — as far as I could tell, I just managed to create some blank posts. One of them was supposed to be the above photo and the other was going to be a quote from a book I’m currently reading at a friend’s recommendation. So it goes. I will try to avoid sending out future experiments via email!
But the above photo is from yesterday’s morning walk. I woke up around 5:45 to a beautiful clear sky — an uncommon sight in the home of one of the world’s foggiest airports. (According to Wikipedia, the Army Corps of Engineers built the airport specifically to test fog dispersal techniques, none of which worked. I like the thought of the optimists saying, “Sure, we can figure out how to get rid of fog,” though. What do you suppose they had in mind?) But since it was such a gorgeous morning, I promptly hopped out of bed and took Zelda and Riley on a good walk, the mile to the Arcata Marsh and Wildlife Center.
I should probably be walking them there every day. It’s certainly close enough. But there are actually enough good walks around here that I haven’t settled into a routine at all. Sometimes I do the short walk to the yoga studio and think wistfully of some future when people can exercise together again. Sometimes I do the uphill walk to the park and playground. Sometimes I walk along the abandoned railroad tracks, now turned into a bike path. I like having lots of options.
I also like Zelda’s enthusiasm, although I have to keep reminding myself not to yell at the senile dog who seems to be forgetting how leashes work. She keeps running ahead, then hitting the end of her leash with a jerk. I should dig out Bartleby’s harness, which is somewhere in the van, and start using it with her. Neither of us like it when she gets choked. But it is, of course, delightful to have her running with enthusiasm.
As for the quote, I posted it to Instagram. I am mentally arguing quite a bit with this book (The Four Agreements: A Practical Guide to Personal Freedom (A Toltec Wisdom Book)[image error]) — it reminds me of the parenting books that never took hunger, tiredness, discomfort or overstimulation into account when considering behavior — but at the same time, I’ve highlighted a number of quotes. I never read Kindle books with the feature that shows other people’s highlights turned on, but I might reread this book when I’m done with highlights on. It would be interesting to see what other people took away from it. I don’t know whether what I’m taking away from it is what my friend thought I would, but I also highlighted:
Real love is accepting other people the way they are without trying to change them. If we try to change them, this means we don’t really like them.
The Four Agreements
It made me want to say, “Yes, exactly! Ha! Take that!” in my ongoing imaginary arguments, which somehow made me laugh. It’s so satisfying to thoroughly win an imaginary argument.
May 19, 2020
Settling in
I was chatting with my dad this weekend and he was asking me questions about Arcata, none of which I knew the answers to. Population? Um… College enrollment numbers? Um… Industries? Um…
After I hung up, I went to wikipedia and read about Arcata for a little while, so I now know the population is somewhere around 17,000, about half of which is related to the university in one way or another, and that the “industry” is, in fact, the university. I also know that the average high temperature — all year long! — is in the 50s or 60s. All year long!
In September, which is the hottest month of the year here, the high temperature will be 62. And in January, the coldest month of the year, it will be 53. Ironically, that’s almost perfect weather for living in a van. On the other hand, with the low of 42 in January, I’d probably be quite happy to be in my cozy tiny house. (Except that I’m still planning on being back in Florida by then.)
[image error]Tank and Zelda, uncertainly sharing space on my bed.
Tank would be quite happy to be in my cozy tiny house, too, but he is slowly adapting to his own house. Okay, so the picture doesn’t show that, but I’ve caught him curled up in his own house at least a few times. And I’ve relented and let him into my house only when the rain was really pouring down. I’m not sure he’s figured out what the secret is, but at least he’s not trying to run in every time I open the door.
Now that I’m finally mostly done with house projects, I’m trying to get back to my writing projects. It hasn’t been easy. I want to write fun and joyful books, the kind of thing that you finish with a happy sigh, with maybe a chuckle of two of delight along the way, but every time I try to give my brain room to create, it falls into terrible spirals of self-loathing. In our culture’s stories, if your child rejects you, you must be a really horrible person. Even if you can turn it around and say, well, a child who rejects the mother who loved him is probably a horrible person, then you’ve raised a horrible person and that’s just as bad. Either way, horrible all around.
It’s not very conducive to writing joy, so I’m thinking I should probably write horror for a while. Something with lots of very gruesome murders, innocent people suffering but the bad guys getting theirs in the end. It feels like it might be very satisfying to commit lots of virtual murders. I suppose the alternative might be to play lots of video games for a while, but writing out my hurt and anger would be cheaper. And possibly more productive. Not emotionally productive — I told a friend yesterday that I didn’t see the point in therapy right now, because I saw no hope for change: my sense of betrayal is so deep that I don’t see how I ever recover from it. But there’s obviously a market for books with gruesome murders — a much bigger market, in fact, than that for books that try to delight. That said, I’m really tired of living in my head. I might need to look for more house projects to do instead.
May 15, 2020
The New Tiniest House
Although Suzanne’s stepson, J, moved out of the Tiniest House months ago, it was not entirely uninhabited when I decided to move in. It had a resident cat, Tank. As I understand it, some years previously, the then-feral Tank started showing up for dinner and decided to stay. As far as the inside cats were concerned, he was very much Not Welcome, but eventually he became J’s cat. Not though — never! — the kind of cat that you can easily stick into a cat carrier and bring cross-country with you. So when J left, Tank stayed, and continued living in the Tiniest House. During the cold of winter, Suzanne set up a heating pad for him and the door was permanently ajar, so he could come and go as he pleased.
Unfortunately, I’m allergic to cats. Enter the New Tiniest House. I ordered it on Amazon, it came last week, and we promptly put it together for him. I’m not sure Tank likes it much so far, but eventually, we’re hoping to make an awning for it that will keep off/out the rain (that blue tarp was an attempt that didn’t work — the tarp is not waterproof) and when it gets cold, we’ll put the heating pad inside. On the one night of serious rain since I moved into the former Tiniest House, I wound up with a wet cat snoring on my bed, but that’s not a great long-term solution. Neither is me moving out for the winter so Tank can move back in, mostly because my house is much too nice now to be left entirely open to the elements.
Speaking of which, my countertop solution was to cover the counter with contact paper. It’s not a long term solution, because the contact paper’s not going to last, but it was a way to make it bearable for a few months until I feel like I can afford some nice tile. My cabinet door solution was to take one of J’s old curtains and tack it up across the open space. I still haven’t painted the cabinets, and I need to touch up some paint on the shelves, including one bracket that had to be replaced, but my tiny kitchen is looking quite kitchen-like.
[image error]A fridge, a sink, an electric kettle, an induction cooktop, and some dishes. All the comforts of home.
I cooked my first meal in said kitchen this morning. After I walked the dogs, I was making myself a cup of coffee and decided it was time to dump my compost (mostly old coffee grounds & some dog food) into the chicken coop. The chickens were happy to see me for the sake of the dog food, but while I was there, I found an egg in one of the nests. Freshly-laid, still warm from the chicken.
One part of me thought, “Wow, the whole concept of eggs is really gross when you think about it.” The other part of me thought, “Okay, that’s really cool, I could eat the freshest egg ever.” And so I did. Totally simple egg scramble – just egg, butter, salt and pepper — and it was, in fact, delicious. Not so head-and-shoulders above any other eggs that it would have been notable, but as I sat in my camp chair, sun shining, breeze blowing through my open window, I very much appreciated my breakfast and my life.
That side of the house is also looking nice, IMO, although it’s all about the outside. I found a $10 shoe rack at Target that seemed perfect for my needs, and a wooden coat rack at the hardware store. I borrowed a drill and a level to put the coat rack up and am quite pleased with my endeavors. And with my coats!
[image error]Coats, scarves, shoes. Yep, I’m prepared for Arcata now!
Funny story with the coats: J left behind a large screen television which didn’t fit in the Tiniest House at all — there was just no room for it. I kept putting it outside and then moving it back in when rain threatened, but it was very much in the way, so Suzanne posted on Facebook offering it in trade. The very first person to respond offered raincoats and home-brew. We never investigated the Why of the raincoats — I just said, “Yes, raincoats!” because my notorious eggplant coat, while quite nice, is not actually waterproof and Arcata is a place where a waterproof coat comes in handy. I didn’t worry about whether the raincoats would fit or whether I would like them, because anything other than a bright yellow plastic poncho would have been fine with me. As it happened, though, the raincoats were basically what I would have picked if someone invited me to walk into a store and take what I wanted: three of them, one lightweight, one medium, one heavy, all in shades of purple/blue, all that fit perfectly. How nice is that?
I posted the above picture, though, mostly to show off my door. I painted the design in the sky blue of the ceiling (Harbor Fog), because I thought it would look nice and it does. I wish I’d painted in the sand color instead, because I think it would look even better if I had, but I might do that when I paint the cabinets. Which is still going to happen someday, although I’m enjoying not being covered in paint. (I’m an appallingly messy painter — I was wearing as much paint as the walls last week.)
[image error]One last house picture: My “nightstand”. Not really a nightstand, but the combination of place-to-put-a-cup-of-tea, plus storage and price (cheap!) was irresistible. I should probably shorten the curtain but I can’t cut a straight line and the thought of hemming by hand… well, it’s on my list of things to do someday.
Circling all the way back to the point of this post, Suzanne and I were talking about the house no longer being the Tiniest House, since Tank now has the True Tiniest House. Almost-Tiniest House just doesn’t have the same ring to it. Former-Tiniest House? Once-Tiniest House? She was suggesting alternate names — the beach house? the Wendy House? (
May 12, 2020
Old ladies and their rocking chairs
At some point in the last two weeks, Suzanne and I were sitting on the back patio — the one with the fire pit, that gets the best late afternoon sunshine — and I said to her, “When I move into the Tiniest House, I’d like to clear some space on the patio by the doors and put a small table and a chair or two out there.” Suzanne agreed that sounded like a good idea, and our conversation moved on to other topics.
[image error]The view from the back patio with the fire pit. Dead center in this picture is the back door to the house with the door to the Tiniest House on its right. The area in front of both those doors has the same pavers as the back patio, but at the time, it also had lots of other stuff on it, too. A bike, a trash can, lots of white buckets, some crates, miscellaneous tools. It was a storage area, basically.
A day or two later, we were at the hardware store, buying more paint and gear for our various home repair projects. (Along the path of fixing up the Tiniest House, we’ve also painted Suzanne’s kitchen in the Tiny Mansion, including the ceiling; replaced the wax ring on the Tiniest House toilet; removed an old intercom and doorbell; repaired some holes in the walls, and so on. All of our handy-person skills have leveled up in the last couple weeks!) While I was waiting for her, I sat down in the patio furniture area, on one of these chairs — a rather nice bistro-style rocker with teal blue cushions. It was comfortable, but I didn’t even bother to look at the price: I knew intuitively that it was out of my price range. Plus, my future chair and table were far-future, after I’d gotten all of the things on the “needs” list for my Tiniest House, including blankets, and trash cans, and a shower caddy, and, and, and.
I went back in the store, but when Suzanne and I were leaving, she said, “Hey, did you see these?”, headed straight for the patio furniture, and sat down in the same chair. I had to laugh. Great minds! They were good chairs. But she looked at the price, shook her head, said, “$100 less, maybe…”
I took a photo of the label for future reference, though. And that night, when I was downloading my photos to my computer, I decided to search for the chairs, just to get the photo out of the way. Funny thing: Ace Hardware Online had the exact same chairs — for $110 less, and free store pick-up at the exact same store we’d been at earlier in the day. I sent the link to Suzanne and said, “Split it?” For $400, the patio set was way out of my price range. For $275, it was still more than I was ready to spend. But for $132.50, it might be a deal too good to pass up, despite the need for such useful things as curtains, and cabinets doors, and a nightstand, and, and, and. I don’t think she even paused to think, she just texted back, “Ordered!”
A few days later, she picked the set up at the hardware store and we spent the evening putting them together. Close to sundown, we sat in our chairs and watched the street and chatted. Later, we moved the chairs onto the patio. The next day we ate our lunch out there. The day after, we brought our coffees out from our separate houses. In the evening, we sat in our chairs for a while, then decided to walk the dogs. And while we were walking the dogs, it occurred to me: our patio chairs — metal and teal though they are — are rockers.
We are officially old ladies, sitting on our porch in our rocking chairs together! It’s about twenty years early, I expect, maybe thirty, but the thought still made me laugh.
[image error]Appreciating our rocking chairs and a moment of sunshine.
May 8, 2020
Updates to the Tiniest House
My intensive painting days did not last for the three days I expected them to. They lasted FOREVER. Well, or a week, whichever comes first. Technically, I’m still not done: I have a door to paint, some shelves to finish, and a cabinet to both primer and paint. Not to mention some touch-ups around the ceiling where I was so eager to get it DONE that I put tape on paint that was not quite dry yet, therefore ripping off the paint when I removed the tape. Sigh. And we still need to do something about the countertop — tile, I hope.
My new home is still very much a work in progress. The furniture currently consists of a bed and my camp chair, plus a box that I’m using as a step stool for Zelda to get on and off the bed. The bed might have been a mistake: I bought a 14-inch mattress, which didn’t seem huge, and an 18-inch frame, which also didn’t seem huge. Put them together and you’ve got 32 inches, which also doesn’t seem huge. But it’s closer to three feet than two, and while Zelda could have made the jump easily five years ago, it’s a little much for her now. I’m also, sadly, not sure my quite senile dog will be able to figure out how to use a step. She’s pretty foggy these days. I may be lifting her up and down a lot. But the mattress is comfortable, and the frame was always intended as a temporary solution, so it’s not an insurmountable problem.
It felt pretty strange to be moving out of Serenity. I… well, I just spent a long time thinking about that instead of writing. Suffice to say, my feelings are complicated. What a weird time it is. The other day Suzanne and I were sitting outside on the back patio, enjoying the sunshine and eating something — possibly gluten-free chocolate cupcakes with mint buttercream icing? — and I said, “I’m quite enjoying our apocalypse.” Whenever I’m thinking — about the state of the world, about politics, about the economy, about my son throwing me away like I’m trash — I’m deeply scared and desperately hurt. But whenever I stop thinking and just exist, my life is delightful. Moral of the story: more existing, less thinking. It’s not very good for my writing career to be existing, not thinking, but there’s a roof over my head and chickens clucking next door, so I’ll worry about that tomorrow. Tomorrow being a metaphorical future day that is not today, not actually the period of time twenty-four hours from now. During that period of time, I will probably be painting. Or maybe tiling. Definitely doing something to make my already adorable tiny house even more adorable.
Speaking of which — how about some pictures? These are the same shots from my earlier post.
[image error]The once orange wall, now a color I’m calling “sand.” (Really, Edgemont Gray.)
[image error]The once bright yellow wall, now Jamestown Blue.
[image error]The view of the skylight. The trim around the window is Wedgewood Gray, the ceiling is freshly painted in the same light blue it was before.
[image error]The bathroom, with the same shower curtain (which may or may not stay, I’m not sure yet) and walls in Pale Moon.
[image error]And this was the shot with yellow, orange, and bright green — all now Pale Moon. I swear, there’s so much primer on those walls that the bathroom is probably literally a quarter inch smaller. It looks a lot bigger, though, with light walls.
May 1, 2020
Watch, Like, Share
Today is going to be massive painting day: I tried out colors for the tiniest house yesterday and bought them right before the store closed yesterday afternoon, so I’m finally going to start adding some more interesting shades to my paint-saturated clothing. Plus, Suzanne has a long weekend, so we’re also going to primer and paint her kitchen, which we’ve been talking about doing for oh, approximately a year now. (Since I was here in 2019, in fact.)
So instead of reading a blog post from me, here’s my friend Greg to entertain you:
Watch, like, and share, please!
April 28, 2020
80 bajillion coats of primer later…
Well, really more like four or five. But I’m getting there. Oh, so slowly, though. Some of that is inefficiency: I should have splurged for the wide brush and the long handle for the roller, and I didn’t. And dragging the ladder around is a pain, made worse by all the things in the middle of the floor turning the space into a teeny-tiny obstacle course.
Some of it, though, is simply physics. Or would it be chemistry? The primer dries only as fast as it dries, and trying to rush just makes drips that will need to be sanded away before I can start with the real paint. And the only thing that’s worse than that orange for the coverage is the bright green. I’m still not reconciled to living with it, but if I’d known how much time I would spend grumbling under my breath before it was gone, I might have rethought. Fortunately for me, at this point it’s too late.
This morning I reminded myself to practice happiness as I painted. The first step in practicing happiness is always to take a deep, mindful breath. But my deep breath smelled like paint fumes, of course. The second step is to think of something I’m grateful for. That’s easy right now, of course, because the world is a terrifying mess, but being grateful not to have bad things happening to me or those I love (to the best of my knowledge) is not a good kind of gratitude. It doesn’t make me happy, it makes me anxious.
My third step in my happiness practice is to check my physical well-being: is there something I could do to be more comfortable, to feel better? A snack, a sweater, a better arrangement of pillows? A cup of tea, a more pleasant scent from my essential oil diffuser, music more appropriate for my mood? Given that I was painting, the answer was basically no. A cup of tea would have been lovely, but I wasn’t going to take a break for it.
The fourth step in my happiness practice is to look for something delightful. Maybe it’s something purely beautiful, like the rhododendrons that are flowering all over the place, or maybe it’s charming, like the chickens or the sleeping cats. In a national forest, it’s remarkably easy to find something to appreciate. But in this case, I was staring at a wall and I’d been staring at the exact same wall for four mornings in a row. It didn’t give me a lot of scope to find delight.
At that point, I had to laugh at myself. I have never failed quite so thoroughly in my happiness practice. Fortunately, laughing at myself improved my mood and I started working on reframing my task, from an incredibly tedious repetition of yesterday’s chore to a careful investment in my long-term future. I started imagining what the Tiniest House would be like when I’d been living in it for a few months, a year, many years? The longest I’ve ever lived in one place is seven years: my average is a lot closer to two or three. But I pictured myself twenty years in the future, still living there. My imaginary Future Me was being very grateful to imaginary Past Me for creating such a pretty space, which made current Present Me a lot more tolerant of my efforts.
All that said, tomorrow I will be back at it. I’m not excited, but it’s going to be really nice someday very, very soon.
April 25, 2020
The Tiniest House
When I was in Arcata, a year — or maybe a lifetime? — ago, Suzanne’s stepson, J, was living in her backyard, in a building known as the Tiniest House. It is — was? — maybe the former garage, sorta remodeled for habitability. I say “maybe” because it doesn’t really look like a garage to me. If there was a garage door, it’s long-gone, replaced by a wall, and the ceiling is sloped, with skylights.
But I say “sorta” because while it has a bathroom, it didn’t (apparently) have hot water. While it has nice laminate flooring, they mistakenly installed the flooring without putting a moisture guard between it and the ground, so the floor needs to be redone. While there is a tiny kitchen area, they’d stopped construction midway through the job, so the countertop is unfinished and the cabinets have no doors, with the plumbing open to the room. There was no heat and the electricity was unchanged since maybe the 1950s?
[image error]An interior view from the door
[image error]And the view from the other side
[image error]The skylight wall with its new electric wall heater.
Although J was managing fine, and had been for years, he was also talking about moving out. I claimed first dibs, if and when he did. It was theoretical. Maybe a plan for when I got tired of traveling, a few years in the future. Maybe a plan for when Suzanne retired, several years in the future. Maybe a plan for when one of us or both of us had enough money to really fix up the place as it needed.
Or, you know, maybe a plan for when the world is having a major pandemic and I’m trying to live in a street. That could be the right time, too.
[image error]The bathroom, and yes, I’ve confirmed that the hot water is working by taking a shower.
[image error]Another angle on the bathroom.
[image error]Outside view showing the chickens…
So, yeah, plans for fixing up the Tiniest House have been occupying much of my attention and internet time recently. We started with the electricity: it’s now been inspected and confirmed safe by an actual electrician and an electrical wall heater has been installed. In the quest to figure out what exactly was wrong with the plumbing in order to talk to a plumber about it, we discovered that the plumbing is fine, hot water included. On our every-other-week CostCo run, I discovered that CostCo had mattresses on sale, so started my home-spending by buying a mattress.
And now I’m painting, because I am pretty sure I can live in a space that’s 108 square feet. But I am pretty sure I cannot live in a space that’s bright orange and green.
April 21, 2020
Self-isolation, day whatever
Isolation offers a lot of time for self-reflection. In the grand scheme of things, self-reflection is pretty close to infinitely more worthwhile than reading the news, following social media, or watching the death toll tick up on the Washington Post map tracker, but I’m sick of it nonetheless. The line between insight and insult is too easy for me to cross.
Yesterday Suzanne and I took the dogs to the park after dinner and while we were there, she said, “That dinner was so good.” Then she laughed and said, “Is that the fourth time I’ve said that?” Yep.
It made me laugh, though, because dinner was grilled cheese sandwiches and soup. So exciting, yes? Admittedly, the grilled cheese sandwiches were made with caramelized onions, and the soup was sweet potato with ginger, smoked paprika, brown rice and spinach, so, yeah, it was good. And the relevance is that whenever the level of self-insult rises too high, at least I can remind myself that I taught myself to cook. Making a fantastic grilled cheese sandwich is not the world’s least accomplishment.
