The House. The House. The House. THE HOUSE.  Sorry I haven’t blogged in so long but I’m a little preoccupied these days and all my creative energy has been sucked up by THE HOUSE!

Anyone who owns a house knows that the responsibility can be overwhelming.  Suddenly you are responsible for the maintenance and upkeep of a whole entire building.  Put that building in another state, 240 miles away, add some peeling stucco, a faulty staircase and a multitude of other annoying problems and you get some major stress. 

In the past 6 months I’ve experienced a level of anxiety I haven’t seen since 1995 when I worked at a law firm that represented clients being sued by dying AIDS patients. 

People have been telling me I should write about it, to help get it all out.  I’ve been telling myself the same thing.  But seriously, will writing about new stucco really help? 

Does anyone really care about the week of sleep I lost when Jerry and I decided at the last minute to forgo white trim we had studied carefully in all shades of light on specially made stucco samples for a color we chose off the chart the night before it went up? 

It was called FEATHERLY and it ended up being a great move.  The new stucco on the house, with dark trim around the doors and window, is beautiful. 

Next on deck is a deck.  

For some reason the blue moon we had last night fascinated me. Friday morning while I was thinking about it I pulled out my iPhone and fired up my Ladytimer app and voila!

Not only did August have two full moons but I also got my period twice this month! I did some more looking back and saw that my menstrual cycle follows the lunar cycle pretty closely.

I’m sure I’m not the only woman who had made this same discovery but it sure did make me feel special! It reminded me that I am in fact connected to this earth. And for some reason that confirmed to me that I am in fact on the right path, which is something I’ve been fretting about lately, what with buying that new house which seems to have a new problem with it every time we go up there.

Don’t worry, I haven’t lost it yet. If anything this revelation has helped calm me down.

Excuse me now while I construct a red tent in the backyard.

Nine years ago when Jerry and I started dating he took me to central Nevada. Less than an hour after our flight on the Casino Express landed at the Elko airport we were in a 4 wheel driving across the desert.

Jerry was in heaven and I was wondering where the nearest Target was. Turns out it was at the Nevada/Utah boarder in Wendover.

Jerry had been talking about his love for Nevada as long as I’d known him. He told me his dream was to retire there. I nodded politely and “The sky sure is a pretty shade a blue.” The sky was a pretty shade of blue and I did see some beauty in the desert but at the tender age of 35, the idea of retiring out there scared the crap out of me.

When he pulled up at a real estate office a few minutes later I burst out in tears.

Jerry doesn’t do well with tears. He told me right then and there that any future we had together would have to include Nevada. If I wasn’t up for that I could move on.

By that time my heart was already won so I adopted the Nevada dream as well and after eight years of scouring the internet, countless road trips, numerous phone calls with real estate agents and most importantly, squirreling away cash, I am happy to announce that we now own four acres of Nevada land with this on it:

It was a pretty good compromise I think. There’s enough land for Jerry to feel remote yet only a 5 minute drive to downtown Carson City, Nevada’s state capitol and home to a Target and plenty of other retail establishments to make me feel at home. Best of all, it was cheap.

Of course, cheap doesn’t come without its own price. The house does need a nice chunk of construction work done to it. We’ve spent the majority of the summer gathering bids from contractors and hope to finally get started with work on the place soon. Here’s hoping I’ll have some “after” photos by next month.

My friend Lisa is someone who comes up in this blog occasionally and in my thoughts a lot. This is for good reason. She is my oldest friend and was as much an integral part of my childhood as my own brothers. I knew her before I even knew my brothers and considering our mother’s became friends when they were pregnant with us, one could argue that Lisa and I knew each other before we were born.

My earliest childhood memory of Lisa goes back to when we were 2, maybe 3, years old and her toy stove. Lisa’s dad built the stove out of a big wooden box painted white and big enough to fit a couple of kids inside. Flat coiled coat hanger wires were fastened to the top to make burners along with a few discarded dials, either from a real stove or maybe a TV. Best of all, the stove had small wheels attached to the bottom and a small door on the front side of the box which was supposed to be the oven. But Lisa and I did very little pretend baking or cooking. Instead we would climb into the box via the oven door and scurry across the kitchen floor, pretending we were in a car. Once we got to our destination we’d close the oven door so it was pitch dark and pretend we were at the movies.

A few years later when Lisa’s family moved to another house the stove was given to my brothers and me. It lived in the playhouse we had in our backyard and it became the main prop in a game we called Witchy-Witch. I believe that Witchy-Witch was the invention of one of the neighbor kids, but I’m pretty sure Lisa and her sister Lynda played the game with us many times as well. Witchy-Witch was our version of Hansel and Gretel. One kid played the witch and chased the other kids around the yard trying to catch them. If you got caught you got stuffed in the stove.

Lisa always tells me that I remember everything from the past and it’s true. My head is filled with great childhood memories and she happens to be in the majority of them.

Guess what I saw the other day when I stopped over at, Practical Paralegalism? I saw that my favorite paralegal, Lynne DeVenny won an Awesome Blogger Award! It was no surprise to me of course, since anyone who reads her blog already knows that Lynne is a pretty awesome blogger as well as a snappy dresser.

In order to qualify for the award Lynne had to share 7 random things about herself and then, (surprise! surprise!) at the end of her post she nominated 7 more people to do the same, including me!!!

I am not only honored but am extremely grateful for the prompt because in case you haven’t noticed I’ve been pretty slow with the posting lately due to a severe case of blog block. Luckily the idea of share seven random facts about myself got my creative juices flowing. I enjoyed listening to that tap-tapping sound while I came up with this list:

1.  I repeated 4th grade.  Yep, they still did that back in the 70s.  Actually one of the reasons why I was held back is because I was extremely shy and a year younger than most of the other kids in my class.  By the time I hit 4th grade I was a complete loser with no friends and I couldn’t learn my times tables.  I gotta say, 4th grade was a lot easier the second time around. 

2. The school I went to was an experimental “open walled environment.” Each grade was in a single giant classroom, with three teachers and 90 kids. There was never a quiet moment during school hours. Hm…that might explain part of item number one.

3. I am a native Californian and have never lived outside of the state. In fact, I have never even lived outside of Alameda County. (Other than a brief sojourn in Santa Clara County my husband can make the same claim.)

4. I am a terrible driver and always have been. In fact, the legendary Jim Willis declared me the worst driver’s ed student in the history of Granada high.

5. I am not a fan of fruit. To all those people who say, “Gee, I love fruit! It’s so sweet and delicious” I say “Have fun and eat your fruit. Just please leave me out of it.” That said, I do my best to still eat some fruit every day because it’s supposed to be good for you but I don’t do it willingly. Bleh!

6. I went to school with Jill Whelan. You know, the girl who played Captain Stubing’s daughter on The Love Boat? She also played the sick girl in Airplane and had a short run TV series called Friends. (A different Friends…it was 1979.) Jill was in my junior high French class. I never spoke to her. She was always surrounded by a posse of admiring girls.

7. My grandfather was a chemist at Lederle Labs in the 1940s and worked on the team that helped develop penicillin.

OK, that last one is not really about me, but hey close enough right?

Thanks Lynne for the shout out and most of all the prompt!