I was curious and did some googling today (yes, that is a verb in our household) and found that one of my scientific papers from my graduate student career has been cited in Wikipedia. It makes me feel good to know that my years of toil in the basement of the physics building produced something useful.
Another thing I’m looking forward to with the move is not having to keep up with the gardening any more. This house has flower beds all around it , more all the way down the slope out front, on the boulevard, in front of and behind the garage, and there’s also a small vegetable garden. For a while I was going out for an hour or so every morning just to pull weeds. It’s very difficult to do anything out front when I have to watch OLC like a hawk to keep her out of the semi-busy street. Now, I’ve almost given up on it and just do a little weeding here and there as I follow OLC around the yard to make sure she doesn’t get into the street or the alley.
This is the sign that I thought of putting out front:
Wilsons’ U-Pick Weed Farm
$5 a bushel
I’ve been feeling pessimistic about the general direction of the economy lately. It didn’t help that the newspaper had a long article about affordable housing in the Twin Cities suburbs, and how people with incomes very near MFH’s were qualifying for subsidized housing. If we had another child, and I kept staying at home, we would definitely qualify. As I told him, not seriously, “Dude, where’s our handout?”
The apartment that we are moving to is affordable within MFH’s income. Heat is included in the rent, and it is three miles from his work. Essentially, we’ve maximized square footage per dollar while minimizing cost and commute distance. The house we are moving from is more than we can comfortably afford on his income, particularly with high heating and commuting costs. The apartment is actually a little bigger than the house, but will cost several hundred dollars a month less.
We got our keys today, and moved in the first carload. We’ve made it up the big, long hill of the roller coaster, and now we’re easing over the top. I am out of practice for moving; we’ve been in the house for three years, which is the longest I’ve stayed in any one place since I left home for college. Anyway, it’s going to be a big change, going back to living in an apartment and having to rattle around more quietly. Also, dealing with a much more restricted lifestyle: can’t set up my plywood soaking tub in the bathtub (won’t fit), can’t let the cat out, can’t play with my MAPP gas torch, can’t have a live Christmas tree. Can’t even have an extra freezer. Blah, blah, blah. On the other hand, I get a whole bedroom for personal space, instead of an oversize closet. And the apartment has certain modern conveniences that the house doesn’t: dishwasher, air conditioning (not that I will ever use it unless I’m pregnant), and 300% more closets. And linoleum and toilet seats that are much less than 20 years old. Each place has its pluses and minuses.
I was disposing of some old medication in the downstairs bathroom, and the low-flow toilet there took two flushes just to get pills down.
We’ll be beginning our big move to Eden Prairie next week (we have some overlap with our leases). I’m starting to start to pack.
This Mother’s Day column by Vox Day is one that I keep going back to re-read, when I get too worn out by the constant battle to maintain a level of civilized life in my home. He’s got it right that motherhood is not all cupcakes and cherubs.
I got so tired from building the compost bin because I did all the sawing, drilling, and screw-driving by hand. Not that it takes any great strength to do any of these operations with hand tools; even drilling holes with a hand drill is surprisingly easy. It was the cumulative effort over a long day that got me.
A side benefit of building the compost bin is that I used up a fair amount of our scrap lumber. Less to move.
I spent all day yesterday building a new compost bin, with the help of my young assistant. It is mostly finished, just needs front slide-in panels and maybe another row of mesh around the top. I moved all the compost into it this morning. Today I am very tired.
I’ve quit my job; my last working day was last Friday, and on Saturday I crammed all my work stuff into the car and hauled it over to the office. So that’s why I was so busy last month. I gave my notice at the beginning of the month, and then spent all of May trying to finish up all the things I wanted to get done before I left. I feel satisfied that I accomplished the things that I wanted to accomplish, and left my project in good shape. I left because I had prayed for a long time about when the right time to leave my job would be, and it seemed that the end of May was the answer I got.
My work there is finished.
The process of quitting was a little like dying, though. A few months ago I read through most of Kubler-Ross’s On Death and Dying. She noticed that the dying tend to be in the process of detaching themselves from the bustling affairs of the nondying. I felt that the last few months. My coworkers had have to think longer-term about their projects and the new projects they were trying to start up, while I was winding down my contributions to a single project and looking ahead to a whole new freedom.
I have plenty of projects to occupy my time. First of all, I need to get my household in better order; we will be moving next month. With the drop in income, I’ll be spending more time plugging the money leaks at home. Then, I have a few ideas in mind for starting a microbusiness of my own. Actually, I have very many ideas bubbling up in my mind like a pot starting to boil over. The past month of turning down the creative heat so I could finish my job well was rather painful. But I am free now.
I have another project in OLC. She wants me to read and read and read to her. She is picking up new words very quickly now. Also, she has figured out that words I’m reading are the words on the page, and she has decided that she wants to learn her letters, too. First she picked up O, all on her own, and in the past week or so has followed that with A, T, and Q. It looks like she is now learning M, N, S, K, and B. She studies her Dr. Seuss alphabet book quite seriously. Both MFH and I were quite surprised when she pointed to the Q and said, “Q!” though. MFH learned to read at a ridiculously early age, before he turned three, and it looks like his daughter may turn out the same.
We are still looking for a new place to live, closer to MFH’s work. Since we only have one car now, that means that every time we want to look at a place to rent, he has to drive home from Eden Prairie to St. Paul (i.e., all the way across Minneapolis) to pick us up, and then back over again. A lot of driving and a lot of time.
Here’s what we’ve seen so far:
A small house in Edina, very close to the highway. Edina is the inner suburb where all the Republicans with very shiny cars and very green lawns live, with the exception of one house, which appears to be inhabited by hippies trying to evangelize to the carbon-spewers. Anyway, this house had just been fixed up and remodelled by a flipper, who admitted that she would be renting it at a loss. (Makes me want to start doing credit checks on potential landlords!) The kitchen had been totally redone and over-improved out of character with the rest of the house. At least, the appliances were over-improved; there was practically no counter space or cupboard space and actually cooking anything there would have been a total pain. There also weren’t any grounded outlets in the bedroom we would have wanted to use as an office. Overall, the house was cute on the inside, with lots of little cupboards all over for storage (except for in the kitchen). The rent was on the high end of what we could afford, and when we asked about doing the lawn work and snow removal ourselves in return for a discount on rent, the most we could get out of her that it was possible, but “negotiable”. The use of that word at that point pretty much ended the negotiations right there.
A duplex in Minnetonka, basically the upstairs of a house with outside access to a laundry room in the basement; there was a basement apartment. This place turned out to back right onto 494, and was just too small. Hauling the laundry around to the back of the house with a toddler in the winter would have been fun, too.
A townhouse in Eden Prairie. It looked good, but when we thought it through, it was also just too small for us. Staying home with a toddler, I’ve found that it’s good to be able to move from place to place within the house throughout the day and have a change of scene. This townhouse just didn’t have enough places. Also, the only place to eat was a little table crammed into the kitchen; it would have been hard to fit a high chair in there.
A small house in St. Louis Park. Also somewhat too small, but here the problem was the very, very musty basement. I’m allergic to the musty-mildew-whatever-it-is now, and that place was definitely setting it off. So that was definitely a no-go.
A duplex in south Minneapolis. This actually looked pretty good, aside from little unfinished corners in the basement, and a garage that wasn’t usable for more than storing junk. It was a side-by-side duplex, with a full half basement underneath each unit. The basement had two finished rooms, like a family room and an office, and an unfinished space with the furnace and laundry. So there were plenty of places to be in it. We liked it pretty well, but after sleeping on it and praying about it I have a bad feeling about the place, so I guess we are still looking. That’s ok, the bedroom closets in this place were absolutely tiny.
The way we’ve been evaluating places is to go take a look, and then while we’re driving away, make a list of pros versus cons. That helps us think clearly about the place and better evaluate how it would or wouldn’t meet our needs. Otherwise we would get carried away by our desire to just take a place and be done with it.