Stuff of Life: Love the place you live

I'm not the biggest fan of apartment living, mostly because I'm not the biggest fan of people. Living in rabbit hutches so close to people. People stomping around above our heads. People parking too close to our trucks. People letting their dogs do their business outside our window during breakfast.

I dream ALL DAY about getting out of here to the point that I sort of neglected our little abode, be it ever so humble. I didn't really decorate. I let plants wither in the heat. I had very little pride in living here because I just don't really want to live here.

Does that even make sense?

I watched the Hobbit with the kids this past week. On top of that, Gandalf got me thinking about a poster in my bestie's house back when we both lived in Alaska. I loved her house. It had dark woods and Baggins colors and all the comforts of a hobbit home. It made me miss her so bad that I had to watch the movie a second time and drink 32 cups of tea.

How many of you can claim you decided to love your house because of a fantasy movie and memories of days spent with your best friend? Never thought I could, either. But I sat dreaming about my farmhouse and my acreage (that I WILL have) and I began to think about decorating it. I've never dreamed about how I would decorate stuff. If it were up to me, I'd still have a Patrick Ewing poster stuck to my wall with pushpins.
I haz no style.

But I fell in love with the dark woods and earthy vibe of Bilbo Baggins' home (it is a hole, afterall). And I wanted a hobbit hole all of a sudden. So I spent three days pulling 13 bags of toys/clothes/trash from the house and dusted off those poor plants and brought them inside and pruned them, watered them, repotted them, and pulled out all the art and knick knacks I never bothered to unpack from Alaska and began rearranging this place.

I have a really long way to go, but I woke up today and I don't hate this place so much. Sure, I hate the concrete jungle full of ambivalent neighbors and serial lawn poopers, but I don't hate what's inside our walls. It's homey and warm (hot, actually, but that's Houston). It's not nearly as drab and lacking character.

It's a start, anyway.

a year since march ended

last year's march was awful. i don't think i complained too much via social media or blogging because, well, i hate that sort of nonesense. but now that it's a year gone, i can say that i wasn't sure how we were going to muscle forward. the prospect of staying in alaska one more year made me nearly homicidal, truth be told!

p lost his job. and a lot more than that for reasons we never really unraveled. people are awful, awful beings at times and while he's fairly stoic about it, i still wish plagues and locusts on a few folks in the old neighborhood.

a couple weeks before that bottom dropped, we found out we were almost FIVE months along with a surprise baby. holy #%$@. we'd JUST had a baby. how could we possibly have another one with just one lousy income?

the house. the house was a piece of junk with it's haunted downstairs, uncooperative heater, and rickety front staircase...but it's where we were. so when the landlord's brother (landlord died a few months prior) told us he was selling SOON, i was sure life was about to land in a ditch.

there was no work for my company in the houston office. period. but the anchorage office offered to float me some work until i had the baby and then i was on my own.

we had to leave pepper. p rarely talks about it, but he mentioned the tears he shed driving her to our good friends' house to be fostered for a few weeks. that was tough.

so we did it. sold nearly EVERYTHING we owned. left alaska with tears in my eyes on may 27, 2012 because i was pretty certain i'd never see it again. i'm cool with that now, but at that moment, it seemed so final. never. again. no reason to, right? our families are in texas and virginia, vermont and new jersey. all far, far away from alaska.

we lived with no furniture for weeks. the kids ate off plastic storage bin 'til ricky shivers rescued a farmer's table from the parking lot and BAM all of a sudden we had a stick of furniture. things came in slow and steady from that point. and now here we are.

i never got a new job in houston. i was hired in katy to run a house full of four kids and one husband. two fish were added to the roster, though nobody offered me any more salary for it. i also got the chance to teach fourth graders creative writing for an entire year on fridays.

my life changed SO MUCH since last march. i get goosebumps when i think of the journey we traveled from there to here. but it's been a year now. a long, bumpy, fast-moving year and it all started back there.

in other news, things are looking downright unpoetic around here lately. i try to keep up, i really do. but they outnumber me and well, things look a little haphazard and UNPINTEREST like. Hahahah. Stupid Pinterest makes me hate my house somedays.

have a great week, ya'll!

I'm hiding my face with my hood because Roo moonlights as Wolverine with her claws. We've all been scratched and now I'm too savvy for it. Ha!

Smoothie time around our place. The kids are permanently stained acai-purple and I've lost more tablecloths to these smoothies than I care to count...but they love them. And they love helping dad make them. The can of raid on the windowsill? That's a product of the GINORMOUS spider P had to kill off the wall. It had fangs, ya'll. It had to go.

My boy. My boy wonder. He's studying poetry in his class and he's started copying down the ones he likes and he leaves them all over the house in his haste. I love this so much and remember doing the same thing with Shel Silverstein poems...his favorite poet, too coincidentally.

Piles of mess. They're everywhere in this place. Too bad Raid doesn't kill those, too.

The Best of Times and the Worst of Times

Feeling very Dickens-ian there. Did you catch that?

I spent the past week teaching creative writing to second through fifth graders at a local elementary school and am still recovering. Wow. They're some of the most creative, spontaneous, exhausting creatures God ever made. Truthfully.

I came back altered, I'd say. I look at young writers differently now (way more capable than I ever gave them credit for), and I look at myself differently. It became apparent that I'm most myself when I'm in a position that interacts with other humans and where I feel like I can make the tiniest bit of difference. Not that I can't achieve both of those in my current situation (though it's a struggle in my industry), but just the fact that I haven't been. Eye opening. Made me realize I need to live my days where I come home tired and spent from giving everything I had that day and I can't say that I always do that.

The week also ended on a bit of a sour note. If you'll recall, my husband was laid off this past month. Yikes. It's a nasty situation and I get myself angry just thinking about, so I decided a few weeks back to leave it in God's hands and not stew. So this is me not stewing. However, an email from our landlord Friday afternoon informed us that he's going to sell the place immediately and it's going on the market soon. Like next week or something. Sure, we have a place, technically, until May 1. But c'mon. Really?

Lost job, lost home. What the hell?

We've made plans to move out of Alaska recently, but they were much slower plans. Seems now that we're in a place where we need to move much quicker. And if I can't find a position to relocate us, well, we're selling everything we own like a bunch of gypsies and arriving in Texas with our clothes and hopefully our dog. It sounds dismal and sometimes, during the darkest hours of the night when I can't sleep, it feels that way. But for the most part I don't feel like we're being jerked around yet, that it's all part of a bigger, more meaningful plan.

But damn, ya'll. How about some good news soon, eh?

Once I quit pouting and stewing, I spent the weekend sewing my hiney off. Maybe I'll toss the blankets and dolls on the new Etsy shop and try to grow our "Boogie Back to Texas"fund. Maybe I'll just add more stuff to our already HUGE pile of stuff we can't take with us. And yes, I have moments of panic where I look at my beloved books and piles and wonder how on Earth I'll be strong enough to purge all but the barest of bare essentials.

And then a tiny voice in my head reminds me that the dream is more valuable than the stuff and I take a breath.

So there we have it. Highs, lows, in betweens. In the meantime, here are some more photos from this past week. My minions are kinda adorable, even if I do say so myself.

1. It should be noted that the above photo was taken on Friday. Not Christmas Eve or even in January. Nope. Friday, end of March. Spring time, even. Holy moly.

2. She is her daddy's girl in most senses of the word. They adore each other, and rightfully so.

3. What boy doesn't love baseball bat-sized icicles?

4. Our house grows teeth. How about yours?

5. My Boo. My constant travel companion. So much so that we call him Mama's "road dog." I think it's some sort of reference to "Road House," because my husband uses the term interchangeably with "Wade Garret."

Have a blessed week!

Humble Fabric Beginnings...

I'm calling her Maisie. And even though I forgot to sew in her pig tails before sewing the body together, I still think she's on her way to perfect. Call me biased. All that's left now is the hand sewing steps and I had my fill of tangled thread yesterday...the finishing touches will wait til a little later this week.

But I was excited. And I wanted to share.

Happy Monday!

Me and My Sewing Machine

A long time ago, before Boo was born (you know, my three year old?), I taught myself to sew. Well, technically, the Singer DVD included with my machine and my most awesomest of awesome husbands who took Home Ec in middle school taught me to sew.

It wasn't fancy by any means. A rag quilt here, a burp cloth there. When Boo was born I was a wise little blackbird and refocused on my writing. (I'm sure the student loans as a reminder did nothing to urge me on to use the craft I was paying so dearly for...)

It's been a good two years since I dusted off my simplest of simple sewing machines, but last weekend I did. I hauled out my old fabric stash, I organized the old projects that I'd left in stick pin limbo.

Oh, sure, I forgot how to thread the needle and I boned it on the bobbin once or twice, but eventually, I was able to sew a very simple fleece blanket for the Boo. (See the picture? He loves "beep beeps" of any flavor, so the fact that these are farm machines and he's never seen a farm means nothing to him. I am a rockstar!)And thanks to one of the cutest books I've come across in a long, long time, I began to sew again.

It was a bumpy re-start, but it happened. From there, I was inspired to try a real project, and thanks to Kasja Wikman's book "Scandinavian Stitches" (a random buy from Amazon.com, thankee verra much!), I was hooked. Again.

I made two teensy projects, which, in hindsight could have worked against me. See, I'm not the greatest at small turns and tight corners...I'm more of an "open road" sort of sewer (read it: long, long stretches of flannel material all pinned out before me. I love blankets!)

The first project I attempted was the Spring Bird. In the fabric stash I'd found, there lived some vintage pillow cases my mama had sent me. One of them I actually recogniz

ed as my old pillow case from when I was in middle school. A few snips and stitches and one button eye later, and I had an adorable, Scandinavian spring bird for the mantle. (I've mentioned my family's heritage is very, very Norwegian before, haven't I? I'm sure I have...once or fourteen times.)

Wikman's approach at quilts and stitched art is whimsical and a ton of fun...just up my alley. I

have a few more projects dog-eared in the book that I'm planning, including some appliqued quilts and a few more pillowcase birds. All of these are building blocks on my way to my ultimate destination...a rag doll for Miss Makenna.

I dream in rag doll color combinations. I live for the day that I don't sew out of bounds around a

gently-curved head or get my embroidery thread knotted into an oblivion when I'm trying to stitch an eyebrow. Someday soon...

In the meantime, here's a picture of me and my Boo. I'm wearing yellow and I'm

smiling. It's about as close to Springtime in Anchorage as we'll get this month.

And Boo? Well, he's smiling because he's been in big-boy undies all week. My man....

Happy Spring melting to all you luckier folks!