I'm Fine, We're Fine, Everything is Fine.

I have a couple friends who reminded me yesterday that I enjoy writing and that the infamous blog is woefully out of date, so, thanks to L & M I’m back with a vengeance. Well, probably not quite a vengeance, but we’ll see. Warning: language here may be a bit saltier than usual because, well, life. You’ll see; you’ll get it.

So… I see that my last post was in April. Oh my. Would it be okay to say that nothing much has happened since then in an effort to pretend I’m still sane? Oh right, lying is bad. Got it.

Well, to start with, I think it’s important that you all know that I finally took the plunge and did something I’ve wanted to do for probably ten years. I got a decent pillow. Changed my life. And I don’t just mean one that costs more that $3. We’re talking $30 of ergonomic bliss. Not gonna lie, it took a couple nights to adjust to, but holy crap my old bones are loving it now. I’ve been falling asleep faster and everything.

I went to get a massage a couple weeks ago and it was divine. I scheduled the massage on a Friday as I sat working in the dining room on a twenty-five-year-old chair at three in the morning. I took a deep breath and hurt my back, so something had to be done and I’d like to offer a big ‘thank you’ to the internet for making that possible. The masseuse didn’t explicitly say that my back was the worst she’d seen lately, but it was quite apparent that was the case. She kept asking me if she was hurting me and I responded, “No,” but what I really wanted to say was “I don’t care if it hurts, just fix my frickin’ back.”

She had all these crazy suggestions like I should drink water, sleep more, roll around on a tennis ball and you know, just generally take better care of myself. The audacity of this woman, I swear. We were about 10 seconds into the massage and she felt the very top of my neck and said, “Oh my, how frequently do you get headaches?”  She also asked how long I had been like this and I wanted to say, “I don’t understand- is this not what living should feel like?” I joke, but she really was great, and I will be going back because let’s be real, there is still plenty of work to do.

She did her best and sent me home to take an Epsom salt bath. A bath, people. I haven’t had a bath since our car accident back in ’05. Shit, I’m old. Anyway. Y’all might be aware that my parents have a soaker tub, but this lady was very clear in her instructions and said you can’t use Epsom salt with a jetted tub or they will clog. Fine. Whatever. Fortunately, my parents have tub options. So, there I headed to the normal tub. And by normal, I mean that the part intended for bathing is approximately 45” long. So, most of you know what I look like. For those of you who have forgotten or just don’t know me that well, I’m at least 5’10” and the inseam on my jeans is 35”. Dan saw me walking to the bathroom and he asked, “You’re using THAT tub?” And then he laughed. Dan’s spatial awareness is not his greatest strength, but even he assumed I wouldn’t fit in that tub. Shocker: I didn’t. Appendages everywhere. It was like a clown car was vomiting limbs.

But do you know what? It really was relaxing, and I quite literally passed out afterward. So all in all, a win? I’m still not really sure. It was all quite surreal.

We successfully sold our house, made a profit and left South Dakota at the end of May. Dealing with moving, finishing the basement, working from home, home schooling, house viewings and contract signings was 100% the giant nightmare it sounds like. What a terrible time to sell a house. That being said, we miraculously rocked at keeping our house spotless for about six days. The place looked fantastic. Truly as immaculate as a house can get while a family of four is living in it. But it was NOT FUN. It was so not fun that afterward, we didn't go back to normal, oh no no no. We went straight to absolute filth. It was like when they mucked up the fish tank in Finding Nemo.

We moved in temporarily with my parents while we finished buying our house, which we closed on at the end of June and started renovating with aplomb. Yes, aplomb. And for a moment, it was going great. Remember when my biggest problem was pet fur in the paint? Ahhh. Those were the days. I remember them well and look back on them fondly.

Well, that was in JULY and now it is OCTOBER. Some of you might be wondering why I’m bathing at my parent’s house. Funny you should ask! And thank you for your interest and concern regarding our current situation!

I don’t even know how it happened anymore; I think we wanted to move the toilet location, so we brought someone in for an estimate and learned that we needed about $20-25K of HVAC work done. Yes, you read that right. TWENTY TO TWENTY FIVE THOUSAND DOLLARS needing to be spent on nearly the most boring bit of building. The only thing more boring would have been foundation work. And then we found out there was asbestos on the ducts as well. AWESOME. You know what? We weren’t even surprised. It’s just like, okay, might as well just sprinkle some lead paint chips on our cereal and get on with our day.

So our HVAC work was done by the end of September and our plumbing will hopefully be done this week, so that’s good. And we have most our kitchen installed. By the way if the thought of assembling something from Ikea makes your stomach turn, I would advise that you not get a kitchen from them. There was just a garbage bag full of hardware delivered to us. I know a guy and we paid him to do it, which was the plan all along and money well spent. So once the kitchen arrived, it was pretty smooth sailing. And ordering it too, was awesome, thanks to the aforementioned guy. So easy.

Delivery was a bitch. And kept getting bitchier. We had deliveries coming via FedEx and another like third party delivery service or whatever. Try arranging a delivery with multiple companies who don’t want to talk to you and who somehow have your wrong phone number AND address. And then, after updating the information, the delivery company straight up frickin’ lied and said they tried to call and that they waited outside for fifteen minutes with no response. NO. NO YOU DID NOT. We were literally watching the road and the phone all damn day. But yes, we thought it would be fun to pretend we weren’t there? We absolutely loved wasting eight hours waiting for you while you supposedly called and knocked on our door. Because we have time for that. Sure.

So, we still need a full bathroom remodel and the guy who hasn’t been in contact with us FINALLY just called about 30 minutes ago, so that’s good news. I’m still dreaming hard to be in by November. HA. Just leave me alone and let me believe what I want.

Oskar has obviously started at school by now. He is doing a hybrid model, so 2 days in person, 3 days at home. We just had his conference and apparently it’s going well, though it really doesn’t feel like it most days.

Elena is in preschool/daycare full-time and only about a two-minute walk from my office and she LOVES it. It is going really well, and I love picking her up afterward and hearing about everything she learned. Also, now I have a buddy for my half hour commute, which is nice, but I feel bad that she’s wasting so much time in the car. And no, the half hour is not because of traffic, it’s just that far to travel.

I had a dream, back during quarantine, that made me laugh. And I’m going to share it right here with you all now because it’s so stupid.

I had been listening to Hamilton a lot while working so I had a dream that there was this Hamilton sweepstakes thing and our neighbor across the street won. And what they won was a meet and greet with Lin Manuel Miranda. I’m no crazy fan girl or anything, but I saw the giant tour bus pull up and I saw him get out and I thought, wow, that’s pretty cool, it’d probably be neat to meet him. So he was walking around the neighborhood, looking in windows and calling all the neighbors out to meet him, so I’m like “Hell yes I will come out and chat, it’s not at all strange that you are literally peering in to people houses, I’ll be right there.”

So, the thing about real life during quarantine is that it was all about comfort, am I right? So, I LIVED in my Comfy. If you don’t know what it is, look it up and then buy one because they are amazing, and you will not regret it.

In real life I had fallen asleep in my Comfy on my couch, and in my dream, I woke to a big ass tour bus rumbling down our crappy road, still wearing my comfy. So, upon being invited outside, I decided, I haven’t really gotten dressed in like a month, maybe I should do that now that I will be interacting with people in real life. I could go into detail here, but I think all you really need to know is that I definitely missed the whole event because I forgot how to put on a bra. This made me angry, and somehow I thought chasing the damn tour bus down the street would fix it. And then I woke up. And I laughed.