Domestic Psychology

random things on my mind

// June 10th, 2013 // 2 Comments » // life, me

I need to paint the front door, but it’s mosquito season and I don’t want the inside of the house to be the box in a bug spray commercial. I also don’t want Doug building another ‘clean room‘ before we’ve repaired the staple damage from the last one. Hmmm.

I need to find a place for a dozen PTSA people to meet on a weeknight in July. Restaurants are noisy, but food does make meetings more fun. I wish I could think of someplace interesting.

I want to find a functional, but aesthetically yuck old chandelier. I don’t want an electrical fire hazard, but I also don’t want to feel guilty about painting and re-doing the bead work. I should ask my friends who find treasures at yard sales and thrift stores to keep an eye out for old light fixtures.

I ordered something online and it never arrived. The vendor is willing to replace the missing order IF I provide a work address. My address isn’t the reason the package disappeared. I haven’t had any other packages disappear. Why do I have to have the package delivered to someone else and get it from them? Does the vendor think I live in an underground bunker or have gangs of print order thieves wandering my neighborhood? It disappeared at the Post Office. Shouldn’t they make it more difficult for the Post Office instead of me?

I wish I could get one of the cars being sold at the local University’s auction this week. I don’t care which one. I’ll even drive a campus security car. I just need out of the house. Especially if I’m going to have to drive somewhere to pick up online purchases.

drip, drip, drip

// September 14th, 2012 // No Comments » // home, pets

We live in an old house with what is politely known as personality. The long list of things that need simple repairs is low priority when something else is dripping, sparking or overflowing. Except for the occasional lightning strike destroying the a/c or a hail storm destroying the roof and siding, repairs are limited to the balance in our savings account. I constantly hope for a moment of home repair calm to allow progress on the master list of repairs.

After an entire week without anything odd, like water dripping from a ceiling fixture, I began to mentally plan for a weekend of home improvement instead of home disaster intervention. I went to load the washing machine housed under the staircase and carefully tried to avoid yet another concussion caused by failing to duck my head at the washer. As I measured the soap, I felt moisture on my head. I hadn’t whacked my head so it couldn’t be blood like last time. I reached up to touch my head and another drip splashed on my hand. I sighed, mentally ditched my plans for the weekend and cautiously looked up to survey the leak.

A smiling dog looked down at me from the opening in the stair rails where she was leaning to watch me load the washing machine.

A fresh splash of dog slobber landed in my eye.

under construction – bed version

// May 25th, 2012 // No Comments » // home

Half-full: We have a new-to-us mattress set to replace our mattress that sagged in the middle and stabbed us with broken springs.
Half-empty: We don’t have a frame for it, so it’s on the concrete slab that is our floor.
Half-full: The new mattress has an extra layer of squishy comfort that makes it feel like a triple stack of mattresses.
Half-empty: We have no sheets that fit on the double-thick mattress.
Half-full: A sheetless mattress on the floor is the perfect bed for a bedroom with unpainted drywall.

In our home, you have to see the potential in things… and people.

But they were nice

// January 25th, 2012 // No Comments » // home

Despite my obviously high expectations about what clean-up should include, I do not have any complaints about the workers that the contractor tasked with repairing our house. They sang and danced to cheesy 80′s tunes. They joked with me. They played ball with the dogs. They were extremely interested in my 18-y-o daughter.

Okay, EXCEPT for the interest in my teenager, the workers were great. They didn’t even get upset with me when the contractor scolded them for leaving the house without a single exterior light. That wasn’t their fault. The house has no porch lights, flood lights, doorbell, or house numbers because I took forever to choose the new lighting and hardware. There are sooo many different options to choose from and I struggled with finding a balance between my desire for whimsy and not wanting an accidental homage to Prince Mongo.

All of this is a roundabout way of saying that I am very thankful and slightly apologetic to the workers who are responsible for making our home sturdier, safer, and infinitely more attractive.

More siding today

// January 12th, 2012 // No Comments » // flickr, home

Back of house before:

And after:

Side of house before:

And now:

no progress today

// January 11th, 2012 // No Comments » // home

The crew didn’t show up today. They missed four hours of bright sunshine, but they also missed a mean hail storm with excessive thunder and lightning. Tomorrow’s forecast looks equally ominous, so I don’t expect the crew to return until Friday. Unfortunately, the house is currently less prepared for bad weather than when the construction began.

Repair Progress

// January 10th, 2012 // 2 Comments » // flickr, home

First, there were a series of storms.

So, we removed the old shutters.

New windows replaced the broken, leaky windows.

New siding replaced the hail dented siding.

Sounds like winter

// December 2nd, 2011 // No Comments » // home, life

Our tiny neighborhood’s hills, trees and creeks combine to create an acoustic oddity that peaks when the leaves have fallen and the air is crisp. Unlike the muted, echoed or separated tracks of noise that you hear in a city, everyday noises blend in our spoon shaped hood to create a perfectly mixed symphony.

It’s a phenomenon that is so noticeable, prior to the real estate crash, a local band rented a home on the next street for the sole purpose of practicing. On their practice nights, every household opened their windows to breathe the musical notes dancing in the air.

During the day, the delivery trucks loop through each cove, like a soloist who briefly stands at the main microphone, before sitting down and rejoining the singularity of the orchestra. Dogs howling at airplanes overhead slow the music down to a melancholy that is universal. The sounds of children in every direction, both calm and energize the collective soundtrack.

Sometimes, I have to sit motionless and silent on the front steps, to let my body absorb the magical sounds in the sweet spot that is my home.

squirrel in the kudzu

// March 6th, 2011 // No Comments » // home, television

Doug knows that the quickest way to make me quit whining is to distract me. His distraction for my kudzu project complaining is project detail discussions. I don’t mind this particular distraction. The decade of ducks as a bathroom theme has ended and we have a new theme that is going to require a lot more effort to pull together. While the end result will be worth it, getting there is making this project akin to sweating blood.

“That is funny, but it doesn’t go with the theme.”
“Sure it does. It’s just a parallel universe connection to our theme.”
“No. It would look like a haunted house bathroom. Besides, that hand is a plot hole.”
“You know you like the idea.”
“I’ll think about it.”

Rocky Hill rocks

// February 22nd, 2011 // 3 Comments » // people

I recently made a joke on facebook about a house in our neighborhood that is home to several graduate students. It is easily identified by the couch in the yard, television on the porch and mailbox stuffed with frisbee golf discs. The twenty-something guys who live there always have bicycles or kayaks or some form of living life to the fullest strapped to their cars.

Someone replied to this facebook post that they are sorry, as if this house causes me strife. The people who live in that house are, like almost everyone in our neighborhood, very nice people who amuse me rather than annoy me. One person in our neighborhood is constantly burning brush in the drainage ditch. The fire department doesn’t ask to see his burn permit. Another neighbor uses fireworks to get the birds out of his vegetable garden. I’m no bird whisperer, but I don’t think birds remain bothered by fireworks for very long. I suspect that somebody just really likes playing with fireworks. In this neighborhood, it’s okay to be yourself. The fact that everyone tolerates the endless construction noise and mess at our house is the best example of a neighborhood that does not sweat the small stuff. The thing about our extremely tiny neighborhood is that it is completely surrounded by the city while we remain county. The neighborhoods around ours are filled with larger, newer and more expensive homes. Our neighborhood is symbolic of the vanishing middle class.

The people who live directly across from the graduate students work for the police department. A few doors down from them in both directions, there are homes owned by teachers. The people in our neighborhood don’t claim to be middle class while driving brand new cars and owning beach property.

Until the real estate market crashed, there was a very real concern by the homeowners in our neighborhood that parasitic developers and realtors would pay us pennies on the dollar to get out so that they could level our unique little homes filled with real people and replace them with the rubber stamp style neighborhoods and vanilla flavored people that surround us. When property stopped selling and the foreclosures began, the houses in our neighborhood started to empty. Once emptied, they stayed empty. I miss those people and what the neighborhood was before. I don’t want another soul to leave.

I wouldn’t trade those graduate students for anything.