Ahem. Kind of like today’s. We cleaned, we fought, we panicked and in the end Jason and Jennifer came down, chatted for a few minutes about various things, accepted our rent cheque, and left. They didn’t have a copy of the rental agreement with them, and they didn’t look around. They were kind of nonplussed by our proposal to sign a lease as long as the rent was reduced by a specific amount, but that can’t be helped. We can’t lock ourselves in for another year at such an unreasonable rate. Hopefully they’ll decide the income security is worth the (very reasonable) reduction!

So now I’m excited again. I really love this apartment and I want to settle in for another year. If they say no, we’ll basically need to start looking around for another place since we’re really trying to be better stewards of our resources.

And that’s basically all that happened today. I lead such a thrilling life!

February, I hit absolute rock bottom in my grief and shame spiral. Somewhere in there, I saw my OB for the results of the ultrasound which was supposed to clear up once and for all whether the polyp that possibly caused my miscarriage was still there. It was inconclusive. We scheduled a hysteroscopy in order to not waste any time, for which I was incredibly grateful. Miraculously, despite a seven-month waiting list, I actually got an appointment for March 9! I thought it must be a good omen – that’s my sweet little Momma’s birthday.

The hysteroscopy was easier than I could have imagined, but the recovery was harder than I thought. Two days before my surgery, our landlord called and left a message saying they they had decided to put the house up for sale.

The house in which we live. Sure, it’s “just” the basement suite, but it’s a really sweet apartment and I’m fed up to the back teeth with moving. It was (is) an incredible blessing that any new owners would be more than likely to want to keep us on as renters, but I have to tell you, I was intensely peeved. Worse, the landlord was calling, not just to tell us this, but to inform us that the realtor (he kept saying reel-i-tor on the voicemail – made me want to throw the phone at the wall) needed access the next day. The day before my surgery. I was so incensed that I just told them no. Flat out no. I’m having surgery, y’all can leave me alone until that’s over.

How well do you suppose that went? Long (oh, so long, and so full of outrage and hue and cry!) story cut drastically short, I spent the week after surgery alternately cleaning like a madwoman and crying from the sheer stress and humiliation of having strangers randomly walk into my home without knocking. The idea of any one of those rude, inconsiderate and frankly offensive-smelling people becoming my new landlord was enough to send me around the bend. Ishi was no help whatsoever. He periodically chooses to side with the enemy, for no reason I can ever quite comprehend. In his mind, Ernie and Alicia^[1] were perfectly within their rights to not only put the house up for sale with no notice to us, but also to leave during these showings with no instructions to the real-i-tors not to just go waltzing into our suite seeing as we kind of freaking live here.

Anyway. After an absolutely miserable week and a half, the house actually sold. By our calculations, Ernie and Alicia must have lost at 20K on the sale. Not only that, but they’re moving back into their parents’ house with two children under 5. We can understand hitting a rough patch financially, but we don’t get these guys. He’s supposed to be a church worker, and yet he and his wife told us the most bizarre lies about why they were selling. The strangest thing for me is realizing that exactly one year ago, we moved into this place thinking they were pillars of the community and people to be looked up to. Now we feel so strange as we realize that in many ways we are far more mature and honest than they are.

So much for being brief. But in my defense, there were quite a few details I left out. You really have been spared a lot!

The couple who bought the house aren’t even in their 30s, and they actually aren’t even married yet. They brought a puppy with them, but the puppy lives outside. I am so incredibly unhappy about this. It’s not that I don’t like dogs – I love them! Which is why it pains me to hear them bark and cry because they are separated from their families! Ernie and Alicia had a lovely Weimaraner named, er, Thunder. And when they left him alone, he would cry and howl to such an extent I would be wild-eyed with fury by the time they finally came home. I offered to watch him for them repeatedly, and they never took me up on it. Just before they moved out, they left him while they went on a three-day seminar. I just about lost my mind listening to poor Thunder pace and cry.

Now there’s an adorable puppy in the back yard just outside my window who cries because he’s lonely. I haven’t felt this way about my neighbours since Ishi and I were married and lived above an abusive foster family with six children. My heart can’t take another situation like that. I’m honestly worried about coping.

As for the owners – let’s call them Jason and Jennifer Jones. It fits, I swear. He’s a firefighter and she’s a kindergarten teacher. He’s a burly bruno and she’s a tiny, perky blonde. The odds are fantastic that she will be pregnant either before the wedding or five minutes after. I hate that I’m being so cynical, but for me, for now, this is an impossible scenario to accept with any kind of graciousness on my part.

Especially when I have to spend the better part of tomorrow cleaning so we can be ready for the “walk-through” on Monday, where we once again have to be on display for complete strangers as they get to peer into every nook and cranny of a home that is beginning to feel less and less like “mine” every day.

1. No, of course those aren’t their real names. Their real names are Voldemort and Bellatrix.

Today I came home with this (half price!) and this (in birch), which in addition to two of these and this (also in birch), brings the furniture item count in this household to the highest it’s ever been, even pre-flood. We are coming very close to living like actual, real-live grownups do. I KNOW! SHOCKING!

Today Ishi and I spent two hours at IKEA, one hour at lunch, one hour at Michaels, and then another hour at a scrapbooking store, and we didn’t have one single argument. Not one. And? He suggested going to the scrapbooking store (which I hadn’t seen yet) when he saw how thrilled I was by the scrapbooking section at Michaels!

We got home and watched the hockey game while he had some wine and quickly put this together.

It’s been possibly the most perfect day we’ve ever had. What a great record to break!

1. My husband. Not his real name, of course. I just got tired of typing “my husband”. “Ishi” (ee-shee) is Hebrew for “my husband” and it’s easier to type. You could almost see that coming, couldn’t ya?

Meagan over at A Certain Lack of Focus describes very well what it’s like to want to do a million things at once, fail to follow any one thing through, and wind up doing nothing. She also has come up with something I consider to be pure genius, the simplicity of which puts it in a class my BlackBerry can’t touch: the Big Box of ADHD.

I was diagnosed with ADHD in university, which was when I started thinking these diagnoses were a pile of doneky manure. I do not believe I have clinical ADHD. I believe I am an exceptionally enthusiastic individual who occasionally has difficulty working on a project to the necessary exclusion of other projects. It’s almost like I’m afraid thinking too long about any one thing will cause the other things I’m interested in to vanish. Having often come across a forgotten cross-stitch project or a folder with half a website in it or a book I didn’t quite get going on, it’s safe to say this fear is at least somewhat founded.

And it has really held me back. I am the kind of person who learns foreign languages for fun, who has dissected an animal without being required to for a course, who once filled entire notebooks with plotlines and characters and ruminations on “voice”. When I was younger, I picked up the violin for kicks. I went to poetry readings, or the opera, or museums in other countries. But as the years pass, we get older and responsibilities creep in and stake out claims on our time and energy. And the world just keeps on getting bigger and more exciting. I had begun to feel intensely frustrated with my inability to manage any more than one or two interests and have seen a real decline in the things I engage in since hitting 30. I felt like whatever deficiency there was in my brain had won.

Reading Meagan’s post gave me an incredible thrill of excitement. For all my schedules and planners and gadgets, I still struggle against the slipping away of the hours and my own flitting concentration. The Big Box of ADHD struck a loud chord in me and I saw endless possibilities springing out of those little drawers.

Here is a way to first of all, decide on eight projects or areas I need and want to spend time on. Then I can figure out how much time I’m spending on each one simply by moving the coins/buttons/tokens from the time drawer to the others. Once I have figured all that out, dividing the time more equally as necessary will be a cinch.

I cannot wait to get it into action here at the Casa de Caos. In a few weeks, I’ll report on whether it’s done what I’m hoping it will!

Furniture. Fuuuuuuurnituuuuure. Oh, how it rolls off the tongue and slides into the air. Specifically, one of… two… two!… dressers. I am awash in love. I am tingling and giddy. FURNITURE!

Those who have been with me for the long haul are only too familiar with The Great Flood of ’08, which ruined half our furniture (and we only had a few pieces to begin with) and forced us to move everything we owned into a storage locker in the space of 24 hours. It was traumatic and difficult and we were spectacularly taken care of, but the one lingering aftereffect I have had the most difficulty with was this:

Sudden homelessness + No renter’s insurance = No Money. Further,

No money + no new furniture + new apartment + all our worldly possessions in boxes = ANXIETY OF THE MOST UNPLEASANT KIND.

I’m 33. In my world, an age-appropriate activity regarding furniture does not include scanning Craigsl*st every week in the hopes there will be a couch that doesn’t reek of dogs or cigarettes available for less than $100. No. That is something I did several times in my early twenties and I think it would be enough to say I am so OVER that part of my life. In my world, at 33, women are finding cute antique pieces to refinish at out-of-the-way darling little shops hidden away on charming side streets in sleepy seaside towns while their husbands look trim and dashing in pressed khakis as they inspect the binding on old, rare books.

OR, they are scrubbing purple kool-aid out of a couch that looks for all the world like the carcass of a hollowed out dead paisley cow in a living room that smells a little bit like poo and a lot like dried applesauce while their husbands fish the Lego pieces out of the toilet that their two-year-old dropped in there with their bare hands and wipe them on bleach-splotched jeans that may or may not have been laundered in over a week.

Either way. Either one of those scenarios, perfectly acceptable in my vision of what 33-year-old women should be doing when it comes to furniture. Not scanning the pages of the IKEA catalogue and trying to calculate the exact dollar per cubic centimetre ratio for each and every dresser to decide which is the best buy. She should at least be able to decide she likes a dresser because, ohhh, it’s pretty!

The last two months have been difficult for me, to say the least. I am happy to be broke, disorganized, and slightly smelly as long as it’s because I’m the edge of exhaustion thanks to three kids and a dog or two. If I am to be forced to have uninterrupted nights of sleep and clothes that totally lack the smell of spitup, WELL, THEN. I would like my entire life to be pristine and organized, THANK YOU. I demand one scenario or the other, universe! Do you hear me?!

So. The sounds of hammering and swearing from the other room are music to my ears right now. Tonight is the first step to me giving in to every Rachael Ray, Julie Morgenstern, Jillian Michaels impulse I have ever had. Tonight marks the night I get to be one or the other of the two perfect 33-year-olds in my mind’s eye. Circumstances dictate that it will be the first scenario, so I bought dressers and a Julie Morgenstern book, and I’m going to start watching Rachael Ray and letting Jill kick my hiney every morning.

Next week, I’ll buy khakis for my husband. But I’m going to buy bleach for his jeans, too.

Just in case.