aroraborealis

I'm in the midst of some small rearranging in my room. I've been doing enough small art projects that I want a place to do that to see if I do more if I have place that's better set up for it. And I rearranged some storage so that I now have an open corner where I think I'm going to put some cushions for a sort of bohemian lounge area. I'm excited! I haven't substantially reimagined my room since we moved in here on halloween in 2012 ... or, I've had lots of ideas, but this is the first time I'm actually making some changes.

mekHad a small desk taking up space that I'm trying out to see a) if I like it and b) if not, what I learn from it to help me decide what to replace it with. Having installed it, I see I also need a seating object. Oops. But still, I'm excited!

I remain disengaged with work, but I'm liking the little places in other parts of my life that I'm getting more traction. More of that, delightful self!

Yesterday marked a year since amber_phoenix, longueur, and I bought our house! They moved in a year ago today, and I moved in a year ago Sunday. I can't believe it's been a whole year. So far, so awesome.

My therapist gifted me a sweet small mezuzah for Conspiracy of Delight. I plan to replace the scroll with a poem or two. I have a couple in mind, but this strikes me as a wonderful moment to solicit new poetry into my life. Do you have favorite poems of home, abundance, blessing, or other ideas that you think would be well-suited for a threshold and homecoming?

Here's one from my potentials:

What We Need Is Here

Geese appear high over us,
pass, and the sky closes. Abandon,
as in love or sleep, holds
them to their way, clear
in the ancient faith: what we need
is here. And we pray, not
for new earth or heaven, but to be
quiet in heart, and in eye,
clear. What we need is here.

(Wendell Berry)

Today, I give thanks for my home.

I have been so blessed with a strong, happy, grounded sense of home for basically my whole life. Those times when I have been uprooted, it has largely been by choice, and it has always been temporary. I know that many people in the world are uprooted from their homes daily, or contstantly, or forever through political or interpersonal upheaval.

I had the great good fortune of growing up in a solid, happy home, and from there, I have moved from one safe, comfortable home to another. I have lived with friends, and I have lived with strangers. I've lived with strangers who have become friends, and, happily, never with friends who have become strangers. I have never been forced out of my home, and all of my homes have felt safe, and have been places I trusted my private space and belongings to be respected, and I never had reason to doubt that they were.

To have a solid, sure sense of home is one of the things that is most foundational to my emotional and psychological well-being, and I am so fortunate to have had that.

After five months of active looking, and a total of three offers on various houses, amber_phoenix, longueur, and I finally bought a house yesterday. I'm alternately elated and weirdly blase about it. There's something about the process having taken so long that makes it a little hard to wrap my head around it being real.

For all that the overall process took a long time, the process on the house be bought yesterday FLEW. We went from offer to closing in less than a month!

I'm really delighted with the house, which is a sweet single family in Union Square, Somerville. I'm super excited that we found a good fit in Somerville, which I feel really invested in, and I can hardly wait to have people over. It sort of has to wait until I move, though, which happens on Saturday. Phew!

Naturally, I've been thinking a lot about what it means to leave my current digs. I've lived at UDL for 8 1/2 years, which is longer than I've lived anywhere but the house I grew up in. If I live in new-and-unnamed-house for as long, I'll be almost 45 when I cross that milestone.

When I moved into UDL ...
* it was named "The Vatican", not Undisclosed Location
* I was dating shayde
* I had hair down to my butt
* I was just settling down after almost a year of international and cross-country travel
* I was unemployed
* The house cat was Gearbox

While I lived at UDL ...
* I cut more than 12" off my hair
* We got another roommate, named Olivia
* I got a job at Campbell-Kibler Associates
* Olivia brought home a consolation kitten after the second time GWB was elected
* Olivia brought home a stray cat, now known as Kitteh
* I stopped dating shayde
* Olivia moved out
* I started dying my hair
* fraterrisus moved in
* I got into and started attending grad school
* I started dating spike
* I quit my job at CKA
* I graduated from grad school
* I got a job at WalkBoston
* I quit my job at WB
* I got a job at athenahealth
* I bought a house

And that's just a few self-centered highlights! 8 1/2 years is a long time, and a lot happened in that time. I feel like a pretty different person from when I moved in, and it's been a super great place to call home for all that time.

It makes me both nostalgically sad to look back at all that and know I'm moving on, and excitedly anticipatory and happy to look ahead at what might be coming next. Life is so full of surprises.

So, last year, our house underwent a huge pain in the butt period of chaos in order to get new windows installed and insulation blown into the walls. That sort of thing being what it was, the whole process finished toward the end of the cold season, so we only got a little taste of its effects before warmer weather moved in.

But now here we are in October, and the weather's cooling, and it's awesome. I love how noticeable the difference is. We haven't turned on our heat, and while we might have been holding out even if we didn't have the new insulation, we'd really feel like we're holding out. But as it is, our house is comfortable and cozy. This is awesome.

Those of you who are following miss_chance's lj know that our house is being insulated this week. We've been anticipating/dreading this for months, and it's finally here, and, as is often the case with such things, it's both worse than and not as bad as I'd feared. The house is in chaos (or, as I typoed last night and then kept, "on chaos", which is much like being on fire), I'm sneezing pretty constantly when I'm home from the dust, the cat is completely freaked out, and all of our furniture and other possessions are quarantined against interior walls and covered in plastic. It's a little weird. But it'll be over soon! And then we'll have a much better insulated house, which will make our lives better in a lot of ways.

Unfortunately, last night, the spot where I set my laptop for the night turned out to be a bad place for it, as the plastic it was sitting on was enclosing the heat vent into my room, and it therefore got flung off the shelf onto the floor around 3am. It appears, on a very quick check this morning, to still work, except for the DVD drive, which looks a little mangled and won't spit out the CD it's holding. I don't use that so much that it will be a huge problem if it turns out to be the only real problem, though. *fingers crossed*

Because it never rains but pours, this is also the week of my work's annual meeting, so the office is also in chaos of a different sort.

I think starting Friday afternoon around 3, I'm going to sleep for a week.

Things I like:

Waking up in the middle of the night to an amazing aroma, only to realize it's what I'm cooking in the crock pot overnight.

Going to bed early enough that when I wake up after a substantial stretch of sleep, I look at the clock and it's barely past my normal bedtime and I have the whole rest of the night's sleep ahead of me.

Being woken up by a phone call from a team member canceling the event for which I was going to have to get up and out the door early.

I'm so happy I'm going back to sleep!

Tell me about your fantasy kitchen! What features does it have? How's it laid out? Etc?

Home!

Now, sleep.