Generation Exhausted

Slightly off-kilter

They say that children thrive on routine, but I seem to be having a harder time than they are adjusting to life after the Big Flood. For someone who could give up having towels folded the "right" way, you'd think I could cope with life being slightly out of sync lately. But ever since December the First, my days have felt like a record album that's got a skip in it. (raise your hand if you remember record albums)

My office has been put back together for a couple of weeks now, but I've been having trouble finding my productivity groove. I'm back to aimless wandering - into the office, back out again, picking up a book, putting it down, idly channel-surfing, then turning the TV off in exasperation. It's only been in the last few days that I've nailed down the problem.

Remember that episode of Friends where Chandler cleans the apartment and then frantically puts things back in place so Monica won't find out? Everything looks exactly as it did, and then they sit down on the couch, go to put their feet on the coffee table and it's just that much too far away? It's the kind of thing that mocks the absurdity of needing things just so, but it's the root of my discontent.

My desk is four inches too far to the right.

I had no idea that I was such a creature of habit. I'm not a neurotically organized person - I don't walk into my living room and automatically register that the couch pillows are at the wrong angle. I don't have a breakdown when I discover that someone put the hand mixer away in the wrong kitchen drawer. And if I happen to leave my shoes in a different place than usual, well, I can still find them.

But this desk thing is making me crazy. Apparently, my work space is more particular than I thought.

I'm also not competely happy with the replacement rug I put in here. I went with a slightly brighter colour -a nice green that I thought would liven up the basement atmosphere. But this shade shows off every speck of lint and dust. I also put the office furniture back before the rug had a chance to "settle" and there's a slight hump in the middle that interferes with the way my chair rolls back and forth.

My pen and notebook are not yet sitting consistently where they always have, and the cordless phone dock is still upstairs in our bedroom. The fax machine feels farther away because of where my desk has landed, and the stand my printer is sitting on feels too low to the ground.

Would you believe that I used to thrive on rearranging the living room every chance I got? Maybe it's age. Or maybe it's just the cosmos' way of telling me that I need to be more receptive to change. In any case, I'm a mess. So this week's goal is to once again dismantle my office and put it back together properly. Hopefully then, I'll be able to get back on track.

One of the best things about living in Southwestern Ontario

Youngest (staring at the new scooter Santa brought): It's too bad I have to wait for spring to ride it.

Me: Who says? There's no snow.

Youngest: Really?

View from my front window: Youngest racing up and down the sidewalk on her new scooter, wearing coat, boots and pajamas. Could there be a better way to spend Christmas morning?

On the flip side, it rained more this afternoon and evening. I am so tired of rain.

Hope your holiday was happy!

Is that reindeer I hear?

T’was the night before Christmas,

And all through the house

We’d barely unpacked,

From our visit to the Mouse

For four days and nights,

We rushed like the wind

Shopping and wrapping,

And settling back in

We made many lists,

And checked things off with glee

Vacuumed and dusted,

Even set up the tree

Now everything’s done,

And Santa draws near

We’re ready just in time,

Christmas, it’s here

To all we hold dear,

Our friends near and far

Best wishes to you,

Wherever you are

May your holidays be happy,

Your days filled with cheer

May your blessings be plenty

In the coming New Year

Merry Christmas everyone!

I've been playing Parcheesi in Morocco**

Have just returned from the Happiest Place On Earth, where once again we attempted to "conquer" Disney. How telling is it that the washing machine is running before the suitcases are even completely unpacked?

Thanks to the Lady of WilsonWorld, the house is still standing, the fish are not dead, and a wonderful pile of Christmas cards was waiting in the collection of mail on the table. We are not rested, (are you kidding? It was DISNEY!) but we are rejuvenated. Regular blogging will return as soon as possible, complete with tales from our trip.

**You'll have to stay tuned to decipher the title, as it was a major theme of our trip. It's good to be home!

Woof

I'm beginning to suspect that I may have a Pavlovian response to rain for the rest of my life. Yesterday, it rained and rained, and I ran up and down the stairs numerous times to make sure the basement wasn't underwater again.

It wasn't.

I am easily scarred by these life events. Thirteen years ago, my car engine blew on the 401, in the dark. It was an eleven-year-old Cutlass, so it was due to die, but still. Two years later, with the same friend as my passenger, driving a two-year-old Aerostar, the same thing happened. On the 401. Total fluke.

It wasn't until last year that I could drive on the 401 again without shaking. And I still watch my gauges like a hawk and panic over every little sound the car makes.

The ruined sub-floor has now been rebuilt and carpet comes next week - whoohoo!

Some time in the next few days, those on my Christmas card list will get a Christmas card from me. Please accept my apologies for the absence of the Haggert Holiday Herald. I love, love, LOVE doing the Christmas letter, but with the flood and everything, trying to put it together this year would have driven me over the edge. We're crammed in here cheek by jowl and even the house decorations are going to be seriously scaled back this year.

It's stopped raining for now - maybe I'll relax when we finally have snow. Then I won't have to be nervous until the Big Melt. (knock wood)

Well, that's a pretty good day

I've been planning a trip to Chapters for a few weeks now. My mom got one of those postcards in the mail, you know, the "magic" gift cards that might be worth $1000, but you can't find out until you're at the register, buying $50 or more worth of books? And she gave it to me.

So, we've been waiting until our book-buying needs were sure to reach $50. And tonight was the big Chapters trip. I spent an hour browsing, approving the kids' choices, and then arrived at the register with my $57 worth of books.

Lo and behold, the magic card wasn't worth $1000. But it wasn't worth the $5 that you're virtually guaranteed either. It was worth $100! So I got the $43 balance on a gift card to spend later and today's purchases cost me nothing.

Good deal.

I'm also back in my office, typing away in my dry-as-the-Sahara basement. It feels good to be here, although I still have some furniture replacing to do. However, being back in my own element is good, and better yet, the dining room table is useable again. Tomorrow, hopefully, the carpenters come to work on the bedroom floor. Poor Oldest is definitely feeling the strain of being without a room of her own.

Who da thunk?

Reading material has become a serious issue around here. 95% of the books from the home library are currently residing in boxes in my dad's basement while the home library, you know, dries out. (5% percent of the books drowned - 100% of the shelving had to be scrapped) In other words, the books? They are not handy. Not at all.

And while a trip to Chapters is certainly in the near future, it's not in the present, so...the big girls and I are having a hard time meeting our reading needs.

So, even though my basement flood drowned Kim's signed copy of Maybe Baby, she let me borrow a book. Actually, Mr. WilsonWorld let me borrow a book, and later, Kim said it was okay. And because Kim's library is different than mine, the first book I could find that I thought might appeal was Misery, by Stephen King.

Guess what? Other than On Writing, which all writers are required by law to read, I've never read anything by Stephen King before. Ok, maybe a few columns he's written here and there, but none of his books.

Ever. Honest.

I picked Misery because I liked the movie and I liked the play, and it's one of the few Stephen King books-made-into-movies that I actually liked. So Misery came home with me.

It's good. It's WAY better than the movie, and I'm especially unsettled by the way King is able to express some of the writer's inner thoughts about writing, which makes sense, because King is, after all, a writer, so who better, but I'M a writer, and I can't imagine expressing some of those thoughts so perfectly. He's able to spend pages mapping out the twists and turns of a writer's thought processes, describing landmarks that are so familiar yet indescribable to me.

I usually settle for, "I'm a bit nutty, get over it."

So, even though I knew that King was a good writer, now I know that King is a good writer that I can READ, which are two entirely different thngs. And I may continue on exploring more of his work.

Other Kim would be so proud.

I also found a copy of Black and Blue by Anna Quindlen, another writer whose non-fiction I've enjoyed but had never tried her fiction. It was also excellent.

I'm motivated to try to widen my literary circle a bit, check out some books I may have overlooked. Maybe this is the first of the silver linings to be found in the cloud that brought the rain into my basement.

Who knew?

Displaced

Would you believe that for the first two years of my online life I connected to the Internets from the comfort of my dining room? From this space I sold my first essays, sent my first article pitches, did my first interviews, got my first big contracts. Joined my first email lists, participated in my first chats, made my first "pretend friends" as my hubby likes to call 'em. And, even more unbelieveable, I did it all on dial-up.

I can't believe it either. I'm here at the keyboard, once again in my dining room, and I feel like I'm sitting in someone else's chair. The light feels wrong, the background sound doesn't fit, and I'm making typo after typo. Usually when I'm working the phone I pace around the basement - up here on the main floor my pacing seems to annoy people.

Ah yes, the people. These wonderful people I call my husband and children. Having lost 30% of our living space due to the flood - well, let's just say that the people seem to be everywhere I go. Plus, the stuff that was in that 30% of living space? Well, if it wasn't drowned, chances are it's also been crammed into the remaining 70% of space we're sharing.

And it's not that I don't, you know, love the people, of course I do. And it's good to spend time together as a family. We're just all feeling very...close...these days.

Oldest and I are like men without countries. We wander around the house, looking for that spot of absolute own-ness that we've gotten used to over the last couple of years. And I know the rest of them - hubby, Middle and Youngest - are also feeling it, as their spaces are the ones being invaded.

I knew, way back when, that having a "room of one's own" was important. I just didn't know HOW important, and how spoiled I'd gotten in the having of it.

The cleanup continues.  At least I've got my own computer set up again, complete with my letter-less keyboard. However, since my dining room has once again become command central, we're reduced to eating dinner on the couch.  And, with the sound of industrial dehumidifiers and fans running day and night, it is, as my husband remarked today, "Like living in an airport."

On the upside, today I finally got to take that nap.

Testing

I wrote a whole post and then was denied access. This is only a test.

Did I pass?

Today was the day I was going to take a nap

I've been working non-stop for over a week, as two project deadlines crashed into each other. I haven't blogged, I haven't been reading many blogs, and Nano became a mere illusion sometime last week. The laundry has been piling up, I haven't even STARTED the Christmas cards, and I even missed the first half of this week's episodes of the Gilmore Girls and Jericho. I didn't get to see The New Adventures Of Old Christine at all. My days have been starting pre-9 a.m. and ending after 1 a.m.

But all that was going to change today. Two days ago, I even said to hubby, "On Friday - Friday, I will take a nap." Last night, as I worked away at the last stages of Project B, I explained to hubby that the reason I was sitting in the dining room with the new-to-me Mac was because my office was a disaster. "Tomorrow - tomorrow, I will start cleaning the office."

Today, I was going to take a nap. Today, I was going to go to Parent-Teacher Interviews up at the elementary school. (even scored the first time slot of the day) Today, I was going to get the kids to spend their P.D. Day folding laundry. Today, I was going to do that odd combination of lots of things combined with nothing at all.

Ha.

At 9:10 this morning, showered, dressed, and ready for the PT Interview, I went down to my office to boot the computer and make a quick phone call before leaving for the school. I went down the basement stairs and...

Oh. My. God.

Water. WATER. Three inches deep or more, from one end of the basement to the other. My phone book, the one I rest my feet on while I sit at my desk, was floating. My power bar was making a "zzz zzz zz" sound.

Now, we've had a lot of rain. A LOT of rain. But seeing all that rain IN YOUR BASEMENT is a little bit unsettling.

Contacting the insurance company, moving everything we could to the first floor, taking inventory of our damaged goods and pumping has taken the entire day. God bless the insurance company - one call, and they've run the show since then, far more efficiently that I could ever imagine. By this evening, big dehumidifiers and fans were running and the basement had been disinfected. The bedroom floor and some drywall will need to be replaced, the carpet is already en route to the dump, and I'm trying to recreate my office in the dining room. Thank heaven the computers were all well above the water line, so where to work has become a bigger problem than how to work.

However, life is a little upside down, and is likely to be for some while. My wireless connection is acting up, so I'm relying on hubby's sharing his 'puter 'till I'm all set up. Plus, you know, there's the fact that the contents of the basement are now jammed into every nook and cranny of the first floor, plus a lot of stuff is being stored at neighbours' houses.

And God bless the neighbours. They hauled furniture, they brought bins for storing and carrying, they watched Little One and fed her dinner.

So, the only thing I got done was the cleaning the office part, but it's not quite what I had in mind. Instead of piles of files in my office, I now have piles of files in my bedroom.

Dear Lani -

If you're reading, or maybe someone could let you know - last year, Kim won a signed copy of Maybe Baby from Literary Chicks. She loaned it to me, because, you know, we do that. And then Oldest was reading it. And, well, you know teenagers and their methods of "organization". Oldest had left Maybe Baby on her bedroom floor.

Which as of nine this morning was underwater.

So Kim's signed copy of Maybe Baby got ruined and it's ALL MY FAULT. And yet Kim has been a doll, making as many trips up and down my stairs to empty my basement as I did. And she didn't even yell at me when I forlornly held out the ruined copy of Maybe Baby.

So, if it's at all possible, could you send Kimmy a new copy with your lovely signature? And I promise I won't let her loan it to me again, even though it's one of the funniest books I've ever read.

Oldest's Math text book was also destroyed, but we're not nearly as torn up about that.

We've lost many books, actually, because the library was in the basement, but it's the signed ones that bother me most. We're still cataloguing. And I lost a stack of my published clips that was on a bottom shelf, and clothes, and shoes, and...today did not turn out to be anything like I thought it was going to be.

And just to show all my faithful readers that I have no sense of rational perspective at all, none of this is the most annoying thing that happened to day.

Several years ago, Linda and I publicly mused about inventing QWERTY gloves. You see, we both work in spaces that tend to be incredibly cold in the winter, and we surmised that writer-ly types would appreciate specially modified gloves that would allow us to type and stay warm at the same time.

When we broached our genius idea, the husbands looked at us like we'd gone 'round the bend. Friends looked at us gravely, nodded and said, "Mmmm hmmmm." And, because we are both procrastinators, we never really went beyond the "wouldn't that be cool?" stage of development, and so we never invented QWERTY gloves.

But guess what? Somebody else did.

They look cool and I wouldn't mind Santa bringing me a pair. Although I'd be just as happy with a dry office.

P.S. For the first time EVER, I missed a Parent-Teacher Interview at the elementary school.