House makeover is daunting

Clearly the long tooth of winter needs to go the dentist and have a root canal. I will gladly pay the bill.

I hate to admit it but I’ve imagined slipping the dentist an extra fifty bucks to forgo Novocain when removing said long tooth, just to emphasize how much of a pain in the posterior Old Man Winter has been this year.

A few weeks ago the crusty old curmudgeon spawned a rebel in me that fought the hard fight against any further snow blowing of the driveway or shoveling of the back step, no matter how much snowfall arrived.

I threw down my mitts and stomped out a eight-inch wide donkey trail of a path—in “Yosemite Sam” fashion—across the top step of the back porch and made a zigzag off-road track down my driveway.

In my warped escapist little mind, I thought I could beat the season into submission if I didn’t play along.

That didn’t pan out too well when it snowed some 14 inches on March 21 and reminded me that I’d best stick to things I can control, like how much chocolate I eat.

I’m also learning lessons about what it means to go forward with a house renovation project and if I was ever meant to learn a lesson about what in fact I do not know, this project is rocking first place as the teacher in that classroom.

All I wanted was new house siding and new windows. Nail the new wood on all four sides and slap those windows in the squares on my house. 

It’s not rocket science. End of discussion.

Little did I know there are decisions, decisions, decisions and big words like building material quotes, unit prices, quantity and total prices that would have me working three more jobs just to pay down the debt.

Just this afternoon I became aware of my dry eye sockets staring blankly at three and four pages of product descriptions that included 15 lbs of plastic-top nails, reams of house wrap and soffit, staples, foam, and—channel runner? Sounds like a movie about a guy trying to escape from one country to another by gunning it over the floodway.

But I know it’s not because my price quote says I need 17 of the little suckers.

I’ve had to learn other daunting word decisions like casement, brick mould, jamb, and argon gas. All I wanted was a window. Just a window.

The whole experience has been akin to a hankering for cereal and then standing in the breakfast aisle at the grocery aghast at the city block-long choices at hand.

That new fangled organic hemp and crabapple mixture with chia seeds sounds interesting but I just want good ol’ “Cheerios,” thanks.

I am a “simple is as simple does” gal and yet I dream of this old house makeover and the molecular changes that are about to crank out around here, like the transformation of Cinderella’s rags.

It’s really going to be something else.

Open up your closet door

Technology, Entertainment, Design. In short, “TED.”

I’ve been a fan of TED for years. Some of the greatest lessons I’ve learned have been from TED, a global platform of speakers who share their ideas—be they funny, courageous, ingenious, inspiring, or informative—in talks of 18 minutes or less. 

There are more than 1700 such talks, in 100 different languages available to us online at www.ted.com.

Ash Beckham, an equality advocate, a tremendous spirit, and a gay woman, is a respected TED speaker. Recently she did a TED talk for nine minutes and 22 seconds about empathy and openness and about how “everyone at some point in their life has experienced hardship.”

We all have had hardships and we all have closets where we keep those hardships that we don’t want to talk about.

She believes that all a closet is is a hard conversation, and that being in and coming out of the closet is universal and scary and we hate it and yet we need to do it anyway.

“Your closet might be telling someone you love her for the first time, or telling someone that you’re pregnant, or telling someone you have cancer, or any of the other hard conversations we have throughout our lives,” says Beckham.

We all have a closet of hard talks we’d like to have with our bosses, our children, our partners, our friends, and a myriad of reasons why we think we cannot open the door—so we live looking through a keyhole and some of those hard conversations never get out and we never get free. 

I listened to that speech three or four times in a row and I was struck by how much it spoke to me about my own “hard conversation” closets, and how many times in my life I’ve hesitated to let them out and in the process been torn up inside for my keeping.

I’m a huge advocate of speaking one’s truth and yet I still struggle to follow through because of a host of self-imposed fears in my closet. You name the excuse; I’ve probably used it.

Beckham also reminded me about the importance of my listening to and respecting others who decide to share a hard conversation with me. And I have no right to judge what I think a hard conversation is not nor to critique the one who just shared what they think was the hardest thing.

A father I know had to tell his young daughter that her dog was soon going to die of cancer. When my kids were little I had to tell them their dad and I were getting a divorce. An old man had to admit he could no longer operate a car and had to give up his driver’s license. My aunt, some 50 years after the birth of a son, finally told her family she had had him and given him up for adoption and that they had just reunited.

Beckham is right. There is no harder, there’s just hard.

Maya Angelou says we are more alike than we are unalike. I believe that too.

Open your closet door and have those hard conversations. To thine own self be true.

The green, green grass of home is my dream

George Home once said, “Patience strengthens the spirit, sweetens the temper, stifles anger, extinguishes envy, subdues pride, bridles the tongue.”

Obviously he never spent a long, cold winter cooped up in this part of the country awaiting signs of spring. 

I don’t know about you, but my patience is pooped out and my disposition has run amuck. I’m sick of the cold and tired of defrosting the ends of my fingers each morning. 

My thoughts have started to freeze to the side of my brain in a slush pile of alphabet soup weighted down by too much snow, too much cold, too much, too much, too much.

If the mercury doesn’t pull up its socks pretty soon I’m going to lose it. Mother Nature and her sun need to get up off the couch and start pushing up tulips.

During one of my recent cold-induced fitful “Yosemite Sam” moments I blew into the hardware store and bought all the 10-pack bags of “Grabber” hand warmers.

It’s all come down to instant warmth everywhere and I’ve been jamming those little suckers into my mitts, my boots, and anywhere else on my person I can achieve a constant radiant heat that keeps the wind chill at bay.

The package says the average to maximum activated temperature of the little beauties is 135-156 F (57-69 C). They’re not kidding.

On one of the burdening -43C wind chill days, while trudging from the house to the barn with hand warmers duct taped in rows under my winter clothes to my long john underwear, I fell off the path and into the deep snow. 

As I lay there paralyzed like the kid in the huge snowsuit from the movie, “A Christmas Story,” my synthetic body heat armor melted the all the snow around me in a 12-inch radius. Sweet.

But despite the body toast I’m still in a “winter blues” funk.

And I’m talking to houseflies. I found myself encouraging one to get up and stretch its legs the other day because I figured it was a sign of spring if it was moving around.

That was okay until I found him rubbing his back legs together while pooping in my oatmeal.

I joined “Millie” the cat the other day in staring out the living room window into the “nothing”—a white frontier of snow where all I can see are the sunburned tips of my lovely evergreen trees all but hidden under the mountain of white stuff. 

“All I want to do is cut the grass,” I said to the cat, who gave me a flat stare that led me to believe I must be fevered to have said such a stupid thing given that there’s about three acres out there to cut. 

And it goes without saying that in about three months I will be complaining about having to do that job twice a week just to keep the grass at bay.

But right now I’d give up chocolate for at least a week just to sink my toes into a lawn full of too-tall green grass under a big old sunshine day where the temperature outside melted the butter on the kitchen counter. 

Ah, to dream.