It’s winter somewhere

“If nothing is straight, then nothing’s really crooked, either.”

April 2025

The first sunny, warm days of spring are here. Trees are blooming. Grass is getting greener every day.

Queue the existential dread, right?

Every spring, I get this feeling… like something is wrong.

Don’t get me wrong, it isn’t as if I don’t like flowers or the feeling of sun on my uncovered skin.

But that only makes it worse that I feel so strange.

So much sadness in the world, and yet the flowers still bloom around it. It makes me wonder if I deserve them. They’d be just as beautiful without me, I’m sure of it.

The world seems fragile at its peak, to think that death will touch the petals on the daffodils in not too long. But really, it’s my own fragility that I’m forced to face. The flowers will keep on shining long after I’m gone.

There’s probably more simple triggers. Having to kill the first invasive jumping worm hatchlings. Experiencing the first egotistical contractor of the season, watching him threaten my house with a giant drill. Gotta widen that hole there. BARF. Just a routine install of some new internet line, a perfect opportunity to do some unnecessary damage, cracking a shingle immediately after bragging about how much he didn’t care about the matter, and refusing to use an existing screw hole already in the vicinity.

I have been using the extra daylight well. If I can’t stall the nervous energy, I can at least harness it to tackle the undone things in my life.

I was cleaning Sunday, sorting screws into my Dewalt “small parts organizer”, gathering things into a donation box, dismantling some dolls and making plans to harvest their decorative parts for my crochet critters. I even got this wonderful idea to turn their bodies into headless horsewomen, with crocheted pumpkin heads. And I got some fall colored blanket yarn at Joann’s. RIP Joann.

SEE—No matter what, I’m still thinking about fall.

I will admit, though, there’s one sweet thing about spring that feels pure in its joy: trash picking.

8:30pm at night, walking into the sunset on a suburban street, a damp chilly breeze penetrating your sweatshirt, you think maybe it’s time to turn back, feed your cats and settle in for the night. As you make a turn at a cross street, something on the curb catches your eye from afar, about six houses in from the intersection where you’re standing. You can tell it’s wooden, a tangle of things piled on top of each other. You must get closer. First it’s four legs of a chair spread out towards the sky. Then it’s five more of them, lying on their sides, entangled in a game of Twister on the grass. Underneath it all, a wood table, lying on its back. Two leaves are setting against a large tree.

My breath caught in my throat, and I immediately looked around for my competition. Just some sleepy dog walkers passing by—nothing too intimidating.

I grabbed two chairs to carry back with me, hanging their carved wood backs off of my shoulders. My biceps burned after clutching them for a good half mile, my traps ached.

To my car. I think the rest can fit.

I zoom over, putting the back seats down.

The chairs were easy. But it was lonely, trying to maneuver the table. Wondering who may be getting a view from the orange illuminated windows lining the street around me. Is anyone going to take pity on me and offer to help?

My mind shuffled through potential contacts, remembered all the injuries and illnesses my compatriots were battling at the time. Felt my own social fissures bleed, all the people who would be great to call, if only we were still in touch, if only they didn’t alienate our friendship, if only I wasn’t holding a grudge.

Well, I guess this is one way to spend a Friday.

I got the legs taken off with the wrench I keep in my car. I was even able to lift the top slightly, move it off of the grass curb. But I learned that the sliding mechanism works flawlessly, watching one half of the table slide closer to the pavement every inch I pulled the entire thing towards my hatch.

Eventually, someone pulled into the driveway of the house it was set in front of. I waved as he exited his car, carrying to-go food in a bag.

Luckily, he responded to the call for help. We spared the tabletop any more scratches against the ground, got it situated nicely, the chairs stacked on top.

The hatch wouldn’t close, but that’s why I keep rope in the car.

A girl’s gotta be prepared, right?

See DIY Pics here: Instagram

Check out June’s DIY journey in my novel.

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Actually, I lied

“If nothing is straight, then nothing’s really crooked, either.”

March 2025

At the end of my last post, I was lying.

I don’t like DIY—whatever that means. From climbing into the depths of some computer algorithm, it seems to mean spending a lot of time making unnecessary cosmetic alterations to things, speeding it up to make it seem like it only took three seconds.

Smiling while the world burns around you.

I only said I liked it because that’s what girls are supposed to do—happily, with no effort at all.

My enthusiasm was fake. I don’t want to contribute to the DIY anthem of making things seem way easier than they are, showing off how great my end result is without any practical instruction attached, hiding the guts of my house behind shiny things. Wasting plywood and paint.

The last four years have been brutal for me; to put it any other way would be a lie.

I get the highs of finishing things, and the immediate hangover of realizing how much is left to do: for my book, and my house.

I’ve got mountains of responsibility on my shoulders.

But I’m determined to gain more independence from this horrible feeling of living an unfinished life. I want my house to be in proper working order, and I want my book to find a loving home. Those each will probably require at least another year or two.

I’ll post about my projects, but I’m not going to waste time pretending to be someone I’m not.

I’ve been thinking a lot about electricity lately. I find it really fascinating, like a high stakes deductive logic puzzle. I might write an essay about that.

Oh, and I got my shower rod hanging from the ceiling. Maybe I’ll share a pic about that soon, and the wall scanner I used to help find the joists in the plaster.

It isn’t all that pretty.

See DIY Pics here: Instagram

Check out June’s DIY journey in my novel.

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But Sir, Did You Stir the Paint?

“If nothing is straight, then nothing’s really crooked, either.”

March 2025

Have you ever asked yourself: Did that man stir the paint?

No? Well, consider yourself lucky, my friend. Consider yourself lucky that you haven’t had to watch him walk around your green yard, splashing a watery chemical pigment onto the low growing thyme and clover with every shimmy of his hips.

In 2021, I bought this house, thinking to myself: I can call a contractor for help. Can’t I?

I was naive.

He didn’t stir the paint. After months of consultation with the person in charge of this 100+ year old construction company, and going to the trouble of having it added to the actual contract that “new boards will be painted prior to installation”, he didn’t stir the paint.

The crew did indeed bring the paint—I know so because they charged me for it, the entire unnecessarily large gallon. And they did slop some watery mess onto the windowsill boards, whatever that stuff at the top of an unstirred can of paint is. It somewhat covered the gobs of caulking lathered directly onto the wood seams like frosting.

I suppose it was too much to ask: having boards primed properly before installation and neatly caulked afterwards.

This wasn’t the only shortcoming of the enterprise—I’ll let your imagination run wild. And it certainly isn’t the only contractor experience gone awry in the last four years. Wiser and calmer 2024-me thought if I hired a company that is about as old as my house, I might have more luck than some handyman found on NextDoor, or yet another disappointing word-of-mouth. And I didn’t even ask for anything that complicated: gutters, wood repairs. It was supposed to be a test, a low risk assessment of their skills before trusting them with other parts of my house.

But, try as I might, I was foiled by my own plan.

It became quickly apparent that we weren’t on the same page about what it means to do something “properly”. And it became a woefully expensive test once they were in too deep for me to bail. So deep that nobody would come back and start where they left off, but with enough redeeming qualities that it slid into the realm of something I’m legally required to pay for.

I learned the hard way that even the simplest jobs, like securing a gutter hanger onto my roof, can be deeply destructive.

I don’t know what went wrong. I thought I did everything right.

The leader of the enterprise was amiable when we met to sign papers on my kitchen counter. Yes, he did spell a number of things wrong, and forget negatives in important places (“will be installed in a neat manor with jagged edges”). But he listened to me. He made a few visits to inspect the premises and discuss the needed repairs. We drew a picture to agree on how the aluminum would cover the parts of the fascia behind the gutters, so that it would look neat at the edges. He didn’t pressure me to opt for a whole house vinyl wrap and acknowledged the advantages of cement shingle siding.

And he agreed that the boards would be primed prior to installation…he insisted…

Here’s where my movie would cut to the image of me crying and breaking out into stress hives on an otherwise quiet Saturday morning.

The entire experience registered more like a traumatic event than a business transaction. And it lingered on like one, for months after it should have ended.

I did pay in late fall for the work that was done, so technically, it is over. But it was too scarring to even let out a sigh of relief. And there’s reminders of them around every corner.

I’ve been distracting myself by moving ahead with other projects. The last four years of this haven’t been pretty, but I’ve done a lot of important upgrades, so I can focus on some pretty stuff.

Big moves are being made in my first floor apartment, which was occupied when I bought the place. It’s been vacant for just under a year now—except for the boxes of linoleum floating floor tiles that needed to be installed last July and an array of paint samples. I’m currently figuring out how to do a pretty metal drop ceiling, and picking paint colors for the kitchen cabinets.

And don’t worry: there’s still plenty of gore to come, and many more stories to tell, plus tips and tricks.

I’ll mostly be doing this alone, and I won’t be using an entire garage full of power tools. I’m more of a tool minimalist, and I like reusing things.

My design mantra is: Minimal Moves, Maximal Impact.

Some upcoming projects are: dramatic dark closet remodels, trash-picked furniture staging, hanging my shower curtain rod from the ceiling, installing 1100sf of Marmoleum Cinch Loc flooring, kitchen plant shelf, wallpapering my fridge, painting an accent wall on my sunporch, replacing a thermometer in a vintage Hotpoint oven, painting kitchen cabinets mint green (probably), raspberry pruning, invasive worm hunting, installing metal drop ceiling tiles… AND MORE!

Stay tuned, folks, and subscribe below for updates.

See DIY Pics here: Instagram

Check out June’s DIY journey in my novel.

For email updates on new blog content, sign up at substack.