Tuesday, July 13

[gottawonder]

Today I am grateful for:

All the help we've had from our friends over the last two days. With their help, we were able to install all of the remaining windows in the addition, and the styrofoam insulation. These are some friends who we have worked back and forth at each other's place over the years (there is another couple that we do this with as well). There are just so many jobs that are easier with extra hands. Also, my husband is very knowledgeable, so he has no problem finding people willing to do this kind of work trading with.

I have to admit, I get frustrated with my night owl tendencies. I WANT to be more involved with the house building, but when the work crew gets here at 8 am, and I need to sleep until at least noon, I feel like I'm not doing my part to work on our own house. I end up feeling very frustrated at myself for this endless short-coming. It's not something I can just train myself out of, either. Over the years, I have often forced myself to get up early (to go to college), but the result is that I come home, almost black out for about three hours, and then stay up until 3 am anyhow. I can DO it, but I'm miserable all the time and never feel like I get any sleep. If I try to go to bed early just for one night, I lay awake all night, and then can't fall asleep if I know I have to get up. It's just better for me to sleep on my own, and let it do its thing. I don't recall ever in my adult life being able to go to sleep before midnight and sleep a normal night's sleep.

That said, I always feel like people probably don't believe that it's a real thing; I'm just lazy or something. So, I kind of hate it when my husband gets people over to help, and they start early in the day, and at some point I just show up and start helping but they've already been working for hours. It makes it seem like my husband isn't getting any help from me, so he has to ask other people to step up and do the work I should have been doing.

Even worse, the woman (it's her and her husband who come) has lately been acting like she's taking over as my husband's sidekick, making sure she's always standing beside him and working with him, leaving me to stand there with nothing to do except go get things from the shop as they need them. It actually pisses me right off, because it's either she's flirting with him, or she's making a point to show how much more capable she is than I am. She does come across as trying to prove that she's tough and so on. Thing is, she's forgetting that THE REST OF THE TIME, I'm the one working with my husband. Literally non-stop for the last 20 years I've been working on whatever house we're living in. It never stops. So, forgive me if my enthusiasm has flagged a bit.

She also forgets that I still work after they go home, finishing up whatever has to be done for the day, and often walking around collecting all the scraps of material and garbage, and putting all the tools away. THEN I still have to do all my NORMAL work in the garden and so on (to be fair, she has chores too).

Thing is, I am tired of always working on the house. I'm not kidding when I said I've been working on a house for 20 years. Our first house was a fixer-upper, and we spent seven years completely renovating just about every last bit of it. From wiring to plumbing to windows and siding and painting and bathrooms. All of it. I also did a ton of work landscaping.

Then we moved here, and worked on the trailer to make it livable. We gutted the bedroom down to the studs and re-did everything, tore out carpet in most of the rooms and put in laminate, re-painted most of it, replaced the fireplace surround, ended up tearing down two walls in one room and re-built them and replaced the windows, re-shingled it.

NOW we're working on this house, for which we built the basement and are building an addition which means we have the exterior AND interior to finish on the addition, and THEN we'll also have to insulate and side the whole house, replace windows, and when that's done, we can work inside moving the bathroom to a different room, finishing the basement, and then having to fix all the cracks in the plaster from moving this old lath and plaster house. I mean every room will need to be plastered and sanded and repainted. Every room.

We will also be doing the landscaping around the house on the bare dirt. We are working on making a brick pathway with mulch around it so I don't have to mow near the house.

Forgive me if I don't treat every day of working on the house as something sparkling with hope and promise and excitement. I guess I kind of feel like we've been doing this for 20 fucking years now, and there's no end in sight. If I start at 8 am or 1 pm, it hardly matters anymore. It's not like we're ever going to be done. Not ever. I imagine we will always be working on this house as long as we live here. Then, when it's time to move to town, we'll likely end up buying some ancient heap and work on THAT until we can't do it any more.

There once was a time when I actually believed that we were working on the house in order to be finished. Now I know that we were working on the house so we could work on the house some more.

So, I no longer really feel any great sense of urgency, like "OMG if we work hard this summer then it'll be done!". Nope. If we work hard this summer, then we'll work hard again on it next summer too. I'll likely work on it hard through the winter too.

So forgive me, neighbor wife, who I can feel judging me, if I don't roll out of bed every day at the crack of dawn to help my poor beleaguered husband. I no longer feel urgency. I no longer feel like there's an end goal. I no longer feel like sacrificing my sleep for an imagined advantage to be seen as real solid final results. Nope. It is now just a condition to be suffered. The never done house.

I still want to paint, and read, and work with my horses. I want to have a full night's sleep.

I still have yard work to do. I'm usually the one who mows, and looks after the garden, and does laundry and so on.

If my husband can round up some people to work on the house, and then he goes and helps them at some point, good. I deserve a fucking break.

I went to see River, and he is, as he has been for most of the summer, tired and not breathing great.