tobermory's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- I'm a homo....ner! Woo Hoo! We finally closed on our house! It�s been a three-year battle, but finally the house and the Uncle Joe Stain* are all ours. Of course now the mortgage payments start so I can kiss my carefree, rentfree irresponsible spending habits goodbye and say hello to Mr. Budget and Mr. Property Taxes. Don�t worry though about me becoming a miserly unfun person with nothing to write about - we�ve been stockpiling money throughout the whole three years to go towards finishing the construction so it�s not like I�ll have to become the Little Matchgirl to make ends meet. *I�m not quite sure if I�ve mentioned the Uncle Joe Stain here. The previous owner of the house, my husband�s Great Uncle Joe, died in the house about ten years ago. Uncle Joe was a bit of a crazy old hermit � the kind of guy you see wandering up and down the alley picking up junk** and bringing it home. Joe didn�t really keep in contact too much with the rest of the family so it wasn�t odd that nobody had heard from him back in the summer of �95, but a concerned neighbor who hadn�t seen him in the alley in a few days called my in-laws. They called the police who broke in the house for a �wellness-check� and found Joe dead on the floor of what is now my bedroom. Now when a short, rotund elderly man expires in the middle of a heat wave in July in an un-air-conditioned house and no-one notices for, oh, maybe 4 or 5 days they tend to (gross-out alert) start to liquefy. If the floor they liquefy into hasn�t ever been polyurethaned they might say, �leave a stain�. Despite refinishing the floors and coating them with polyurethane the stain persists � there was a lot of Uncle Joe to soak into the floor. You might think that this would bother me, but I have chosen to, for the most part, ignore the stain and put a small prayer rug from IKEA over the spot so I don�t have to dwell on it. What I can�t see doesn�t gross me out. I will say that this is not a factoid that we�ll be mentioning to future renters when we move to the upstairs part of the house and rent out the first floor. While I am able to turn a blind eye others might not be so willing. ** When I say �junk� I mean junk. Not cool stuff or retro stuff or antiques or even usable stuff � just garbagey junk. And might I add that Uncle Joe was quite the hoarder of junk. Steve didn�t show me the �before� pictures of the house in fear that I would refuse to live there just on principal � the pictures that show a dirty house with an interior filled with what turned out to be six 40-yard dumpsters worth of crap and non-working small appliances. Steve said that he could have started The Museum of The History of the Vacuum Cleaner. If the Health Department had gotten wind of the conditions I�m sure the whole house would have been shut down on the grounds that it was a biohazard. We spent last weekend up in Wisconsin at the Little Sugar River Farm and it was heavenly. We usually go up for the week following Labor Day so it was a nice change to see the farm in the winter. There was a fresh snowfall and pristine unblemished whiteness spread out on all of the 20+ acres around the house. I brought a tote full of books of which I managed to finish two � The Mermaid Chair by Sue Monk Kidd (she wrote The Secret Life of Bees), and The Last Girls by Lee Smith. Both books were very �eh� so I left them on the bookshelf at the farm. I should have started Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke because it�s such a brick of a book that I�m now having trouble getting into it � reading two chapters every night before I drift off to sleep isn�t enough to really help me remember the cast of characters and the timeline of events. When I�ve tackled other long books � The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova or The Time Traveller�s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger � I�ve done it when I have had a block of time where I can devote whole days curled up on a chair just to read. But no � I wasted good time at the farm in front of a crackling wood stove on an oversized couch reading two crappy books. At least the surroundings were nice. 1:53 p.m. - 2005-12-14 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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