Bedroom Swapping

The last few weeks our house has looked like a packrat’s nest as we swapped bedrooms. When we moved into the house decades ago, we put The Child into the bedroom that overlooked the back yard and ourselves into the bedroom overlooking the sidewalk and street. The bedroom swap prompted a thorough cleaning of The Child’s room and a repainting of ours. During all of this painting and cleaning, the beds, the desks, the chairs, the dressers, the rugs, the paintings, the bulletin boards, and the tapestries had to be schlepped into the garage or the living room. Including The Books. About thirteen banker’s boxes filled to bursting with books have blocked off the fireplace mantel, and about thirteen more have crouched in front of the front window during this whole operation.

Whether it’s through childhood exposure to expansive family libraries, or a past life at the Library of Atlantis, I have a large number of books. It’s not a problem at all—I have managed to refrain from procuring a wheeled library shelf ladder for the purpose of reenacting Belle’s opening song from Disney’s Beauty and the Beast. It does, however, provide a friction point between Mark and myself, and sometimes I think it motivates Mark to outlive me for the sole purpose of disposing of all my books, books, books, books, books. Obviously, I will have to secure a fortune so that I can be interred in a mausoleum/library (pause to imagine writing workshops in “The Dead Writer’s Library”).

The Child’s old bedroom had been repainted when he left for college, so it was mostly a matter of dusting and scrubbing at the more curiously persistent blemishes to prepare it for the switch. Our bedroom still had the original paint job we did when we moved in.

Before we bought the house, the owners had painted the walls a color best described as sandstone meets khaki. I could never decide if it wanted to be dull yellow or olive drab—but what I could tell you was that it sucked all of the light out of the air; we toured the house on a rainy June day and it was like stepping into a dark, dismal, dingy cave.

I told Mark that we’d have to repaint because if the darkness was this bad on a rainy June day, I’d want to slit my wrists from February seasonal depression if we didn’t. We ended up choosing colors from a French Art Nouveau book of patterns that went with the oak floor: sunflower yellow for the walls, red-orange for the window trim, and a pine green for the door trim. Mark liked it for about a month, and then said that our house looked like, “The Honeybun Café.” I will admit that there were times when our home’s interior put me in mind of a high-end McDonald’s. Over the years, the living room, the kitchen, and the bathroom got repainted in much less saturated versions of yellow and green.

In our old bedroom—which we’re beginning to refer to as “The North Bedroom”—we replaced the pine green trim on the windows, doors, and bookshelves from twenty years ago with “aurora brown,” a chocolatey color, and the wall color with what looked like white when it first went on but turned out a light lemon color. (Afterward, when I compared the new yellow with an old patch, the old yellow looked dirty.) For some reason, the colors make the room look like an Edwardian room that Eliza Doolittle would practice her diction in. We’re thinking the Edwardian style will dictate some sort of motto in the corner above the windows: “memento mori” seems a little dark, but E.W. suggested “sic itur ad astra.” Now, of course, I want a sarcastic version of something like “live, laugh, love,” or maybe a PDQ Bach quote like, “Donna nobis pacem cum what mei”. Or maybe something about finding the grail in the Castle of Aaargh.

I really do want to get the books back onto the shelves. I used to have a string of white LEDs snaking along the front of the shelves, and I think I might re-affix them along the back of the shelves so that they provide a more indirect backlighting while avoiding a cantina aesthetic (they are currently strung over the living room window, which makes it look like we’re living in a department store diorama). After that, the trick for The North Bedroom will be to get a floor lamp, a writing desk that’s large enough to accommodate a workstation on it, and some more book shelves into the room without crowding it. I had a vague notion of moving a Stickley Chair from the over-furnished living room into The North Bedroom for a formal reading room feel, but it’s looking like both it and The Child’s bed won't fit. (I’ve always loved the Stickley Chair ever since I first encountered it in my Grandpa Burridge’s home; however, it really wants to be on a short dais, like the throne of Brian Rose’s father in the painting by Sir Edward Burne-Jones, which can be awkward.)

Our new bedroom (The South Bedroom?) has our bed and some minimal furniture in it: a small, medieval style chest for laundry, a narrow secretary desk for Mark to work from, and a glass mosaic night lamp. Mark is aiming for an Arts and Crafts/William Morris look for the room, so if we still have some money left after all of the painting, we’ll purchase a long, Morris-inspired tapestry to go along with a smaller one already hanging in the room. Mark has forbade me from placing glow-in-the-dark stars on the ceiling (although he is open to a projection of stars for the living room ceiling), and a (ironic) Cicely Mary Barker Cornflower Fairy tapestry has been excised from the room. The string of multi-color LEDs under the bed has, however, been approved and acts as a handy nightlight.

The final round in this game of House Tetris will be reorganizing the closets. We decided that we should each take one closet; Mark didn’t care which, and I’m thinking I’ll consolidate all of my clothes and costumes and props and files into the closet in our bedroom. Mark will combine his clothes and toiletries into the closet in The North Bedroom. This will free up a hallway linen closet.

I’m not entirely sure what will happen to the Old Burridge Chest of Drawers. It was sitting in a corner of our old bedroom. If I put it into a closet, it won’t exactly be the most efficient use of space. If I banish it to the garage, I’ll need to find a new place to put my personal altar and Portable Stonehenge. If I get rid of it entirely, it will make my ninety-year-old father sad (pause to wonder exactly why I still store a Scottish sporran and garb for a three-year-old me in the bottom drawer—I’m never going to fit into those clothes again).

Unfortunately, what is also falling out of all of this house reorganization is dedicated craft space and storage space for filing bills, correspondence, and old manuscripts. I suppose if we really wanted a room for crafting, writing, costuming, and archiving, we’d move or convert the garage into living space (considers old plans to extend the one-and-a-half-butt kitchen into the garage and give it a pantry).

I’m pretty sure Mark would chime in here, “or you could get rid of half of your books.”

When Your Husband's a Writer

Scene:  The living room. Mark is using a swifter.

Mark:  "There. I've finished sweeping and the floors feel less gritty."

John:  "Isn't that a metaphor for life." (Notices his shoes on the floor by the couch and goes to put them on the entry shoe rack.)

Mark (aghast):  "John!" (Steps in front of John and clasps him by the shoulders) "Look into my eyes."

John (trying to step around him): "But I need to pick up my ..."

Mark (holding him fast):  "Honey. Honey. Look at me: Sweeping and cleaning is an actual job we have to do to maintain the house. It's not a metaphor."

John:  "It's not a metaphor? Why can't it be both a metaphor and—"

Mark: "Oh my God, this explains so much."

August Reading

Goodness... there's been a bit of a gap since the last posting.  

The current news is that the water main between our house and the utility meeter has broken, so we're on day three without water in the house.  I'd noticed a damp patch in our front yard Sunday evening; by Monday morning it had turned into a seeping spring that moistened the sidewalk for about ten feet.  I suppose this is practice for when the Big Cascadia Earthquake hits (and, yes, the Earthquake Folks are right about how much water one goes through in a day).  So far the most troublesome aspect is making the toilet flush.  I'm not particularly looking forward to the bill, and hope that fixing the leak doesn't involve slicing through the front sidewalk.  

I'm been actively reading more.  I skimmed through Pete Buttigieg's "Shortest Way Home," and am currently reading Ronald Hutton's "The Witch: A History of Fear, from Ancient Times to the Present."  Buttigieg's book starts a slowly and didn't really pick up for me until about page 50, when he gets into college.  The slowest parts forme were the accounts and exposition blocks of the campaign trails.  The better parts were scenes with dialog or first meetings.  The best parts are usually at the end of chapters, where he shares an insight -- like his discovery of the blinders he had about Big Data.  I was hoping for more about his process of coming out and his relationship with the LGBTA community, but the book paints him more of a workaholic than someone who actually dates -- the way the book tells it, he was sort of busy and only until he was thirty did he realize that if he wanted a family he was going to have to do something about it.  

"The Witch," is slow starting.  I always want to go into Hutton's book like I remember going into "Triumph of the Moon":  turning the page to see the next "ancient wisdom's" genesis in the 1950's.  This is a longer overview, which starts by skipping lightly over ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, Persia,  Africa and Canaan, for views of magic and a working definition of what a witch is -- as opposed to what he calls a "service magician."  He's got five criteria: 

1. A Witch Causes Harm by Uncanny Means
2. A Witch is an Internal Threat to a Community
3. The Witch Works within a Tradition
4. The Witch is Evil
5. The Witch Can be Resisted

I suppose I should note that this is a historical definition used by the book to try to get a grip on cultures spanning millennia and from around the globe.  The first section concludes -- which is as far in the book as I've gotten -- with the differences between shamanism and shamanistic practices and witchcraft.  I suppose it would be a much thicker book otherwise, but I do wish he had spent more time on actual artifacts like curse tablets and magical bowls and The Burney Relief (in the case of the Relief, there was some question as to its authenticity and provenance, which in turn has bearing on the question of Lilith as spirit, demon, or goddess).  

Anyway, skimming ahead, it looks like he touches on English fairy lore in later chapters, so that looks interesting.  

Everything And The Kitchen Sink

The last week has been a quiet one; we've been a little under the weather here, with low activity levels.

Also, I had to replace the ten-year-old water faucet in our kitchen, which required multiple trips to multiple hardware store to scope out replacement parts, purchase a new faucet, and finally obtain a massive, three-foot-long water-valve key to turn the water off to our house.  I seem to recall a lot of swearing.  On the plus side:  we can use the sink without a mini-jet of water coming out of faucet; and I now have a tool that will allow me to pose, Poseidon like, shirtless and with one foot resting on a writing mass of pipes, waterlines, and wrenches.

Mark continued to conduct quests to Delta Ponds in order to see beavers.  The latest trip, early on Saturday morning (2/8), the water in the side-chanells was down, and there were no beavers to be seen.  I guess without the extra foot or three of water gone, they were less inclined to corpuscular morning activity (or else they were exhausted from a previous evening's worth of cambium gnawing).

We did come across a nonchalant heron stalking fish.

On the craft front, I came across a star design set in an octagonal grid system, and riffed off of it.  Stars, with their pentagonal symmetry, are tricky to work with, mostly because 60 degrees, 45 degrees, 90 degrees, and 72 degrees come together awkwardly in two dimensions.

What I've discovered is that pinching or opening the angle of the stars' points is a tremendous aid to cleaner designs when distributing stars around a regular polygon, like an octagon or a hexagon.  Specifically, if you trim a 45 degree angle off of an octagon, duplicated the angle five times and rotate it 72 degrees into a star, the resulting stars will project octagon-friendly grids more readily than a regular star.  Also, you can work with how the exterior and interior angles suggest zig-zags in lines for designs that look tangled on purpose instead of recursive snarls.

The star design on the left is using stars with points made with 45 degree angles, which makes for a more orthogonal design; the similar star design on the right uses points with 60 degrees, so hexagons look more regular.

Also on the craft front, I decorated an Altoids tin with a Valentine's design.  At least, it was supposed to be suggestive of Valentine's.  I was attempting to make two raptors, back-to-back, into a heart shape.  I did this all by hand instead of using the plotter-cutter, and got (more or less) identical shapes by tracing hard over my original design over colored cardstock.  I'm not sure if the heart shape is coming out or not; the end product has a pareidolia effect going.  Mark looked at the finished product and said they looked like parrots.  The background I chose gave the whole thing an Arts And Crafts feel, so I'm pleased about that.

On the writing front:  going slowly, but I did manage to submit a short story.  Yay.

On the gym front, I went last Monday for a Push-Pull Routine, which felt like running through molasses.  I was fighting off some kind of stomach bug.  I felt too run-down to go Wednesday.  Because of Thursday's plumbing adventures, I had pulled something in my hands that left my left thumb particularly pained when I grasped things, so I wanted to give my hands a rest Friday.   And Saturday.   And Sunday.

Tuesday Night Dreams

Tuesday night was a rough night for sleeping, and I woke up multiple times in the night.

The first dream was pure id wish fulfillment (OMG!).

In the second dream, I was trying to get home.  Home was a dream-splice of the current house, but it was located at "The Motel Six", the house I lived in Portland when I was going to Reed.  The dream was set in a kind of video-game world, and I was watching myself in a kind of Minecraft/Second Life way.  Mark was in the dream, and I think we were simultaneously in-world and watching at the same computer.  The world was glitchy, though, and every few minutes I'd walk across a buggy area, the system would lag, and then the screen would jump, my avatar would be hanging in black while the landscape flickered out and I'd end up re-mapped to a new section of the world.  I remember climbing up the hill from Reed along Knight street or something and then getting booted over to an underground stone cathedral.  When I tried to fly out of the cave, I hit another glitch-portal and wound up someplace new.

In the third dream, I was in my house, I think.  Only it was an apartment, and it might have been in New York.  It was the room in the southwest corner of our house.  The walls were covered with corrugated cardboard from floor to ceiling, which was slowly pulling away and revealing the real, bright yellow walls underneath.  (It took me a few hours of waking time to recall how many of Remedios Varo's paintings have rooms like this... Energía cósmica and Armonía seem to be closest to what I dreamed, only the room in my dream was much lighter and cleaner.)