Biscuit

This is wee Biscuit, the orange tabby cat with whom I've shared my small apartment for the past 3 years. I've had him since he was 4 weeks old, so he is a dedicated mummy's boy. Here, he's hiding in his favorite surveillance spot on the little roof that sits adjacent to my balcony. From here, he chases bugs, amuses magpies and neighbours, plays hard-to-get with me, chases falling leaves, enjoys the morning sun, and pretends not to hear when I call. He is innocently afraid of "outside" but the balcony is his little kingdom.

Once we move to our new house, he'll be confused and lost but hopefully will adapt to the new space and freedom. We even have a cat door in the basement, which will be like his own apartment if he likes. And maybe he and David will resolve their conflicts over territory, which have been poorly negotiated in this small space. Maybe some day they will love each other like I love them. Until then...

Happy Birthday David, Pottery & Other Loose Bits

Headaches have been okay this week, despite feeling exhausted after a long international conference my company hosted this week, and all the house-buying bureaucracy. I've sorta forgotten to take my elavil several nights in a row, so at bedtime I would take 10-20mg. Much easier to wake up in the morning, but I can feel the headaches waiting to roar.

I started my pottery class this morning at 9:30am. It was amazing - held at a wonderful community arts center devoted to clay. It's housed in an old school, so there are wonderful great windows and the space is light and airy and historical and there are tons of wheels and kilns and a "member's only" studio, where once you get good, you can buy time. Bob is teaching me again. He's a great older potter who wears woolly sweaters and teaches by "feel". My engineer brain had difficulty with this last time (about 2 yrs ago at my last class), but this time, I realize I finally have the "feel" for the clay he was talking about. If not "the" feel, at least some feel. I am beginning to understand why it moves as it does, what my fingers need to really do. The process all came back to me. My pots still have issues and centering is still a challenge, but I felt quite relaxed this morning, content to have wet clay in my hands, and being careful not to judge myself. This time, I am striving to make some decent mugs. It takes hours and hours over years and years to get good at this. My former 2 classes were at the Gardiner Ceramic Art Museum, a wickedly great museum in Toronto, where I was taught by a lady from Rhodes who was very rule-based and methodical. Bob's organic approach is a little more challenging, but let me tell you, it is so bloody nice to get out of my brain for a while.

Then I came home and slept all afternoon and now have a killer headache. My body is finally giving up after the week of late nights and heavy days. David is at a football game this afternoon, watching his favorite team kick Toronto's butt, or he hopes. Tonight, I'm making linguine with clam sauce for dinner. It's the only pasta dish (other than my puttanesca) that he will eat. I, on the other hand, adore pasta. So it will be a rare treat for both of us since we don't have it often.

Anyway, just some thoughts. My arms are aching from the wheel. And I fell in the shower yesterday and my ribs are really aching after I crashed straight onto my side. Oww. I need a rest, but tomorrow will be busy with David's birthday fetes. We're meeting for lunch at his Grandma's at 11am, where we'll visit some of the family including his Mom and brother Steve. Later that night, we're seeing his Dad, who is in town, for dinner. I haven't met his Dad yet, so it will be interesting and fun and weird after being with David for almost 2 years and not having met his papa.

I made a birthday cake for David Thursday night (chocolate layer with chocolate butter cream) and it was killer good. Maybe we will take some to Grandma's tomorrow for sampling. The recipe was from Oprah, from some guy who has a chocolate shop in Manhattan. Definitely the best layer cake and frosting I've ever made. I made a ganache last year, but the butter frosting is obscenely, decadently leagues above, if less sophisticated. If you want the recipe, it is one damned good chocolate cake. In theory, I am the baker and David's the cook, but in reality, I bake about 5 times a year.

Anyway, enough scattered musings. Headache is settling to a low hum. The window is open, letting in the autumn air, Bruce Springsteen is on the stereo, Biscuit is running around happy that mummy is up.

I am tired but life is good. Happy Birthday David, my love!! You're my hero and my well-spring of contentment...have a wonderful day love.

Our New House

On Sunday night, David and I bought a new house in a lovely Calgary neighborhood. We did the home inspection today and the results were excellent. It is a meticulously cared-for house. We take possession Dec.1, provided that we finalize our mortgage. No problems foreseen as we were pre-approved for a higher price already.

Here are a couple of early photos. Owned by an older couple with a penchant for lovely antiques (good), pink (bad), and flowers (nice in the garden, not so nice on wallpaper). It even has a potting shed, a mayday tree (I think), a gorgeous garden with many plants we have yet to ID, lovely dark hardwood floors, a library (wood panelling, fireplace), and about a dozen other rooms. A great improvement over my 800ft2 condo. Don't know how I feel about making a bigger environmental footprint after all my years of living in sensible, small spaces. But hey, I can use some storage. : )

Next step...a lawyer to seal the deal, booking movers, buying a lot of decorating magazines. We are going to change the decor to a more quietly soothing, earthy theme.

A Brief Blogging Hiatus & Headache Update

As you may have noticed, I've taken a wee holiday from blogging! There's simply too much on the go with our house hunt and my engineering workload these days. Also, I'm trying (ever-so-hard) to get back to the gym on a regular basis, which at this point is once every week or so. Not very good progress, I'm afraid.

My headaches have been up and down. I don't pay much attention to them any more. I'm utterly bored with the topic of head pain. They oscillate between a 2 and an 8 most days, and I get very few days of relief. I am overdoing things and I need to get more sleep.

The new fitness regime (my once-a-week work outs) worsens my headaches. This is eternally frustrating. I'm accustomed to exertion headaches, which I often get simply from walking home from work most days. But the day after a workout with weights, the pain is close to unbearable. My neck and shoulders seize up and my back muscles ache and hurt from top to bottom, even after doing low weights. My muscles are hyper-sensitive, over-reacting to a small workout by tensing terribly all over until my legs and arms, and especially my shoulders, traps, and neck ache like I've climbed Everest or had a car accident.

The muscle pain evolves into a dull, sickening headache which is made worse by pain which goes from head to hips. I call it a "body headache" and it's debilitating and exhausting to hurt this badly. Years ago, I was diagnosed with fibromyalgia, which I've never really bothered to address because it seemed to come and go. But over the last few years, the muscle pain is inextricably linked to head pain. Whether or not it's fibromyalgia is irrelevant - the fact is, my muscles ache, badly, especially my neck and back, and when they do - my head aches like a son of a gun. These are typical "tension-type" headache features, but don't explain why my hips and legs ache sometimes too..

So I'm not terribly inspired with my return to fitness. Who the hell can work out after a day of pain at the office, especially when the next day promises to be worse? I can't believe that for most of my 20's and early 30's I worked out regularly 4-5 days a week. Over the last year, I've gone to the gym maybe once a month, and in the past two weeks have been there a couple of times. My body doth protest. How did I do this once? It seems so long ago.

For now, I've put blogging further down the priority list. I'll write here and there when I get a chance, so please keep checking. And forgive me if I don't visit your blogs as often as I did. I promise to resume blogging once things settle down. For now, I'm trying to "pace" and "self-manage" a little better, like my workshop leader taught me. That means using my free time for house-related things, financial things, going to the gym, learning all about home repair/maintenance, poring over decorating magazines, and sleeping...

David is a gem. He makes my life bearable. He cares for me, cooks my meals, buys me groceries, and reminds me to slow down. But being detail-oriented, and an engineer, I'm taking charge of the financial aspects of the house buying, doing spreadsheets, planning our bills, and figurin' and head scratchin' about lots of things, like merging our bank accounts and looking after investments. I love doing these things (being a bit of a control freak and information junkie) but still...I need to slow down.

Thanks to David, I am sane. He supports me and loves me without fail. Without him, I would be a perfectionistic mess, mired in details, who never takes time to eat right or go to bed on time or smell the roses. He balances me out, encourages me to rest and not be so hard on myself. He is the best drug. And I can't wait until we find a house so I can be with him every day...

Houses Encore...

We've only seen two houses in the past week. This sorry progress is due to us limiting ourselves to two, just TWO, fabulously perfect neighborhoods. But there's a really serious lack of interesting listings....we keep getting listings from neighborhoods we told our realtor we don't want to live in. Some of the houses look great. Maybe we need to buy a lot and a big truck and haul one over to our Chosen Community...

One house we saw last night was superbly located. The lot was positively shady in the evening light with several huge trees, and the back garden was splendidly appointed with several types of trees and all manner of colourful flora. The house was solid, architecturally refined, clean, large, perfectly perfect except....OUTDATED! Nothing had been updated inside the house. It looked like it was built yesterday and never lived in, it was that clean, but the decor was pure 1973. Think shag carpets and swag lights. Ugly kitchen cupboards, thick carpet, dreary dark library panelling (that I am hungry to paint a buttery cream), those dark spindle-posts everywhere. The bathrooms were dated, dull, clean but decorated in *peach* no less. The earnest home sellers even had a note in the bathroom saying "the tile is beige...it just looks peach in the light". Ok, so it's beige. Big deal. It looks peach!!

Anyway, we debated and deliberated and pondered and listened to our collective guts and hearts and decided not to make an offer right away because (a) it needs $100,000 in renovations, (b) it is perfectly liveable as is, but we want $100,000 for renovation (c) we don't want to renovate and (d) the clincher...despite it's literally depressing perfection, it had a musty smell and an un-insulated basement.

This morning, at our request, our realtor called to ask the seller's agent for a copy of their utility bills (how many thousands of dollars in heating bills will a 1973 house with little or no insulation require in a -40C Canadian winter???)

Well, he called me back by 10am to tell me that the house had already SOLD last night, after ONE DAY on the market with NO CONDITIONS. He assumed it was bought by a developer (or other disgustingly rich people) to likely GUT and renovate.

We felt ill. And apparently they got more than their $480,000 asking price. Our learning from this was that if we see something we like, we need to jump on it. It was a good practice run since we didn't really want the house but despaired over what if we had wanted it?

Which reminds me of a wonderful quote by Robertson Davies:
"If you don't hurry up and let life know what you want, life will damned soon show you what you'll get".

Let the games begin...