It’s been kind of a blah week – letdown, I suppose. Of course it’s nice to move into the new house, but it won’t be really comfortable until the sofa gets here in several more weeks. I feel like I haven’t gotten nearly enough useful work done on the book this month; I’m only halfway or less through revisions. That’s partly because I’ve been doing lots of moving stuff – the apartment is almost cleared out, needing only another bag brought over (condiments and juice in the fridge, mostly), a wipedown of the kitchen, and a load of laundry until we can hand over the keys. I think it’s also because I don’t have great workplace options here. No couch, and though we have a comfy rocking chair and a couple of folding canvas chairs I can’t really put my feet up on those to prop a laptop on my legs. Upstairs at my desk I have only the vanity chair which came with my vanity-I-am-using-as-a-desk, and it’s much too low for comfortable typing. I need a desk chair, but haven’t found one I like. I want a small wooden chair with adjustable seat height; I can get small wooden chairs, small adjustable chairs, or adjustable wooden chairs, but nothing with all three characteristics. I’ve been mostly working at the dining room table, which is ok, but the seats are hard and the table is a smidge high, so I want somewhere else I can move to after a bit. I suppose I could work in bed.
Another facet of the letdown is the house itself – of course it’s only when you move into a place you find its flaws. There are a few minor ones I could easily live with – bathroom counters too high for me, kitchen work triangle a bit too big for convenience, only linen closet is downstairs instead of up with the bedrooms – but the big one is the trains. The MAX light rail line runs right behind us, and the quiet whooosh of its small two-car trains becomes magically amplified when we’re upstairs in bed. It also doesn’t help that the trains run every five minutes or so from about 5AM to 8:30. That schedule I linked is outbound; we think they stack them up early to get ready for the inbound morning rush hour, because those trains don’t start running frequently until 6:30 or so. I’m also worried the train noise will be a factor a few years from now, when we want to sell or rent this house.
I think a friend is mad at me, which makes me sad because I value her friendship. She said something I perceived as insulting me, or at least a group I belong to. She didn’t mean me, of course; she meant “those other people who are like you in one way but not really like you”. You know how that goes. She’s been hurt badly, and so I understand why she sometimes lashes out. I surely don’t want to be added to the number of people who have hurt her, but I don’t see what else I could have done. I don’t stay quiet about those sorts of comments any more, even from people I love – it’s gotten people mad at me before this. I try not to do things (or more often, it’s about not doing things) that will leave me regretting them for years. I’ve got a couple of those, and though they might sound piddly-small to other people, they’re a couple too many for me. Anyway, I’m not mentioning a name or linking here, because this is very much something with two sides to it, and from the other side I’m probably in the one who’s the wrong.
Even my knitting isn’t going well. Last night, I finished one of the mittens from the kit I bought in Helsinki; I knitted the whole thing twice; the first time it was way too small, so I frogged it and reknitted it with needles three sizes larger. Now the mitten fits, but the thumb is too long and is turned around funny – I’m not sure if that’s intentional or not. It would be difficult to make the thumb smaller, because of the pattern along it. I’ve decided to just put it aside for now; I’ll do the other one at the beginning of next winter, and I’ll decide then whether to redo the thumb. Meanwhile I’ve started a pair of plain two-at-a-time socks. Here’s the mitten:
Tonight we’re rushing down to the lake house with a panel van (a convenient benefit of working with our realtor) – we’ll load up the rest of the stuff that belongs in this house and bring it back up here tomorrow. That includes our bikes, or at least mine – it looks like I’ll be without a car for a week or two later this month, between when we return the rental car and when Ted’s company car arrives. Fortunately supermarkets are in easy biking distance, and my Dutch bike has panniers. The farthest ride I’d have to do would be to the library for my weekly volunteer gig – GMaps says that’s 3.4 miles, less than I used to ride to work in the Netherlands. It’s hillier, though.
Hopefully by next week, I’ll be used to the trains and sleeping through them, the unpacking will be over, my friend will be talking to me, I’ll be back in a more productive work rhythm, and everything will feel more cheerful.