casahighland

There are 2 posts tagged casahighland.

the year of saying yes

Lake party

Jim and I took a quickie side trip to Burlington because he had never been there. Since I’m not much of a shopper or a money-spender we drove down to the lake to just look at it. Turns out it was frozen sufficiently hard that people were out messing about on the icy surface — skating, sliding, photographing, walking pets, kicking ice. It was a festive and sort of surreal mood. We walked around on it. I, of course, took a few photos.

Yet another of my unstated resolutions is to try to get around my normal cynical overthinking brain and try to say yes to stuff more often. Yes to people coming to visit, yes to invitations to do things, yes to couchsurfers dropping in (hi CJ and Alison!), yes to more work (within reason), yes to “can you help me move?” and yes to “would you like dessert?” among other things. I have a tendency to talk myself out of doing new things because I’m actually pretty happy with the old/existing thing. This is a pop culture thing to do apparently, but I like to think I came up with it on my own.

I’m off to San Francisco tomorrow for a quickie meeting and some burrito eating and by the time I get back on Sunday movers should have gotten all of Kate’s stuff out of Casa Highland. Even though Kate’s move makes all the sense in the world, I think we’re all a little in denial of how great it was to have a clubhouse (and a parking space!) in the city. I’ll miss the old place.

empty! full!

EMPTY

Sometimes I think I have a tapeworm, eating like I do. This weekend I helped cook a 5 lb. hunk of lamb, went out for BBQ at Blue Ribbon BBQ and wrapped it all up with a carne asada burrito. It was a delicious meaty weekend which is just what I tend to be looking for at about this time in February. The flip side to this is that I spent the rest of the weekend running up and down stairs carrying heavy objects.

My sister is moving in a few short weeks. I’m that friend who will always help you move. I’m not so great at being the second person hefting the hide-a-bed, but I’m really great at taking whatever shamehole you have been putting off dealing with and turning it into a few labeled boxfulls and a bag of trash. I’m often modest about most of my abilities but I think I excel at this. This weekend I helped deal with Mount Laundry, the Poison Closet, the dreadful Neglected Closet and a few other miscellaneous spaces. Each time I managed to empty something out — I put aside the ticking timer when Kate had a rather strong reaction to the ticking sound, I find its urgency a little motivating — I put a sticker on it as shown above. Apparently the stickers are a little tough to remove, sorry about that.

I drove home to Vermont today with a car full of stuff. One of the magical qualities of my car is that things placed into the back of it simply … disappear. This is good for people who need to get rid of clothes or old computers. This time my sisters’ disappearing stuff is actually mostly winding up in my house. I took home a few bags of clothes (seriously doubling the bulk of my everyday wardrobe), a fold up spare bed, a few things to eBay, a fruity teacup with my birth month on it, a typing table with a little lamp on it, some placemats, some bubblegum and a great big bookshelf. People keep talking about the recession and I know it’s true objectively, but it’s been a bountiful few months for me.