as the sun goes down, here we are

Apple season is the best. I think if I were forced to choose between “apple season” and “autumn” I might go with the apples. Fortunately, I don’t really have to choose and that’s good news. Here is a gallery of some of the apples I’ve gotten to sample around here in the past few years.

Two big pieces of news here. The first is that I’ve actually gotten me and my healing ankle back to the gym over the past few weeks which is doing wonders for my mood. While I think the mandatory ankle-inspired slowdown was maybe not a bad thing, I’m very happy to be scooting around at my regular pace again. Being able to ride a bike and swim laps and still be able to walk okay afterwards is happymaking and especially before the winter comes. Now that daylight saving time has passed, the sun sets over the nearby hill at about 3:30 and I’ve lost all momentum by about the time I start mod-work at about six pm. Exercise helps.

The other odd piece of news is that I’m now an elected official in Randolph, Vermont. I’m now an elected Justice of the Peace along with eleven other people. I start February 1st. Yes, I can marry people. I also help out with elections and tax abatement hearings and not too much else. I can become a notary. I can get a special stamp. I started a little blog about it if you are curious about Justice of the Peace-ery, as I am. Basically once I started traveling significantly less for work, I wanted to do something here in the town that I love so much. And I’m pretty mouthy about people’s civic obligations to one another, so this is me walking the talk. I wasn’t really expecting to win, truth be told, and yeah I’m not really entirely a Democrat but it’s significantly more of a pain to run as an independent, so here we are. I’m excited and interested and we’ll see how it goes, as with most things.

snacks

It’s a continual challenge trying to find things to eat that are delicious and also fit in with the current fitness regime. I’m back to taking long walks on the beach (thank you ankle! thank you Rachel who helped fix my ankle!) while I’m down in Westport for the week so I can also make bigger meals and eat more desserts. Last week in Vermont I felt like I ate, happily, nothing but squash. Every day I’d go to the farmstand and get a new type of squash and then find ways to cook it. This week I am having some people for dinner and even though they are incredibly friendly and polite I thought I could do better than “Here, I roasted this single vegetable for you!”

So, I’m putting together something with stuffed acorn squash and some butternut curry soup. While I’m planning these recipies I’m eating nothing but rice and green beans. I’m never great with desserts. I think my friends are bringing pie. I noticed that I have some marshmallows left over from a summer where I didn’t do many cookouts, so I tried to see if that old “put the marshmallow in the microwave” thing still works and it does! So, I put a melty marshmallow between two of those ginger thins that you can get at Ocean State Job Lots and am making a ton of those little sandwiches to stick in the fridge. Stupid tasty and only about 75 calories.

Another side project while I’m down here is going through the boxes of stuff that I got back, finally, from Seattle. There are a lot of books in there, many of which I liked and still look forward to reading or at least admiring on a shelf somewhere (note to self: get more shelving) but there are two types of books, maybe three, that I feel like I just don’t need anymore: cookbooks and medical type books. I took my favorite cookbooks with my when I left Seattle and the random ones I still have (a Cuisinart cookbook? a guide to soups?) have been supplanted by the easy keyword searching and ease of use of sites like this one. This is especially true when many sites online have calorie counts and/or have huge databases where you can search by what you have in your house. Health books are quickly outdated and, again, I am good at the searching online. I think for a lot of people it’s important to have something authoritative and they’re not sure if they know how to do that sort of thing online. I don’t feel that way, I know the truth about the tree octopus.

Between these books and a few different sorts of dictionaries (rhyming, crossword, Romanian/English) I have a small little pile of books that won’t make it home with me. This house has its share of useful and useless books so it may be part of a larger weeding plan. It’s good to have winter projects. I’m just happy to have one that isn’t all “Leg exercises.” and “Eat more salad.”

frictionless

Tired of talking about my ankle (improved but still painful) or my weight (staying the course) or even Vermont in the Autumn (lovely) so this is a short update to say that being at home is great and I’ve really seriously decided to do less travel-for-work this school year. This involves saying “No, thank you.” a lot. Eventually this may lead to a decrease in overall speaking requests or, who knows, maybe an increase in the amount people are willing to pay me to come speak to them. For now, I have no get-on-a-plane talks scheduled. I have two panel discussions scheduled for October (NELA and in re: books) and I believe that’s it for 2012.

This is just fine since there is a lot to do around here. The house got filled with moths and fuzz in my absence which just highlights how little I’ve been around since May really. And, as I say over and over, I like it here.

So the Pen Drawer Overhaul was a late night project where I cleaned out my pen drawer and got rid of all the slacker pens that take up space but don’t do anything. There’s just a small amount of extra psychic energy I get back from not thinking “Gee I should really do something about that…” And my Albatross List has dwindled from big things like “sell house” and “retrieve things from friend’s basement” to “make dentist appointment” and “dust.” Not bad for autumn-slipping-in-to-winter.

out and a boot

Took the stupid boot off and have been limping around and doing my exercises without it for the past few days. I am one slow person. Went out to my favorite stores (Savers! Ocean State Job Lots! Price Rite!) to get some supplies for the weekend and realized that there is no such thing as a favorite store when you’ve got a gimpy foot. Plus I’m bad at parking near the entrance to places since I’ve got the “Park further away and get some exercise!” bug so firmly ingrained in me.

On that front, things are good. Since I started this “Lose that grieving weight” program in April I’ve lost 14-ish pounds eating about 1200 calories a day and getting a good amount of exercise. The MyFitnessPal routine (are you on there? friend me.) is that if you do, say, 400 calories worth of exercise you can add those to what you’re allowed to eat for the day. This is a lot more fun when you can work hard, play hard and eat hard. Less fun when you’re in an aircast slicing up yet another apple. I’m going off the plan for the weekend because we’re going to get the grill going and I might want cake and/or ice cream…

Aaaaand, I never did get this little blogopost finished before the weekend. I had a lot of people come over and hang out and it was a good time, the weather couldn’t be beat and I ate an extra day’s worth of food calorie-wise which is actually totally okay with the plan that I’m on as a “Hey it’s your birthday” sort of extravagance. Here are some photos.

I’ve got some friends coming in and out this weekend and then I head back to Vermont on Tuesday. Drop-in time starts up again next Tuesday and I’m looking forward to my home routine a little. I spent most of yesterday in and out of the backyard hammock reading a Big Summer Book after getting myself a library card at the Westport library. Starting the slow process of tidying up and closing things down. Not starting new projects. Wrapping up old ones.

As a few people have noted on the Facebook Happy Birthday Machine, the Virgo Month of Leisure is again in full swing and possibly for the first time ever, I’ve hit the mark.

some before and some after

I have some friends who came down to Westport for a while and did one of those work vacation things. They spent some time here recreating and noodling around and taking advantage of the nice location and the decent weather. And then they spent some time helping me around the place. I was hoping for just a little gardening and weeding but they found the power washer and went to town on the patio along with helping out with a lot of other terrific things. I am still galumphing around in this boot (may be a few more weeks, otherwise I am feeling great) and it’s tough to describe what a wonderful thing it was to just have the place get all spruced up around me while I concentrated on working and getting sleep and eating well and getting better. I’m a pretty stubbornly independent person; having people around getting things done with no input from me and having folks to chitchat with over dinner and snacks was incredibly pleasant in a way I’m not really used to.

The week before this, Jim and I headed to Indiana on a fly-by trip to get the remainder of my Seattle stuff that has been in various basements since I moved from there “for good” around 2003. I still have a few misc. pieces of furniture in a few places (anyone know where my metal table got to?) but for now the bulk of my things are in places that are mine. Last step is to get the Topsham stuff which is temporarily in a friend’s shed into either my apartment or some nice yard sale or FREE pile somewhere. The trip was fun and short and filled with little nifty parts and I’d forgotten sort of how much I enjoy road trips, and Waffle House.

Which is good because this next week is going to be a Real Road Trip where I do the thing I used to love doing and drive someone else’s car across the country. In this case a friend of mine got a job in Los Angeles and has a Mini in Brooklyn and I have a free week more or less and there you go. I’m taking the first real week off of work that I’ve had in years (mostly my own fault) and this will be my first cross-country trip I’ve taken with a smart phone, as far as I can remember. And for longtime readers you will remember that I used to do this sort of thing a lot.

So I’m assembling some maps and NOT getting tour books from AAA and realizing that I don’t have to plan almost any of this and can still find good places to see and eat and sleep. Driving out, flying back. Hoping to be almost out of this boot by the time I’m back in MA/VT.

Seriously, look at this patio!

houseCLEANED

So it’s sort of crazy but I actually sold the house. The crazier part of it is that when I signed a purchase and sale with these buyers months ago [the first people to make a serious offer on the place] they were interested in moving in as soon as possible and we set the closing date right then, July 13th, and that’s actually when the house closed. Apparently this rarely happens. The actual event was pretty much pro forma. Sign a bunch of stuff, say hi to the buyer [and his wife and adorable little kids] who I was meeting for the first time, receive a big check and then go driving around taking photographs of Vermont towns hoping even more than usual to not get into a major accident.

The whole thing wound up really well, in exchange for me chipping in some of the closing costs (not part of the original deal) the buyer basically took the place as-is meaning waiving the usual back and forth that happens when they get the place inspected and say things like “Well there is a kestrel in the chimney, will you take $500 off the price for kestrel removal services…?” which I was happy for. This meant a little less angsting over what “really clean” means in barn terms. I gave away a household’s worth of furniture to the RE-Store in Barre (wonderful people). I gave away ladders and drill presses and card catalogs to friends. I threw a lot of things away, even stuff that was maybe recyclable. It felt weird. I put some stuff in a friend’s shed until I can figure out what to do with it. I have even more stuff in my place here than before.

Not being a homeowner [of my OWN home, yes I technically own some part of my dad’s place but I certainly do not feel that it’s mine] is about as good as I thought it would be. Not having 40 acres of land does not cause me psychic distress. Or if it does, it’s significantly less distressing than owning a house that is too far away and too high maintenance and not enough fun. As my sister, who sold her own house a year and a bit ago, presciently said “You’ll wonder why you didn’t do it years ago” and she’s totally correct.

As an odd and only-sort-of-related coda, I am heading out to get my stuff that was originally in a friend’s basement in Seattle since I moved out of there for good in … 2003? Yes, 2003 (thanks Scott!). Another friend drove it partway across the country last year and now there is a storage unit full of … things I haven’t seen in almost a decade that I am going to retrieve. Renting a van, the whole deal. I think it’s mostly books. Some clothes. A few odd bits of furniture. This is the sort of thing that I call a vacation.

houseclean

No sooner had I posted a breezy little “Hey here’s what’s up; check me out, posting twice in a week!” than things got busy. And this is busy-for-me busy which is somewhat crazed by other people’s perspectives. In short, I got a buyer for the barn and they were interested in closing as soon as possible. And this would mean handling all the deferred maintenance and whatnot in as short a timespan as possible. And that would mean dealing with all of this in the same two-month is period where I had six (6: MA, ME, NH, NY, NC, Montreal) talks planned along with the usual stuff. My thought at the time was that school would be wrapping up and then I’d want to be busy and then would kick back, spending some time in Westport and maybe just noodling around New England. Instead I’ve been following this schedule where I’ve been working at RTCC Tues/Weds then leaving for somewhere Thursday, giving a talk, then coming back Saturday and assembling people to go do stuff at the barn in the meantime. And also trying to get contractors to fix things at the barn that have needed fixing for longer than I care to admit.

The whole thing sort of pushes a bunch of buttons for me that are difficult. Having to make a bunch of phone calls to poke people about getting things fixed (I had to call the furnace people six times to get a set date, this seems abnormal to me). Having to face that this all might have been simpler if I’d handled chunks of it before now. Feeling time pressure on someone else’s schedule. Writing big checks for things like surveying and renting a dumpster. Getting friends to help me with a sort of messy annoying task and trying to manage a bunch of people doing a weird hard-to-outline job. Dealing with the fact that I bought this house when I was maybe too young and too isolated to really manage it properly. Explaining to people that I’m actually mostly happy being this busy but that yes, I don’t have time to hang out when I’m in their city. Deferred gratification hoping it will all feel worth it at this point. Managing a lot of other people’s stuff that was left behind at various points and being annoyed at that. Throwing away things that might, in some other world, be reusable and repurposable. And doing a lot of this while also managing my full time job at MetaFilter while other people are trying to go on vacation and have their summers be fun also. There is no cell service in Topsham. I can’t multitask there. This is the good news and the bad news.

This weekend my friends Stan and Brian and Forrest (pictured, with me. I keep forgetting I am short) came up to help me clean out the barn and it was an incredible surgical strike of efficiency. We were there for about 2.5 hours and got most of the barn emptied out. This means now I have to mostly sort out the small stuff and figure out what goes to the thrift store and what goes to the yard sale, but that the bulk of the “things I can’t lift” have been lifted. I have about three weeks.

And so there were a bunch of other things I was going to talk about, but today has been my first Totally Free Day [where I wasn’t writing a talk or having a thing scheduled or out of town] in quite some time. And I’ve been meaning to write this all down. I’ve still got a few small jobs there if people are interested in coming up and saying goodbye to the place. All barn jobs come with a free meal at the Wayside afterwards. Worth considering.