the procrastinating girl

Back to the Future

If I step back, I realize how incredible my town is.  I can get to the Upper West Side in under an hour, but live in what looks like a snapshot of Vermont.  But life with two commuting parents is difficult.  That leaves this question hanging in the air between many of us around town:  What did you used to do?  My used to do sounds decent enough.  I was a freelance writer.  But as I raised my daughters, my used to do evaporated before my eyes, as the magazines I wrote for ceased publication and the whole industry tanked.  Now I used to do it with a whole lot of people.  For years, it was easy to just say no to magazines even as the shock and awe set in.  House & Garden!  Gourmet!?  But as my kids just started school and an iPad entered our house, I felt myself turn a corner.  It's time to open my eyes again to the world that I was used to, even if it's all different now.  So my first act was to go to the library (in the neighboring town) and rip all the little subscription cards out from recent issues on the wall.  I did so as an old man sat in a beat-up leather chair right next to me.  Each time he coughed, out a new one came.  HACKKK (The New Yorker)!  SNNORT (Pyschology Today)!  It was pure cacaphony.  Soon, I was loaded up.  I wasn't proud to defile the library's collection, but inching back toward what I used to be felt long overdue. 

Spacial Relations

In case you haven't noticed, or especially if you have, I've been on a self-imposed hiatus of late.  Actually, exile is more to the point.  With Zoe's school last year a healthy driving distance from our house, which, to be fair, isn't close to anything, I spent most of 2010 criss-crossing the county.  Unable to make it back home during the day, every morning I had to pack as if I were moving to Japan.  With that much rubber to burn and environmentalists to piss off (my brother and father are at the top of the list), one would hope some positive self-reflection would emerge as I bopped my head to the great existentialist Katy Perry and inadvertently tailgated cop cars.  As tank after tank emptied, I realized how much I missed my home, particularly my office.  My space is far more cluttered than the rest of my house and with some items that are decidedly un-office-like.  I don't typically don a blue polka dot toddler-sized raincoat to write.  But I do enjoy my gifted AMY O paperweight.  I guess it's the raincoat and the paperweight combined that make this room so quintessentially me.  Not to rest on that, the raincoat and its brethren are due to exit the premises.  I will get to it.  And I will get back to this. 

Tank Sweat

I live in an interesting town.  One where I have inadvertently purchased a granola bar for $6.50.  Where I pick up my prescriptions alongside Chevy Chase (no, I am not amused that we seem to be on similar amounts of medication).  And where I have a toilet that can only be properly flushed by sticking one's arm up to the elbow into the uncirculated tank water and manually taking care of business.  At first, we went through the formalities of removing and then replacing the porcelain cover each time, keeping the facade of powder room normalcy alive.  No need.  For weeks now, the cover has sat the way we preferred, askew on the bathroom counter.  What a pity we don't regularly entertain heads of state.  But the raw, industrial look just doesn't work in our 1960's center hall colonial.  Just recently it was decided that our toilet should finally move on to plumbing supply heaven.  We only have to wait a few weeks for its replacement.  Wait?  I meant hold it.

Photo Finished

The new year is less than two weeks old, but it's already time for a sweeping generalization.  I believe it is out to get me.  Around most corners, there has been what feels like some kind of inexplicable cosmic force slapping me across the cheek.  And I don't do inexplicable cosmic force.  My Sunday was the best example.  With several hours unbelievably to myself, I decided to be efficient.  Right.  I wanted to burn CDs of pictures from the last (mumbled number of) years, then go have prints made and begin assembling albums.  Because, you know, we. don't. have. any.  Upon sitting down in front of my laptop, already totally impressed with myself, I immediately noticed something was quirky with iPhoto.  Things weren't dragging and dropping.  I could drag, but then I couldn't drop.  Then I couldn't export.  Then I could, but I couldn't export enough.  I definitely couldn't burn anything.  But I was about to spontaneously combust.  I called Apple's infamous helpdesk where everyone sounds like they just hopped off a surfboard and picked up the receiver.  The good news is that my pictures are indeed safe.  The bad news is that for now they are safe, but stuck on my laptop.  Although, the more I think about it, I do carry it with me often.  Pictures from our trip to Quebec?  Well, I happen to have them right here!

The Late Show

I was just wondering if procrastinating is a weird form of being late to the party.  Given my psychotic compulsion with time, I am never physically late to anything, but, metaphorically, it's another story.  My birthday doesn't arrive for another three weeks (or rather, seventeen days, three hours and twenty-six minutes), so, as the November baby, I had the baked in pleasure of being the last to qualify for my driver's license.  And then I failed my road test.  Twice.  Other late-comings didn't leave quite the same mark.  I waited until I was a 20-something to allow peanut butter into my world and that took very nicely.  The hot dog I tried back then?  Not so much.  And there's a party to which I was already very late.  It's the tale of the Guess jeans, the ones I was sure my mom bought me for Chanukah circa 1983.  So sure I saved the unopened box until night eight, the grand finale, when I confidently ripped off the blue and silver paper to find, wait, a dictionary.  A dictionary, I should say, that I still own and use.  So I'm laughing as I type this post while stationed at my favorite post.  It's a place with one very small and unabiding lamp, but tonight I'm using this contraption called, um, a booklight?  Zoe has one in hot pink.  Late as always, but tomorrow for the doctor I will be right on time.

Garden Slug

There is an elephant in the room.  And I don't do well with elephants.  I don't mind large animals.  Since childhood, my favorite has been whales.  I find polar bears inordinately adorable.  I even rode a camel once in Israel.  And I did happen to marry a very tall man.  But when it comes to elephants, I have a problem.  I like things in my life to be acknowledged.  Cards on the table.  I have something hanging over my head and each day it goes unresolved, I become less optimistic that it can happen.  It's the garden.  Last year, we had a big, bountiful veggie and herb garden that was tended to by our family.  It was roto-tilled, staked,  fenced, planted and watered.  For the next time, we had plans to compost.  I know!  But, unfortunately, this year we are down a man.  A big man.  My husband had surgery and can't move his right arm.  At all.  So it's basically up to me.  Roto-till?  Is that French for 'strained lower back'?   I am torn and need to decide.  The little ones will start inquiring as soon as the thermometer starts to rise.

Fate Accompli

Yesterday morning I was still inexplicably drawn to my unending spring cleaning projects.  The weather was glorious.  The kids were cooperating.  It had the makings of a perfect Sunday.  Yet those boxes, untouched for the previous 106 weeks that we've lived in this house, needed attention.  So I knelt before them, almost in prayer, to see what they held.  I felt they owed me something.  An Egyptian staff encrusted with jewels?  A yellowed photograph depicting a relative steeped in scandal?  A missing earring?  Well, here's what I got.  The box for my running watch.  A long piece of shoelace.  Unidentifiable electrical cords.  As I sifted through the wreckage dejectedly, the phone rang.  It was Nancy asking if we wanted to go to the city for the afternoon.  Always happy to move on from work, I left my bedroom floor covered in bits and pieces of my own stupid mess.  But I felt no guilt.  No pain.  The park was filled people.  Energy.  Blossoms.  And about an hour into our visit, an old man walked right next to us while holding the hands of two much younger women.  As if I needed further proof that the decision to abandon ship on my cleaning project was a good one, this would have been perfect evidence that there is some such higher being.  My first Woody Allen sighting came on a perfect Spring day.

Spring Cleaning

It's late.  I had intended to start this post earlier, but my house was bombarded with a relentless electrical storm along with golf-ball-sized hail.  Apparently, spring is here.  Aside from the petrifying dose of mother nature, how else can you note the change of seasons?  This morning pre-Grape Nuts, I began to attempt to declutter.  It's truly an annual phenomenon.  And I have to move slowly or I'm liable to pull something.  I started upstairs.  Back in December for Zoe's birthday party, we had moved all the playroom junk up to the office.  And. there. it. has. remained.  The path from door to desk chair had become a life-threatening obstacle course.  Dramatic?  Have you ever mistakenly stepped barefoot on a wooden block?  Oh, it's a world of hurt.  As I was making 'keep' and 'give away' piles, I found a white plastic bag from Target.  Hardly unusual.   This one contained school supplies.  At the beginning of the year, I had bought different notebooks and folders, not knowing exactly what kind Sydney needed and assuming I would return the extras.  Right.  Of course these now unreturnable items can be used in a second by my songwriter-poet-artists-to-be.  I wish I could say the same for the toddler size 7 shoes I found in a bag next to my dresser.  Any takers?

The Domino Effect

I read only a handful of periodicals with regularity (Vanity Fair, Dwell) and subscribe to, well, none.  That all changed a few months ago.  I saw a promo deal for Domino magazine and actually mailed in that flimsy postcard thingy.  Did I affix postage?  That seems unlikely.  But, like magic, I began receiving this wonderful shelter pub right to my door.  God, America is wonderful.  Then, the bill came.  It was tiny, mind you.  Equal to the cost of about eight organic squeezable yogurts.  Or enough oil to heat my house for 27 minutes.  But I had to pay it.  And we know how that goes.  The bill sat.  Waiting.  For attention it never received.  I even felt a minor pang of guilt as I brushed past it to dive onto the couch and delve into the latest copy moments after it arrived.  But, as I found out yesterday, Domino will arrive no longer.  It is shutting down.  I am very, very sad.  Curling up in bed with my laptop to read design blogs just doesn't work quite as well.  But, at the same time, I've found myself in another situation where my laziness has been rewarded.  Not only did I get a free ride for a few months, but those who have pre-paid for a year or (gasp!) two will likely be pawned off on another 'similar' magazine like Architectural Digest.  Similar?  I think not.  I would never have tartan walls.  So, I'm glad to be kept out of that mess.  But I'd still rather have my Domino.

Pump It Up

Please forgive me.  I don't think I've ever gone this long between posts.  But the holiday build-up compounded by the national holiday that is our Miss Zoe Holiday's birthday (yes, we actually named her that) left me pretty overwhelmed.  There was no moving of those dates, no matter how much childish foot-stomping went on in this house (um, that would be mine).  During particularly chaotic times like these, the mundane details typically fall through the cracks here at TPG central.  As they would elsewhere.  Or so I tell myself.  Just the other day a card in the mail reminded me of a certain detail that most certainly can't.  We need to have our septic pumped.  It was last done by the sellers when we bought this house almost two years ago.  Not having your driveway shoveled or your gutters cleaned can be fine.  And with the financial crisis, you can definitely let your lawn go (our landscaper could winter in the United Arab Emirates for what we pay him).  But I don't think this one can slide.  And, yet, I think I've already lost the card.  Won't you be my neighbor?