Seeing Blinds

I must confess that I don't really care for vertical blinds. Or any sort of blinds, really. Except for the wooden ones, and that's probably only because I've never actually had wooden blinds, so I'm blissfully ignorant of the troubles involved in their upkeep. But I'm well aware of the troubles with aluminum blinds that collect dust and are impossibly difficult to clean, and that are so very easily destroyed with a single encounter with a single toddler---never mind constant interaction with three very rambunctious wuggies. I'm also altogether too aware of the troubles with verticals, how they collapse to the floor with the slightest bump, and get quite tangled if you try to open or close them without remembering the proper order of operations.

As I said, I don't particularly care for vertical blinds, but I'm beginning to see them with new eyes.

The place we're living in right now is a really great house. The location is perfect. It's a great subdivision, and right by Andy's school. At first I was a little disappointed about how deeply we were buried in the neighborhood, but that was before I realized that the subdivision has outlets on two major roads and we're just about halfway between them. So if we want to go to Andy's school, we turn right, if we want to go to Wal-Mart we turn left, and in either case, it's not too far. As for the house itself, I love the floor plan, and it has a terrific back yard. Or at least, the back yard would be wonderful if the fence didn't extend around the utility easement and maybe didn't have quite so many rotting slats. And maybe if their wasn't an attempt to grow a lawn without any sunlight. Maybe the trees need some thinning, or maybe there's some wonderful alternative shade-loving ground cover, but the scraggly bits of grass are a bit silly. All things considered, we absolutely love it... bit there's a sense in which it's something of an eyesore.

And that's the way the whole house is. A wonderful, absolutely perfect... eyesore.

We knew what we were getting into when we the realtor/property manager told us that no, they had no intentions of fixing the peeling vinyl in the kitchen. It's a bit nerve-racking to rent from somebody who considers intact flooring optional, but as you get deeper into your second week of the toddler invasion of your relations' lovely home, you take what you can get.

Even so, when he pointed to the package of brand-new doorknobs on the counter, and said the handyman would be by to change the locks, I had no idea that he meant that we'd have a mismatched lock component installed within the same old grossly misshapen and deeply dented doorknobs.

Filling out the inventory and condition form was a feat of tiny writing, and despite my best efforts, we needed an extra page. Whoever thought that one line would be sufficient to describe the condition of the garage ceiling obviously didn't have this particular house in mind. To be perfectly honest, I was vaguely nervous about turning in the form, because it just felt so rude to be putting all this down in writing. It was embarrassing.

Apparently the management thought so, too. Incredulous, they sent someone over to see if it was true, or if we were stretching the truth.

Yup, it was all true, and absolutely unacceptable. He would let the owners know that some things were going to have to change.

I don't know if they're really going to fix the vinyl. He says they are, but I'm not holding my breath. And is the handyman really going to come back after the rains dry out and fix the fence? Probably, but who knows.

But in the mean time, all the kitchen drawers work now, the crooked window has been replaced with one that doesn't leave a whistling gap, and we have new vertical blinds in the living room. Beautifully crisp, clean, brand new blinds that open AND close, made of smooth, easily wipe-able vinyl, without a single trace of mildew. The room is filled with sparklingly fresh light, and every time I walk in, I take a deep breath and savor the feeling. I love, love, love them.

Life is oh-so-good. I have new blinds.

Jane no like jungle so much. Must stay inside grass hut with air conditioning.

During our house hunt, we looked at an apartment complex in Tomball. It seems that the laws about no more than two to a bedroom don't apply if the youngest resident is under 24 months. As our youngest resident is currently only 23 1/2 months old... well, it's all open to interpretation.

Anyway, this particular apartment had everything. Okay, so it was 6 miles away from Andy's job, and they didn't have anything opening up for another three weeks, but oh man, this place had everything. Playground, private balconies, sizable patios... it even had its own private graveyard. No, I'm not joking.

Anyway, we didn't end up getting this apartment, because it was, after all, 6 miles away from Andy's job, and they didn't have an opening for three weeks, but among the amenities of this particular apartment complex was a 24-hour excercise room, complete with a dry sauna.

Dry sauna? What in the world is a dry sauna, and what in the world would anyone want with one? Doesn't that defeat the whole purpose?

Then I stepped back outside, and it all made sense. Whatever the merits of dry saunas may be, one thing is certain. A normal sauna would definitely not be much of a selling point around here. The whole Houston area is just one big, steamy sauna.

I like saunas. Really, I do. But everyone knows that the best part about a sauna is the part where you get out and go jump in the pool.

And so it is that my very favorite thing about Texas is air conditioning.

Home Sweet Home

Well, I hope he and his wife enjoy the play set.

Meanwhile, we're one street over. Dream house, it is not. Same floor plan, but a rather different philosophy of property management. Let's just say that it won't to move when the time comes to buy a place of our own.

However, for the time being, I'm just soaking in the joy of having enough space for all of us.

Andy's parents are arriving for a short visit tonight... and we actually have room for them!

The kids have room to thoroughly wear themselves out.

And that long-running dispute about how to cram all our dishes into the smallest space possible? Utterly irrelevant. Finally, I know what it feels like to have sufficient cupboard space, and you know what? It feels really, really good.

Cue the Jeopardy Music, Please

We have each submitted our applications to the real estate office. Neither application has priority over the other. Both will be processed, and given to the owner, who will then make the final decision.

The realtor is optimistic about the possibility of getting an answer this morning.

The rational side of me is quite sceptical. We won't know until tomorrow afternoon. That's just the way things work.

But all the rest of me is waiting by the phone, burning up with impatience.

It's 10:39 already... why hasn't he called?

Nevermind the fact that they have to get through to our former landlords, and due to the time difference, they won't even be open for another half hour.

I'm scouring the multiple listings site, trying to convince myself that there are other houses out there. And there really are other houses out there. It's just that they have carpet in the dining rooms, smell like smoke, and have tiny, unattractive backyards.

It's going to be okay. Really.

But it's so hard to take all this as lightly as I want to.

Love, War, and Real Estate

The real estate office is closed over the weekend, which makes this whole thing a bit nerve racking. If we have our application tucked through their mail slot by the time they get in there Monday morning, we should be fine... as long as nobody else has an application waiting for them, too.

Andy just got back from his faculty retreat yesterday afternoon, and we went out together to drop off the application. First, though, I wanted to drive him by the house so he could take a look at the neighborhood. Just for the fun of it... it wasn't like there was any sort of decision left to make. Kid proof floors--check. Trees--check. Biking distance from school--check. Gorgeous miniature playground--where did that unfathomable blessing come from? We'll take it!

So we drove by, and saw the neighborhood... and the unique wraparound entryway... and the front yard... and the young couple standing in the front yard talking to a realtor. The man grinned and waved at us.

"It's Tony! Pull over and park!"

And so it was that I got to meet one of the other new teachers at Providence. Andy had been having lots of great dialogue with him all weekend.

We chatted a bit about what a great house it is, great neighborhood, great location, and wow, isn't it funny, this is exactly the house we're putting in an application for! Were we looking at any other houses? Well, not if we get this one!

We left them to their tour, and drove off to find Star Realty.

We looked and we looked, but we can't find them. Learned a whole lot about the Houston area freeway feeder-roads system, but we never did find 19627 I-45 North.

We're getting a little bit desperate here. If the application isn't in before they open on Monday, then we can't quite legitimately pester them all morning about it.

And everybody knows that all's fair in love, war, and real estate.

Homecoming

It's a strange thing, slowly to come home to a place you've never been.

After far too long on the road, too many motels and truck stops, Nathan told me that he wanted to go home.

Heart breaking for him, I asked where exactly he meant by that.

"I want to go to the new house."

It's a strange, and peculiarly desperate sort of homesickness, not to long so much for a particular place that is home, but simply to long to be home, wherever it is that we are.

Today, out of the blue, my little bug-boy announced to me, "We're almost there."

Indeed we are. We're almost home--and oh, what a home!

We've picked out a place to rent and gathered all the application paperwork. All I need to do is pick up a money order in the morning for the application fee, drop everything off, and wait for approval.

It's gorgeous, and with carpeting in the bedrooms only, it won't be terribly hard to keep it that way. Beautiful, beautiful laminate floors! I could kiss them!

And the back yard! A good sized back yard with four or so mature pines, providing both house and yard a canopy of shade. And a beautiful play set, just the right size for our kidlings, and very attractive.

Things I never would have bothered to wish for, too, like walk-in closets in every bedroom.

Even the things I wouldn't have chosen, like the forcefully floral wallpaper in the kitchen, the walls separating the kitchen from dining room and living room, and the unique overall shape of the house... all these things have distinct advantages, and may very well end up being better than "just what I wanted." After all, the wallpaper actually is very pretty, and since we really do want to get into a place of our own in the near future, it's really better to have a kitchen that is cozy and homelike as is, than one with the potential for all sorts of decorating that probably wouldn't even happen until right before it was time to move. And, well, if you can't see the rest of the house from the kitchen, that does mean that you can't see the kitchen from the rest of the house!

I'm just a little bit excited, in case you couldn't tell.

And in the mean time, we're experiencing the warm southern hospitality of my dad's cousin Lorre, and her husband Paul. They've welcomed us into their home with open arms, and while we haven't met the rest of the family yet, I've been hearing enough to get the idea that there's a lot of family, and that family means a lot. It wasn't even on my radar when we made the decision to move here, but do we have family in the area? Indeed we do.

Family, moreover, that really likes kids, and let me tell you, that is a very big deal.

Speaking of which, I can't count how many times I've been asked if twins run in the family, and it turns out I've answered them wrong every time.

Years ago, Paul and Lorre had pretty much the same sort of family as we do now, twin boys and their little sister.

And I have no idea how I'd forgotten, but off in Ohio, I have a set of second cousins who are fraternal twins. And yes, it's their mother that's my dad's cousin, not their father.... apparently twins do indeed run in the family, and not just all over the house and yard!

It's surprising what a warm and belonging feeling a discovery like that can bring. I didn't think it really mattered, but it does. Always before I thought that I was just special, the odd one out, who just has twins out of the blue. It turns out that I'm actually participating in a peculiar quality of Palmer women. We are the sort of women who bear twins, and somehow that "we" means more to me than I would have guessed.

It means something like home.

And here we are.

Unquenchable

It's hot around here. Not nearly as hot as when the van broke down in the middle of the Palm Desert on our way over from California, but certainly hot enough to make a stove quite superfluous to egg-frying.

Hot enough that I was exceedingly glad that I'd let the Tercel's fuel levels get down to "E" before filling up, because the explosive burst when I opened the tank wouldn't have been much fun had there been more than a drop or two of gasoline inside.

Hot enough that the world looks a bit like a Renoir through the unulating haze.

And hot enough, that as I passed by the fire department, sweltering under the blazing sun, for a moment there I actually considered running in there and asking them to put out the fire.

Mealtime conversations

Over the past week or so, we've started having real, live, honest-to-goodness family mealtime chatter. Not just Mom and Dad trying to talk to each other between incessant interruptions, but whole-family discussions.

And it's so much fun.


This morning, over breakfast, the twins announced that they want a birthday party. With party hats. Yellow party hats. And cake. Isaiah wants a chocolate cake. A black chocolate cake. Nathan does not want the cake to be chocolate, but he does want syrup on it. A white cake with lemon sauce? Yup.

And at this two-cake party, they want to paint a train. With a caboose. And an engine.

And actually, this is sounding like a much better idea for a four-year-old birthday party than I could have come up with. I'm glad there's a little time left before January, though.

They're such fun little people, my boys.

=)

Security Measures

You know how sometimes people will install fake security cameras, just so folks will think twice before doing anything they wouldn't want recorded?

Well, the United States Postal Service is far too honest for such things.

Far too honest.

So honest, in fact, that there are a number of signs all over the Cottonwood Post Office, making certain that everyone understands that the security cameras are NOT monitored, only recorded.

On Emergent Molars: A Conversation with Meepo

"It's cutting me, mommy. It feels like snakes."

"I'm sorry that it hurts, but I'm glad that you can describe it like that. You're very articulate."

"NO! Don't tickle it!"

When it floods, it... floods.

The dishwasher is leaking.

Story Problem

If the bathroom sink flows at a rate of 1/2 cup per second, and is left running for 1 hr. 20 min., how much water will be on the floor?

Neither Here nor There

We're officially gone from California, but we have yet to set foot on Texas soil. In the mean time we're hanging out in my parent's home in Arizona. (Thanks, Mom and Dad!) The limbo is a little strange in some ways (no library cards for residents of nowhere), but for the most part we're having a blast. Mom and Dad aren't here right now, but my sister is, and we're having fun together.

And, oh my goodness, the HOUSE! I'd sort of forgotten what it's like to live in a HOUSE. With a YARD. Suddenly, my life is not consummed with preventing my children from doing developmentally appropriate and important things that just so happen to be very much destructive in the small space. Now if they're being destructive or just plain in the way, it's a simple matter to direct them toward another equally attractive activity--preferably outside in that lovely back yard.

Speaking of the back yard, it's been a matter of contention in the Palmer family for a very long time. You see, my mom, sister and I really really wanted a nice lawn and pretty garden. My dad wanted to cover the whole thing over with gravel. We prevailed, and preserved our precious lawn. Or, at least, the closest thing possible when you live in Arizona, and are gone for well over half the year. Year after year, the ratios of grass to weeds fluctuated, but at least we had something green, and we always prevented Daddy from covering it in gravel.

Until this past year. I'm not quite sure what happened, but somehow an agreement was struck, and Daddy had his way. The back yard is now covered in gravel.

And it's gorgeous. I should have known that Daddy's plan wasn't for a hideous, unbroken expanse of gravel. Daddy may not have lots of time for lawn maintainance, but he does have a superb eye for proportion and good composition, a strong aesthetic sense, and good taste. They now have an attractively ordered desert landscape, with pampas grass and yucca and mesquite and honeysuckle and mint. Most of these are local plants that volunteered--and since they are in their proper environment, they thrive quite nicely with minimal care. It's a lovely, restful place, alive with birdsong, joyous and vibrant and peaceful.

I can't believe we fought him for so long.

And I think that surely there must be a lesson somewhere in there.

We are alive.

I've always thought of myself as a girl of the desert.

Now I realize that it is not the desert I love, it is the oasis. The clear blue stream overflowing with life, the droplets splashing on the hot, windcarved sand.

From the shade of a cottonwood tree, I love to gaze upon the cactus and the redrocks.

But the true desert... the endless expanse is cruel and wicked. Its desire is to bleach my bones and the bones of my children, like the bones of so many coyotes before, creatures made of much sterner stuff than we.

But we are alive.

The desert has not bleached our bones, and we are safe in this familiar and lovely oasis... I'd forgotten just how beautiful the Verde Valley is. It is good to be home.

To whom it may concern:

I have a strong distaste for moving.

But I do like nice people who take my children to the park.

That is all.

Great opportunity for nursing moms

The International Breast Milk Donation Project is an incredibly good thing on so many different levels.

First off, I'm sure that you know that between AIDS and famine, there are a lot of orphaned babies in Africa. But did you know that those babies are six times more likely to survive if they receive donor breast milk, as opposed to formula? Six times.

So a few years ago, some women started expressing their extra milk, and shipping it to Africa on dry ice. I've actually known about this part of the story for some time, and to be perfectly honest, I wasn't all that interested. I mean, that's really wonderful, but how is it even remotely sustainable?

Well, now it's actually sustainable through a unique partnership with a for-profit corporation called Prolacta Bioscience. Prolacta uses donated breast milk to develop medical products that save the lives of preemies here in the US. Their biggest thing is human milk fortifier--that's what they added to my expressed milk before they put it in Nathan and Isaiah's feeding tubes, to add calories and protein so that they could catch up on all that growing that should have happened in utero. The stuff my twins received was based on cow's milk, but now Prolacta has developed a human milk fortifier that is actually made from human milk. Which is much better for these fragile babies. It's also pretty big business. Even the cow based stuff runs $100 per day per infant.

Of course, the one difficulty with all this is that they are completely dependent upon breast milk, and the law does not allow them to pay their donors. And not many women get too excited about pumping so that somebody else can make a fortune off their milk. On its own, this project is about as sustainable as the idea of shipping breast milk to Africa.

Together, though, these two crazy idealistic projects actually work.

Prolacta provides all the equipment, from hospital-grade electric pumps to dry ice, and pays for overnight shipping to their laboratories. 25% of each woman's milk goes to Africa. Prolacta tests and pasteurizes the milk for free, and pays for all shipping costs.

Then Prolacta uses the rest of the donated milk in the highly profitable business of saving babies in the US. Prolacta then pays the Breast Milk Project $1 for every ounce of breast milk that stays in the States. This money goes toward the establishment of local milk banks, mobilizing local women to meet this huge need for breast milk.

So go talk to your doctor about it, and see if this would be the right thing for you!

I sure am, just as soon as I get to Texas!

Ensnared

The other thing I've been doing lately is playing with the espresso machine I got for my birthday.

I'm highly caffeinated.

Oh, the wonderful things you can do with coffee beans and milk!

Anyway, I had this wonderful post all worked up about how if you just pour the coffee over the frothy steamed milk instead of pouring the milk over the coffee, you get a consistently wonderful gorgeously layered result with minimal effort. But how it's psychologically easier to try to control everything, even when you know you'll get a better result by letting go a little and just allowing the nature of things work to your advantage. And how all this affects childbirth and parenthood, and, well, just about everything.

Oh, it was a great post.

But then I wanted to make sure that I was using all the proper coffee-snob terminology, and I just kept running across stuff like this.

I'm helpless against the temptation.

I'm on a quest for the perfect microfoam, perfectly poured.

I'm drinking way to many lattes for my own good, and all that nutritious vitamin D enriched whole milk my children drink? Steamed, every bit of it. Well, mostly, anyway. At first they were extremely excited about the "special milk." Now they're requesting "special milk" once again, but this time, they mean straight from the fridge.

I think I may be going a little overboard.

And the thing is, it never actually ends up looking or tasting nearly so good as when I just pour the espresso over the milk, and leave it at that.

I just can't stop.

Square picture: No faces, just eyes

I still blog. Really.

It's just that I'm also moving.

And trying to find a place to move to.

And reading the foundational epics of just about every major world religion and sundry works on the philosophy of education, and basking in the fact that suddenly being a good wife doesn't just involve learning how to do all the stuff I'm not particularly good at, but also involves stuff I am particularly good at. Like reading and synthesizing and and discussing, and well, all the stuff we loved doing together, the whole reason we got married in the first place.

And hanging out in downtown LA, because you just can't live in the area for 7 years and then move away without ever having spent at least one day becoming acquainted with the city itself.

Which, by the way, felt surprisingly reassuring and homelike. These years in California, I've keenly felt the lack of sky and rocks, but I never really articulated my need to look up at towering canyon walls. Had I known how downtown could feed this inarticulate need of mine, I would have spent a whole lot more time hanging out down there. Because, amazingly enough, standing in the middle of one of the biggest cities in the world is approximately the same experience as standing inside a sparsely populated chasm in the middle of the desert.

Beyond the comforting sense of enclosure, that strangely freeing sense of vertigo that comes from gazing at a very high cliff, either up or down... beyond all that, each spot had specific character and location, a particular place with a particular relationship to all the other particular places. Like the canyon, the city cries out to be known in all its particulars, known in it's colors and textures and sounds, not merely known by the numbers and signs on which we must depend to find our way home in suburbia. I found myself wondering what it must be like to know the city as I know the canyon. There is a strangely deep kinship that comes from knowing a place in common. What must it be like to share that knowledge, not with a few hundred, or even a few thousand, but with hundreds of thousands? And what must it be like to be that pinata vendor, a quite ordinary person so vividly shaping the experience of everyone passing through that corner of the city?

As striking as the sense of massive intimacy was the sense of autonomy, the sense that the city did not exist for us. It simply was what it was, which strangely enough, gave us the freedom to simply be who we are. I wanted to stock up on wholesale fabric, so we wandered through the fashion district quite a bit. We never did find any fabric vendors who appeared to be open for business, but we had a lot of fun wandering through shop after shop full of imported clothing, as the owners hovered over us explaining in broken English how much of each item they had in stock, eager to haggle out a deal. It looked very much like a mildly dingy outdoor mall--except that the whole purpose of each store's inventory was entirely different. Each store did not contain a careful selection of items designed to appeal to a particular demographic, but rather a set of items from a particular place. Their goal was not to sell things that a particular group of people would most likely want to buy, but rather to sell the particular things that they had. The difference was subtle, but striking.

It was a lot of fun, wandering through the wholesale shops, and we thought what fun it would be to be a buyer for a shop, to put together an inventory. It's rather amazing, really. It had never occurred to me just how much of my shopping is actually done for me by complete strangers.

We drove through the flower district with our windows down. The gaudy and the exquisite blended strangely, but the fragrance was glorious.

In need of a snack, we found a parking spot in the food district, and browsed through the mexican markets. I looked around for potatoes--perhaps I could spare myself the grocery stop on the way home. But none of them had potatoes, which surprised us. Potatoes are just such ordinary, basic things... doesn't everybody carry potatoes? But of course these places were not there to provide us with the things we wanted to buy, they existed to distribute the things that the vendors had to sell. And as ubiquitously salable as potatoes may be, they aren't generally imported from Mexico, so that's not what they were selling. So we bought ourselves a case of gorgeous strawberries and moved on.

The taco stand didn't look particularly interesting, or necessarily safe, so we reluctantly went across the street to McDonalds. It was a strange experience to walk through those doors and be suddenly transported back into suburbia, into that carefully crafted experience, where suddenly everything is all about you, and telling you what to want and bringing it to you. Where I ordered a large drink, not because I really wanted anything but french fries and water, but because it was there and they were selling it to me, and where they sold me a large drink, not because they had drinks to sell, but where they sold drinks because they knew I could be easily persuaded to buy one.

We drove by 6th and Hope. The Church of the Open Door is gone, and the Jesus Saves sign, but it is still in the middle of everything, right there between the enormous homeless population huddled beside crumbling buildings, filling run-down parks, and the sophisticated, powerful businessmen striding quickly and confidently down the sparklingly clean sidewalks in the shadow of glisteningly glorious monuments of glass and steel . It's a touch ironic, really. Our own church, Blessed Sacrament, got its start right in the heart of Placentia, right there on the main intersection, in the middle of it all. But as the city grew, that main intersection became an obscure little cul-de-sac, and even the city itself was swallowed up into obscurity within the urban sprawl. The church stands there still, and flourishes, right where it was planted in the first place, but that place where it was planted is very different now, a sheltered place and tucked away.

Meanwhile, the place where Biola began is still at the heart of everything, but Biola has moved to the suburbs. Sometimes I think this is sad, but sometimes I think it makes sense. It really does free up a lot of energy, to be in a place less all-consuming, a place that matters less, perhaps. It's terribly sad, but I start to understand, as I watch our family make the same decisions. We aren't moving to Houston, we're moving to Spring. To the suburbs, where everything is artificially structured around making life easy for us, because right now, we care more about fully participating in a vibrant community of thought, than in a vibrant community of location and commerce. And I think that's the right thing.

But it's still a little sad.