On a more somber note, this is the post I’ve been dragging my feet onwriting.  I’ve been using my crazy workload as an excuse to put it off, but the reality is it’s just not the easiest thing for me to put out into a public forum.  But considering I put other parts of our relationship on the blog, I probably need to put this, too… Awhile back, Charlie and I agreed it was time to stop dating.

While we’re both sad, it was very much a joint decision.  We’d reached a point where we simply could not longer ignore the fact that we want some very different things for our relationship and futures.  And the differences were significant enough that there was no way to resolve them without one or both of us compromising in ways that would leave one or both of us profoundly unhappy in the long term no matter how much we cared for one another.

The biggest deal-breaker was children.  I very much would like to have a family, whether that would be finding a partner who already had children or, preferably, having some of my own.  (And, considering my age, the later option is growing less and less likely at a pretty quick clip.)

Due to the Huntington’s gene being in his immediate family, Charlie has spent most of his life thinking that children probably weren’t an option for him.  It’s only in the last year he’s been tested and discovered he’s not a carrier.  And, as much as he’s tried to get behind the idea of children for my sake, he’s simply not there, and there’s no indications that that might ever change.  (As things stand currently, Charlie has an enormously difficult time even being in the room with a child under about the age of eight.)

Charlie also is not a believer in marriage. He simply does not aspire to have that be a part of his life.  While he would like to find some form of long-term, “committed” relationship, in his mind that means still having the ability to wake up one more, pack one’s bags, and leave in under two hours flat if things are no longer working.  (To be fair, Charlie could probably much better explain his position on this than I.  As many times as we’ve spoken about it, I’m still not certain I fully understand.)

I, myself, am not in a huge hurry to be remarried based on my experience last time.  If Charlie had proposed to me about now, I would probably have run screaming in the opposite direction.  But I do, someday, really want to be married again.  I want that commitment with another human being that you’re in it together for the long haul.  And while I have no sort of mental timeframe about expecting a ring in some certain amount of timeframe,  it’s important to me that the person I’m in a relationship be working toward the same long-term goal.

I also wouldn’t be completely honest if I didn’t say that my buying a house in Portland and my whole fascination with the small home movement had put a significant strain on our relationship.  Charlie dislikes small spaces about just as much as he does screaming infants.  And he was more than a little hurt that I chose to buy a place in a state other than where he lived.  I will probably write some more on that at some point, but not now.  I think there’s some valuable lessons in my experience, though, for others who have partners who disagree strongly about what’s important to them in a home.

There were also some interpersonal issues at play between Charlie and I, but nothing I want to go into gory detail about here.  My close friends have been hearing about those for awhile.  Suffice it to say, he’s still terribly British and I need a partner who’s more “out there” in terms of his thoughts and feeling, particularly in regards to how he might feel about me.

I still care for Charlie deeply and really, truly want him to be happy.  We’ve been through a break-up once before and we able to maintain our friendship.  It is my hope that once we’ve given it some time and space, we’ll once again be able to be part of one another’s lives as friends.

As it was, we had the most peaceful, loving break-up conversation(s) I’ve ever experienced.  We ended things well enough that we actually were able to go out to dinner and movie together before I left town during my stop to pick up belongings.  And I think highly enough of Charlie that I’d be happy to offer a character reference to his next girlfriend.

So consider yourself informed that at this point my personal story is me, my crazy cat, and a half-finished floating house.  And, for now, that’s okay.

Ladies, forget about sea-salt scrubs and other expensive spa treatments for your skin. Have I got the cutting edge thing for you in skin care… Scotch-Brite pads!

Actually, that’s just my goofy way of introducing the story of how I came to find myself in the shower last Sunday night trying to take off the top couple of layers of my skin with a Scotch-Brite pad. Let me try to explain…

The stratagems to keep me from moving into my place in Portland seem to have reached a full-court press. I first clued in to this fact when Charlie’s friend Ben showed up on our doorstep to visit this weekend and the first words out of his mouth were that he had a friend in Portland who would like to buy my house. I tend to be a little slow on the touchy-feely, intuitive stuff but I get the feeling that means Ben has decided it’d be okay if I kept hanging out with his buddy for the time being.

It gets better, though. When I first came to crash at Charlie’s until the work on my house is complete, I set up a temporary office in his guest room. Every time someone has come to visit, I’ve ended up moving my little electronic shop to either the dining room table or the master bedroom bed.

By way of background, Charlie is enormously house-proud and quite particular about his house, as only a male who hasn’t owned his own place until his mid-thirties can be. He and I have very different preferences when it comes to interior colors. He favors strong colors in cool hues. For example, the his bedroom is a dark burgundy. I tend to steer towards lots of earthtones and warmer blues and greens.

So, needless to say, I was surprised when he came to me a few weeks back and offered to give me the now empty Room for Wayward Boys to use for my office space… and told me, with a minimal number of facial ticks, that I could paint and decorate it however I wished.

The Room for Wayward Boys, as I have affectionately dubbed it, is where a revolving progression of Charlie’s male friends have stayed for various intervals of time when they’ve found themselves in need of a place to live and no funds. It is one of two remaining rooms in the house that have received nothing in the way of TLC since Charlie moved in. It still had 1970′s popcorn on the ceilings and walls yellowed with years of bachelor men chain-smoking and doing god knows what else in the room.

Since I first came to crash this past May, the door to The Room has remained firmly shut at all times except when the random male of the moment was entering or leaving at some strange hour. There have been friends of Charlie’s who’ve stayed in it for weeks at a time who I’ve never actually seen but, rather, merely heard due to the creak of the door sometime after midnight.

Charlie has either tired of being thought of as the flophouse for his social circle or he’s grown serious about me thinking of his place as my home, because he offered me The Room as my own personal space in his house. And I’m allowed to have complete artistic control. Now granted, this may because he’s already used to having the door shut at all times to hide the disaster on the other side. I’m not sure he emotionally acknowledges that The Room is actually part of his house.

Whatever the truth may be, a weekend ago, we ended up spraying down the ceiling and scraping off the popcorn. I had been dreading the task but it ended up being quite a bit of fun. There was something quite satisfying about running a scraper across the ceiling and having the offensive popcorn drop off in large, gooey blobs. Moreover, we had the whole ceiling clean in under an hour.

As a result, I was totally unprepared for how miserable a task the painting was going to be.

Charlie asked if I could keep the ceilings a flat, hard white so that it matched the rest of the house, and, after plastering 17-some-odd paint samples on the wall, I selected a warm Caribbean blue for the remainder of the room. (Leslie, considering you’ve dubbed me “the Queen of all things beige”, I know you’re skeptical. I’ll post pictures when the project is done.)

Anyway, Charlie was attending an event this weekend and I was impatient to make some progress on painting. Charlie had brocaded the ceiling right after we removed the popcorn, so the first order of business was to put two coats of primer over the brocading and then to paint it.

I’ve never painted a room before on my own. The closest I’ve ever come is when my friend Ed moved into a rental house that was in need of some serious fixing up. A group of friends banded together to help him paint. After assessing my relative painting skills, the group unanimously decided to put me in charge of painting the inside of all the closets. Sniff.

Aware of my status as a relative painting virgin, Charlie verbally walked me through the basics before heading out for the day. He neglected to mention one key point, however–don’t roll directly over your head when painting a ceiling.

Now, in my defense, I was smart enough to borrow one of Charlie’s motorcycle bandannas and I braided my hair back so it wouldn’t drift tendrils into the paint tray. (My hair tends to have a mind of its own about that sort of thing.) I also wore pants and a T-shirt I didn’t mind sacrificing to the decorative cause. But I didn’t really grok the whole “don’t standard directly under the roller” concept until I seriously splattered myself more than once. And painting tends to be messy work no matter how cleverly you may approach it.

By the end of the day, I was freckled head-to-toe in little spots of blue and white paint. I had paint flecks in my eyelashes. I had paint between my toes. I’m trying to avoid graphic detail, here… just trust me when I say paint ended up everywhere. Don’t ask me how. It just did. And repeated scrubbings with soap and water just weren’t doing the trick to take the paint off. Which brings me to the Scotch-Brite pads…

Charlie returned home to find me in a steaming hot shower using a Scotch-Brite pad to scour my skin raw. To his credit, after he finished laughing his ass off, he joined me in the shower and helped me scrub the spots I couldn’t see or reach. Which, considering he’s my favorite hunky Brit, was not a bad way to end the day.

After hearing from Charlie more details of my painting debacle than I would have preferred, Ben, who has worked as a professional painter, informed me he was taking over the remaining coats of paint. So while I’m typing up my saga of the Scotch-Brite pad, he’s busy making my den-to-be a cheerful, even blue.

And, strangely enough, even though I keep skeptically peeking into The Room, Ben’s not covered head-to-toe in paint. Go fig.

Living with someone, even temporarily, is definitely the quick way to discover differences in idiosyncrasies.

Case in point… I needed to do my laundry a few days ago and offered to do some of Charlie’s at the same time. When it came time to put it away I was puzzled to discover Charlie had three separate sock drawers. I couldn’t figure out why one human being needed three drawers for socks. But he did have a massive bureau he wasn’t sharing with someone else. I figured the socks had simply expanded to fill the available space.

Upon closer study, there appeared to be one drawer of black socks, one of tan, and one of white. So, I put the clean pairs of socks in their respective drawers and thought nothing more about it until the following morning… when I woke to Charlie in a mild panic to get to a meeting and completely incapable of understanding the devastation that had been wrought upon his sock drawers since the day before.

Apparently the actual system is this–there is a drawer for “work socks”, one for “casual socks”, and one for “slummin’ around socks”. Somehow, I had managed to put every pair of socks I had washed in the incorrect drawer.

Charlie has since tried to explain to me in great detail what constitutes each of the three categories of socks. He might as well be speaking Latvian to me, for all I understand him.

Now, I would like you to know that I am trainable to a reasonable degree when it comes to cohabiting in a relationship. You want the toilet paper to hang a particular direction on the roll? Fine. You don’t want me to kill the DSL in the house by plugging a fax machine into the wrong jack? Cool. I’ll move the machine. You’d rather I not use your first edition Iron Man comic book as a coaster for my morning green tea? Whoops. Sorry ’bout that. Won’t happen again.

But I’m afraid I’m never going to be able to adapt to Charlie’s sock classification system. In the future, any clean socks of his are going ON TOP of the bureau and he can sort them appropriately to his heart’s content.

Arriving in Albuquerque last week, I hit the end of my adrenaline spurt from closing up my Tucson home and multiple cross-country trips, and simply crashed. The first few days in Albuquerque, I was pretty much a slug on the couch, watching unhealthy amounts of Grey’s Anatomy on my laptop, bonding with my very clingy cat, and attempting to eat my weight in white cheddar popcorn.

After a few days of that, and tiring of Meredith Grey’s fictional drama over a guy for whom I fail to understand the appeal, I got a little more productive. I unpacked and organized my belongings which will be living at Charlie’s (all my historical reenactment gear and a surprising number of bladed weapons). I figured out how to successful operate the hot tub and get into and out of it without shocking Charlie’s retiree neighbor or arthritic dachshund, Wilbur. Then I turned my Virgo eye to the bachelor squalor in which Charlie and his invisible roommate Josh choose to live. (Josh spends 95% of his time at his girlfriend’s.)

Charlie has a very nice house in the foothills of Albuquerque. But two early-30-something guys have lived there for the last two years without a female presence or a maid. It shows. I understand why Josh’s girlfriend likes her own digs.

When I arrived at Charlie’s, there was nothing but a six-pack of RedBull and a lonely Guinness in the fridge. (Well, that is, if you discount everything in a bottle that had an expiration date later than 2006. There was also something a mottled grayish-blue I never did successfully identify.)

There was no sign of toilet paper in the house. One bathroom had a few sheets of paper towel sitting on top a dusty pile of magazines with titles like “Twisted Throttle” and “Motor Cycle: Ten-Nine-Eight ARRRGH!”

The pile of unwashed laundry in the corner of the master bedroom resembled Marjory, The Great Trash Heap from Fraggle Rock. Dust bunnies the size of Rumi caromed in herds across the red birch floors. (Charlie insists he vacuumed just before I arrived. If he’s telling the truth, God only knows the size of the ones he killed.)

Anyway, you probably get the idea. So, last weekend and most of this week I’ve been trying to clean and organize enough so that I don’t feel the need to renew my tetanus shot if I want to pad barefoot to the kitchen while still allowing Charlie a few bastions of masculinity. I’ve left his “man cave” upstairs (translation: den) completely alone. Even if I wasn’t trying to not disrupt his natural habitat too much, I’m too big a wuss to know where to even start on that chaos.

Charlie has accepted the disinfection and organization of his world with a surprising amount of equanimity. However, I suspect he’s going to be quietly grateful when things return to normal in his house at the end of this week.

The orientation for my new job starts next Monday in Dallas. I fly out Sunday evening. I’ll still be crashing at Charlie’s on the weekends when I’m not up in Portland. Especially until the construction is finished on the boatwell. But this should be the end of the full-time cohabitation for a while.

The blurb on BobVila.com came out today. If you’re curious, you can check it out here.

I have to say, I find it interesting to have someone else try to summarize what’s currently going on with me in a sentence or two. My own take on things is rather, ah, meandering. Or as the author of this piece puts it: “haphazard”.

Personally, I prefer to think I’m just partial to the richness one finds in tangents.