In the most recent chapter of the Floating Folly renovation saga, we left our poor heroine (i.e. me) chewing her nails to the quick because: 1) her contractor had a seriously broken leg; 2) her house was currently without siding or a roof; and 3) the rainy season was about that start…

Well, since then, Portland has received an unprecedented amount of rain–yes, even for Portland–with some snow thrown in for good measure. I’m talking forecasts with 100% chance of precipitation for weeks at a time. And on the rare days it hasn’t been raining, it’s been too cold to cut lengths of siding outside.

Kenny has been receiving biweekly messages from me asking for assurances that he’s worked some sort of magic to keep the place water-tight. I didn’t care if he shrink-wrapped the whole damn house. I just didn’t want water getting into the new insulation or mold ending up growing in my walls.

Needless to say, I breathed a small sigh of relief this morning when I received word that the last of the siding is going on today. The new stairway to the rooftop deck gets built tomorrow. And then, once Kenny gets the siding on around the deck wall, the new roof can go on. Glory be.

I’m hoping they can get the stairway and deck siding on before the next onslaught of weather, which looks to be arriving Thursday. Then I just have to pray for one more break in the weather long enough for the new roof to go on.

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.

This past weekend, I traveled back to Arizona to participate in an annual camping trip with friends. Charlie was initially supposed to go with me, but he ended up having a work commitments that kept him in Dallas until fairly late Friday night. So, he had to fink out on me. The original plan had been for Charlie and I to drive out with our fairly deluxe collection of camping gear. But when it was determined he wouldn’t be coming, I couldn’t find the motivation to drive all that gear out for a weekend event for just little ol’ me. Instead, I decided to fly in to Tucson and supplement my flying-friendly minimalistic rig with a few key pieces borrowed from friends. You know—minor things like a tent and enough bedding not to freeze into a block of ice overnight.

All this sounded great in the planning stages, but I forgot one critical element–who I was dealing with when I put out calls for help… The first person I asked is my friend Warren Faidley, who makes his living as a professional stormchaser. I don’t normally tend to think of myself as a princess, but Warren’s idea of “enough bedding” to keep me warm was one of those goofy little Mylar blankets you find sold in $1.99 “survival” kits at back-road truck stops. (I exaggerate slightly for the sake of the story, but not by much.)

Weekend Learning Lesson #1 for me–never ask the guy who spent the worst hours of Hurricane Andrew chest-deep in water in the basement of a parking garage in order to report for CNN for enough blankets to stay “reasonably warm”. Warren is not a guy who easily grasps the concept of “reasonable”. And “warm” is totally out of the question.

Learning Lesson #2 was: if you’re going to borrow a tent from someone make sure to check it out throughly before you head out to the camping site. (This, by the way, is a close cousin to the rule: never try to set up a new tent for the first time after dark. I learned that one many years ago.)

Anyway, I made plans to borrow a dome tent from my friend Argyle. I think at some point everyone jokingly describes someone of their acquaintances as “having done too many drugs in the 60’s”. Well, in Argyle’s case, it’s actually true. He had the rap-sheet and Hepatitis C to prove it before cleaning up his life. Argyle is a very cool man with a huge heart. I am happy to claim him as a dear friend. But I just have to say that sometimes common sense completely escapes the man.

This lack of common sense was reflected in two ways in terms of the tent he loaned me. The first was the size of the tent. Argyle had assured me that the tent was big enough to comfortably sleep two adults on a queen-size mattress. Well, the reality was, the only way that could have possibly happened is if the theoretical adults he was describing were malnourished hobbits.

I’ve never honestly seen a dome tent as small as the one Argyle loaned me. I could barely fit myself (at 5 foot 11 inches), head to toe, inside the tent, let alone have room for anything else. I seriously suspect the thing shrunk in the rain during a previous camping trip. Either that or the tent was designed so that your pet dog could have its own space overnight. Suffice to say, my duffle bag of clothes and other camping gear ended up spending the weekend outside the tent.

I guess I shouldn’t have been quite so concerned about whether or not I actually fit inside the tent because the second issue with the tent made itself quickly apparent—the front door was no longer attached to the tent. Somehow Argyll had neglected to mention this minor fact when he said he had a tent I could use.

Now, call me old-fashioned, but when I’m camping out in the desert I kind of like having a way to seal up my tent. First, it helps to keep heat in a night. And second, it helps keep creepy-crawly things out. I’ve already been bit once by a brown recluse and I’m really not in a hurry to repeat the experience. Things were further complicated by the fact that I ended up staking my tent facing into the direction of what the wind ended up blowing all weekend. (Did I mention that camping in the desert also tends to be pretty dusty? It’s never good when you’re so gritty from camping that you can feel the sand lodged between your teeth.)

When I set up camp I wrestled with the zipper on the tent for about a half hour and thought I had it to the point where the door would stay on. But when I actually turned in for the night around midnight, the door was back on the ground. It was already freaking cold outside and I didn’t have the patience to try to wrestle with it again in the dark. Instead, I crawled inside the tent, whipped out the small package of safety pins I travel with–I tend to look obsessive-compulsive next to Eagle Scouts when it comes to certain things–and stitched the edge of the door to the rest of the tent.

When I ran short of safety pins, I grabbed the two pairs of earrings and a pin I had with me, and closed the most egregious of the remaining gaps. Then I crawled under my pathetic little Mylar blanket and did my best to pretend I was sleeping until sunrise, sandy teeth chattering through the night.

Anyway, that ended up being the way my tent was held together the rest of the weekend. The crew I was camping with ended up laughingly referring to it a “Steph’s Goth tent”. To be fair, more than one person in camp offered me crash space in their much more luxurious tents replete with tent heaters. But at that point, it was a matter of pride to stick it out in my little hobbit hovel.

I froze my ass off. I and all my belongings were covered in grime from head to toe. And I did, in fact, end up having creepy-crawly things visit me in my tent. Most importantly, though, I ended up having a total blast with friends I haven’t seen in too long.

This experience got me thinking about my place in Portland. While I’ve still got a long way to go in terms of renovations I want to do, if I’m being completely honest, the place is to a point of being pretty much habitable in its current state. All the windows and doors are now in place. It’s got a functional–albeit, admittedly ugly–bathroom and kitchen. The biggest creature-comfort that’s missing at this point is any sort of heat source. (Well that, and any sort of insulation in the walls of the new back room.)

But until I have the new heaters added by the electrician, it wouldn’t be that hard to bring in a portable unit and live in the front half of the house. It’d be a hell of a lot more comfortable than how I spent the weekend and I came out of that no worse for that experience. And as much as I like my creature comforts, I’m capable of roughing it if push comes to shove.

I think being there would make it significantly easier to coordinate some of the remaining work that needs to be done and possibly even light a fire under Kenny’s crew. (Hey, a girl can dream.) Plus, I’m just ready to spend some time in my house, dang it.

Anyway, the game plan I formulated on the way back from my camping trip is to drive my Mini Cooper up to Portland over the holiday weekend of Jan 1st and then camp out in the house for a few weeks and try get the remaining interior work kickstarted.

I made sure to book my return flight in late January on Southwest. Not only will they let me move up my departure date without a change fee in case I discover I’m truly miserable in the house with no central heat, but they also offer the only direct flight beteen Portland and Albuquerque I’ve been able to find on any of the airlines. Go figure.

So expect tales of “roughing it” on the river shortly after the holidays are past. Hey, at least with my house I’ll have a front door that actually shuts.

I just figured out what I’m giving to myself as a Christmas gift this year… I’ve been longingly looking at the schedule of Tumbleweed Tiny House building and design workshops all summer. Jay Shafer and Gregory Johnson drove right through Portland a few months back towing an Epu (picture to the right) and I wasn’t there to see them or attend their workshops, dang it.

Well, low and behold, I just discovered I’m going to be pretty close to Orlando for work when the workshops arrive there next month. I’m cashing in some air miles and shamelessly using my company’s corporate hotel rate to travel on the cheap. And, by God, I’m going to attend the two workshops.

Now, admittedly, I already have my own small home project that I’m in up to my eyeballs right now. But I’ve been enamored by Jay Shafer’s designs for a couple of years, now. I would love an excuse to build one of his little homes someday. Moreover, his design workshop is of quite a bit of interest to me because I’m at the point in (re)constructing my own place where I need to figure out how to maximize the internal use of space to best meet my needs. Even if I don’t ever build by own Tumbleweed home, they have several clever features I think I may be able to adapt for my own floating cottage.

I also think I’d really enjoy meeting some other people who are passionate about small housing in person.

So, all in all, I’m pretty excited that I’ve found a way to attend.

Much Lamaze breathing (and two generous tumblers of Charlie’s Scotch) later, I finally felt capable of trying to formulate an emergency plan.

Kenny assures me that the remaining exposed wall of my house has been sealed against the elements and Gene has been enlisted to reattach the roof panels until Kenny is well enough to work on the roof again.

In the meantime, while Kenny is doing R&R, Gene is being assigned to do the remaining framing work inside so I can get the house to the point where I can draft other people to work on it. The main work Gene will be doing is shifting the center wall of the house back 2-3 feet so it falls almost directly under the ridgeline. This will significantly open up both the kitchen and bathroom. The only thing I lose is ratty cupboards in both rooms, which I wasn’t keen on in the first place.

Once that is done, I can get the electrician in to finish installing the two new heaters, a few additional outlets, and the recessed ceiling lights in the new back room.

After that, it’s time to tackle updates to the bathroom. Oh, and pray that Kenny is right about my place, in fact, being water-proof.

As bad news has followed bad news, and delay followed delay, Charlie has grown increasingly, quietly gleeful. From the very beginning, he wasn’t happy with the news that I had bought a home in Oregon when he lives in New Mexico. He’s grown increasingly un-enamored with the idea since I arrived in NM.

I suppose in some ways that’s good news for me. Considering I was only supposed to be staying at his place for a month or possibly two while the work on my house was completed, I could easily understand if I had overstayed my welcome. As it is, I’ve been feeling pretty guilty at how over-schedule things are running. Fortunately, Charlie not only doesn’t mind but finds my predicament humorous.

At this point, I’m starting to tease him that he has hired a small crew of covert operatives to sabotage the project, including, possibly, my contractor in the conspiracy.

(I swear, being able to see the humor in the situation is the only thing keeping me going at this point.)

Color me foolish but, in this whole adventure of downscaling, it never occurred to me to enroll my contractor in an accidental death and/or dismemberment policy. Which is another way of saying that a few days ago I received an email from Kenny… from a hospital bed somewhere in Oregon where he was scheduled to have surgery the next morning.

Apparently, Kenny had spent the weekend enjoying a ski-trip. Enjoying, anyway, until a major wipe-out in which he ended up breaking his leg. And Kenny, ever the over-achiever, didn’t just acquire any sort of run-of-the-mill break. Oh no. We’re talking a massive spiral fracture of the femur requiring surgery to bolt him back together.

I would like to make it clear that my first reaction upon hearing the news was, in fact: “What?! What happened? Are you okay??” I’m less proud to admit that this was closely followed on the heels with: “Where the hell is there skiing in October and who gave you permission to do anything life-threatening before you’re done with my house?!”

Somehow, I managed not to relay this second set of sentiments to Kenny. (Mainly, I think, by biting my lip bloody.) This was especially difficult at the point he broke the news to me that his doctor has told him it will be at least two months before he can return to work. Things like working on rooftop could be much more time and physical therapy later.

On the best of days I wouldn’t be thrilled by the news that scheduled work on my house was going to be delayed by two months or more. But Kenny’s news arrived when a quarter of the siding on my house still needs to be installed, the old metal roof has been stripped off, and the rainy season in Oregon is just about to begin.

(And now a brief break while the narrator of this story lapses into a half-hour of primal screaming…)

At the risk of some snarky comments from my best friend Wes, I’ll say that I’ve slept in some pretty strange places over the course of my life.

I’ve napped in the lowered sails of a 70 foot sailboat in the Bahamas. I’ve shared my bed with a very unhappy brown recluse spider. I’ve been in hotel rooms with multiple bullet holes in the bathroom door and a suspicious stain on the tile. But this is definitely the first time I’ve been in a hotel room that looks like it came straight out of a centerfold shoot for Ranger Rick. I kid you not.

I’m up in Portland to check on the status of the renovations on my house and to pick out colors for the new siding and roofing. Through my multiple forays back and forth to Portland this summer, I found a Quality Inn that’s two miles from the marina. That’s where I usually stay during the times I’m working from Oregon and dealing with the house.

Anyway, a new owner took over the place about two months ago. They’ve been redoing the rooms, which really needed some TLC. I’ve been in a couple of the remodeled rooms and, while somewhat bland, they’ve been fairly nice in terms of amenities.

This trip I had a bit of a shock. Instead of being on the ground floor, where I usually am, the desk clerk put me in one of the corner suites upstairs. So far so good. But my entire room is decorated to appear as though I’m in the middle of a forest manufactured by Disney.

There are clouds painted on the ceiling, pine boughs and tree trunks in every corner of the room, a bird’s nest tucked jauntily in the corner next to my lodgepole bed, and a picture of cranky-looking grizzly bear next to the desk. But the true highlight of the room has got to be the menagerie of lawn-ornament animals scattered with decorative abandon about the room. So far I’ve counted two deer, a raccoon, and a mallard duck who, for some inexplicable reason, is nesting in a heart-shaped basket woven of twigs.

I keep glancing over my shoulder expecting some demented version of Snow White to pop out of the shrubbery and offer me a freshly baked, Quality Inn cookie.

I have no idea how I’m going to manage to sleep here tonight. The only reason I haven’t run screaming from the room is that it also hosts the most spectacular Jacuzzi bathtub I’ve ever seen. This isn’t just a you-and-your-boyfriend-have-a-romantic-weekend-alone kind of tub. This is an invite-everyone-in-your-graduating-class-and-host-a-three-day-orgy kind of tub. (Don’t worry, Mom. I don’t know anyone in the area code who isn’t one of my contractors.)

Anyway, I intend to have a bubble-bath to end all bubble-baths tonight. After that, I’ll take my chances with the menagerie of woodland creatures. If worse comes to worse, I guess I can always sleep in the bathtub, right?

Since life has settled down for me somewhat while I wait-out the renovations in New Mexico, I’ve been starting to focus on shedding the fifteen or so pounds I gained over the course of my relationship with David.

I haven’t been terribly motivated to fight lately. Especially since my right hip, knee, and foot are still all in various phases of recovering from injuries. So I’ve been hunting for other forms of exercise I can enjoy.

I joined a local gym in Albuquerque that I like and I’ve been doing a combination of yoga and pilates to try to recover some of my flexibility and core strength. But I really needed to find something cardio to add to the mix.

My gym has a pretty good Nia program and Albuquerque also has an independent Nia studio called “Sway”. I’d seen vague references to Nia in the past, but didn’t know a whole lot about it. When I missed one of my yoga classes due to a conference call that ran over, I fortuitously decided to poke my head into the Nia class that came after and was hooked.

I’ve been describing Nia to Charlie as “hippy aerobics” but that doesn’t really do it justice. It’s more a form of dance with a lot of emphasis on the individual doing what feels good to their body on a given day. It’s definitely not your typical aerobics class with a bunch of leotard-clad perfect bodies marching in lockstep. It’s a lot more fluid than that. Most of the classes have felt less like exercise to me than being silly and dancing around in my living room to music I love when no one’s watching.

The couple of instructors whose classes I attend are all the kind of groovy, free-spirited, bohemian chicks I’d admire and enjoy spending time with. The women who attend the classes are also a marvelous eclectic mix. You get everything from dance majors at the local U to pink-haired painters in their sixties. It’s great fun.

Aside from being great exercise, one thing Nia is teaching me is just how rigid I am in my body. I just cannot move and flow to the music the way a lot of the women in my classes can. I feel as rigid and creaky as the Tin Man in the Wizard of OZ prior the much-needed can of oil.

I watch the other women, and the teachers in particular during class. There’s a type of fluidness to these women that I sorely covet and aspire to. And I don’t think it’s just about performing better in class.

I’m missing limberness and ease in my life. And I want to figure out how to find it.

”Life isn’t about waiting for the storm to pass… It’s about learning to dance in the rain.”
–Vivian Greene

I’ve been pretty stressed and moody lately. And, until last week, I’ve been confused about why I’ve been feeling that way.

I mean, my life is in a much better place than it was this time last year, and REALLY in a better place than it was two years ago. This is supposed to be my “Happily Ever After”, dammit. What do /I/ have to be stressed about?

Well, for starters, there have been a hell of a lot of changes for me in a short period of time. I was in a rocky relationship and had an ugly divorce. Now I’m trying to date someone new. I’ve moved from Tucson, a place I really liked. Now I’m in a holding pattern in New Mexico while I try to finish making my place habitable in Portland. And it’s taking a lot longer to accomplish that than I anticipated. I don’t put down roots easily and it’s difficult to know how many I should be putting down in Albuquerque.

I’ve started a new job that I really like. But there’s also a lot of pressure on me to perform. Not to mention, it’s been stressful just trying to hunt down the basic supplies I need to do my job. It seems like half were shipped to Portland and half to Tucson. I’m spending an insane amount of time on the phone trying to explain to people why they need to be re-sent to Albuquerque—from a phone with a Dallas area code.

I miss my friends. I miss my stuff, which is all stowed away in storage up in Portland. My life feels like a fragmented mess spread across four geographic locations. I’ve just been in a real funk.

I finally broke down a week ago and called my former-rockstar-groupie counselor, Chris, who I adore. Chris has been through some pretty spectacularly ugly times in her own life. (Chris ran with the Patti Boyd, Beatles, Eric Clapton, Rolling Stone crowd for about a decade of her life and has had two rocker husbands of her own before she cleaned up her act, went back to school, and got her masters.) I value her for both her wisdom and sense of humor.

Whatever drama I might be having in my life, odds are good she’s experienced it some point in her own—and with far more drama and Technicolor than my own.

Chris reminded me that if I were to look at my life on one of those “Life Event Stress” scales, I’m pretty close to being off the end of the chart… divorce, new relationship, new job, new house, (two) out-of-state moves, significant change in social activities/recreation, etc.

That explained the stress part to me, but not the deep emotional funk. Some of my mood could be related to stress. But this has felt a lot more like I’ve been sulking because I don’t have what I want/expected.

I’ve been feeling like I’m stuck in “limbo” in New Mexico. This was not what I intended to be my new home. I want “limbo” to be over so I can get on with my visions for the next phase of my life. And that ain’t happening anywhere near on the schedule I would like.

Anyway, shortly after my call with Chris, I stumbled across the quote at the top of this entry, and the rest of the picture clicked into place. Life has definitely felt like one long storm for me over the last year or so, and I feel sorely overdue for some sunny weather.

However, all things considered, things really aren’t so bad. They’re just not what I anticipated. My current choices are to continue to stew in a moody funk until I get what I thought I was going to. Or I can look up and make an effort to appreciate what I do have.

As much as it may feel like it, this isn’t limbo. These are hours of my life. And my choice is whether I wish to spend them sulking or dancing.

Dancing sounds like a lot more fun.

So, it’s been a little while since I posted an entry. This has been a combination of being focused on getting up-to-speed with my new job and, frankly, because I’ve kind of been stuck in construction limbo-land.

The float rebuild is done on my house, which is good news. I still have to finish sealing in the boatwell before I can move in, however. And I’ve just exhausted my readily-available cash for the project. Having to completely re-do the electrical and plumbing set me back in my planned budget for renovations.

I’m trying hard to do everything with the house on a cash basis rather than using credit. I REALLY like owning my house outright. So, now, it’s a question of letting my shiny new paycheck catch up with the new round of contractor fees. My paycheck on the 15th covered the last of the boatwell. My paycheck at the end of the month should cover the money down to get the new contractor rolling on the boatwell.

I’m just a bit grumpy and more than a little down that things are taking longer than I would like. I had been hoping to be in my place by now. By the time all the construction is done, odds are good I’ll have missed the prettiest part of the summer.

Plus, since starting my new job, I’ve been pretty much handing 95% of my paycheck over to contractors. My income looks great on paper but, man, am I living frugally right now. I’ll be really glad when I’m through the Money Pit part of owning my new place. Charlie has been great about letting me crash at his place but I’d also really like to give him his space back as soon as I can.

On the more upbeat side, I really am enjoying my new job. It’s nice to be using my brain again and I feel well-suited for the position. I’m also profoundly grate that the position pays well and my boss is extremely flexible about where and when I work just so long as things get done. The universe cut me a real break with my new job.

All in all, life is okay. I’m just restless to get on with moving in to my new place and making it an actual home.