On Not Doing It All

I realized today that perhaps I try to do too much. I just signed up for an online medical writing course. I'm also trying to launch a jewelry line made of drilled seaglass pieces. And I want to keep up this blog, and my other one, 2cats.wordpress.com

This is all in addition to working full-time and trying to be a good mother to my two young children. S is now 3-1/2, and C is 15 months. And of course I want to be a decent wifey, now that I'm officially married and all.

But my sense of time is skewed. I left work an hour early the other day, and because it was still light out I believed I would be able to do my Tracy Anderson Post-Pregnancy workout, start fixing dinner, and do a few loads of laundry, all before N came home with the kids. Obviously, little to none of this got accomplished. I might have done 10 minutes of the workout before the girls came home and C started crawling on me.

I'm trying to be more in the moment, as they say. When I try to fit too much in to one day, I don't pay attention to any of the actual moments of the day.

Do you ever get the sense that some people climb mountains just to be able to say they climbed a mountain? I don't want to say someday that I lived a good life and have two wonderful grown children. I want to live the life. Sometimes I feel like I'm forgetting to do so.

A New Direction for Reverie in Maine

I've got a new gig: volunteer blogger at the Environmental Health Strategy Center. Check out my first blog post, here.

Oh, I'm still working full-time as a data analyst at Maine Medical Center, but I'm looking to expand my horizons a bit. Environmental health and sustainability are two things I think about a lot, and I'd like to revisit a former career of mine as a would-be writer.

So, in an effort to make all of the paths of my life converge in some meaningful way, I am hoping to reinvent this blog, dear reader, as a place where I can share what I learn about environmental health and show you how you can apply that knowledge to protecting your health. From little steps (not microwaving in plastic) to big ones (attempting a green renovation of our home), I'll let you know what works, what doesn't, what to be really worried about, and how much it all costs.

Stay tuned.

Port of Portland

Spotted at the Portland Ocean Terminal

Books

Sidewalk outside Carlson & Turner bookstore on the East End

The storm

before

after

Peace in the Valley

Amazing what makes some cats happy. Thumbs has been suspended in this bag for about an hour.

On another note, as promised, I've started a new blog to chronicle our new house renovation. Go to 2cats.wordpress.com to check it out.

House Blogging

Big plans afoot. Our mortgage was conditionally approved (pending proof of hazard insurance, and copies of some papers), so if all goes according to plan we should close before the end of June! We're so thrilled. We've both been renting now for upwards of 15 years apiece, so having a place to call our own is going to be huge. I think it will feel really, really different to be living in our own place, that we create together, and I can't wait to experience that.

Since we thought we'd be living in our current rental for the foreseeable future, we already did a lot of little DIY improvements here and there. For example, N put dimmers in most of the rooms, we painted several rooms (or painted them halfway), and added some lighting fixtures and other little details to spruce up the place. But we always did them as cheaply as possible and in a sort of comprised way, since this was a rental. So owning a place and being able to do things the right way and just the way we want to do them is going to be huge.

And in that spirit, we plan on documenting the whole process, from soup to nuts, from ripped out, pee-stained carpet to dismantled ceiling tiles. And we'll be doing it all on a new blog. Title not yet determined, nor host (I have trouble making my photos look the way I want them to on Blogger, so I'm thinking of trying out a different blogging platform--suggestions welcome!) nor launch date, although I guess we better get going ASAP. N and I will both be contributing, so stay tuned!

It's Happening

We're under contract! We walked through the house with an inspector last Friday and a contractor this morning, and the resident is already starting to move things out onto the sidewalk. Oh, which house, you ask? Oh, um, well....this one. That first one described there in that post.

Yeah, I know, I'm going to eat my words. Something compelled me to go back and look at this house, despite my initial--and, I see now in re-reading that post--overwhelming misgivings. I think part of my reluctance in thinking the single-family home could not possibly be salvageable was because I didn't think N would be on board with the renovations. But when he saw it, saw that it was in a great neighborhood (our current one), and was an actual house that we could actually afford the mortgage on, I think he got really excited. Frankly, I think he's excited to do the demolition. Ripping down the ceilings, ripping up carpet, knocking down walls. Guys love that sort of thing.

But circumstances have conspired to make this a really good time for us to buy. There is the $8,000 tax credit that Obama is giving first-time homebuyers who purchase a house before December 1, 2009. The low, low interest rate our mortgage broker locked in for us last Friday, even before we had a signed contract, because our realtor assured him we would definitely be going under contract (4.5% people!!!). And because this house does need so much work, we got it for a low, low price. We figure our sweat equity over the next 5 years will be like our second job, making the house pay off down the line if we decide to sell and move into something larger (or something with a yard). Our broker thinks that with the location we're in, we'll probably be able to sell for double the purchase price in 5-7 years. And, no matter how you slice it, the mortgage, even with property taxes and hazard insurance added in, will be less than what we're currently paying in rent. So, I think financially, we're making a wise move, despite the many, many weekends of home improvement we have coming up.

And yes, I realize I'll be trying to live down that blog post for months to come.

Second Thoughts

Okay, I just read this and now I'm feeling really nervous about buying a home. If this economics writer for the New York Times can screw up, what does that portend for me and N???

Poking Around

I looked at three houses today in my neighborhood. One, which was going for all of $124,900, smelled so badly of cat piss, I could almost taste it on my tongue 3 hours later. I'm all for DIY renovations, but there's no way I could salvage that place. Not only was the stench unbearable (and I am totally a cat person), but the layout was all wrong: a tiny, disjointed, dark kitchen; a rabbit's warren of bedrooms upstairs, a deck only accessible by pushing out the bottom part of the window. But the good thing about looking at that place was meeting the neighbor from across the street, a kitchen renovator who handed me his card with a sweet smile. He and his wife lived across the street from the house for sale, next door to his sister. He also thought the house was a good deal, and said houses for that price rarely came for sale in the neighborhood.

One of the other houses I looked at was much nicer, but was also 3x the price of the first. This one was a two-unit with a single-family house feel. An elderly woman lived there, and the decor reflected the occupant. I could see past that; what I couldn't deal with was the vague sound of Interstate 295 that hummed in the distance. There were views from the upstairs window, but I didn't want a view of the highway, even if Back Cove and New Hampshire could also be seen. When I lived in New York, I spent 5 years within spitting distance of the Brooklyn Queens Expressway, and to this day, the sound of highway noise stresses me out and reminds of waking up at 4am to the sound of massive semi-trucks downshifting in traffic outside my window.

Finally (well, not so finally, this was the first house I looked at, but I after I saw the other two I went back and looked at the first with a different mindset) I saw a two-unit on corner of one really nice quaint street and one sketchy not-so-great street. Besides the location, there isn't much to recommend it. The broker and I counted five layers of peeling linoleum flooring in the kitchen, there was fake wood parquet floors elsewhere, wood paneling in most of the rooms, vertical vinyl blinds, dropped ceilings, and on and on. But there was also decent light, some nice molding around the window frames, and the potential to create a really nice open concept kitchen/eating area. If we got a tenant for the downstairs, our mortgage would be eminently affordabel. But, to give you an idea of what we'd have to do to the place to get it rent-worth, here's the living room.