The Edge of Trust

I've been staying in generously donated housing for the last 10 weeks.  It's a one bed, one bath bungalow and it's been tight quarters for me, the boy and the dog, but it's been a blessing.  It's a furnished place so when I moved down at the beginning of September, I only brought office books, clothing and a box of toys for Gareth.  Sparse living, I miss all of my books, and I really miss the privacy of my own room (and my own bed!), but I can't complain.

Except the people who own the place need the house back (which I totally expected and I'm not complaining about!) and now I find myself in the position of hurrying to find housing (I've got a walk through of a place scheduled for Friday) on an island still in recovery from a hurricane.  After Ike slammed into the island, one of the aspects of life that never really recovered was affordable housing (for rent or to buy).  So there are lots of little houses and apartments that you can rent, but in my price range?  They may be in the less.. safe parts of the city.  And as a single woman with a small child, safety is one of those prime considerations.  But that's not even the part that has me really concerned.

My house is still on the market.  STILL.  I even opened it up to renting at the end of September and it is STILL on the market.  And I have absolutely NO idea how I'm going to be able to afford a mortgage payment and a rent payment.  It's going to eat up close to half of my monthly pay, with G's childcare taking up most of another week of pay and that leaves me with a very tiny pile out of which to pay for groceries and gas and the utilities from the old house AND the utilities from the new.  Color me anxious.

My prayer life is a bit frantic lately.  (Key words: please, help, and how?!)  I'm at my own edge here - there's nothing I can do and it's horrible.  I can't MAKE anyone rent or buy the place.  I have to trust my realtor to actually do his job despite the fact that I have no way of verifying that he does (what with the fact that I'm hundreds of miles away).  I can tighten my belt and live VERY sparsely, giving every dollar (and cent) a name.  But I still am out of control of the situation and I hate being out of control.  It is very tempting to turn my gaze towards the heavens and say "God? HELP ME! What are you doing?"

Which I know is petulant.  Because obviously God has been present and helpful in my life for a long time.  I mean, I'm here aren't I?  Serving in a church in a place that I really like with a son who is funny and smart, and I'm on my way to a new life.  But apparently, the edge of my trust in God is housing, because right now I feel like one of those grumbly Israelites in the deserts after they escaped from Egypt.  "Yeah yeah Moses.  Manna from the sky - great.  What has God done for us LATELY?!"

I'm trying to breathe through the anxiety and trust that God will care for me in the midst of paying for two houses.  I'm trying so hard to believe that God's providence stretches beyond this vocational position and into all aspects of my life.  I'm trying not to let panic take over, so I'm spreadsheet-ing like a madwoman and trying to do all the math to stay afloat during this especially lean time.  I'm trying y'all, but I'm still pretty scared.  And angry that I'm still tied to Waco despite my efforts to leave it all behind.  

Pray for me, my friends?  Pray that I would rest in God's care no matter what happens; that I would stretch the edges of my trust in God beyond the yard of my house.  Pray that very soon someone would find my house and just HAVE To buy it - or rent it.  Pray that I would manage our finances with a deft hand so that we don't have to go without.  Just pray, yes?

Wrinkles in the Plot

My brother-in-law is a part of the coaching staff for a Divison 1 college football team, and at the recent bowl game they went to (and WON), all the coaches received IPad minis.  I offered to buy his old IPad off of him and he ended up just giving me the mini despite my protests.  He's a generous guy! I always said that if I got an IPad it would be because someone gave it to me - I could never justify the expense otherwise.  But really, I've loved this thing since I got my hands on it.  It's like a huge IPhone and the games Gareth can play are great, but I do have one complaint.

The camera is...too good.  I keep trying to take a "selfie" and deleting the picture because of the WRINKLES UNDER MY EYES.  Seriously - when did I get these?  I keep looking back through my pictures trying to figure out when these lines got so deep and obvious.  Gray/White hair doesn't faze me and I'm actually pretty psyched for my upcoming (December is upcoming, right?) birthday so that I can be out of my 20's and into my 30's.  Age really does help in my profession, especially considering my gender. But these lines - these lines are freaking me out.  To the point that I'm wondering what can be DONE about them - you know, medically.  I don't like what they are communicating.

Don't get me wrong: I don't resent aging.  I'm not trying to "recover" any kind of lost youth, I'm not regretting "things left undone."  Judging from the lives of my parents and many other older adults I know, every year of life is a chance to do exciting and meaningful things; I don't assume youth equates to vitality.

What I'm afraid of is that these lines under my eyes may be communicating something OTHER than age - I'm afraid that they are communicating Weariness.  I'm afraid they're communicating Suffering.  I'm afraid that they are preemptively appearing and thus whispering to the unknowable crowds around me that I am bearing heavy burdens.  These wrinkles feel like spoilers, telling private stories to people I don't know.

In looking back through photos, these wrinkles seem to appear after my son was born, which makes sense.  His birth was trauma free, but the days afterwards were not.  And there's the fact that he didn't sleep through the night until he was close to 18 months old - and then stopped sleeping all together when Cliff went to jail.  And didn't sleep well again till he was 2.    But I know many women with more children than I who seem to have escaped the deepening lines under their eyes.

I fear that this is more than some kind of genetic predisposition towards early aging - I fear that Cliff's betrayal and incarceration have actually ETCHED themselves onto my physical body.  I resent that so much.  There is PRIVACY in having invisible wounds.  There is PROTECTION in complicated situations that can be hidden in plain view.  But these wrinkles?  They are violating my need to KEEP ALL YOU STRANGERS OUT OF MY INNER LIFE!

This is probably an overreaction, a psychic leak in my otherwise strong mental barriers that help to contain my personal brand of crazy.  But it also may be a part of that continuing struggle I fight, the struggle to be perceived as MORE than what has been done to me, as more than how I am coping in the midst of tragedy. I'm not just a wronged-wife, not just a single-mom, not just a tired parent, not just a Christian minister.
I'm more, I'm more, I'm more!

But these wrinkles.....it's hard to remember that I'm more when I see them.

The Tale of the Terrible Flooring Project

Hey Y'all!

Seeing as how I've been a blogging slacker as of late, I'm trying to catch you up on the goings on of the Grasham-Reeves. See my previous post for vet visits, birthday parties and anniversaries.

Oh - I forgot - we went to see our friends Chris and Natalie in Houston and we went to a baseball game. Blech. I'm glad they liked it. WHAT A BORING SPORT!!!! But the pictures are good, so I'll include those:Cliff and Chris show the thrilling process of buying tickets. I was expecting to pay some hefty prices, but we actually only paid $7 each. That's cheaper than a trip to the movies!!

This is why the tickets were so cheap. We were maybe 12 rows from the CEILING of the ballpark. I had some trouble with the impending death by falling that seemed to threaten every time I wanted to get up and get food/go to the bathroom/seventh inning stretch

But Beffy, you say, if you dislike baseball so much, where did you get an Astros jersey?

From Natalie, of course!

Frankly, the game would have been a LOT more entertaining if the bats and balls had decided en masse - "we're out of here!"

The Moores. We miss them.

----

August and September were much less fun than the above...much less. Why you ask? You should have had a great time - School started! And fall is coming! And Heroes came back! Well, yes those are all good things. But they were all overshadowed by one ominous and terrible event: Cliff and I refinishing our floors.

::Sigh:: Things are never as easy as they seem to be on the Home Depot Do It Yourself Website.

Here's what we started with:

Ugly Orange Carpet from the late 70's.

Cliff and I had long discussed convincing our landlord to replace the carpet with something else, preferably all of one color and texture. We figured laminate flooring could go on the concrete slab beneath the carpet - we would offer up our services to the landlord and do all the work if he would let us deduct the cost of materials from our rent. He agreed. WHEE!

So we pulled up the carpet, and what did we find?: HARDWOOD FLOORING!!

Well, we figured then, why put laminate down when we could just refinish the floor ourselves? Hardwood is better than laminate and we would have the satisfaction of improving our duplex with our own four hands. So we called the landlord, and he agreed with us, so we went about the business of pulling up carpet and renting a sander and all that jazz. Everything we read said we could do the sanding in a day and the varnishing within 3 and be done. Less than a week for a new floor? DONE!

So, one Sunday in late August, I came home to Cliff pulling up the carpet. You'll see the carpet on the right and the hardwood on the left and my cat in the middle being helpful as only cats can be.Good kitty.

But before we could take all the carpet out, we had to move our couches. Where might you ask? Well, the larger one (below) we moved into the kitchen. That's right...the kitchen. It would only be there a couple of days, right? What could go wrong?

Take that gravity!

The smaller blue couch (below) we tipped on it's side against the office door. It would only be a couple of days, right?

Ghost again, surveying all that he rules over.

The bookcase went into our bedroom, as did the tv, while the dining room table got taken apart, and slid in behind the blue couch, and the entertainment center, speakers, coffee table and pictures went into the office. Whew. We own lots of stuff.

So I went down to Action Rentals and rented a Square Buff Sander for a day, along with three different grains of sand paper and a white pad. Cliff picked the sander up one Wednesday morning (his day off) and I went to work.

The infamous sander

Around 10am, I started getting frantic texts and phone calls from Cliff - the sand paper wasn't getting very far before it was ruined. The left over carpet padding residue and glue wasn't coming up without ruining the paper. So Cliff was going to Home depot to get some stuff that would lift the glue up. Sounded good to me.

Except some IDIOT gave Cliff Goo-Gone saying that would lift up the residue. ARE YOU KIDDING? GOO GONE? Cliff called me again - the goo-gone wasn't working. So I came home during lunch and tried to help him. He was so frustrated he had to leave the room (understandably). I scrubbed for a while and then decided that we needed a stronger solvent. So I headed to Lowes (family preference) found an employee and purchased the strongest chemical solvent I could. It was strong - I promise you. So I came home and started to use it. It worked. I got all of the carpet glue reside up, called the Rental place, rented the sander for another day and purchased more sandpaper. Cliff called in a "family emergency" and we settled in to try another day.

Thursday dawns. We're hopeful that the sanding will progress and that we can get our jumbled lives back soon. I head off to work again. And then I start getting calls and texts again - the sand paper is still getting ruined. Not all the adhesive is up. I start googling to see what the problem is and read (to my horror) that older houses (OURS) with hardwood floors (OURS) used WAX instead of VARNISH to finish the floors. CRAP. There is no way that sander can lift that wax/varnish/evil substance of doom. Only a drum sander could, and there was no way that Cliff and I could use a drum sander.

So I go to Lowes again that night and purchase varnish stripper - the employees must of thought I had a chemical fetish. I bring that home (Cliff again has vacated the premises so he doesn't try to blow up the house in frustration) and start to strip the varnish off the floor. It's working. I go through the first gallon can before the floor is finished. So I go buy more cans. And use those. I'm still optimistic (family trait) that this step will get us to a place where the sander is working. Cliff, pessimistic (family trait), starts to look up the costs of bringing in professionals. No way we can pay those prices. We consult with our landlord - he's already let us deduct our failed attempt from one month's rent - will he let us do it again? YES?! AWESOME. BEST LANDLORD EVER.

Weeks have gone by. Two? Three? I don't know - it all mixes together in my head. We're miserable - we have to eat all of our meals in bed (where else could we?) We have to watch movies on Cliff's laptop. We can't have friends over. The house smells like a chemistry set blew up so we get high just coming home. We can't get to the laundry room or kitchen without having to vault over couches. Cliff is so frustrated I feared he might pull a Peter Petrelli and go nuclear on the neighborhood. I just try to stay positive. And then I plan on my Saturday off to rent the sander again and have a go at it. It's September by this time. Cliff is worried I won't be able to handle the weight of the sander, but I resolve to try anyway.

Second Round - I rent the sander, sand paper, white pad. Pick up saturday, return on Monday. That gives us a buffer Sunday if there are any problems. Cliff and I figure that I'll be half way done when he gets back from lunch. Whatever - I'll sand into the night if I have to. So we get back from picking up the sander, and Cliff is getting ready for work. I clear the floor of gallon cans and plastic sheets, paintbrushes and trash. And I start. And it goes fast. VERY fast. I'm halfway across the room with grain 20 by the time Cliff leaves. I actually finish the whole floor by the time Cliff comes home for lunch.

After weeks of stress and misery and chemical intoxication, the floor is sanded in 3 hours. Talk about anticlimactic. I go to his grandfather's house and borrow some hand sanders to get the flooring along the walls and the closets. I go to Lowes and buy some varnish for the floor. A couple of days later we're varnished, cleaned and moved back in. I can't find the camera or I'd upload a picture for you of the end result.

Suffice it to say, Cliff and I won't be doing any home renovations for a while.