The World According To Anne Arky

I didn’t really mean to be an absentee blogholder, but that is what’s happened. My apologies to one and all. No real reason for it – I’ve just been uninspired. I’ve also been busy, but that’s really no excuse.

After moving into my then-newly-purchased house in November 2004, I have been trying almost incessantly to “get my house together”, which at one time had some concrete meaning. I am still trying to do that, although I am now finding the phrase to be overused and somewhat meaningless. I am aware that when one buys a house or even moves into an apartment, “setting up housekeeping” is an ongoing process wherein one completed project leads to another newly-started one, or in some cases, one uncompleted project leads to several other uncompleted projects, but I swear I am not going to allow the latter to become my lifestyle. Finishing that part of “getting my house together” is not really what I mean, since I don’t ever expect to be completely satisfied with whatever the status quo might be at any given time. What I have always meant by that phrase is getting unpacked and put away or situated all those things I brought with me from my previous residence (not to mention all the stuff I’ve had in storage at Mother’s for years, some of which is still there).

Time and energy seem to be the main stumbling blocks for my “getting my house together” (herein known as GMHT). I work two jobs – one day job, 40 hours a week Monday through Friday days, and one night job, two nights a week (Thursday and Friday) for about 10 hours a week. The latter is a retail job (a perfectly wonderful job in a bookstore), which means that I am abusing my much-overweight body by standing on sore feet and inflicting myself on my arthritic knees for several hours at a stretch. I don’t work weekends, but Saturdays I just die.

Working two double shifts in a row (both jobs Thursdays and Fridays) incites the metabolic law that means on Friday night (or whatever time I get to bed that is closest to it) my body will collapse upon impact with my bed and not be roused by anything short of a nuclear holocaust until it gets damned good and ready. This even includes neighbors who mow their lawns before noon on weekends, which is some kind of suburban crime that should be punishable by weeds, if not outright death. Of course, this metabolic law doesn’t reckon on O’Malley, my otherwise wonderful and thoroughly adored cat who racks up thousands of frequent flier miles per year, usually three feet at a time and mostly on Saturday mornings.

Having slept away the whole Saturday until I am spent, I usually get up and stumble into the kitchen, pour a glass of iced tea for myself and set up camp on one end of my couch (Command and Control Central, my equivalent of Archie Bunker’s chair – no one gets to sit there but moi) and begin to plan my day. Sometimes this involves actually doing something, but more often than not, it involves reading the television guide to see what channel I want to put the TV on while I ignore it and read whatever book I’m involved in at the moment until I decide it’s time to get up and go back to bed for awhile. This process is repeated throughout the day, usually without anything productive having been accomplished in any way, shape or form. During this time, I am often visited upon by the “Do Something!” police, but I usually choose to ignore them. I do, however, at least make plans for what productive things I will spend the impending Sunday doing.

Sundays. Although I am not a particularly religious person (I was using the term “spiritual” long before it became a yuppie rationale for attending church), I do belong to a church, and I used to be active in attendance and choir and Sunday school teaching and ladies’ circle and all that good stuff. All that was before I took an intense dislike to our then-minister (circa 1997) and then took a second job (circa 1998). [I have always had an intense dislike for mornings in general.] When I was working on Saturday nights, getting out of bed on Sunday mornings to go to church wasn’t even an option. I did, however, show up in church on the first Sunday after our then-minister left, figuring at the very least to make a statement with my presence. I had intended to continue doing so, especially now that I’m not working Saturday nights, but for some reason I just don’t feel moved to go to the trouble, even though I do go to the trouble to set my alarm so I can get up before 9 AM and watch my favorite show on all of television outside of Braves baseball – CBS’ “Sunday Morning”. I have inspired my friend Fran and my mother to watch this show, and usually when it’s over, one or the other of them (or both) will call me and we will spend incredible amounts of time on the telephone talking about not a damn thing and enjoying ourselves thoroughly while we do it. (Unlimited long distance was created with me in mind, thank you very much.)

If I can gather some momentum, I actually manage to accomplish quite a lot on some Sundays, but other Sundays (like yesterday), I can manage to accomplish nothing whatsoever. Most of what I need to do to GMHT is downstairs in the guest bedroom or the garage, and it’s stuff I am really beating myself over the head to get done, but my poor knees are so resistant to stairs that I can sometimes manage to come in from the bookstore (and dinner afterward with a friend) Friday night, climb the stairs and not go downstairs again until Monday morning, when it’s time to go to the office. Other times, I can actually manage to make myself go downstairs, whereupon I manage to get quite a lot done. Yesterday wasn’t one of those times.

If I can finish putting up my tins, I can pretty well manage to get the rest of that room pulled together, and then I can drag my feet and get the garage done at my leisure, in and around other projects I have in mind. The projects are related to fixing up the house, as such, not unpacking anything I brought with me. You would think that putting up a few tins wouldn’t be such a big deal; would that it were “a few” tins. It’s actually more like a few hundred tins, to the tune of over three thousand tins, many of which have already been put up. I have rebuilt the “main” walls of tins three times now, and I’m getting ready to rebuild the secondary walls as soon as I can get my lazy arse down the stairs on a weekend. I have done as much in that room as I can by working around the tins awaiting their eventual fate, but the only possible next step is to finish the tins before I can do anything else.

I have decided that should I have reason to move again in the future (when I bought this house, the very idea was totally unthinkable, and my plan has always been to leave the place no other way but toes up), I will not take the tins with me. I have moved them about four times, the last two times of which they were numbering in the multi-thousands. No more. I will find some poor soul who is willing to come and get them and pack them up and take them with them, or willing to move into the house to live with them. There are way too many to try to sell them on ebay onesie-twosie, so I’m not even going to go there.

And how was your weekend?
(The tins pictured above are about one fourth of my tin collection, when I had them on display at my apartment.)