Monthly Archives: November 2012

I’ll be home for next year, darling, I’ll be home for next year…*

published on by kati

*Lyrics from Next Year by Two Door Cinema Club off their newest album Beacon. I’m pretty smitten with their up-tempo songs – great for running – and their overall modern, pop, alternative vibe. It’s so exciting when a band you found that you really liked releases a new album. It’s like a fresh start. I needed that.

Our house is a very lovely house. Our house is a very fine house.

Well, sadly, I’m here to announce: we didn’t sell our house. After four months on the market, we decided to let the listing expire, and take the winter off from trying to sell. The stress of having to keep the house in museum quality condition – and that means it’s virtually impossible to do any crafting or art of any kind, since those activities always make several days of clutter and debris – was getting to be too much. Plus, with Thanksgiving only a week away, and then Christmas right behind it, we’re going to want to be free to un-stage our house to make way for guests, gifts, feasts, and celebrations. Who can do that if you have to drop everything to get the house ready for a showing? Not I.

We’re hoping to re-list the house in the spring, when, possibly, the market improves, and the weather lifts. This cold snap brings the reality of shoveling, and muddy feet (thus mopping, mopping, mopping) that would surely lengthen our preparation time for house showings. But, you can always check out our house room by room by searching for (you guessed it) ‘house tour‘ in the archives, or view a briefer tour at our house tour tab. And there’s always our house’s very own website which will stay up for now (just sans MLS#). We’re (obviously) incredibly proud of all the hard work we put into the home, and are sincerely sad to leave it (which is why we’d rather just enjoy our time here during the winter). Hopefully, a lucky family will come along who simply MUST live here, and the house will end up in the care of a dedicated and loving family. Until then, this is our reality.

Not ideal, no, but what can one do? We’re going to try to make the best of it, and do things that normal people still do to their homes: hang art, decorate for the season, possibly spruce up a wall or two (I might, or might not, have a stenciling problem). So, I’ll have more things to show you, eventually. And I’ll get around to finalizing our pied-à-terre. So much was going on simultaneously that it’s been hard to complete anything, let alone photograph it.

Well, I hope you’re all well. Disappointment is hard to cope with (as some of you know from last Tuesday’s election results), but it is a part of life. I am choosing to see this minor setback as an opportunity – to create, to play, to linger, to reassess. What do you do to cope with a disappointment?

xoxo

Vote.

published on by kati

I wasn’t going to put yet another opinion about who to vote for, blah, blah, blah, on the interwebs, but, well, I felt I had to. I’d like to say that I don’t really care who you vote for, that the important thing is that you DO vote. But that’s not fully true. I do care who you vote for, and it DOES matter to me. Now, I can’t make you believe in my point of view any more than you can convince me that I should believe in God, or that I should have 12 babies. We all have our own paths in life, and we all have the right to do as we see fit.

"If I never meet you in this life, let me feel the lack." - Unknown

Responsibility

In the wake of the storm surge that inundated the Northeast last week, and in light of my fervent belief that with great power comes great responsibility, I felt it was right to talk about it. Responsibility. People on the (political) right speak of ‘personal responsibility‘ a great deal, and they speak of things like liberty, freedom, and other abstract notions of basically doing whatever the fuck you want, whenever you want to do it. (Maybe they don’t mean it that way, but the deregulation that many of them call for makes me believe that they don’t really believe that we are responsible to one another, for better or worse.) I don’t believe in that sort of way of thinking about culture, society, and each other.

Ok, sure, you want to own a gun, and I don’t want to stop you. But I don’t want you to shoot me. So, what do we do? We make rules, and we abide by them. We all agree on some basic things: it’s not okay to murder, steal, torture, etc., so we enlist law enforcement and legal systems to deal with people who break those rules. What strikes me as odd, however, is how often the plea for basic health services is seen as some sort of lazy entitlement; or, how the desire to care for a people’s elderly or infirmed (and I include mental health in this) is seen as weak, or unnecessary. These so-called ‘social programs’ are there to protect the greater population from the failure to look after our weaker, or harder hit citizens.

We all share in the benefits of having a huge country, with plenty of natural resources, coastal ports to import and export goods from, from the ability to feed our own people from our own land, and to engage with the world from a position of great economic power. But, with that power comes the responsibility to look after our own – when the storm surge hit the entire coast of New Jersey, vast swaths of New York City, Long Island, Connecticut and Rhode Island, did we as a nation say to ourselves ‘eh, too bad for them, eh?’ No. We commended the efforts of our political leaders to put aside the petty squabbling to do what is right. To use some of our collective power to protect those read on…