Tag: ramblings

antigone

We Bought a House and Sold a House and Nobody Died

Ramblings

First, we spent SO MUCH MONEY and SO MUCH TIME getting the house ready to sell. People do not tell you how expensive it is to SELL a house. I was assuming we would just put it on Zillow and Redfin and people would come and 7 days later the house would belong to somebody else.

HAHAHAHAHAHHAHHAHAHAHHAHA. No.

We did make one excellent decision though and that was to hire a ROCK STAR agent. He had us do all our inspections ahead of time and it was probably the best thing we did in all of this mess other than making the backyard look the way we’ve wanted it to look for 13 years but never put the money into.

PROTIP: Spend the money to make the house look the way you want. Stop fucking around and just do it.

The universe was looking out for my sanity and the house sold in 7 days almost exactly to the hour from when it first hit the MLS listings. In that 7 days our lives looked like this:

5:00AM – I get up, start some laundry, shower, get dressed, clean up Ready Room.
6:00AM – I start working.
7:00AM – Ben gets up, makes bed, showers, cleans bathroom, picks up bedroom, and heads downstairs to feed the dogs. He dusts, picks up poop, sprays side yard with pee enzyme spray, and blows/cleans up leaves.
9:00AM – I take my first 15 minute break. Move laundry to dryer, pick up dog poop and spray side yard with pee enzyme spray, clean up any kitchen mess, vacuum if I have time.
11:00AM – Ben takes dogs to daycare. I take lunch and vacuum again, mop the floors, dust more, and take down both baby gates we use for the dogs.
1:00PM – I take another break from work. Put any dog beds and the dog stairs in the back of my car. Possibly vacuum again. Finish up any laundry I had started that morning.
2:00PM – Depending on the day I would either work on deep cleaning things or we would have to leave the house if we had showings. House was available for showings between 2:00 – 6:00 daily. If we had showings I had to put Romanoff and the litter box in my car and hide all of her beds, food, and water.
5:50PM – Pick up dogs.
6:00PM – Put all baby gates back up. Let pissed off Romanoff back in the house.
ALL EVENING – Vacuum, work on any house projects, find more things to clean, eat dinner (We haven’t cooked at home since we put the house on the market. We’ve had a brand new stove top for 2 weeks AND I HAVE NEVER GOTTEN TO USE IT.) Stay on top of poop and dog pee outside.
8:00PM – Go to bed. Spend all night tossing and turning and being convinced nobody is going to buy our house.

Rinse/Repeat every day.

On the weekend we had to be out of the house most of the day so we got up and cleaned like crazy people then left with cat in tow while the dogs were at daycare. Thankfully we were able to hang out in Ben’s lab one day (Romanoff was NOT a fan of lab life), and then some friends let us hang out at their place on Sunday and Romanoff found a nice comfy pile of blankets to sleep on in one of their closets. She was much more happy with that arrangement.

BUT! The house is SOLD.

There were several moments when I wanted to strangle Ben. LOVINGLY. And there were several moments where I could see smoke start to drift from his ears when talking to me. But we would come back within minutes and apologize and the other person would also apologize and then we would both agree that this is HARD and it is okay to be frustrated and a bit short.

Communication! Our old therapist would totally high five us in these situations. Then bill us $270 and give us homework.

Again, all of this was ONLY possible because we hired a very seasoned and amazing agent. If I had one piece of advice to give when selling a house it would be to hire a Pat. Pat started out very diplomatically guiding us down this road but we soon let him know to just be brutally honest about the house and what we needed to do and he did that… kind of. He was the perfect amount of tenderly honest but also kind and funny and just SO on top of everything and never once complained about any of the like 23,482,342 emails we sent him at all hours of the day and night. One day when we were coming back to the house after getting some food he was out front weeding our sidewalk! He was every bit as invested in us selling our home as we were and that showed from the very first conversation.

NOW! We are in a 5 day period where a buyer can back out. Ben caught a flight to Austin to attend the F1 race, a plan he made months and months ago but somehow happened at the perfect time. I am going to take the weekend to do ABSOLUTELY NOTHING. Honestly, I plan on GLORIOUS SLEEP and Netflix and finally getting to cook myself a meal on our (for 25 more days) beautiful new cooktop.

Then, the Moving Stress can begin!

I will miss this house, I will really miss our amazing neighbors, I will miss Gilroy, she has treated us well. But I am so excited to live in a whole new area and all of the fun exploring it will lead to.

Dixon bound in around 25 days!

antigone

#BOOSTED

Ramblings

So I got the Pfizer booster shot late last week and after my second shot experience (I was a giant baby for 24 hours) I wanted to better track my response this time.

This time I was a big baby who had to act like an adult for 36 hours. We had a contractor here tiling our fireplace which required a last minute annoying trip to Lowe’s. Two different couples came to get some of the massive boulders I’d been pulling from the back yard. Ben was at a track day so I was on my own when dealing with all of this.

AND I JUST WANTED TO GO TO SLEEP. Finally around 3:00PM the contractor left and I stopped answering text messages from boulder hunters.

COVID Booster timeline
COVID Booster timeline

I was pretty good most of Saturday. We made our 29,374,920,374th trip to Lowe’s and Home Depot this month and worked on house stuff but I slowly just kept getting more and more sleepy and finally around 4:00PM had to lay down. I slept till around 6:00PM and felt a lot better.

Today has been pretty great but my swollen lymph node does hurt pretty good. I was able to do all the things I wanted to except braid my hair because it hurts that spot to raise my arm. After the second shot it took about 3 days for it to swell and hurt. This time I started to notice the swelling at the 16 hour mark. I don’t know why but much more quickly this time my body was all TIME TO RAMP UP BABY. I’m not mad about it at all.

Okay, I’m done writing about being a whiny baby.

I’m so happy that I got the shot. Once again, I feel extremely lucky that the science exists to protect not only myself but everybody around me from a disease THAT WE SHOULD NOT STIL HAVE TO BE THIS SCARED OF.

antigone

Now I drive (legally) alone past your street.

Ramblings

I have been 43 for 3.5 days now and for 3.25 of those days I was not a licensed driver.

Apparently 42 year old me thought that I should just shove the renewal form in my desk drawer to worry about later. She did put a reminder in our planner. Then for the last two weeks Past Anna decided that she was adult enough not to plan anymore.

Then 43 And 1 Day Old Anna tried to buy something that required a license and they were all, “HAHAHAHHHHAHAHAH NO.”

Today after work I rectified Past Anna’s laziness and went to the DMV and am now officially a licensed driver again. It’s crazy how COVID has forced the DMV into a well oiled machine of efficiency. I made an appointment last night for 3:10PM and was out the door at 3:27PM. I’ve never been able to get an appointment in the SAME MONTH, let alone the NEXT DAY. And out the door in 17 minutes? UNFATHOMABLE.

I also punched Past Anna in the face and got my planner sorted pretty quickly by downloading one of Planner By Kay’s monthly kits. As a person that is unable to Art, I really love her kits so much that I subscribed to her Patreon. Mistakes were made, I highlighted a Monday instead of a weekend. It’s okay though because that kind of chaotic mess is what I like in my planner. If everything went smoothly and looked perfect that would just feel like a lie.

Lastly, in a attempt to get more people to become as equally addicted to TikTok as I am, I’m going to start dropping my current favorites at the end of these posts.

YOU’RE WELCOME.

@austinwatkins662

Nah he heard that Valcano erupt and he got ghost 😂😂

♬ original sound – Austin Watkins
antigone

9/11 makes me feel shame.

Ramblings

20 years later I have a much different perspective than I did on that morning as a fresh 23 year old. As the events in New York, Pennsylvania, and Washington DC happened I was watching on TV. I switched the radio on to listen as we drove to work, and I hardly did any work that day. I just kept listening to the radio and refreshing new websites and the forums I was on at the time. In my memory, it was the first real tragic even where the internet played a big roll in information dissemination and where I was getting facts.

Mostly, when I think about 9/11, I think about where I was living at the time. Kern County is a VERY red county in a VERY blue state and there were so many people with little American flags on their cars, and flags raised on houses I had never seen before, and flag clothes worn in not-July, and moments of silence… but I also remember vividly the hate and rhetoric being shouted around me by my in-laws and husband. About other Americans.

Vile things about Muslims. Vile thing about other religions on the coattails of that hate.

I don’t ever remember saying these same things. Maybe I just suppressed that memory. I REALLY hope I didn’t, I have grown immensely since then. But I also did not try and correct these dumb opinions. I lived in a town that hasn’t really changed all that much today, with lots of people who are still saying the exact same things.

Now 20 years later I see those same people posting remembrances about that day. About how tragic it it was. How we mourned collectively as a country, stopping everything to watch specials on TV, to attend ceremonies, to pay tribute to the 2996 American’s that died and the anger that it happened. That that many people could be lost in a day. That many families torn apart in 24 short hours.

But a lot of the people I see posting this won’t get vaccinated against a disease that has killed, averaged since the US went on lockdown, 3763 people. PER DAY. Americans.

So when people talk about how far we’ve come and how much we’ve learned, I just want to ask them what the fuck they are talking about. Because if we’re being honest, we are far worse off now. The same people that were shouting American First seem to be the ones doing the most to keep American last.

So I feel ashamed to still be where we are today. I desperately hope that one day I won’t feel this way on 9/11. That one day American will be the beacon of hope and inclusion so many of us dream it could be. But today, 20 years later, is not that day.

antigone

S’all good, man.

Ramblings, Uncategorized

I came downstairs to write a blog post about what ungrateful douchebags birds are but Ben came down too and now we’re watching Better Call Saul. So this is just a post to say the post I WAS going to post is not this post and it’s actually Ben’s fault.

Saul Goodman
antigone

Because brains are DUMB.

Depression
Survivors Guilt

Pandemic survivor guilt makes me feel like an asshole. Just wanting to blog about this makes me feel like an asshole for complaining about feeling like an asshole.

I lie in bed at night and I think about this and I feel like I need to purge it from my brain and when I tell people about it I don’t want to trauma dump on them so I just kind of gloss over the topic while hiding the fact it causes me so much anxiety that I want to crawl out of my skin and run away.

“I feel GUILTY that people are out of work, they’re struggling so much, they’ve lost so much, people are DYING. This pandemic has brought me to the dream point of working from home permanently. I never lost a single hour of pay, as a matter of fact in the last year I’ve been given a raise and a promotion. People in my family have gotten sick, but nobody has died or is suffering any kind of long term complication.”

“But I’m FINE! Everything is FINE! IGNORE ME LETS TALK ABOUT SOMETHING ELSE.”

It’s so hard… no, it’s IMPOSSIBLE to rectify in my brain that I’m just LUCKY. I didn’t do anything extraordinarily amazing or worthy of being in life where I am in life post 2020. I don’t have a degree. I didn’t have to overcome some hardship to get to where I am. I was born into a white middle class family and went to private schools where I fucked off to the point of being expelled. I literally never took school seriously till I was raising another human being who was in school.

I ended up with a great job that I’ve been saying for years could only get better if I didn’t have to drive 2.5 hours per day to get to it. Now I have that forever. I didn’t have to work for it, it was just handed to me. People lost their jobs and all of their income but I got a pay raise and didn’t have to put on a bra for almost an entire year.

This is dumb. It’s so dumb to feel this way. There’s no logical reason to for it. Feeling this way doesn’t solve anything and it doesn’t make me a better person.

Maybe because I’ve been reading so much about race and privilege in an attempt to be a better person, I’m just now realizing the dumb luck of being born white and middle class is why 2020 didn’t suck for me like it did for a lot of people. And even as I type this out I realize the privilege in that feeling like an asshole is the hardest hurdle I face currently.

So I lay in bed at night and feel guilty. Because brains are DUMB. Imposter Syndrome is even more dumb.

The end.

antigone

It’s a fun ride.

Ramblings

I can remember watching Little House on the Prairie as a kid and thinking they would LOSE THEIR SHIT if they could time travel into that current time and see that we can FLY in the sky to go from one side of the country to another in FOUR HOURS. Your buggy can’t even get into town when it snows, Laura. Also, toilets that flush. In the house. DARK MAGIC, LAURA.

And then later in my 20s laying in bed and thinking about how my high school aged self would LOSE HER SHIT if she could travel into that current time and see that we had PHONES we carried with us EVERYWHERE WE WENT. THAT COULD ALSO TAKE PHOTOS.

And now I lay in bed and think about how 20 year old me would LOSE HER SHIT if she knew that every night I would get into bed and tell my house to turn off all the lights AND IT WOULD HAPPEN. And then I set the alarm on my watch, my LITERAL LIFE LINE, to gently awaken me the next morning by tapping my wrist. Now I can tell you the exact geolocation of my child anytime I want to. And I look up ANY FACT at ANY TIME at ANY LOCATION to prove I was right about something. Remember encyclopedias? Remember going to the library and using a CARD CATALOGUE to find a book? WHAT THE HELL WAS THAT ABOUT!?

Now I lay in bed and wonder who the first tourist in space will be and why don’t we have high speed trains in America yet. Look, I won’t be completely crazy and ask for flying cars but HIGH SPEED TRAINS IN AMERICA. TUBES IN THE GOUND!? MAKE IT HAPPEN, ELON. WE ARE READY.

Also, it is definitely Wednesday and not Thursday.

Welcome to my brain. It’s a fun ride.

antigone

We are now 348 days into quarantine.

Depression, Ramblings

We are now 348 days into quarantine.

And somehow I’m, like, okay.

I thought at first it was because we gradually went to work from home. We started with 3 days a week at home. Then we went to only going in once a week so we could stagger days. Now only one person from each part of our team comes in once a week so we go about 8 weeks between office visits. It was a weird adjustment but I’m kind of glad we had the slow crossover. It kind of slowly lowered me into the burning building of COVID rather than tossing me in directly after dousing it with gasoline.

When it looked more and more like this was going to be an extended time away from friends, away from coworkers, and away from family, I had a conversation with Ben letting him know that I was worried about my mental health. Not that I was in a bad place THEN, but that I expected a crash to happen.

Anytime.

At some point.

I was going to crash.

Except… I never did. And to be 100% honest, I DO NOT FUCKING GET IT.

Long time followers know that I’ve been very open about my battle with depression. I love that when I’m raw and real about it I get comments and messages saying thank you for putting into words how they are feeling. For normalizing the mental illness. For being an advocate. And I have to tell you, I have felt some significant guilt for NOT doing that. For NOT feeling that way. For NOT being that support for others.

But it just… never happened. Maybe it’s the Lexapro? Maybe it’s that I get to sleep longer every day now that I don’t have an hour commute in the morning and have to put like 5% of the effort into getting ready every day. Maybe it’s the feeling of INCREDIBLE PRIVILEGE to have a stable and steady income through a time when a lot of people are really struggling.

I don’t know what it is but I’m ready to stop second guessing it and start trying to process it. In a private friends Facebook group we sometime ask for a mental health check in. A place to sound off, judgement free, letting it all out. I described being really shocked that I am okay. But also that some nights I can’t fall asleep and lie away wondering when the crash is going to happen. What trigger is going to set it off? What random chemical imbalance is going to suddenly trick me into believing that sleeping all day is the only way to stay alive. I haven’t even TAKEN A NAP in months, let alone a depression nap.

I know how lucky I am right now. I had a long conversation with a friend the other day that is not okay. I was able to listen to her and tell her that I know where she is and that I understand how she feels. And I told her that I know there is nothing I can do to fix it, but I promise you, I understand and you are not alone.

If you are there, if your brain is missing the chemicals you need, please know that I am safe harbor. I GET it. I KNOW where you are. I can’t fix you, I know better than to try, but I can HEAR you. Shit still really sucks right now and I don’t know when it’s going to get better and I also know that even when everything is going perfectly in your life, you can still be There. In that shitty dark place where your brain tells you lies.

I hope you’re all okay. Wear your masks. Wash your hands. Stay the fuck away from people that don’t live with you. And take care of yourself and your mental health in the best ways that work for you.