We moved to this house over Memorial Day in 2007. He looked at the tree. I looked at the lake. We both looked at the deck, and it was good. And we looked at the rest of the four-bedroom bank foreclosure not updated since 1977, and it was bad, but not awful.

We both imagined how things might be. I imagined where the Christmas tree might go inside, and he envisioned hanging lights on the tree outside, the one taller than the house.

The first time he tried it, he used a pole with PVC pipe and a coat hanger duct-taped to it. His contraption refined a bit and eventually I convinced him to just leave the damn things in the tree all year, why risk your neck?

And he persists. He tapes the strings together, he checks the strands. I sigh and shake my head. But when I meet a new neighbor and they ask which house is mine, if they've been here at least one winter, I say the house with the outdoor Christmas tree.

It's hard to miss.

Domestic Why Do I Bother #6,000

I have cream-colored carpet. It's really squishy and feels good under your feet. We knew we were taking a risk when we moved here in 2007 and installed light-colored carpeting with small children around, but we thought, you know, maybe it would be different for us. Kind of like how I thought we'd only have educational, wooden toys and watch less than an hour of Nickelodeon every day.

And I know, you're all wondering why we didn't just put hardwood in the living room instead. We put it in the library when we pulled out that awful carpet (and the one time I begged to use the nail gun is the one obvious screw-up in the wood, another Domestic Why Do I Bother). Hardwood is all the rage, you don't have to vacuum, you don't get stains. Yeah, I know, I know. But I've lived with hardwood throughout twice and there are other issues. It gets scratched. Stuff gets embedded between the boards. It needs to be swept almost daily. It fingerprints (and toeprints). Hardwood is not magic, though after this latest cleaning fiasco, I'm ready to rip out the living room carpet and lay pebbles if need be the minute someone hands me $12,000.

I digress. So our cream-colored carpet has suffered eight years of high traffic, children thundering in and out from the deck door no matter how many times I implore them to use the garage door, stay off the carpet, take off your shoes, for the love of all that is holy. Most of it looks okay after I steam it, but there are certain spots on the landing of the stairs, right next to the couch and on the threshold between the kitchen and the living room that have developed a grayish tinge that isn't quite a stain but more the carpet giving up on trying anymore. Steaming doesn't help. The Little Green Machine doesn't help. Woolite doesn't help.

In my desperation, I consulted Jillee and found this post on using vinegar and baking soda to clean your carpet. Last Sunday while everyone else was outside, I tried it. At the very least, it was super satisfying to listen to the whole thing sizzle. I dried everything as well as I could and went on with my life.

Only, it didn't really dry. That was Sunday. Now it's Tuesday. And it's still wet.

Not only is it still wet, my daughter keeps walking through it then walking all over the tile that I mopped to a high shine also on Sunday. I can see her little toeprints glinting in the sunlight. Twice I've scrubbed them off the floor, and twice they've reappeared on her next pass through the house.

I tried appealing to my husband, who thinks putting vinegar on the carpet is up in the top five of stupid things I have ever done. He just shook his head. "This one's on you," he said. "It smells like salad in here."

So now my carpet is less stained but I have little sticky toeprints all over my tile until this fucking vinegar dries.

Why, again, do I bother?

(This post originally appeared on BlogHer.com. And look, I made a Pinterest-y thing!)

Because I'm not like a professional blogger or anything, I forgot to take rock-solid "before" pictures, so some parts of the deck are already removed here.

In recent years, we realized the deck was getting seriously squishy. As in, someone might actually fall through soon.

We started scheming for affordable ways to replace the deck, because our taste is never in line with our budget reality. Then my father pointed out he had a pile of wood from what used to be a corncrib. He is unusual in that he also has a huge shed and a planer. Handy and unusual.

Last fall, we traveled to Iowa and spent a day planing down the wood. It is cedar and even though the boards were over sixty years old, they planed down really nicely.

After the old, gray, weather-beaten wood goes through the planer, a layer of wood is removed to reveal the beautiful wood underneath. Just like exfoliating! Magic!

Around early May this year, we rented a trailer, drove back to Iowa, and picked them up. We stuck them all in our garage and started ripping off the old deck. I highly recommend investing in one of these should you try to destroy anything as large as a deck, ever.

We rented a dumpster for one weekend, which meant it all had to come up, even though it was raining. Fun!

Once the deck boards were up and the railings and pergola was down, we realized the joists had not been supported with joist hangers and really we could use about twice as many. The boards had been attached with nails, not screws, so all those nails had to be pulled out or cut off, as well.

Pulling up, cutting off or pounding down thousands of nails was one of my least favorite parts of this project. Oddly, I found drilling holes and hanging joists very satisfying.

We added new joists in between all the old joists and added new joist hangers everywhere.

Then it was time to put the old corncrib deck boards back on top. We combined them with a few new boards, but luckily we had enough to make the floor almost completely upcycled.

Next, we installed the posts and built the pergola. It was hard.

Then we stained everything.

Finally, we added some of the more fun touches -- a vintage washtub we converted into a cooler, a Tiki Toss game, our shells from Florida, some new pillows, fake copper post caps with solar LED lights.

This project turned out to be far from free -- deck hardware and pergola boards are expensive -- but because my husband and I did all the work ourselves, we saved thousands of dollars in labor costs. And we both lost weight. So there's that. But we gained it all back by grilling and throwing back cocktails on our new deck!

To see more of our home improvement projects, see The Transformation of Chateau Travolta on Surrender, Dorothy.

A month and a half ago, Beloved and I began merrily ripping apart the deck on the back of Chateau Travolta. It's a big deck, around the size of my first Kansas City apartment, and it had railings and a rickety pergola, as well.

Since then, we've braved torrential rains and searing heat to tear the deck down to the joists and begin building it back. (If you like home improvement posts, I'll be blogging this when it's done.)

Nothing has been as entertaining as the search for the elusive Cabot Australian Timber Oil in Honey Teak.

The elusive Cabot. Goddamn it, you will not break me.

There is no evidence I can find that this color is discontinued. However, I have only been able to track its movements one gallon at a time across Ace Hardware store websites that claim a gallon is at this store or that store, but when you buy it online and then drive to said store, the Cabot has already moved on. I'm so sorry, Mrs. Arens, we don't have two gallons. We only have one. Our inventory system was just joking.

Sometimes, I'll drive to a store and it will be there. Sometimes the cashier will stare dumbly at me while waving for another employee to hurry up and come deal with this woman who has a coupon that I have never seen before did she print it at home is she a felon I don't know so I'll just stare.

Why don't I buy more than one gallon at a time? See above.

And the price! It varies wildly. I have paid $59, $44 and $10.95 for identical gallons of the elusive Cabot, the latter after a request for a twenty-mile, across-metro, in-store transfer that ended with, "Bobby says why don't you just drive over there?"

I have never seen a product so wily or so variable in its price and availability. I think it has something to do with the actual color "honey teak," because I can find its brethren in Home Depot and Lowe's .. but when I ask for honey teak, they need to call Brad in customer service because they have never heard of such a color.

Yet, it exists.

At this point, we have used two gallons on the rails and pergola and still need to sand and stain the actual deck floor.

God help us all if we need another gallon.

When I was younger, there were several outbuildings alongside my parents' driveway. One of them was a corn crib for hogs that became where we stored my horse Cutter's hay and grain. One of them was a hog shed that became Cutter's barn and my tack room. If I close my eyes and concentrate, I can still smell the inside of those buildings. They've since been torn down as they outlived their useful lives, but my father kept the wood.

I don't remember how it came up, but Pa offered to let Beloved and I have this wood if we would come help plane it down. Chateau Travolta's deck has a large footprint, and the wood appears to be near original. We patched it a little last summer, but it's getting really rotted. We're going to use the corn crib cypress wood to resurface the deck next spring. 

Here's what the wood looked like before we started.

It's pretty rough and still has a little bit of old white paint clinging to it.

Pa bought a secondhand planer and we bought some blades for it. Pa and Beloved gave me permission to use this pic of them and the planer. I was the catcher, so to speak. I would grab the boards as they came though the business end of the planer and help them through. Sometimes this was just holding and sometimes this meant leaning with all my strength when they got kind of ... stuck.

Each board took a minimum of one and usually more like two or three passes. 

First pass.

Second pass.

Getting closer.

You could tell things were rocking when the big shavings started to come out. 

So pretty!

I lost track of how many boards we did. I would guess somewhere in the neighborhood of sixty. Then I bagged up all the sawdust shavings. I think we had around seven 55-gallon bags of shavings, which Pa is going to add diesel to before using them for sweeping compound, whatever that means. He did push a little pile of the wood shavings outside the Morton building. When I asked him what he was going to do with them, he said, "I'm going to pour some diesel fuel on them and set them on fire, because that's the kind of guy I am."

I've got to use that in a novel somehow.

So he did, and that is how I learned how to control a fire without any boundary. I got to put it out.

It took all day. It was satisfying. I can't wait for spring.

Live on, wood. Good job.

When I was younger, there were several outbuildings alongside my parents' driveway. One of them was a corn crib for hogs that became where we stored my horse Cutter's hay and grain. One of them was a hog shed that became Cutter's barn and my tack room. If I close my eyes and concentrate, I can still smell the inside of those buildings. They've since been torn down as they outlived their useful lives, but my father kept the wood.

I don't remember how it came up, but Pa offered to let Beloved and I have this wood if we would come help plane it down. Chateau Travolta's deck has a large footprint, and the wood appears to be near original. We patched it a little last summer, but it's getting really rotted. We're going to use the corn crib cypress wood to resurface the deck next spring. 

Here's what the wood looked like before we started.

It's pretty rough and still has a little bit of old white paint clinging to it.

Pa bought a secondhand planer and we bought some blades for it. Pa and Beloved gave me permission to use this pic of them and the planer. I was the catcher, so to speak. I would grab the boards as they came though the business end of the planer and help them through. Sometimes this was just holding and sometimes this meant leaning with all my strength when they got kind of ... stuck.

Each board took a minimum of one and usually more like two or three passes. 

First pass.

Second pass.

Getting closer.

You could tell things were rocking when the big shavings started to come out. 

So pretty!

I lost track of how many boards we did. I would guess somewhere in the neighborhood of sixty. Then I bagged up all the sawdust shavings. I think we had around seven 55-gallon bags of shavings, which Pa is going to add diesel to before using them for sweeping compound, whatever that means. He did push a little pile of the wood shavings outside the Morton building. When I asked him what he was going to do with them, he said, "I'm going to pour some diesel fuel on them and set them on fire, because that's the kind of guy I am."

I've got to use that in a novel somehow.

So he did, and that is how I learned how to control a fire without any boundary. I got to put it out.

It took all day. It was satisfying. I can't wait for spring.

Live on, wood. Good job.

When the little angel was a baby, we lived in This Old House. If you're new here, you may not know that This Old House was a beautiful Arts & Crafts with a screened-in porch in the Waldo neighborhood of Kansas City. It was built in 1921. It had push-button light switches that sometimes threw sparks, it was not ducted for air conditioning (making my home office nearly unbearable in the summer) and it had decorative metal grates with holes big enough to pass my fist through, lovely as they were.

While in the throes of postpartum something, I became convinced that snakes could climb up through from the leaky, Silence-of-the-Lambs basement through the ductwork and slither out the very large grate holes into my daughter's bedroom. Every time I looked at those grates, I had to push the thoughts away, but it was hard. It was so hard. These thoughts, I now know, are called intrusive thoughts, and they are closely associated with anxiety disorder, OCD, eating disorders, and psychosis. I still have them from time to time, but they are much lessened after medication and meditation and all manner of my managing-my-anxiety-disorder daily rituals.

I feel a kinship with Stephen King. Here is a man who must suffer, as I do, from intrusive thoughts.

I first read PET SEMETARY in high school, and then I thought it was a horror novel. I've been rereading it this week, and I now understand it is a book about grief. A parent's grief.

I got the ebook copy, and there is a foreward in this version written by King in 2000, in which he admits something very similar to what happened to Gage in the book happened to his own son (almost) when his own son was two. He wrote:

"But a part of my mind has never escaped from that gruesome what if: Suppose I hadn't caught him? Or suppose he had fallen in the middle of the road instead of on the edge of it? I think you can see why I found the book which rose out of these incidents so distressing. I simply took existing elements and threw in that one terrible what if. Put another way, I found myself not just thinking the unthinkable, but writing it down."

What would King have done with my grate snakes?

And what is a parent to do with the fear that comes of losing a child through any manner of preventable horrors? What would we do, what lengths would we be willing to go, if we thought we could (fix them) protect them from everything?

When my girl was two, a co-worker told me about a little girl he knew who swallowed a great deal of water while learning to swim and dry-drowned. I didn't know such a thing existed, and I immediately suffered a solid week of nightmares and became terrified of letting my daughter in the water, even as I was insisting she learn to swim. This week, she's at horse camp learning to walk and trot and canter, even bareback, and each night as I lie in bed next to her as she drifts off to sleep, my mind tries to send pictures of all the awful accidents that happen in barns, even though I myself owned a horse for three years in my childhood and took almost exclusive rights to the hard and personal care of him, picking his hooves and brushing him without tying him up and walking carefully around his back away from the hooves that could go misplaced even though that dear, sweet horse would never hurt anyone intentionally. As much as I loved my horse, and as much as I love to swim, I've never lost a healthy respect for either large animals or water, as my brain easily produces full-on, Scorcese-directed mind movies of all the horrible ways to die dealing with either. 

I've learned at 40 that the best way to deal with intrusive thoughts is to bat them away like horseflies. Letting them rest even a minute allows them to bite and gather until the only way to break free is to flail in the most embarrassing and overwrought way when I can't take it for one more minute. I've had minor breakdowns from my intrusive thoughts probably a dozen times over the course of my life, and it's never been pretty. I'm not proud of how I've turned my fear into anger and stabbed out at those around me. I'm trying to learn to handle them better. My intrusive thoughts are merely the worst possible course of what if, and a life well lived is a life spent in the now, breathing deeply and remembering that no matter what, I can get through it, and it probably won't even happen. I can't worry about the bad thing happening until it does. The ironic thing is that sometimes when the bad thing happens, it's a relief, because there's no more anticipation of the bad thing; there's only dealing with it.

I think that I can make these decisions, because I have to in order to manage my anxiety disorder. The truth, though, is that our subsconscious minds decide things, and then our frontal lobes take credit for them. A study done in 2000 found:

Participants in the study were asked to make a decision about whether they would use their left hand or their right hand to press a lever.  By using fMRI scans of the brain’s activity, the researchers knew the participant’s decision by analysing the activity in the frontopolar cortex of the brain.  This information about the participant’s decision was available up to seven seconds before the participant had “made” a conscious decision.  The researchers used the information from the scans, to predict with success, the 36 participant’s decisions before they had consciously made them!

What does that mean for someone with intrusive thoughts? What is really more frightening than imagining you've lost the ability to control your own mind? In PET SEMETARY, as Louis Creed drives to his son's grave to do you-know-what, he thinks:

"He supposed he had known that he would do that, but what harm? None."

Because, of course, subconsciously he'd already decided to hop on the Micmac Indian train and ride it to the end of the line.

Brain research is fascinating, but it also brings into question the moral compass, free will and how easy it would be to slip into distressing thought patterns. I know, in my rational mind, and I'm sure I knew then, that it would be really hard if not impossible for a snake to climb up two stories of slick ductwork, and quite frankly, if a snake wanted to eat my baby, all it would have to do is climb the stairs. Heaven knows the basement door didn't really shut. That my brain conjured this elaborate lie out of turn-of-the-century grates still amazes me.

But then it doesn't.

Writers observe things, details. Details make the story interesting. But they also lead to the what ifs, and sometimes those thoughts are better off dead. 

After I attended RT Booklovers, I came home and plotted out my scenes and updated my long synopsis of the new adult novel I'm working on now. (I've decided it's new adult, not young adult, because the story works better that way. Though I would like to write another YA novel. Really like writing teenagers -- it's such an exciting and also terrifying and also boring time of your life, all at once and every day.

Then I completely stalled out as we started spending every night ripping apart our kitchen and foyer and then slowly rebuilding it and holy hell we're not done yet because the last cabinet is STILL not installed which means the pantry can't be attached to the wall, which means every bit of nonrefrigerated food I own is on the kitchen table and floor. And because I can't control that situation, I turned my frenzied eyes back to a project I can move forward: THE BIRTHRIGHT OF PARKER CLEAVES.

The beginning is so hard. I don't really know Meg well enough yet. I'm getting there, slowly, but most of what I'm writing right now will probably end up chucked and I'm just writing it to get to know Meg and for no other reason. I like the plot so far, which is funny because the plot was the hardest part of THE OBVIOUS GAME. Of course, I didn't really think about the plot in advance for TOG the way I am PARKER CLEAVES. I probably should've done that, but what did I know about writing novels? 

So now I've got a scene list that I like and it's much easier to sit down after my daughter goes to bed and tell myself to just start a scene or add to a scene that's started or just puke out a thousand words somehow and then you can watch TV. I've been doing that and I'm up to about twenty thousand vomit words. This way of thinking makes the process much easier because I have absolutely no delusions about this rough draft being good. No, it's vomit with maybe a few decent sentences sprinkled in there so I don't set my Mac on fire in the end.

The other thing that's different this time around is the pressure I'm putting on myself to move forward. I do want a career as a novelist. I want to write a bunch of books. It seems more likely that I'll get anywhere if I have more than one book. But the first novel is done, I proved to myself I could do it, and that temporarily has muted a huge voice in my head. (There's another one in there pointing to my book sales, but I just shush it by saying DISCOVERABILITY, ASSHOLE, and that works for as long as it takes me to fall asleep at night.)

I haven't added anything to my PARKER CLEAVES pinboard in a while, so I added something today. I'll be adding to the board as I write, for my amusement and anyone else's. I also have a pinboard for THE OBVIOUS GAME.

ONWARD!

First, there was rain. From my bed, it sounded nice and dreamy, the kind of rain that makes you want to record it for posterity and secure your mosquito nets as you drift back off to sleep on a peaceful Carribean island. Near a waterfall. And interesting birds. 

Since we've been in Chateau Travolta for six years and haven't had water in the basement since that fateful first week, it didn't occur to me to check the basement for water until the little angel and I had donned our swimsuits to avoid the torrential rain at the local rec center pool. Beloved, unfortunately, caught us before we escaped with the news that Hoggin Craft had flooded and Tiny was a casualty. 

We crashed down the stairs to find two inches of water in the Hoggin Craft headquarters. Tiny was indeed soaked in a way only a giant stuffed gorilla can be soaked, and that is a way in which soaked is soaked and don't even think about keeping him because BLACK MOLD IS REAL. I asked Beloved if we could stick Tiny in the basement shower to drain while we cleaned up the mess. No, we could not, he said, because Tiny is too damn big to fit in a shower for humans.

Farewell, Tiny. I can only imagine your trip to the landfill.

We mopped up the muck and threw the rest of the stuffed animals that were stored in Hoggin Craft (in case of a tornado, extra stuffed animals are required to live in Hoggin Craft full-time by the little angel) were in the washer. Only two hours remained before the indoor pool closed, so Beloved excused the little angel and me, but our joy was short-lived, because an hour or so later, I got a text from Beloved: 

Borrowed ladder. Will need you to hold it when you get home so I can blow out the gutters.

Oh, yay! Can we please spend the rest of our day off from work cleaning out gutters after vacuuming up four bathtubs' worth of water?

Our roof is quite tall. I really hate seeing anyone on very tall ladders, least of all someone to whom I'm related by blood or marriage. But no, we had to do it, and I knew we had to do it, but I very much did not want to do it, anyway. Alas.

Minutes later, there I found myself, holding a ladder, while my husband used a leafblower tied to an extension pole to blow water, dead leaves and helicopters out of the gutter and on to ... me. It was like some unique form of Nickoledean-sponsored torture to close my eyes and grimace as I was spattered with rotting, muddy tree matter as neighbors frolicked about in the sunshine, enjoying their Memorial Days and pretending like they weren't listening to me squawk as I was pelted with feculent foliage.

After the little angel went to bed, we had this conversation.

Beloved: "We're going to have to do that every spring if we don't want more water in the basement, you know."

Me: "I know. I hate ladders."

Beloved: "Maybe we should get those gutter covers."

Me: "That sounds like the least fun way to spend thousands of dollars I can think of. Except maybe mudjacking."

Beloved: (.)

Me: "I am so bored by this conversation I can't even believe I'm continuing to talk."

Adulthood, huzzah!