Happiness for a Lazy Procrastinator

It's no accident that, years ago, my first blog was called Kim Procrastinates.  Somewhere along the way I had totaled up the numbers and found that if I had spent that time on my dissertation rather than my blog I would have finished years earlier.

I am a procrastinator,* and I am a bit on the lazy side.  I'll own that, fully.  I'd rather fiddle around on the Internet, for the most part, than do anything other than perhaps read.  I am also so NOT a neat freak, preferring to spend time doing anything other than cleaning up things.  Short of world peace, the one thing I would wish for should a Genii pop out of a lamp in front of me would be a non-defective Robot Maid to keep my house clean and laundry done.  Seriously. 

So this past week of cleaning up rental properties and running around like a crazy woman to Lowe's to pick up supplies (all but our annoying fake snow day when I was home with kiddos all day) has been a surprise to me. I know I like painting rent houses & remodeling; that I've figured out already.  But cleaning them is something I've always hired someone else to do in the past.  (I mean, since I've been able to do so.)

I've been having fun! Yes, the three baseball player college students who lived in our one rent house really really had a filthy refrigerator that stank when it was turned off and had this brown teriyaki sauce goo EVERYwhere.  But cleaning up after these folks & the other place (that wasn't actually as bad, to be honest) has brought out my inner Monk.  A little bit, at least.  I now have a real preference for a cleaning product (a couple of them) because of how much better they worked than other things I've used before.  (I like 409 and those Lysol wipes & this orange cleaning stuff.)

There's a certain satisfaction in just looking around and knowing that a few hours ago the place was trashed and now it's gleaming, and the fridge looks like new and you did that.  Now, heaven help the tenants who trash the place I spent so much time and effort cleaning.  They're going to be SO busted. 

Andrew has been joking that he has the "most educated cleaning lady on the planet."  Now, it's entirely possible that there are other PhDs who are doing professional cleaning, for whatever reason.  It's a tough job market out there.  I am kind of overeducated for the position, and yet, I do NOT mind it.  The whole point of this rental property landlord business is so that we can make enough moolah to retire early and live on a yacht in the Med.  Seriously.  Daytrips for the kids to the Louvre for art history class.  Etc.  And thus, it really does NOT suck to be working on this.  It takes up a LOT of time, and sometimes it's darn hard, but it's worth it.

But I'm really fine to not be worrying right now about making syllabuses and getting ready for another semester.  Next week's plan is to post my killer issue of Women Writers and work towards making it into a nonprofit organization, and possibly  squeeze in some more on my novel.  This last week of manual labor has been kind of cool, and I'm channelling my inner cleaning lady on my own house a bit, too. 

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*surprisingly, I didn't even have procrastination as a tag until now!  Funny!

**and, by the way, what the heck happened to blogger's spellchecker?  ANNOYing.

Day One

Those of you who have been here a while know about Sean's speech delay. Last year at this time I was involved in figuring out what was going on, what we could do about it. Over the summer we had tests, tubes put in his ear, meetings. He has had private speech and occupational therapy since mid-August, and it IS working.

But not really fast enough. Not that I want him to be perfect or anything, but he's still testing as about a two year old on his language skills. Since he'll be four in June, that's pretty delayed.

He can talk. He'll sometimes surprise you and come out with a whole sentence, perfectly logical, communication of his desire or need. But most of the time I prefers, like Bartleby the Scrivener, to not.

So, we finally agreed to put him in the "Special needs" class at one of the local elementary schools. He was qualified to do this before but I was afraid of what he might pick up from kids with more severe problems than his. He is such a sweet kid-- I don't want him learning temper tantrums & violent behavior. Many of us probably felt that way in elementary school, ourselves, but just had the ability to control it. :)

Anyway. Yesterday we set him up to go and today was his first day. I have to go pick him up in about two hours and he was pretty good when I dropped him off this morning.

There are all kinds of things to be anxious about. As a twin, he (or his sister, for that matter) have never really been on their own totally. Oh, sometimes, to a doctor's appointment or something. But they hold hands. They play with each other well. They are with each other almost constantly. Maia is mad because she wants to start a new school, too.

I'll have a shorter day of freedom/work ability, myself. I could put him in after school daycare, but why spend a lot of money when I can pick him up and he'll be so happy to get some "private time" with mom? But I think it will be good for him.

Anyway. This has been a big transition. Admitting that your kid needs help, that he get to ride "the short bus" at least for a while, overcoming your fears about how other people will treat him because of that above. Knowing that he'll be exposed to new things that you can't control. But wanting, so badly, for him to say "I love you mom" or "I'd like some ice cream"-- simple things most parents get way before now. Knowing that it will be worth it when he communicates better than he does. Being a little afraid that he never really will, in spite of all evidence that he OUGHT to be able to. That he has the lights on upstairs just fine, just doesn't choose to answer the buzzer when you call.

That, and Andrew probably found us another rental property, also in the local historic "Highland" district. This one will take A LOT of work, and it will be a duplex apartment. But it could be SO cool if restored, and if it doesn't have any major structural problems our inspector will go look for, then it could be a fun but very, very busy summer for me working on the restoration.

We call ourselves slum lords but really, if we really were, we wouldn't be restoring these places and doing all this work; we'd leave them the way they are. But it's super cool. We're going to post some "after" pictures of the place I've been working on the last few weeks soon. So there. Day one of two things. Sean + possible rental property project.

And life goes on, and there is so much more to think about.

Adventures in Home-Repair

So our rental property is all set to go. We have tenants-- a sweet couple who don't have excellent credit but who are trying. They have three cute kids and love the house and I think they have paid the same rent for a real craphole in a bad neighborhood and so are thrilled to be getting something much nicer in a better neighborhood. In other words-- they know what is out there and they know how much we ROCK. I really really wish we had thought to take "before" pictures. The place was such a mess-- dark, smelled musty and old-lady, with ugly 30 year old curtains that fell apart when I moved them that had been stapled to the walls to keep them tight, ugly ORANGE carpet in one room, blue dingy nicotine stained wood paneling in one bedroom, three layers of wallpaper from various periods peeling but stapled (seriously) to the walls in the hallway/foyer. Lamps that looked stripped, as though if you tried to change the bulb you'd get a shock. Etc, etc.

We finished up the last little things last week. I put up wallpaper, we had our handyman refinish the wood floors. Yes, when the tenants tried to move in a fridge, the movers scratched the floor a little (figures). I put up "lace curtain Irish" pretty curtains. We put up the pretty little part glass, part nice plastic chandeliers you can see in the picture-- from Lowe's, not super expensive but soooo pretty.....

It just rocks. Seriously. I love this little house. If I were living there, I would probably make some of the rooms bright, bold colors, and we did this place in white, mostly, but I still really love it. One of the things that I feel good about is fixing up a historic house from a sad state of disrepair. And when we get the roof done, that will be even more so because while the roof isn't yet leaking, it's not long til it will be and that would just trash this "diamond in the rough" home.

So I'll shut up about it and post some pictures. The first is the view down the Living Room/Dining room area. You can't really see the big awesome china built-ins. But that's allright. The other picture is Maia. While I was doing the last bits of cleanup (vacuuming, picking up shreds of the ancient wallpaper from the closets) she wanted so much to help. I put her to scrubbing up the bits of white paint that someone (Andrew, maybe?) tracked over the fresh wood shiny stuff. (It didn't work. And the place is NOT perfect. But still.) Our little Cindermaia, hard at work.

I just have to finish off saying that I truly hope the local authorities don't freak out so much about this incoming Hurricane if it isn't truly coming this way. It looks like it's going to Houston (where my sister just moved, funnily enough...) so we do not need to cancel everything here in our little town. I JUST got my syllabuses re-organized, please!!!

Gustav Fizzles

For us, at least. We had rain, yes, but honestly a regular thunderstorm about two months ago did more damage around here, flooding several houses down the street from us (literally down-- downhill and in a bad spot, apparently). There were some downed tree branches, and I did see a fairly large tree branch downed a few blocks away but it didn't look like it damaged the house. So we're all good. We had two days of class cancelled for it, though.

I spent those days working on restoring the rental property. We have a tenant that wants to move in on Sat, so we need to get 'er' done.

The property is a Craftsman style bungalow house and it's really quite pretty. There are so many nice features that I'm excited to rent it to someone. I would live there, myself, if we didn't have an awesome place already. Today, I put up wallpaper. It was work, and for a few minutes of several crooked corners in the walls, I was cursing a bit. But I got it done. It looks really nice.

What's weird to me is to grow up as poor as I was, and now be "the landlord." Checking people's credit (which, by the way, we mostly gave up on. The folks we're renting to admitted to not having great credit, but they're such a sweet little group of family/cute kiddos that we just want to give them a break. And we have this dream of making up some really nice places that are affordable for people who otherwise wouldn't get a nice house. It's kind of cool, but a source of much cognitive dissonance for me sometimes.

Now, tomorrow, back to school. I am going to meet with my new class, which I was just assigned a week into the semester, for the first time. The professor who was going to teach it has had to take a semester off, so they asked me to take it and I am happy about it. I love teaching survey courses. :) I'm already ON it. :) But the day off delayed us again and I had to delete one new reading. Ah well. So it goes.

Anyway. I'm TI-IRED. And I have wallpaper glue all over me.