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Booming

It has been weird to have the Fourth of July celebration on a weekend. It has felt, in fact, as if the day snuck up on us. Usually I feel much more prepared, but this time around it was as if suddenly it was July and wow, we hadn’t made any plans at all.

We did what has now become the customary celebration for the Fourth, ever since we got this house. We gathered all the local family together (Richard’s parents and little sister, my parents, my older sister and her family, and her mother-in-law) and they all came to our house for dinner and dessert and then to watch the fireworks from our back porch.

This means, of course, that the bulk of the morning and early afternoon were spent at home getting ready. Richard roasted Cornish game hens on the barbeque and we found a recipe for grilled vegetables (green beans, asparagus and mushrooms) in a light seasoning of rosemary and thyme. I spent a few hours coring and slicing apples into paper-thin chips, then sprinkled them with cinnamon sugar and baked them until they were almost crispy. I don’t make the apple chips very often because they’re so time consuming, but sometimes they’re worth it.

The last few times we’ve had family over for dinner cooked on the barbeque, we’ve had the timing off and dinner ends up being served later than planned. This time we made extra sure to have everything in place so dinner would be ready right when we said it would. Naturally, this meant that everyone else showed up late – traffic, naps for little kids, and so on. In fact, we ended up eating almost in shifts. Richard’s parents showed up first, and my older sister called to say they’d be a lot later, so we started in on the chicken and the veggies and then my sister and her family came in just as we were finishing our food, so we all sat around the table and chatted with them while they ate theirs.

Because the oldest nephew has learned to read, I made sure to go through our collection of kids’ books before they arrived and pulled out a small stack of books I thought might be in his ability level. After dinner the two boys excused themselves like they usually do to go play, but when we went to check on them later, only the three-year-old was actually playing. The six-year-old had planted himself on the couch in the living room and was lost in a book – and that’s just about where he stayed the rest of the evening. Luckily my family and Richard’s were more than used to having kids lost in books (Richard and I were both reading from an early age as well) so we all just moved around him and chatted above his head and only finally dragged him back into reality once it was time for the kids to get into their pajamas in preparation for the fireworks.

As usual the city put on a spectacular display. We all sat on the back porch, or in lawn chairs lined up on the path around the grass in the back yard, and oohed and aahed and laughed and applauded some of the more amazing explosions. And then it was all over, like it inevitably must be, and my sister took her two very sleepy kids out to their car and we waved them goodbye, then my parents (sending them home with the remains of the apple pie from dessert), and Richard’s family as well, leaving only Richard and I and seven very annoyed and slightly skittish cats in a suddenly quiet house.

Actually, there was one amusing incident during the fireworks show. In preparation I ran around the house and shut all the windows before the fireworks even started, to minimize the level of noise on the cats since I know it tends to scare them. Most of the cats immediately skittered upstairs and hid nervously under the bed until long after the fireworks had finished and everyone had gone home. The one exception to this, however, was Tangerine. At one point someone looked toward the glass door and started laughing, and the rest of us turned to see her standing there. With the noise of the fireworks we couldn’t actually hear her, of course, but we could see her mouth moving, since she apparently had a lot to say. We weren’t sure if she was just miffed because we were all outside and she couldn’t come join us, or she’d been sent down by the rest of the cats to tell us all off for the scary noises, but whatever the reason it was pretty funny to see.

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Whatever Lola wants

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We left work and got to the dealer yesterday around 3, and did not leave that place until after 6. Luckily there wasn’t too much traffic (probably because everyone had already left for the holiday weekend the day before – something my boss and I discovered on our way back from the San Francisco office Thursday afternoon), so we managed to get back home with enough time to pick up my parents and get dinner before continuing on to Davis for the play. There was a brief moment of consternation as we realized we had no clue how to actually *start* the Prius once it was stopped – this model comes with the Smart Start system, which means that as long as the key is within a few feet, the doors will lock or unlock, and the car can start without having to actually touch key to car at all. But starting it does required the combination of pressing a button and putting one’s foot on the brake – something they neglected to tell us at the dealer – so we had to frantically look it up in the manual and figure it out ourselves.

(As an aside, I should note that we have, quite possibly, looked at the manual for this car more than any other car either of us has owned in the past few days. We looked up how to fiddle with the 6-disc in-dash CD player. We looked up the size of the gas tank. We looked up how, exactly, it notifies the driver when the tank is empty. We have taken turns driving it, and while one drives, the other is pressing buttons or pouring through the manual, trying to figure out all the gizmos and gadgets)

Richard and I have been more than a little disappointed in this season’s quality for the musical theater company in Davis, and so we were both dreading this last play just a little – after all, we walked out at intermission in Music Man, and we did not even try to reschedule when it turned out that we were going to miss Gypsy (my parents told me later we were lucky we missed it). But neither of us had ever see Damn Yankees before, so we figured at the very least, it would be vaguely amusing, even if it was horrible, and after all there would be the traditional ordering of pie afterwards. And to our surprise, it turned out to be perhaps the best play of the season. The man who played the Devil was wickedly funny, and the woman who played Lola managed to be both a little bit sultry and a little bit wholesome at the same time. The guy they got to play the younger version of Joe was perfect for the role – ruggedly handsome and a little awkward in his own skin (as would be expected, considering his character’s recent transformation). In all, it was funny and sweet and ended the season on a higher note than I’d have thought possible. I’m actually looking forward to next season now, now that there was this reminder of what this little company is capable of doing.

Today there had been grand plans of moving bookshelves from downstairs to upstairs (in preparation for converting the guest room into a library), but with the acquisition of the new car, we ended up doing a lot of driving instead. We headed back down to the dealer because they’d forgotten to give us the extra key and we’d forgotten to bring along the title for the Maxima, and then we swung by Trader Joe’s since we were in the area and stocked up on enough of our favorite cheese blintzes to stuff the freezer, and then we swung by the grocery store to get everything we’ll need for tomorrow and now we are home, relaxing with what is left of the day, and each of us pondering where we could possibly drive our shiny new car next.

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Two months shy of a baby

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It was the weekend after Thanksgiving when, on a whim, we started calling around. “Do you have one?” we asked, and after far too many phone calls, we finally found someone who did. Out of all the possibilities in the surrounding three counties only one could be found.

“Can we see it?” we asked, and they said sure, come right down, but you can only look because it’s already been promised to someone else. So we zipped right over as quickly as we could through post-Thanksgiving traffic and we looked. And we oohed and we aahed and we wished we could do more than look but that would have to wait until later, and then we went inside and they handed up papers and we signed our names and they told us “We’ll call you.”

Then we went home to wait.

And wait.

And wait.

I began to wonder if they had forgotten about us. I began to wonder if our names somehow slipped off the list. I called around to other places. I started hearing stories about other people who were given their opportunities within weeks. I was starting to think maybe it was never going to happen.

This afternoon, during lunch, there was a call.

“I have one for you,” he said. “I know it arrived. I just need to find it, somewhere out there. I’ll call you back.”

And he made me wait some more, but this time it wasn’t months, only about half an hour.

“When can you come?” he said, and I fired off emails to Richard, and then gave up and called him. “Can you leave work?” I asked him, and my boss laughed at me and told me to go get it because it was obvious I wasn’t going to get anything else productive done that day.

We met at home and I emptied out the old Maxima. We stopped along the way to have it cleaned from top to bottom. We made it to Fairfield and filled out paperwork – oh, so very much paperwork, and we sat for hours while they twiddled away at financing and extended warranties and we eyed the clock and wondered whether or not we might actually make it back to Davis in time for the play, and then finally, finally, everything was done and they handed me the key and we walked outside and it was ours.

It is the prettiest blue possible. It looks like a stretched out Volkswagen Bug. It sounds as if it is unwinding when it stops. It is so very lovely, inside and out. And I am so very, very happy that we finally have it, even if it did take us seven months.

Our Prius, at last. So worth the wait.

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T is for Tofu

In our continuing quest to be healthy, Richard and I have started an active campaign to broaden our base of healthy and delicious low-Point meals. To this end Richard dragged out some of our cookbooks and we’ve been pouring over all the possibilities during the last week or so. So far he’s made stuffed peppers, which were marvelous, and a jambalaya with shrimp and chicken and ham that was extremely filling, while I’ve stuck to old stand-by’s, like the incredibly dense apple cinnamon sweet potato muffins that we both love. Tonight, however, I decided to give one of the new recipes a try – Broccoli in Garlic Sauce. We had no broccoli, however, but a recent trip to the local farmer’s market had netted a huge bag of fresh green beans so I figured those would be an adequate substitute. And in order to make this a main dish, I decided to toss in some tofu.

I have never cooked with tofu before tonight. I’ve eaten it when other people have cooked it for me, and usually I like it. It’s one of the blandest foods in existence, so really just tends to be a slightly squishy conveyor of whatever flavoring is contained in the rest of the dish. However, I found lots of useful suggestions for just what to do with tofu on TUS so I decided that I’d give a few of them a try.

I cut the tofu (as well as anyone can cut something with the consistency of soft jello) into randomly sized bits and gave them a quick flour coating, and then pan-fried them using non-stick spray. Then I just stirred them in with the green beans as I added the sauce, and let them mix in with everything else.

The end result was delicious enough that we’ve both decided it’s a keeper. The tofu turned out just chewy and flavorful enough to be interesting, and the whole dish was wonderfully good. I’ve got another full package of tofu in the fridge. I’m pondering how this would work with a mix of vegetables as well – perhaps I might toss in some broccoli after all, or even half an onion. I’ve got another full package of tofu in the fridge, and I’m not sure how long tofu will keep. We’ve got nothing at all planned for dinner on Saturday night yet. So I think this recipe – or something like it – will show up on the menu again, and soon.

This has been an entry for Alphabytes.

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E is for Email

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A few weeks ago there was a rash of people on TUS who had invites to give away for Gmail accounts. I have, with jenipurr.com, and stonegoose.com, and our DSL provider, more email accounts already than I really need, but the whole concept of Gmail intrigued me. So when it seemed like there were no more takers, I raised a virtual hand and said if anyone still had an invite to throw away, I’d take it. Within a day I had a response, an invite, and I was set up on my brand new Gmail account.

I decided I would be a good little beta tester and I transferred my subscription to the highest volume newsgroup, naturally – over to the new email address, just to keep email going in and going out. I’ve done a little poking around here and there on all the settings since I got it. And yes, it’s nice to have a web-based email account that is accessible from anywhere, plus lets me keep a decent amount of information without having to worry about running over some ridiculously low space limit. The ads – such as they’ve been so far – are small and discrete and half the time are not there at all. There are things I like about it – the way it threads messages is nice – and things I don’t. The biggest issue I have with the system right now is that there is no ability to stash messages in folders. Yes, I know I can keep every message I ever receive, but I really prefer to organize all my data into folders. It makes me happy to see a series of folders, nested neatly within each category. I do not like lots of excess gunk cluttering my inbox. I don’t like clutter at all, quite frankly, when it has to do with computer things – even the desktops on my home and work computers remain as bare as I can make them, with only a single row of shortcuts on the desktop itself, and all other programs access through – you guessed it – neatly organized folders. So to have to deal with a pile of email that I want to save but cannot move out of view makes me antsy. You can apply nifty labels to the emails to categorize them, but you cannot move them into other folders. What on earth are they thinking, not giving me my folders?

Frankly, if the lack of folder functionality really just gets too annoying, I am perfectly willing to just let the account idle until it dies, since it’s not as if I really needed the it in the first place. I also suspect that eventually I will transfer that email list subscription back to my regular account, if only to no longer have to log in to two places every time I want to look for new mail. But for now it’s a new toy to play with, and if nothing else, I suppose I can use it as a place to store large files, or lists of links I might want to access when I’m away from home.

This has been an entry for Alphabytes.

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W is for Wishful Thinking

When I first found the plans for our house online I fell in love with them. And there were so very many things about those plans to love. The master bedroom is huge. The front porch is lovely. There are three huge bay windows, and a skylight in the bathroom, and plenty of light in the house. The plans seemed, somehow, to be perfect.

But as with anything else, once the house was built I could see why the plans weren’t exactly as perfect as I had thought. The ceilings are only 8 feet, which may be nice for heating costs, but makes the downstairs feel a little cramped. The layout of the kitchen and the laundry room makes no sense, and if I’d had any concept of what it was going to look like I would have had them do a complete redesign of that entire area. The access to the attic is a tiny little hole in a closet that makes it next to impossible to get up there, and if I’d had half a brain I would have insisted they put in a pull-down staircase in the hallway, where we could actually make use of that 8 square feet of plywood flooring we had them install three years ago when they built this house – flooring we’ve never had occasion to use because getting up there is just next to impossible.

Most of the time those things just aren’t that big a deal. After all, there’s a lot to love about the house, not the least of which is the simple fact that it is ours. But every once in a while I look around and add one more thing to the list of changes I would make to this house if we ever built it again.

I like to look at model homes. I’ve always liked looking at them, even when I was in no position to buy, and even now that we own a house and really have no intention of selling it and moving anywhere else, I still like looking at model homes for the decorating ideas. It’s fun to see what the designer has done – where they put things, how big (or tiny) they made the bedrooms. It’s fun to compare things in new homes to things in ours.

So on the way home today I saw a sign for a few new developments in our area, and we took a detour to go check them out. There were two sets of models, and we started with what turned out to be the smaller of the two – four houses in each set. We wandered through single and two-story house, winced at the size of the closets they call bedrooms, agreed that we really liked the color one of the master bedrooms was painted, and then set off to wander through the second set.

That was probably a very big mistake. In fact, we figured that out after we got into the first house, but it got worse as we kept on moving down the line. And it all culminated the minute we walked into the final house in the set. There was a formal dining room, and a formal living room, and a staircase, followed by the type of kitchen I have dreamed of having, and a huge and comfortable family room, and then, oh then, just around the corner from the kitchen, the office – bigger than the one we have at home, and across the hall a little low-ceilinged closet underneath the stairs that would be just the perfect spot to house things like servers and routers and other equipment that one might want to keep safe from cats.

We walked up the stairs and everywhere we turned there was something else wonderful to find. Three bedrooms – all decent sized – a master bedroom with a huge bathroom and walk-in closet and lots of space in the bedroom itself for a little reading nook, and then to top it off, there was a huge bonus room with two little window seat cubbies, open to the entire house, that screamed out ‘library’.

Naturally, we realize that this house is all wrong for us. The yard – while a larger lot than you usually see in new developments – is certainly not as large or as nice as ours is right now, even still as incomplete as it is. The price is a heck of a lot higher than anything we could hope to afford, even with the equity I know we’ve got in this house from all the work we’ve put into it. Most importantly, the house is almost double the size of the one we own – a ridiculously huge amount of space for two people, even if we do come with seven cats. We would rattle around in it and never see each other. But knowing all those things didn’t change the fact that we both fell head over heels in love.

I know that when I built this house, my intentions were for it to be the place where I would stay, permanently. I did not want to buy just a ‘starter’ home and then work my way up – I wanted to start with a house where I could really believe that it would be my home, for as long as I needed to be there. I realize, of course, that things change; life changes, jobs change. A lot of things can happen during the course of ‘forever’. We might decide to move. One or both of us could lose our jobs again and *have* to move. A lot of things can happen.

Despite the fact that we both really liked that house, we realize that it would be silly to even think about making it a reality, and not just because it’s ridiculously huge, or far more house than we really could afford. We do realize, however, that maybe there are things we could be doing to this house we’re in right now. I know there are things on that list of changes that will never be possible – after all, raising the downstairs ceiling a foot is kind of hard to do in a two-story home – but there are other things that might be a bit closer to our grasp.

And maybe, just maybe, the next time I see a sign for model homes, we should just drive on by and not go looking. Sometimes it’s better not to know what else is out there. Sometimes it’s better just to keep to things just the way they are.

This has been an entry for Alphabytes.

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P is for (Harry) Potter

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Yesterday we were both supposed to go down to the Scottish Games in Campbell. However, when I woke up yesterday my sinuses were hopelessly clogged, my head was throbbing from the pressure, and I was exhausted from spending the entire night trying desperately to find some position in which I could sleep without my sinuses draining down the back of my throat and making me try to cough my lungs out. So I curled up on the love seat downstairs with a box of tissues and a mug of coffee and waved Richard goodbye. He went off by himself to spend the day with his family, amid bagpipers and burly men in kilts, and I spent the day home by myself. I decided that the only way to get over this current bout of sinus infection hell was to just let myself relax. I took a short nap after lunch, once my sinuses decided they were going to play nicely for a change, and poked around online, and did a bunch of knitting, and eventually decided that I felt well enough to take myself out for dinner (because everyone should treat themselves to fries and a chocolate shake now and then). I also spent most of the morning reading.

After we saw the third Harry Potter movie two weeks ago I immediately read Prisoner of Azkaban again. I try very hard to not read books immediately before I see any movie based on them because I do not want to how the movie director saw fit to make any changes. Obviously there will always be changes, since (with the possible exception of The Princess Bride), movies based on books will never be exactly the same because there is no way that any human can ever translate the things we imagine from words on a page into what we can see on a big screen. And yes, as I read through the third Harry Potter book, I could see the things that had been changed – some of which I agreed with and some of which I didn’t – but I deliberately waited until after the movie because I knew this way I would enjoy both more.

Today, since I had nothing else to do, I decided to read the next two books in the series again – if only to remind myself of what happens next. I poured through Goblet of Fire and then I made myself peanut butter and cottage cheese on toast (trust me, it’s good) and devoured Order of the Phoenix once more. And I reminded myself all over again just why I love these books so very much, and why I – like most of the rest of the world – is so impatient for the next one to be published.

They are not great literature – although I have my own opinions on the books that the snooty set considers ‘great literature’ (it often translates into ‘great bore’, in my opinion) – and they may not be the best examples of perfect writing. But what I think a lot of people forget, when they are looking at a book and tut-tutting over how well sentences are structured or whether or not the editor should have really let the author get away with those extra few hundred pages, is that the whole point of a book – especially a book for children – is to entertain. And the Harry Potter books are certainly entertaining. They are entertaining, not only for the kids for whom they were originally written, but for their parents too. They get the whole family reading the books together. They give everyone something to talk about. And most of all, they are fun.

This has been an entry for Alphabytes.

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I is for Ill (or Ick)

Last week one of my coworkers flew off to a conference on the other side of the country. When he returned, he brought with him a cold. He came into the office the day after he was back, since it hadn’t quite hit him by that point, but the next day or two he was out sick. The rest of us weren’t concerned, since he did try to be really good about staying away from us so as to not infect anyone else. But then Friday a second coworker was feeling really tired, and Monday while the first coworker was home sick, the second one ended up going home early because he wasn’t feeling too good, and by the end of the day I was starting to feel a bit under the weather as well. Yesterday I made it into the office for the first half of the day because there were some things I needed to finish, and I knew that since my desk is off in a separate corner from everyone else at least I wouldn’t be exposing anyone. But by lunchtime I’d just about had it. I gave up and went home, with only a brief detour by the Nissan place to have my car serviced, and then I came home and crashed.

Today has been a day spent home in bed. Richard, who has been fighting this same thing on and off now for almost two weeks (since it has been making the rounds and taking out coworkers at his office as well), had a meeting that he had to go to in Davis, but after his meeting he came right back home, pale and exhausted, and went immediately to his nebulizer. We have been a lovely pair these past few days, lolling around listlessly, me coughing and sniffling and him wheezing and short of breath. As an asthmatic, everything he gets eventually settles in his lungs, while everything I get eventually settles in my sinuses.

This evening we were both antsy to get up and do *something*, no matter how cruddy we felt. So I snagged the shopping list off the fridge and we made a brief foray out to the grocery store to stock up on things like cottage cheese and vegetables and milk. And then we gave up and came back home because even that was just too tiring.

This has been an entry for Alphabytes.

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Z is for Zucchini

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This past week I finally did something I’ve been meaning to do for months. I redid the Cats Page, a task which necessitated going through all my archive files for this journal and the photolog to track down every picture I’ve taken of the cats since I started this journal. Once that fairly monumental task was accomplished then it was just a simple matter of tossing up a few more html pages. The whole thing took me barely an hour to accomplish, and the majority of that time was spent looking at non-cat pictures anyway. Do you think I’ll learn anything from this little lesson and maybe procrastinate less? I didn’t think so either.

During this process I quickly figured out which cats tend to be more photogenic in this house. Allegra is, of course, impossibly photogenic, with her coloring and her fluff. Rebecca and Sebastian have more pictures by virtue of the fact that they’ve been here longest. Tangerine is very good at posing pretty for the camera. Rosie, however, is not such a fan of having her picture taken, and Azzie, while adorably cute (as the resident Perpetual Kitten should be), tends not to photograph well because he is solid black, and a picture of a solid black long-haired cat tends to look less cute and cuddly and more like a large black fuzzy blur with maybe some glowing eyes in the middle if he was being cooperative.

Zucchini, however, has only one picture – only one picture in the entire time I have had this website. This is because Zucchini is convinced that the entire world is out to get him, and despite the fact that he has lived with me since he was three weeks of age and not once have I ever hurt him, he has spent his entire life acting as if he is sure that I am only biding my time until I grab him and tear him into little pieces. So taking that one, solitary picture was a chore in itself which involved huge amounts of catnip all over the floor and me lying on my stomach in extremely uncomfortable positions for several hours until the darn cat was finally high enough on the nip to not immediately run in terror every time I blinked. Even so, the one picture I have of him is a bit blurry, so you don’t get the true sense of dread in his eyes as he realizes that I am pointing what is obviously an evil Ray of Death in his general direction.

Lately, however, things have started to get a little better. Ever since that little incident a few months ago – the week where he ate most of the stuffing out of a cat toy and got to go for daily x-rays and test and poking and prodding and nearly went under the knife before he finally puked it out on his own – I have seen very steady improvement. . During that entire time I spent hours with him each day, holding him, forcing food and medicine down his throat, taking him to and from the vet. I guess all that attention meant that something finally trickled through the mixed up chemistry in his brain that I’m really not so bad after all.

So the cat who usually lurks underneath the bed and only comes out at night when we are lying down and thus apparently (according to his strange little feline brain) incapable of inflicting horror unimaginable on him has, in the past month or two, actually not only *not* run away when I get the food bowls out in the morning, but stood close enough to me that I could reach down and pet him on the head! To make matters even more amazing, he has also taken to lurking in the computer room. Granted, he tended to lurk before, but usually his version of lurking was to hide out underneath the desks until we sat down, at which point he would erupt forth in sheer terror and bolt out, usually doing his best to trip one or both of us. There is a similar version of this ‘game’, which would take place at random intervals when we happened to go into the bathroom where the linen closet is kept. An innocent stroll into that room to get batteries can turn quickly into near heart attacks on the part of human and cat as Zucchini shot out of the linen closet and nearly tore off a limb of the unsuspecting person who might possibly be standing in his way. So ‘lurking’ is a different concept for Zucchini. The other cats lurk by hanging out at our feet, or perhaps jumping into our laps with absolutely no warning whatsoever before you are faced with a lap full of purring fuzz which sees no reason why you should be allowed to actually *use* your keyboard or mouse. Or in Sebastian’s case, lurking involves weaving around my feet until I dangle one hand over the side of the chair so he can rub his face on it and lick it to death.

After over eight years of watching the other cats lurk in this oh-so-dangerous manner and still survive without any injury whatsoever, Zucchini is starting to catch on that maybe he could give it a try too. Lately he’s been right there alongside Sebastian, shoving his head against my fingers. Just this past week I’ve been able to very slowly turn my chair around to face him and lean down to actually pet him, without him running away. Oh, there is still a look in his eyes that tells me that it wouldn’t take much for him to revert back to his wanna-be feral ways, but with this cat I tend to take whatever progress I can get.

I now have a Sony Clie, which has a little camera built in, just perfect for close-ups. It does not have a flash, and only makes a very unassuming little click when I press the button. In fact, it also comes with a little strap which can be dangled enticingly in a cat’s general direction, just enough to make him look up at me and hold still long enough to press the button.

So here he is, folks. The invisible cat, live, and in color. Let’s see, that makes two pictures in more than twice as many years. Maybe it won’t take nearly as long until I can catch him in the lens again. We’ll see.

This has been an entry for Alphabytes.

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H is for Hands

I don’t know when I first heard about Habitat for Humanity. All I know is that it has been years since I first saw those words and found out what it was all about. It’s an organization dedicated to providing affordable housing for people who couldn’t otherwise afford a place of their own. This isn’t government-subsidized apartments – these are houses – houses built by volunteers and the people who are lucky enough to own them. They are not given away – the people who get the house must put in something like 500 hours of their own work on either their house or other houses, and they do have to pay a mortgage. But because the mortgage is interest free, and because so much of the work of building that house is done through donated materials and volunteer work, the house ends up a much less expensive property than it otherwise might be. Habitat is a pretty amazing organization, and it’s something I’ve wanted to get involved with for a very long time. But things keep getting in the way. First I did too much traveling. Then I couldn’t find a Habitat group building in my area. Then I did too much traveling again, and then I just plain got busy.

It looked like things might change when, a few years ago, a Habitat chapter was started in our town. I didn’t want to volunteer to be on any of the committees because frankly, after the SPCA, I was sick of being on committees, and also I knew I wouldn’t have the time. But I put my name down on the list to be a volunteer, and anxiously awaited word on their progress as they started down the long road of finding a site, finding a recipient, and all the other little things that have to be done before an actual house can be built. There’s a lot of us who’ve been in the same boat for quite a while now, asking around, trying to find out just what was up and how we could help and hitting dead ends at every turn.

But suddenly, opportunity presented itself. One of the members of our church has been a general contractor for years – the type of wonderfully gentle man who works marvelously with volunteers. On a whim he applied for a job he saw advertised, which turned out to be working as a site manager for the Habitat in Sacramento. As an added plus, he happens to be the dad of one of my coworkers – a coworker at an office full of people who have all also expressed interest in getting involved in Habitat themselves.

A few phone calls later we had a date. As a matter of fact, somehow we ended up with two dates – one this month and one the next. We weren’t sure what we would be doing, and we all had extremely different levels of skill (from ‘lots’ to ‘next to none’), but we were assured that wouldn’t matter. All we had to do was show up and be ready to work.

So show up we did, this morning, bright and early, at the designated site in Sacramento. It’s an existing house that is getting some significant remodeling done due to damage from weather and neglect. Our jobs today were to pour the back patio, finish up some of the interior wiring, and lay the french drain in the back yard.

Remember how very much fun Richard and I had last summer when we filled wheelbarrow after wheelbarrow with rocks and dirt and carted them to our backyard, over and over and over? Guess what I did for several hours this morning! Yep, that’s right. I filled wheelbarrow after wheelbarrow with extremely heavy wet gloppy cement and carted it to the backyard to dump it into untidy heaps in the designated area, so two other volunteers could smooth it out and transform it into a perfectly smooth patio. And then this afternoon I dumped shovel after shovel full of pea gravel into wheelbarrows, which were then carted into the backyard and poured into a very long and deep ditch, into which we had just positioned a very long length of flexible piping full of evenly spaced holes, which was to become a french drain.

In the middle of the heaving and the shoveling and the carting, there was a brief stint inside the house, where I got to go around and check every single beam to see if the holes for the wires and pipes were far enough away from the outer edge. If they were not I got to pound spiky nail stops into the beams so that when the drywall installers came they would not accidentally pierce a pipe or electrical cord and cause all manner of problems later down the line. I got to do this because I am a huge wimp and do not do well on things that require being on top of a ladder, and so everyone else stood on ladders and installed flooring in the attic around the heating and air conditioning unit, or stood on ladders and did electrical kits for all the light fixtures.

It was hard work, mostly (except for installing the nail protectors because how hard is it, really, to smack a spiky metal plate into a wall with a large hammer?), and physically tiring. It didn’t help that by the afternoon it was getting pretty hot and there was a lot of dust and grime and pea gravel and bits of wood, but somehow it was still fun. I learned something new today about how to ensure proper drainage in a yard, and how much skill laying cement really can require (a lot more than I ever want to possess). When we were finally done I was tired and sore and impossibly grungy and yet somehow I felt a little bit exhilarated by it nonetheless, because I know that it was all to benefit some stranger who I will never meet. And I also cannot wait until next month when my coworkers and our spouses and friends and anyone else we can scrounge up and I will don our grungiest shirts and jeans and baseball caps and arm ourselves with determination and as many bottles of water as we can carry, and go do this again.

This has been an entry for Alphabytes.