Richard and I borrowed a car from the Toyota dealership last Saturday. We didn’t have to pay any rental fees – we just let them copy our driver’s licenses and then drove off as they waved goodbye. We got no hard sell – an unusual thing for an auto dealership; no fast patter to convince us we should buy. But that’s because the folks at Toyota probably realize by now that there is no need. They can’t keep these things on the lot. The car sells itself.

We drove the Prius last Saturday – Toyota’s little gas and electric hybrid. We traded driver vs passenger every time we stopped the car on our many errands that day, taking turns adjusting the seat, fiddling with the controls, watching the digital display screen avidly, watching the little picture diagram of gas vs electric motor usage and excitedly calling out each increase in our miles per gallon ratio. We drove at least 200 miles in that car Saturday and by the end we were both head over heels in serious like.

The Prius looks like someone took a normal compact and squashed the nose and rear. It’s a cute car – which scores points with me (the one who’s dream car used to be a Volkswagon Beetle because it’s so darn cute). It’s also got most of the bells and whistles of the standard compact, plus an air conditioner where you can choose the temperature. This also scored big points with the one who can never get comfortable with AC in the car and keeps turning it on and off even on hot days. Um – that would be me there too.

We scooted around the greater Sacramento area in search of marble for the fireplace. Our stop at one home improvement store was futile, but as we were about to get into our little loaner car, another family stopped us. What the heck *is* it, they wanted to know. So we dutifully babbled all about how cool this car was, even popping the hood so they could check out the engine, letting them pile into the front and back seat so they could ooh and aah over the nifty digital display. The one thing which gets everyone (it got both of us – heh) is that when you’re idling, the engine eventually stops. It just shuts off. It’s more than a bit disconcerting because the normal reaction is to think that it’s stalled, but it’s simply that the electric motor has taken over. This little car is *made* for rush hour traffic, and toodling around town hitting stop signs and stoplights. Contrary to the regular compact, it’s fuel economy goes up when it does lots of stops.

We took that car everywhere. We showed it off to all our friends and to my parents. We had one heck of a lot of fun with that car. And we gave it back the next day without buying one.

Like I said, we’re head over heels in serious like with the car. The possibility of cutting our gas bills literally in half has an enormous appeal, plus the fact that’s it’s environmentally friendly is a big selling point too. But we’re being good. We’ve got this house we’re buying and very soon we’ll be dealing with one whopping huge mortgage and, well, it just wouldn’t be a smart idea to jump into car loans right now until we make sure we can afford it.

But in the meantime, we’re still gushing. And looking down the road to when we’ll be able to get it – one for each of us.

There is an undercurrent of unease at work these days. We’re in a period of assessment, examining what’s been developed so far and trying to figure out how much further we have to go. But while we’re doing this, development has been frozen, and while all the technical team members have been pulled instead into documentation, assessment discussions, and design sessions, there still isn’t enough work to keep us all comfortably busy.

We’ve known there might be cutbacks – the rumors have been circulating ever since they first started planning this particular activity of the project. So it’s not that we didn’t know they were coming. Still, it would have been nice to have been given more warning than simply to leave work one evening, and come back to empty desks where developers once sat. There was no message circulated to prepare us. Just – one day they were there, and the next they were gone. The second wave – scheduled at the end of this week – is at least expected now, but still, there seems to be gaps in their reasons for who should go and who should stay through this process.

There are rumors of yet more cutbacks. We eye each new email from our own company managers as well as communications handed down from the program managers of this project with trepidation, never knowing if this will be the next missive full of names to disappear overnight. No one seems to know what we’ll be doing come April – this includes the technical consultants as well as the business people themselves. We’re told that those who’ve been removed will come back when development starts again, but we contractors and consultants know the business too well to be willing to believe that promise so easily. Companies do not like to have their employees sitting idle on the bench while a customer twiddles its thumbs. It’s highly likely that some of those people will be placed on other projects and will not return in May, taking with them all the knowledge they’ve accumulated and were never given the chance to pass on before they left.

So we busy ourselves with the tedium of documentation long overdue, and we watch, and we wait. There is nothing else we can do.

It is March, but you wouldn’t know it from the weather. It’s been in the high 70’s this week so far – far warmer than it should be for this time of year. I’m wearing short sleeves and it’s not even spring. This does not bode well for summer.

I’m sitting in the computer room and I’ve opened the window because it was a bit stuffy in here. There are a number of tiny bugs that have darted inside the room and keep alighting on my monitor. The cats find them fascinating. Sebastian is sitting on Richard’s desk, crying piteously each time he tries his futile best to capture one of the little critters. Allegra is creeping up behind him in that cautious awkward way she has when she’s intent on a target, and Rebecca has taken over the windowsill, nose pressed to the screen, bugs ignored because she can smell Outside through there. Azzie – not too sure about all of this – is watching from Richard’s chair, patting at Sebastian in puzzlement, and otherwise ignoring the bugs.

I’m going to regret letting the bugs come in, I know. The cats will probably tear the computer room apart to get to them and there will be a mess to clean up tomorrow morning, plus random crashes tonight that will be of the sort where we lie in bed and debate if it sounded breakable. But for now, they’re happy – excited to have something different.

They’ll have something different very soon – something far more exciting than a few random bugs crawling on the window screen. We’ve an end date now – just a bit less than four weeks left to go. Once tax day has passed, Richard and I will move into our new home.

It’s hard to imagine that it’s this close. Now that I have a date – even though I’ve been wishing for one for so long – I’m not sure if I’m more excited or scared. It’s going to be a big change – living in a house that’s truly ours. So many things to think about. So much to do to get ready. We’ve barely begun cleaning the garage. We need to start gathering boxes and packing things. We need to talk to moving companies. We need to talk to someone about landscaping the front yard. We need to call the bank and lock in a mortgage rate now, while it’s still low, while Alan Greenspan is being so kind as to drop it bit by bit. Two full points it’s fallen since we began this project five months ago.

I’m not ready. I’ve been so impatient all this time, waited so many years to finally have a place of my own, and I’m not ready for it to happen. I keep waiting for the ax to fall. Somehow, someway, this isn’t really going to happen. It can’t be this close – just around the corner.

Sebastian has succeeded in capturing one of the bugs, hooking his paw around it and pinning it to the wall. In just a moment, he’ll begin the game of lifting his paw slowly and looking for the bug, which will – unless he actually managed to squash it – have escaped. He’ll ponder this turn of events for a few long moments, staring at his paw in puzzlement, and eventually give up and go leaping for another victim to start the cycle all over again.

It used to be that I loved my job all the time, and the days when I wished I could do something else were far and few between. It used to be that I would dream code in my sleep and leave myself half-awake voicemail messages for how to fix the problem that was plaguing me at that moment. It used to be that I enjoyed work, and never watched the clock. It used to be.

I do not have to wonder where my disillusionment and dissatisfaction began – I know the starting point. I don’t have to ask how I became so jaded. I know far too well. I’ve tried so often to convince myself to find reasons to be optimistic with the Big Fish, to stop comparing now to then. But this has gotten harder and harder the more I learn about this company I work for. Their policies and business ethics in upper management don’t anger me as much as they sadden me now. My former company – the one Big Fish swallowed up just over a year ago – was so different. As consultants we were sent to projects with one goal – to make the customer successful. We knew that the money we brought in was important to our managers, but never did I feel as I’ve felt lately – that they would add people to a project simply to rake in the cash.

It’s hard, sometimes, when you are hanging on by a thread and constantly questioning your decision to stay, to remember why it is that you were there in the first place. It’s difficult to see through the frustration and the anger and the disappointment to the reasons why you came.

It’s days like today, however, that make me remember why it is I used to love my job. Days when I’m in the middle of things, when I’m designing in my head, when I’m working hard. Days when the time zooms by and I’m not constantly checking my watch to see how much longer I have to stay. Days when I leave with a smile that lingers even once I’m out the door where no one can actually see me anymore.

I love consulting. No matter what happens with the politics and the management policies of this company for whom I now work, that cannot change that fact. I love the challenge, the constant changes. And even though it is often frustrating (especially these days), I even love the excitement of the politics and ever-changing policies at the customer site. There are few jobs that offer what consulting offers – never the same thing twice, and even though I am sometimes overwhelmed and feeling as if I’m struggling to hang on by my fingernails, I also know that I’m very good at what I do.

Sometimes it just takes a day like today to remind me. Despite everything, the Big Fish cannot ever tear that completely away from me. Not unless I let them.

Covington Cream. Painted Lady. Peppertree. Lakeside. White Shadow. Swiss Coffee.

There are whole folder of names like these, beside inch-square chips of color, grouped carefully on a white background. One whole folder of colors was marked ‘historic’, meant specifically for those of us who are partial to the Victorian era.

I am not good at matching colors (For this very reason, the house interior will be all one shade of white. White Shadow, to be exact, although the Swiss Coffee intrigued me, simply because of the name). But the paint chips gave me a glimmer (albeit a faint one) of how these things might go together. These are the colors you see on carefully preserved homes hundreds of years old. Each name calls to mind a different image. Painted Lady will be the hue of the fishscale on our gables. I like that image – our house will be a bit feisty as a result…but then, with stone dragons on the front walkway, how could it be otherwise?

********

Some time, when you’re bored, wander through your house and count every single light. Closet lights. Hall lights. All of them – and don’t forget the ones in the garage, and the ones outside. Porch lights? Toss them in too.

Now. Just for fun and giggles, take that list and go to a home store, and pretend you’re going to replace them. All of them – all at once.

Home Base is going out of business, so for the first time, our contractor sent us to go do the purchasing instead of simply handing him a list of model numbers and having him do it. We did a walkthrough of the house and were handed a rather lengthy list, which we were to take so that we could purchase every single one of them. By ourselves.

Some of them were easy. One hall or closet light is just like the other, so all we had to do was grab a whole stack of the same fixture and pile it into the cart. The rest weren’t quite so simple though. Which fan to get – four blades or five? Wood or painted? Antique brass or shiny? What type of ceiling light – flush or semi-flush? We walked in circles in the display aisles until my neck ached and my eyes started to cross. Will it be as bright in the house as it is in the store? How hard is it going to be to clean? What type of bulb does it use?

There are now two cart-loads of lights sitting in a pile in our garage – a very expensive pile, I should add. We still have yet to buy bulbs for them all too (wince), and worse yet, we’re still not done. Even though we threw up our hands and gave up and begged our contractor (wonderful man that he is) to get the can lights for us, we’ve still two more to buy, plus a few fans.

Here I was, worried about kitchen appliances. I should know better, really I should….

Today we drove to Chico for a funeral.

The drive was long – longer than it should have been as we later learned on the way home after actually checking a map instead of believing in the almighty power of Mapquest. It was a pretty drive in places. We saw a few clumps of California poppies along the road. It took me by surprise to see them, actually. I remember when you could find those brilliant clusters of orange along every freeway in this area, and now they’re nowhere to be found. Our state flower, practically nonexistent. Back in high school I had a biology teacher who’d come from out of state. He was very tall and thin, and painfully young. We had to do the California memorization thing – where we had to memorize tons of flowers (and birds) – their common and latin names. I recall hours spent with friends, working with flash cards, trying to come up with anything at all, no matter how silly, that would help us to remember those darn latin terms. I’m still not sure why they forced us to do this – most of us promptly forgot all we’d memorized shortly after the test.

But the test itself was a room lined with various plants – samples of them, mostly, since they were all Californian. And in one vase was a pair of flowers – brilliant orange petals (four each), hanging limply down at the sides of the stem. We were stumped – this did not look remotely familiar, although the color should, I suppose, have been a dead giveaway. “Poppies,” the teacher exclaimed when we asked him later, and was mortified when told that it was illegal to pick them. He’d had no idea. But at least now we all know what they look like when they’re picked. They don’t hold their shape. They wilt and turn their pretty, delicate heads inside out.

There were orchards along the roads we drove. The sign for one town proclaimed it the kiwi capital of the United States. I’m not sure if that is necessarily true, but I can only assume that if it was, those squatty, leafless trees we saw were kiwi trees. Do kiwis even grow on trees? I’m a bit ashamed to say that I don’t honestly know, although since they’re a fruit, I’d have to assume they did.

In one section we passed the air was filled with the perfume of thousands of flowers – pale pink blossoms that liberally decorated the otherwise bare tree branches. Between the trees something grew that was dotted bright yellow. At first we thought perhaps it was a deliberate planting, but then, noting clumps of the stuff in random patches in fields and parks we passed, we wondered if it was simply a local weed. Whatever it was, the blanket of yellow pin pricks under a canopy of delicate rose was vibrantly beautiful.

There is not much else out there on the road up to Chico. The route is sprinkled with a handful of small towns, most of which looked to be the sort of place young couples dream wistfully of moving to to raise their children, and from which teenagers dream desperately of escaping.

We found the funeral home with no trouble at all, and went inside. The room was packed, and it was only after finding a place to sit that Richard’s aunt flagged us down and pointed us toward one of his cousins.

I never met his aunt – the one who lay in the coffin at the front of the room (although I’d never met the other one who greeted us before either). I know that funerals are not the place where faults and flaws are often revealed, but still, even with that in mind, the way people spoke of her, she sounded as if she were the type of person I would have liked to know. Service over, they raised the coffin lid and as people milled past, Richard and I met the rest of his family.

This is a side of the family he knows barely, having seen most of them only 15 years prior. His cousin Richard looks just like him – so much that I pointed him out as we sat in the back corner (our first position before his aunt found us) and noted that he had to be related.

Richard (my Richard, not the cousin) commented, looking at his aunt’s body, that she seemed still alive, that somehow one could almost believe that she was about to wake up. She died in her sleep – the best way to go, peaceful, quiet. She had called only a few weeks prior, completely out of the blue after so many years. Others said that she had called them as well, everyone in her family on both sides, trying to touch them all. She made the effort to get Richard’s phone number for that call, and it was that effort which was the sole reason we even knew she died.

It was a bit odd, being at a funeral when I was not emotionally involved. I attended my grandfather’s funeral several years ago and mourned because I would never have the chance to really get to know this man who shared my love of the scientific and practical – the only one in my family who could ever read my published works and comment on the actual topic because he understood what I wrote about. He was laid out in his coffin, and looked like a wax dummy. It did not look real – he was too artificial, lying there. This was not my grandfather as I remembered him, the summer before at the family reunion. He had been just as old and frail then, but he was alive. This body in the coffin did not look as if it had ever been inhabited. He was the only one of my grandparents I ever knew.

Handshakes and ‘glad to meet you’s’ were murmured. What do you say to someone who has lost their sister / mother / best friend, when you have never met anyone in that room before – either living or dead, except “I’m sorry about your loss.” We left with addresses exchanged, hugs and promises to remain in touch.

On the way home, sun setting so the flowers in the trees weren’t nearly so brilliant in color, we saw the egret by the side of the road. He stood, poised, thin and white, sharp against the uneven grass of the shoulder, pretending that the cars whizzing by didn’t exist.

I pass a house every day on the way to work. Most days I don’t even turn my head to look – it’s merely something alongside the road, and I’m too tired to care about the scenery that early in the morning.

But lately I’ve been looking more, sometimes even slowing down a bit just to get a closer view. It’s the same sort of square box of a house as the rest of the homes on the farms that line the back roads to the freeway, except that no one lives in this one anymore. It’s falling apart, slowly. The wall that faces the road has completely fallen away, and the roof sags deep in the middle, while what remains above the front room hangs down slightly, a paltry attempt at covering the room that is now exposed. The foundation is worn open and the house itself tilts slightly. It may once have been painted a different color, but time and weather have taken their toll and the exterior is now a defeated white, streaked with dirt and age.

The house draws me because it is slowly falling apart, at the same time that I am in the process of putting my own house together. While we watch the walls rise in the house we’re building, this one’s walls crumble and succumb to the weather, deteriorating bit by visible bit each day. Another heavy rain storm may do in the rest of what remains of its roof.

It draws me because when I’m tired my mind wanders, and I’m often tired passing that house. I wonder if someone, years and years ago, stood where that house now huddles and watched it grow from a pile of bricks and boards into the home it once was. I wonder if it was someone’s dream, if this was where they imagined they’d live, watch their children grow, grow old in this place. I wonder if that someone worried as much about the details as I worry, if they were unable to make up their mind, or simply built it matter-of-factly. I wonder if the curtains in the windows were lace, or covered in pastel flowers and tied back with lengths of fabric; if family pictures adorned the walls on uneven lengths of wire looped around nails. I wonder if someone planted flowers in pots on the porch, or if they hung clothes on a line stretched between trees to dry. I wonder if someone stood in the kitchen and looked out on the farm and knew that she was *home*.

It’s sad, in a way, to watch the death of what was once someone’s home. I’ll never know why it fell into the shape it’s in – if someone died and no one wanted it; if it was simply rented out and then never taken care of. Or there may not have been any one reason why it became so neglected. Perhaps it just grew too old and tired.

I know that someday, years and years from now, there is the possibility that the house we are building – this shiny new home full of unimaginable possibilities, this place that I cannot wait to live in – may someday look something like this tattered remnant. It’s not a pretty thought, and I hope that I’m long gone by the time it happens. I’d like to think that our house will last, carefully tended by all of its owners, loved just as much by all those who come after us as we will love it.

The reality, however, is that the day will come when even our beautiful home will begin to fall into disrepair, the roof buckling, beams worn away, and sometime in the future, someone will pass by and wonder too.

If Collab – March: If given the challenge, could you live without a mirror for one week? How much emphasis do you place on the outward appearance you show the world?

One week. No mirror. What’s the big deal with that?

It sounds so easy, doesn’t it, and of course if you say ‘no’, then that makes you completely shallow – obsessed by how you look and how others view you.

But my answer is ‘no’ anyway.

Am I obsessed with my appearance? Of course not. I can do my hair without benefit of a mirror – give me a comb and a barrette and I’m all set. My beauty regime is minimal – five minutes, most of that spent in applying moisturizer and lotion, since my skin and the Sahara desert share a few things in common. I never got the hang of most forms of makeup – every time I apply eye shadow I look as if I’ve been punched, and blush only makes me look artificially sunburnt. Mascara doesn’t require a mirror to apply, and I can even do eyeliner by touch if need be.

So why do I need the mirror? Not for any grandiose illusions of beauty, no. I need it for a far more basic reason. Because of the trichotillomania, I live in constant worry about my eyes – how they look. In times when the trich has gotten really bad – times like now when stress overwhelms me and I give up on the struggle to leave my eyes alone – it becomes crucial that I do the eyeliner and the mascara very carefully every morning; that I color in the brows; that I do whatever is in my power so that noone will know about my ugly little secret. In times like these, I glance into any mirror I pass, checking to see how pale I look – if the eyeliner is even, if anyone can see that there’s huge bald patches in my brows. It is always in the back of my mind, this disorder.

In less stressful times, when the disorder is mostly under control and I am reasonably certain that, even makeup-free, I look ‘normal’, I might answer this question differently. Filled with confidence, sure that this time I’ve finally got it licked, I might declare ‘I don’t need a mirror! Ha!’

It’s far better to be realistic. I have a dream that someday I really will be able to answer this question with a resounding ‘Yes, yes yes!’ But for now, I will keep my mirror close, if only for my own peace of mind.

There’s been this little part of my brain that has insisted that this isn’t going to work – that she will sew this dress and it will be horrid – not what I wanted, but exactly what I picked, and I’ll be stuck with it. And I’ve never been good at visualizing things on me from pictures.

Last night, the seamstress came over, with all the pieces of my dress, and proceeded to put them together, with pins, *on* me. When she’d gotten it mostly constructed, she ushered me off to the mirror.

I stood there in that beginning of a wedding dress – skirts gathered carefully in both hands so I didn’t trip on the hem, only one sleeve finished and the other one a diaphanous wing of too much material, my hair a mess – and all of my doubts were completely gone. It’s gorgeous. It’s incredible. It’s exactly what I pictured, and more so. And it makes me *feel* beautiful. I can see it now – the final result – and it doesn’t matter if I never lose any of this weight. This is the perfect dress for me.

********

The house is really looking more like a house inside now. The sheet rock is mostly done, they’ve constructed the linen closet (huge!), the shelves in the master bedroom closet (I love that idea!), etc. The contractor said they’ll do the decks next – kinda funny when he was mentioning his difficulty in figuring out what to use. I said I’d heard of this stuff that looked like wood but was made of recycled material. He grinned and took me over to show us what he’d got us – the stuff made of recycled material. I know it makes him quite happy when he comes up with an idea and we’ve already thought of it. Heck, I know it makes us thrilled when he does the same, and this guy is amazing at coming up with marvelous ideas (after twenty years of building custom homes, he’s got all sorts of handy do’s and don’t’s).

One of the things we were supposed to look at Thursday night (when we went out armed only with a flashlight), was the fireplaces. We looked, dutifully, but aside from saying ‘yeah, it’s a fireplace’, and noting that we’d like a broader mantel, we weren’t really sure what we were supposed to be seeing. Luckily, when we headed out yesterday for our what has now become weekly ‘meet with the contractor’ session, one of the builders explained to me exactly what it was we were supposed to see. The downstairs fireplace is going to be absolutely stunning. They’re building ‘columns’ into the walls above and below, and the mantel piece itself is detailed beautifully. He noted that a broader mantel would work just fine – all we have to do is add it to the top. It’s going to be a truly magnificent centerpiece for the room – the first thing to draw the eye when you walk in.

Sebastian is losing weight and I am starting to come to terms with the fact that he is getting older. He tends to do more sitting and staring into space than running and being active. I’m not sure I’m ready for him to be old, but I’ve had him for nearly ten years now. Has it really been that long? Somewhere I have pictures of him as a kitten – a tiny little white rat curled into my college roommate’s lap – all white fur and pink toes. It doesn’t seem that so long has passed and yet it has. Rebecca hasn’t aged – or at least visibly. She’s always been the grouchy old lady – ever since she became an adult she’s been this way so there’ve been no behavior changes to signal the onset of age. Or perhaps it’s simply been more gradual – who knows. In a strange way, I am more prepared for Rebecca to die than for Sebastian. It’s not that I’ll miss her any less – it’s just that I can somehow separate it – and it’s a shock to see the visibility of age in the one who always seemed somehow not quite in this plane of reality.

********

The house is so close now. I realized that now that it’s March, there’s only about six weeks left. We were tasked to go out and look at some things this evening, so we did, dutifully, wandering around by flashlight. Half the time we’re out there it’s by flashlight, parking a car so the headlights shine into the house and then stumbling through the dark. It was easier to illuminate the house from outside when the walls weren’t covered, but now that the sheetrock and insulation are in place we can’t simply pass through the walls. We must go through doors, as it will eventually be. It’s an odd feeling, to be suddenly ‘confined’ to what is normal as opposed to the open framework that’s been there for so many weeks now, and even odder to realize that sooner than we know it, we’ll be living there.

We’ve both agreed we’d rather pay the extra price (although the amount does make me wince) for the Corian countertops in the kitchen. It’s better this way – we won’t regret it. The only question that remains is, of course, how much more will come – little bits here and there, little extras to pay, more decisions to make, and more hindsight revelations to uncover.