Excuse me for a moment, but I have some spleen to vent

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If you ever want to make me feel very sad, and like a total loser, listen up. I'm about to tell you how. There's one sure-fire way to make me feel totally worthless and lonely.

You invite every single person in a group of which I am a part to a social function, but you exclude me. That's part one. Part two is to make sure that I find about it.

Right now, I'm the only person in the paint half of my scene shop. The carpenters are back at work, but there's no scenery built, so no painters are needed to paint the non-existent scenery. I'm working all by myself, which gets a bit lonely. I've been away from the shop during lunch, and during morning break, every single carpenter had their nose in a book. (I swear the new intern was reading the obituaries, but he was probably pondering the crossword puzzle. Without a pen.)

At the end of the work day yesterday, I went out to water my garden, and when I walked through the shop, every one of my co-workers were gathered around for a post work party. That nobody had thought to ask me to join. Nobody thought to walk into my shop to see what I was doing. In fact, they must have chosen a path to avoid my shop entirely. Awesome.

Today, I was on the phone, when I realized that everyone was leaving work early for the day. They had decided to close up early and go out for drinks. Without asking me if I wanted to join them. I had an important question to ask my technical director, and he made it very clear that the work question I had was seriously impinging on his Party Time. A party that nobody had asked me if I wanted to join.

Believe me, I'm not so oblivious that I don't hear about fun that "everyone" had at the parties that nobody thought to invite me to. And we're not talking about one or two. This has been a constant in my life for years.

Few things in this world will make me sadder, or feel more worthless, to over-hear someone say, "Everyone is invited to such and such" and then be totally excluded from those plans. It makes me feel worthless and invisible, and very very lonely. Being actively snubbed in one thing. Having nobody even notice my existence is even worse. Few things are more humiliating than being constantly made aware that people aren't aware of me at all. That I don't matter even one little bit.

I'm an independent person, and I've made my peace with the fact that there are lots of things that Robb and I aren't able to do right now, and that we can't keep up with the able-bodied Cool Kids. But I'm not okay with this petty, unintentional form of cruelty.

Catastrophic Hair Loss?

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I don't know if there have been budget cuts in street sweeping, but I've been noticing a lot more discarded and run-over wigs in the road.

Did you know that dish soap can save lives?

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It's not hyperbole. Dawn dish soap has saved the lives of thousands of animals who were unlucky enough to get covered in oil. Its ability to break up oils is invaluable, when trying to remove toxic oily gunk from a terrified wild animal. (Here's a fascinating article about how this humble dish washing detergent became the go-to product for cleaning oiled wildlife.)

Right now, Dawn is partnering with the International Bird Rescue Research Center and the Marine Mammal Center.

Here's how it works -- each time you buy a bottle of Dawn dish soap, 50 cents goes to the International Bird Rescue Research Center and 50 cents will go to the Marine Mammal Center.

You'll need to register your purchase on their website, but they don't need much personal information.

I can't tell you how much this commercial makes me smile. I know that it was filmed at IBRRC's center in Southern California, so that I know it was made with the animals' well-being as a primary concern. The otter's little paw on the edge of the washtub just about makes my heart explode.

Also I think I met the penguin at a party a while back.

Pre-Purchase Panic

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I'm not very good at "hurry up and wait."

My mind starts to race, and it doesn't always end up in the nicest places.

Because I'm in an over-sharing mood, here are a few of the things that I've been fretting over.

Robb and I, who have lived so frugally in order to afford this little house, will not be able to trim any more "extras" from our budget, go broke, and lose the house. (Big worry.)

All the contractors we have met with will turn out to be incompetent at everything except taking our money. (I've been reading renovation blogs. People love to blog about What Went Wrong.)

Our little house, after existing for so many years will fall to pieces under our watch. It will go the way of all the antiques that died once we to own them. Do I regret the beautiful silk parasol that got ripped in half in a tussle outside of Penn Station in NYC, or the mourning jewelry that broke in the bag on the way home from the antique fair, or all the vintage textiles that I've hastened to their early, tattered demise, or the mountain of vintage china and glass ware that Robb and I have smashed, due to our clumsiness? Sadly, I remember wrecking these things more vividly than I remember enjoying them. Guilt is a powerful force.

Every second of my spare time will be eaten up by the house, and we'll never hang out with our friends. We'll be all alone, inside of a half-restored cottage.

Robb and I will fight about renovations. He'll come up with complex schemes, and I won't have the skill or energy to get the job done. In my mind, the plan had always been that Robb, who had the skills, would use me for unskilled labor, and I would finally learn carpentry. God knows, I've failed to do this in over twelve years of working in scenic fabrication studios. I've never met a carpenter who's had the any interest in (or time for) teaching me how to use the power tools. But I've worked with plenty who have expressed their contempt for my lack of knowledge. Crikey, guys! How am I supposed to learn to use dangerous expensive machinery, if nobody is willing to teach?

We'll never fully unpack and we'll end up living in a tiny house, crammed full of disgorged boxes. This leads back to worries about never socializing, and losing all our friends.

We'll have spent every dime that we've worked so hard to save, done all the renovations, and the Big One will hit. Our house will be destroyed, and we'll learn about the scam that is earthquake insurance. Robb and I will spend the rest of our lives in a toxic FEMA trailer.

I worry that my job will be de-funded, and that there won't be any other local opportunities for my esoteric skills. Or that I'll get injured, and that neither of us will be working. This fear circles back to us going broke, and losing the house.

GAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!!!!!

As long as I'm able to step back from my fears, and laugh at myself, I'm okay. But sometimes that's not so easy. I'm really, perversely, insanely good at convincing myself that I can singlehandedly ruin my own life, and drag Robb down with me.

That's the downside of having a creative mind. You often get the Fertile Imagination for Disaster tossed in, free of charge.

Be Wise ...

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So far today I've slammed my finger in a drawer while retrieving a (finger-protecting) thimble, and accidentally tossed a dustpan out the window. Robb picked up a jar by its (ill-fitting) lid, and dumped raisins all over the kitchen.

With a track-record like that, I think we'll resist the urge to express our patriot feelings by combining beer and explosives.

The Waiting is the Hardest Part

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I've been on vacation these past two weeks, and have spent a fair amount of that time meeting with contractors and pondering our preparedness for home-ownership. We had the official inspections. The inspectors have to disclose every single issue, and as you can imagine, an eighty-four year old house has quite a few issues. When all the flaws are written on one document, it's sobering.

Today, Robb and I plan to tackle our garage. We've accumulated a huge mass of goodness-knows-what (crap) in the past six years, and today is the day of reckoning. Two nights ago, I "slept wrong" and since that time I've had a very unhappy left shoulder. I have limited range of motion, which is a bother.

Here's the before-and-after image that Robb worked up in Photoshop. I think that this paint scheme gives the house so much more charm.

I want to get started on all of this, before I get terribly busy again at work. Of course, we don't actually own this house, so we've been spending our free time researching shower fittings for historic bathtubs, grey-water systems, and downspout diverters -- among other things. We really live an exciting life, don't we?

Color

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Photo courtesy of Antique Home.

I'm putting this question out to all of my painting friends. Do you think you can assign paint colors to this house? If you can find these color from the Benjamin Moore palette, all the better!