New house update #4: framing – we’re going vertical!

There was another long delay, but we’re back in motion now! We changed our stairway to have one side open so that it wouldn’t feel like a tunnel. We also removed a dividing wall in the master closet.  Those two things required structural engineering to weigh in on things because both affected load-bearing walls, so we lost two weeks while plans were being redrawn to accommodate and then another one for reinspection and getting started again.

Going forward, I’m told the structure will come up fairly quickly.  That must be true because once they started going vertical, what you see at the end of the post is only one day of work!

I’ve turned in all 21 of our tile selections.  Just for fun, I made a collage of most of them to see how they work together:

I’ve been working on cabinet sketches, lighting, and railings now and for the next few weeks.

Above the CMU walls and piers begins the crawlspace:

Crawlspace frame and termite shield

8/31 Underground plumbing is in and passed inspection

2.5 weeks later… 9/19 Foundation framing revised after structural changes.  City inspector onsite – passed crawlspace reinspection.

9/20 Subfloor decking complete

Going vertical! This was this past Friday, September 21.

The weather here has been very wet, but we’ve gotten a good start.

So now we can walk through it and begin to see where the room divisions are. Here’s a time-lapse of two months of work…

More soon!

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Rambling thoughts in prayer

The weeks leading up to the Jewish High Holidays of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur are meant to be ones of introspection.  There have been many instances in the past month or two when I’ve thought about ways I have been less than perfect.  I have even reached out to a few people to apologize for not being for them what I felt they deserved.  In their responses, I have learned a great deal about what it means to be present in someone’s life.

I’m not so great at maintaining contact with people. I am often disappointed in people and would prefer to keep my distance in order to preserve their positive status in my thoughts.  I hesitate to find out that someone is less educated than I thought, or votes a particular way, or has any negative qualities.  (This is a complicated issue and I am working on this too!) Until now, I had not considered that anyone might rely on me for anything or that hearing from me might make a difference to them.  I choose to take it as a compliment that I do make a difference to some people.  I vow to do much better at being a participatory member of friendships.

I’m often surprised at the depth we as humans can cause another to hurt.  The feeling of unintentionally hurting another person weighs so heavily on me as to feel like a chokehold.  Being betrayed by someone I thought to be a partner and friend also brings forth stinging tears, even a year and a half later.  All part of the human experience I guess.  And, of course, each person has a different perspective.

Yesterday, at Temple, many images were coming unbidden to mind.  It is the most solemn day of the year.  Our prayer text often has us reading aloud and apologizing for sins “we” have committed.  I personally may have walked past a stranger instead of welcoming them, but I haven’t participated in most of the sins that crossed my lips, but I imagine we are meant to feel that, being a small drop in the sea of humanity, we are mixed together with others among us who have. Until all human beings have ceased their evil actions and intentions, each one of us is accountable for the other.  Am I not “my brother’s keeper?”

I have always felt a great responsibility to counteract the violence and negativity in the world and to be an example to others in the hope that they will also be a voice for goodness and acceptance.  Just this morning my walking partner told me of a man who killed his wife and children, which just baffles me. Are some people born into the world with a tendency or susceptibility for that? Or is it a matter of one generation teaching the next by action and example? How do we break the cycle?

* * * * *

As I sat freely in Yom Kippur services, listening to the cello make it’s winding way through the powerful and emotional terrain of Kol Nidre, I felt the history of our people.  I often feel such weighted mournfulness for the comprehensive span of abuse and pointless death the Jewish people have endured that I can barely speak.  And yet, each year, I humbly ask for pardon and I strive to optimistically move forward with the best of intentions.

Sometimes I wish I were born a man in the time of rabbinic Judaism, when scholarly pursuits of texts and human nature, many of which we read today in our prayer books, took root.  How would it feel to be amongst the most learned of society who could ponder such matters and correspond with those who were (and are still today) the most influential thinkers?

I also often imagine myself and my family among those who escaped slavery long, long ago in Egypt, leaving behind all we’d ever known, to journey to the Red Sea, trusting in Moses and in God and hoping for a different life.  I wonder how much a person can be expected to endure before breaking. And how to carry on even thus.

Probably every time I am leaving a crowded concert, baseball game, or movie theater, when the person ahead of me is taking microscopic steps forward every so slowly, I picture us all mutely stepping toward our deaths, naked and huddled together in fear, as so many were during the Holocaust.  One group overpowering another for no valid reason I can see.  No accomplishments or social standing can help us then.  We are all equal before each other.

Every single time I recite the Shema prayer, “the watchword of our faith,” I imagine Jews all over the world doing the same and feel a powerful sense of community and belonging.  We say “Hear, O Israel,” referring to all Jews the world over, and we proclaim our defiance of many of the societies we once lived among by saying that we believe there is One God.  It is a simple recitation of faith and trust, and yet how many years have we as a People been saying these words and living by its message? How many have died with those words on their lips?

I don’t know if I am praying to a God who has already decided “who shall live and who shall die” in the coming year, or if any higher power is listening to our pleas at all.  I don’t know if what happens to us has been pre-ordained or has anything to do with us at all.   I do know that the supplication and introspection does us all good.  Stopping all else and participating in a holy day as a global Jewish community, whether out of obligation or heart-felt purity, is one of many ways that the Jewish faith carries on l’dor v’dor, from generation to generation.

I am fairly positive that not everyone feels the heaviness of the burden as I do.  I’ve always felt deeply, and that’s ok because that’s just who I am.  I hope it allows me to be a more present friend, a more understanding spouse, and a humbler human being.

For now, I must shake off the solemnity and get back to my regular programming… there’s a school book fair that is not going to plan itself, you know! 🙂

Thank you for reading.

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August update and books

Hi everyone. My daughter started school last week and so we’re back into a structured routine. All in all, this past summer seemed like it passed fairly quickly. I have been very busy with house meetings and selections and we’ve had some travel, camps, and playdates… and in-house card tournaments. 🙂

It’s been 10 months since I picked up a paintbrush but I began again on Monday making a  large canvas for our new house and it felt so good.

I hope you enjoy these reviews. I’m almost done reading my second novel this September.  We were in Austin for the weekend and I got to go to my favorite bookstore. I saw so many to add to my list!  Let me know if you have any more book recommendations!

The Death of Cancer: After Fifty Years on the Front Lines of Medicine, a Pioneering Oncologist Reveals Why the War on Cancer Is Winnable–and How We Can Get There by Vincent T. DeVita, MD and Elizabeth DeVita-Raeburn

Wow. Really good.  This is part memoir, part history of cancer research and treatment, and part prescriptive.  DeVita was the longest-serving director in the history of the National Cancer Institute, working there for 26 years.  Before that, he developed the first successful chemotherapy treatment for Hodgkin’s lymphoma using a combination of drugs, which was then unheard of.

Since Congress funded and launched of the war on Cancer in 1971, we have spent more than $100 billion on cancer research. Huge strides have been made, and yet there are bureaucratic regulations and outdated beliefs that hinder progress.

I enjoyed his personal stories the most.  DeVita describes many of his colleagues who were hesitant to let go of long-held beliefs, determined patients who participated in research studies, and how cancer has touched him personally. Recommend this one for sure.

“… it illustrates what has been, for me, a source of perennial frustration: at this date, we are not limited by the science; we are limited by our ability to make good use of the information and treatments we already have. Too often, lives are tragically ended not by cancer but by the bureaucracy that came with the nation’s investment in the war on cancer, by review boards, by the FDA, and by doctors who won’t stand by their patients or who are afraid to take a chance.”

How to Stop Time by Matt Haig

A beautiful look into a rare condition that causes him to age very slowly so that he has already lived hundreds of years.  He married in the 1600s and still misses his wife, who died of the Plague, but knows his daughter has the same condition and he’s determined to find her. Can you imagine living long enough to meet Shakespeare or Scott Fitzgerald and travel all over the world? I have so many excerpts from this book that I love… it’s such a beautiful look into the meaning of life and time. If you hold yourself back to prevent yourself from loving and getting attached to someone, are you really living?

“The longer you live, the harder it becomes. To grab them. Each little moment as it arrives. To be living in something other than the past or the future. To be actually here. Forever, Emily Dickinson said, is composed of nows. But how do you inhabit the now you are in? How do you stop the ghosts of all the other nows from getting in? How, in short, do you live?”

More excerpts in this post…

The World as It Is: A Memoir of the Obama White House by Ben Rhodes

A detailed look into the entire expanse of the Obama years, from the campaign’s idealistic beginnings to accepting and working within the divisions in politics to finally leaving the White House.  Rhodes was a writer before being a communications director and he has intimate access to Obama. Thus, we get image-rich descriptions of meetings and true portraits of our country’s leaders as if we were a fly on the wall.

Excellent and engaging writing is difficult for me to put down, and so even though this memoir is exceptionally long, I enjoyed it and loved knowing things about life in the White House that I hadn’t known before. I learned about the long process of negotiating for relations with Cuba, or the Iran deal, and what the president’s relationships with foreign leaders were like.  Of course, I’m also saddened that a contemplative and diplomatic leader has been replaced by the absolute opposite (who it turns out had no interest in all the material the WH staff prepared to ease the transition). I hope Obama will write a memoir, but until then, this is the closest I’ve come to understanding what his administration was like. Oh how I miss it.

“Every presidency is a story with one person at the center of it. This is how America organizes its political life and history books. This is how the world consumes the disparate elements of American democracy in an age of American dominance. The president as hero or villain; the president as the person who decides, consoles, commemorates, and reacts; the president as temporary royalty, in command and at the mercy of events that share this time with him.”

My Absolute Darling by Gabriel Tallent

I realize that it is through reading that entire worlds and experiences open up to us.  This one, though, was just too much for me.  Tallent writes about the isolated world of a 14 year old girl living with an psychotic and abusive father.  The amount of courage this girl must have had to get out of that environment… wow.  I sincerely wish I had not read this book, and I can’t sort out if it was anything more than the subject matter.  It has been reviewed very highly and I’m not entirely sure why. Such disturbing writing and he goes on and on when his descriptions are enough.  The language, the repetition, the extremity of it all.  The language the “narrator” chooses, which is irrelevant to the plot.  I wish it were not even published because of the way it portrays violent sexual abuse. I want that reading time back to spend with a much better book.

She leaves parts of herself unnamed and unexamined, and then he will name them, and she will see herself clearly in his words and hate herself.  

“And even if you tell no one, if you give no sign, if you never breathe a word, but someone, anyone, comes to me again and so much as suggests, I will open your little neck, and won’t that be a goddamn beautiful thing. Then we’ll find out if you can be had. Then we’ll know. You think on that. You’re along for the ride, you little bitch. We will see what light is in your eyes then, what ineffable little spark they might lose. Watch your goddamn little corneas drying up like fish scales.”

My Oxford Year: A Novel by Julia Whelan

The only way to describe this one is that it’s chick lit for grad students.  I identified with the main character spending time abroad, got wrapped up in the love story, and laughed out loud and cried a lot.  The references to literature were bonus.

“… it turns out, the act of making a choice, of choosing a path, doesn’t mean the other path disappears. It just means that it will forever run parallel to the one you’re on. It means you have to live with knowing what you gave up. Which isn’t a bad thing; if anything, it only serves to strengthen my resolve.”

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Book Review: How to Stop Time

How to Stop Time by Matt Haig

SUCH BEAUTIFUL WRITING! I just finished this beautiful novel and was writing a quick review for my monthly book reports, but I was having such trouble choosing one excerpt to share! Haig has the perfect way to consider how time can be a comfort or a hinderance to us and how precious our lives truly are.

The novel is a thoughtful look into the meaning of life and time.  Tom has a rare condition that causes him to age very slowly so that he has already lived hundreds of years.  He married in the 1600s and still misses his wife, who died of the Plague, but knows his daughter has the same condition and he’s determined to find her. Can you imagine living long enough to meet Shakespeare or Scott Fitzgerald and travel all over the world? If you hold yourself back to prevent yourself from loving and getting attached to someone, are you really living?

I’ve selected all my favorites here so I can remember them and hold them close long after I forget this book.  I hope you enjoy.

… although you can gaze at the past, you can’t visit it. Not really. I can’t sit by a tree in a forest and have my mother sing to me. I can’t walk along Fairfield Road and see Rose and her sister again, selling fruit out of a basket. I can’t cross the old London Bridge and enter Elizabethan Southwark. I can’t go back and offer more words of comfort to Rose in that dark house on Chapel Street. I can’t ever see Marion as a little girl again. I can’t go back to a time when the world’s map wasn’t known. I can’t walk snowy streets lined with beautiful Victorian streetlamps and choose not to visit Dr Hutchinson. I can’t go back to 1891 and tell myself not to follow Agnes onto the Etruria. The yellow bird sits on a windowsill for a while and then it flies away. That is nature. There are things I have experienced that I will never again be able to experience for the first time: love, a kiss, Tchaikovsky, a Tahitian sunset, jazz, a hot dog, a Bloody Mary. That is the nature of things. History was – is – a one-way street. You have to keep walking forwards. But you don’t always need to look ahead. Sometimes you can just look around and be happy right where you are.

And, just as it only takes a moment to die, it only takes a moment to live. You just close your eyes and let every futile fear slip away. And then, in this new state, free from fear, you ask yourself: who am I? If I could live without doubt what would I do? If I could be kind without the fear of being fucked over? If I could love without fear of being hurt? If I could taste the sweetness of today without thinking of how I will miss that taste tomorrow? If I could not fear the passing of time and the people it will steal? Yes. What would I do? Who would I care for? What battle would I fight? Which paths would I step down? What joys would I allow myself? What internal mysteries would I solve? How, in short, would I live?

The longer you live, the harder it becomes. To grab them. Each little moment as it arrives. To be living in something other than the past or the future. To be actually here. Forever, Emily Dickinson said, is composed of nows. But how do you inhabit the now you are in? How do you stop the ghosts of all the other nows from getting in? How, in short, do you live?

It wasn’t just the loss of people I had known but also the loss of myself. The loss of who I had been when I had been with them.

The past is not one separate place. It is many, many places, and they are always ready to rise into the present. One minute it is the 1590s, the next it is the 1920s. And it is all related. It is all the accumulation of time. It builds up and builds up and can catch you violently off guard at any moment. The past resides inside the present, repeating, hiccupping, reminding you of all the stuff that no longer is. It bleeds out from road signs and plaques on park benches and songs and surnames and faces and the covers of books. Sometimes just the sight of a tree or a sunset can smack you with the power of every tree or sunset you have ever seen and there is no way to protect yourself. There is no possible way of living in a world without books or trees or sunsets. There just isn’t.

The lesson of history is that ignorance and superstition are things that can rise up, inside almost anyone, at any moment. And what starts as a doubt in a mind can swiftly become an act in the world. And so our fears grew.

As far as I can see, this is a problem with living in the twenty-first century. Many of us have every material thing we need, so the job of marketing is now to tie the economy to our emotions, to make us feel like we need more by making us want things we never needed before. We are made to feel poor on thirty thousand pounds a year. To feel poorly travelled if we have been to only ten other countries. To feel too old if we have a wrinkle. To feel ugly if we aren’t photoshopped and filtered.

I thought we were going to talk about bicycles or cars or aeroplanes. Trains, telephones, photographs, electric lightbulbs, TV shows, computers, rockets to the moon. Skyscrapers. Einstein. Gandhi. Napoleon. Hitler. Civil rights. Tchaikovsky. Rock. Jazz. Kind of Blue. Revolver. Does he like ‘The Boys of Summer’? Hip-hop. Sushi bars. Picasso. Frida Kahlo. Climate change. Climate denial. Star Wars. The Cuban Missile Crisis. Beyoncé. Twitter. Emojis. Reality TV. Fake news. Donald Trump. The continual rise and fall of empathy. What we did in the wars. Our reasons to carry on.

People you love never die. That is what Omai had said, all those years ago. And he was right. They don’t die. Not completely. They live in your mind, the way they always lived inside you. You keep their light alive. If you remember them well enough, they can still guide you, like the shine of long-extinguished stars could guide ships in unfamiliar waters. If you stop mourning them, and start listening to them, they still have the power to change your life. They can, in short, be salvation.

Omai strokes water off his board. ‘No. Not for me. Love is where you find the meaning. Those seven years I was with her contained more than anything else. Do you understand? You can take all the years before and since and weigh them next to those, and they wouldn’t stand a chance. That’s the thing with time, isn’t it? It’s not all the same. Some days – some years – some decades – are empty. There is nothing to them. It’s just flat water. And then you come across a year, or even a day, or an afternoon. And it is everything. It is the whole thing.’

you cannot know the future. You look at the news and it looks terrifying. But you can never be sure. That is the whole thing with the future. You don’t know. At some point you have to accept that you don’t know. You have to stop flicking ahead and just concentrate on the page you are on.

Everything in life is uncertain. That is how you know you are existing in the world, the uncertainty. Of course, this is why we sometimes want to return to the past, because we know it, or we think we do. It’s a song we’ve heard.

There is only the present. Just as every object on earth contains similar and interchanging atoms, so every fragment of time contains aspects of every other. Yes. It is clear. In those moments that burst alive the present lasts for ever, and I know there are many more presents to live. I understand. I understand you can be free. I understand that the way you stop time is by stopping being ruled by it. I am no longer drowning in my past, or fearful of my future. How can I be? The future is you.

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New house update #2: laying the foundation

Friday 7/20: Beams being excavated.  Steel cages being assembled. Dumpster arriving.

Friday 7/27: Pouring 50 yards of concrete for exterior beams. Perfect weather for concrete.

Forms came off Wednesday. Rough grade Friday.  CMU starts Monday.

8/7-9: Interior drainage completed. Concrete debris picked up. Crawlspace rough grade. Begin CMU (which is those concrete blocks).

8/10: Crawlspace drainage. CMU started 4 rows lift.

8/13 CMU walls being filled with grout.

I got the app TimeShutter, which helps guide you in taking a picture of exactly the same thing from the same vantage point.  That will help make sharing progress easier, I’m sure.

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What do you need to radiate today?

We went on an extended family vacation with my parents and my siblings and their families, 7 days on a cruise ship.  With Sweet Girl and her 4 cousins, there were 13 of us.  We created a lot of great memories, of course, and it was the typical trip with kids… someone whining because they are hungry or tired or just being a normal 3-year-old, someone not wanting to do what everyone else wants to do, and some tired parents needing a break that wasn’t coming. I was doing my best to enjoy the time but still looking forward to being home again.

However, on the drive back home, I was seriously dreading all that awaited me there. This happens to me at the end of every single vacation! I thought about what exactly it is that I’m resisting.  Of course nobody is overjoyed at doing 3 loads of laundry, at cooking and cleaning and grocery shopping, or at the usual operations of a house.  I did a brain dump of all my tasks and that helped get me organized. But I still felt overwhelmed!

What do you need to radiate today?

Today I came across this question and immediately paused.  I have unpacked. I have vacuumed.  I have made 3 meals.  I’ve gone through most of my emails.  I have a kid laying on the couch with a virus and a very long project and task list.  What would help make dealing with that feel better?

My very first thought was to head here to my blog and write.  Next, I decided not to sign up for an art school drawing class I was going to enroll in this morning for the fall semester.  Paring down projects into manageable chunks helps too, as does seeing all my projects on one piece of paper.  I feel better already!

I have never been good at having tasks listed as unaccomplished.  I like getting things done! However, more and more times I realize that there is no way it can all be accomplished right now. Some projects are meant to unfold over time.

What do I need? I think I need more tiny windows of space for myself… a mini me-cation right in the middle of the day, where I intentionally put down my load.  Because honestly, I haven’t really stopped and relaxed! I am thinking of how to structure that around childcare and appointments and tasks, but maybe it’ll just be reminding myself to stop for 10 minutes and calm my mind.  OK, I’m off to try it right now!

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