Limbo

“Limbo” is an accurate summary of my last few months. We started the official house hunt in mid-March, and after one failed house closing, one lost offer, and now an offer on a third we’re waiting on pins and needles. We’ve tried for a lake house with 2 acres, a hidden country property on ten acres with plenty of moles and farm cats to go around, and now a 1/4 acre house only a few houses away from our rental with a lovely yard for a suburban garden and plenty of space for some chickens.

We’ve spent the last two months, and even the months before that, being entirely unsure of our summer plans. We agonized all Christmas over how much to plant this year – do we risk losing a garden when we move, or just plant them all in planters (a more expensive and far less sustainable method for us)? The difficulty and frustration we had over the home meant so much more time finding comforts to solve our unhappiness rather than actually keeping up the garden and seedlings (read: we watched too much Netflix rather than having the discussions we needed to about what to do with the seedlings and start a fertilizing schedule). The stress sucks. But hey, if you’ve bought a house, then you know my pain. So what to do? Succumb to the stress and barely do house chores because you might be moving, so it can wait until a deep clean during the move? (So the spiders start building bigger webs in my basement…) Start thinking about moving boxes but get so depressed after perusing Realtor.com for 15 minutes and find nothing even close to being worth it? (Those boxes are empty…)

Being in limbo is a horrible feeling. Every decision about my home and my finances (can I buy a new work shirt this week for my new summer restaurant job, or should I save it for a new security system potentially in my future?) are tied to this homestead dream. Sometimes – no, most of the time – chasing this dream feels like dating as a teenager all over again – dragged around in the misery of puppy love, flirtations, the crushing denial of being distant and cool, flightiness, and unplanned, spontaneous meetings. So tonight, contemplating what to do if yet another house lets us down, I’ve decided to make a few decisions that keep my mind more rooted and to lower my anxiety throughout this process.

First, I’m going to make sure that I’m maintaining my house as best as I can despite the potential moving process. I have patches of spackling all around the house – time to actually touch up with paint and move on. The kitchen and bathroom deep cleaning? Still need to regularly happen. My cobweb-infested basement? Yup, time to unleash the vacuum. For me, a clean home keeps a clean mind – when we have gone to see homes and they are messy and cluttered, I totally feel the resulting anxiety from viewing cramped and unkempt spaces. Why should I continue to invite anxiety into my safe space at home simply by neglecting my work?

Secondly, time to tackle the projects I’ve been putting off that don’t depend on a house structure. Our bar cabinet has crooked hinges on one side, I have a pile of teacher to-do’s regarding long-range planning and concept plans, and I haven’t had a sewing project in ages. I have a stack of coupons ready for fabric purchases – time to attack Pinterest! We’ve been half-trying to introduce our cats to my mother-in-law’s cat, and without much success – time to hunker down and start positive associations and psychology work.

Third, I want to use the time I have to work on building my creativity and options for stress outlets. I’ve been meaning to write more on my blog, to start new sewing projects, and to find new ways to organize my small office creatively. Our library has a summer reading challenge and the reward is coupons for local businesses and a wealth of additional knowledge. My day times are now free for yoga, walks, or work in the backyard – or, better yet, time spent reading or sun-bathing in a new above-ground pool we splurged on this weekend from Target.

The point is that the house frustrations can’t be the reason for my summer grinding to a halt, my stress to be through the roof, or my home and possessions to be a jumbled mess. Life continues on, with or without a new 30-year loan, and it’s time to keep going along with it.

 

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Summer Goals

It hasn’t quite hit me yet – that the usual, daily grind has been postponed for a couple of months. Part of it has to do with my current misery – I’ve been coughing and sick for a couple of days now, coming to a head last night when I came down with a low fever and spent most of my evening huddled beneath blankets and binge-watching HBO. Tonight, I’m at least upright, and this time it’s binge-watching Hulu, but still – I’m not poolside, or even gardenside, by any means.

When I have unbooked time, I habitually create goals. Sometimes it’s just vacuuming and laundry, others it’s plant a whole garden. With two and a half months ahead of me, let’s see what I can do with the time and willpower I have.

1. Grow food!

With the homestead shopping spree still remaining that – shopping, not purchasing – we have piles of seedlings in our window sill with no destination. If we plant now, we’ll move without our seedlings (I joke that’s the only way to find “the” house – by planting the garden, we’ll jinx ourselves into finding the “one” the next day). We had hoped to have a plan by now, but to be honest, there isn’t one. I’m thinking we’ll go ahead and resort to what we did four years ago at our last house – a patio garden! It’s hardly sustainable, and goes against almost all of our hopes and dreams for improving soil, but growing in pots does provide homes for our seedlings and food for our table.

2. Finish my certificate.

For the last two summers, I’ve been working on levels I and II towards my Kodaly methodology certification – each level is offered for 5 hours graduate credit at Wichita State with a two week, ultra-intense course in the beginning of June. Since getting my level I, I have found a wonderful and satisfying new path with my teaching – a child-centered approach that uses folk songs from our student’s cultural traditions, all while enhancing their music literacy abilities to the fullest. This year will be my last of three levels to complete – which will bring me not only my status up to “Kodaly-certified teacher” but also my master’s degree status to “15 hours completed” – and this fall I’ll start in on the rest of my coursework to finish a master’s.

3. Buy a @#$^ house already!

Can you tell I’m feeling frustrated? I heard an NPR report that said in this past quarter of housing sales, houses have sold faster than they ever had in a decade. I can’t tell you how many houses we’ve looked at or gotten ready to look at only to arrive and find out an offer (or 3) was already on the house. It’s exhausting. It’s tiring. We’re at the point where we are happy to get a house with a big backyard just so we can build equity with something, but even that has been hard to find! It’s really stressing me out, so that means I probably ought to…

4. Take a yoga class or learn to meditate.

This school year, especially the last few months, have been stressful. I’m ashamed to admit how often I’ve broken down in tears or how often my husband has gotten some kind of exhausted or facepalm emoji through text the last couple of months. I. Need. A. Break. I’ve barely had time for myself, none for my friends or family, much less patience for any of the aforementioned. I’m going to start with some organizing to help me feel in order and then just some plain old sleep. It’s wonderful how therapeutic being in the garden can be, so as soon as I feel up for some exposure to allergens I’ll head out to the garden to weed and explore with the kitties.

Longterm, it would not be a bad plan for my mental health to establish a yoga or meditation routine. Even YouTube has some fabulous guides and gurus, and quite honestly I just need to step up and recognize how much I need this and do it already!

5. Get some thorough work done on my long-term planning.

In order to know what to teach, you need to have an end goal for your students – what do you want them to know when they leave your classroom at the end of your school year together? From there, when do you want to teach those goals, and how? With what resources or focuses? I want to take time to develop my concept plans and long-term planning, now that I’m entering my fourth year of teaching. My first several years were about experimenting, surviving, trying new things, and seeing what fits – how long it takes to teach a concept, that sort of thing. Now that I feel like I have the handle of it, it’s time to think broader, more deeply, and with more effectiveness.

 

Most of all, I want to spend time with myself, my friends, my family, and to relax. After all, it is summer.

All Quiet on the Home Front

It’s been far too long since I’ve been able to sit down and write. In fact, this is the first night I’ve really been home and not been running off to meetings, concerts, projects, or heading out of town. My poor kitties won’t leave me alone when I’m home, they’ve missed me so much! Olivia, in the picture above, has missed going outside with me, so the last couple of days we’ve been trying to stock up on some more outdoor exploration time with her brother and I.

On the home front, all is quiet, unfortunately. We chose to retract our offer on the lake house we were pursuing a few weeks ago. It was relieving and disappointing all at once – we had made it all through the inspection process when we found out that it needed some significant electrical, HVAC, and roofing improvements in addition to nearly $200 a month in flood insurance. I’ve learned to always check the county website and verify flood insurance requirements and whether or not homeowner’s associations restrict the property FIRST, rather than find out what zoning requirements are on the land AFTER the offer has been made. To be honest, the stress of the financial burden we were facing was starting to physically and emotionally hurt. While there were 2.5 acres of promising land with which to be sustainable, the comfort gathered from growing your own food can only outweigh the risk of financial ruin so much.

We said ‘goodbye’ to this vacation home, this house with it’s own dock and hundred-year elm trees behind the pole barn. After letting go, we spent a week or so refusing to think about moving. The headache, the money we couldn’t refund from the inspection and appraisal fees, the dozens of documents we had to collect and upload to our bank – we just couldn’t do the exhausting, stressful cycle all over again so soon. We focused on moving my mother-in-law up from Wichita and being astounded at Cattigan’s new defensiveness towards the new cat in the house (a small child came to visit the house once and he hid behind the couch because the baby moved, and now the same cat is prowling around the door to the guest bedroom and is intent on jumping Sharon’s cat if she ever emerges).

My mother-in-law definitely shares in our love of all green things – I drove back home with this happy jungle of hers in my front seat! 

After a bit, we began to see houses again, and the last handful or so have come close but not quite good enough – either no place for my mother-in-law, not enough space in the backyard, or out of our price range, or some combination of the three. We have another one to visit tomorrow, a fixer upper on 5 acres just 5 minutes from town, about which I am cautiously optimistic – there are apparently horrible urine smells and the house has been filled to the brim with hoarded items, but if the bones are good, we could do a lot with a cheap home and flip it to be our little dream home. It’s half the price of the lake house property – and we’d be paying 30% less on a mortgage than we currently pay in rent. Plus, what better time to create a truly green space – energy-efficient appliances, recycled materials countertops, energy-efficient windows, solar panels, and more.

In the meantime, I’m spending my afternoons shoving my new little flower plantings back into their containers and shooing the scavenging squirrels away as we wind down the school year. Only five more days with students and then it’s time to take 5 more hours of my masters program – and we’re off to summer!