That's My Bix!

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I’ve been a bundle of nesting energy as the busy season smacks me straight in the face. On top of the familial demands, I have been poring over home decor blogs and food sites. I want to make lentil salads and roast various squash items. I have been thinking about declaring war on the basement and creating a pottery studio down there instead of our current refuge for wayward spiders. On Sunday, Abby and I made freaking Halloween wreaths thanks in large part to my discovery that I own a hot glue gun. Clearly, the insanity is at an all-time high at Casa Bix.

All the while, my garden shed project has been languishing: I still have to finish the windows, but luckily I can just haul them into the warmer garage or at worst, into the basement for the painting and glazing. Which is totally going to happen before the end of October, because I don’t want to still be dealing with this at Thanksgiving and we can’t let winter happen without putting the windows back on the shed. We wouldn’t want to upset the ghost of the garden shed!

We removed the super fugly battleship grey old screen door off the breezeway. I’ve been fighting with that thing for the thirteen years that we’ve lived in this house. It never seems to want to open and when it does, it swings back to hit you in the face almost immediately, plus there are pointless decorative scroll work thingies that reach out and snag you on the belt loop of your jeans. A few years ago, I was walking out the door with a large box in my arms when the screen door did it’s slam back trick and the corner of the box hit the glass window, which shattered IN MY FACE. And yet even then, we didn’t remove the fucking thing. We’re a bit brain damaged, clearly. However, last week, we set about removing the door, a task that sounds much easier than it really was, as it was hermetically sealed in place. We ended up breaking three grinding wheels on the Dremel, trying to get the screws loose on the base plate, and in the end, Esteban just ended up prying the whole thing up off the concrete. We then marched to the Hundred Dollar store and ordered a new one (because of COURSE the opening for the door isn’t standard and OF COURSE it had to be custom ordered). Of course, just like the dysfunctional home owners we are, we started another project before finishing the last one, but actually, they were thematic, because it also involved painting and the end of the last remaining bits of old ugly oxidized paint on the exterior of the property. But unlike the garden shed windows, I can’t exactly haul the entrance to the breezeway down to the basement so will be throwing myself at that before it gets too cold. My lack of painting is also what’s holding up putting the new screen door up, so the pressure’s all on me.

I think the problem has been that the line of demarcation from outdoor activities to indoor ones has imperceptibly been passed. I’d so much rather sand and repaint our 1950’s cabinetry (a project for winter, when we replace the scorched countertops and peeling gross faux-tile backsplash) than stand outside in the waning sunlight and enjoy the sound of crispy rolling leaves and the smell of damp earth. Yes, I know how stupid this sounds, and I want to smack myself in the head for being lame.

I’m finally getting around to reading John Irving’s Last Night In Twisted River (if you’re an Irving fan boy, this is SO the novel for you, it’s like a greatest hits of all Irving novels, with bears and death by blows to the temple and Vietnam avoidance and more untimely death) and one of the more lovely passages that struck me was “Oh, plans, plans, plans–how we make plans into the future, as if the future will most certainly be there!”

Here’s me, banking against the future yet again, for something as silly as window glazing. I’m sure that Irving could appreciate my desire to pass those open windows, or at least to get them closed.