constance | Oddments

It's been a while, hasn't it, since I last inflicted a giant economy-sized bullet-point post upon you? Well.

Ever since I got this latest laptop, a twin to the one I poured that Coke into months ago, my internet access has gone from more up than down to way more down than up. I don't know what the difference is between the two laptops (from what I can tell, the new one really is an exact duplicate of the be-coked one), but since I've begun using it, my wireless connections haven't been nearly as strong. :((

At any rate, I've been pondering the advantages and disadvantages of living without a reliable internet connection at home. On the downside, it means that I know I'm missing things; I come across posts by accident that I ought to've seen on my friendslist but didn't, and I put comments to one side until I have a few minutes at work to reply properly and then lose track of them. If I've left you hanging on anything, I'm most dreadfully sorry for it -- I'm truly not doing it on purpose.

On the plus side, my house is getting lots of tender loving care (and the cleaning I've been doing has yielded a new sport: calling the dog and watching him try to jump on the bed from a freshly-pledged floor. It's even funnier now that he's taken to hoisting himself up rather than trying to take a running jump).

I'm also getting a few projects done. Right now, I'm working on refinishing my baby chair for my niece. From a battered-looking, grubby old white-painted miniature rocking chair with appliqued ponies on the back, it's slowly turning into a sanded and stained solid-wood chair with a zebra-striped seat cushion and her name painted on the back (BTW the zebra stripes are meant to coordinate with another chair in my brother's living room and were not exactly my top choice -- I feel I should make this clear). It's taking a while, because I fail at sewing machines and am doing everything by hand, and also because my body, I've discovered, is no longer the sort of body able to sit on a hardwood floor for ten hours straight without seizing up but good; but so far, it's looking quite nice. I'll post pictures when I'm finished, but they'd really be much more impressive if I also had pictures of it in its Before state. Alas, I do not, because I never think to take pictures of the important stuff, only of things like haircuts.

And I'm spending time hanging out on construction sites. Well, one site in particular. Our company is in the middle of building a Habitat for Humanity house to celebrate its 60th anniversary, and while I'm not swinging a hammer -- sadly, there's no need for my "skills" when we have an army of professionals to do the actual building -- the office staff is doing things like distributing lunches and cleaning up at the end of each day. I've never seen a HfH house go up before, and it's honestly amazing to watch the orchestration of it all. By the end of the second day, the roof was up, for example, and now, at the beginning of the second week, only the interior is left. Everyone is eager to help; all the lunches are donated; people keep stopping by to see if they can help. The owner is pretty awesome, and as amazed as we are at the speed of the thing. Some of the lunches are hers, and she's a fabulous cook.) It's an excellent thing to be a part of, even if all I'm doing is picking up trash before I go home to dinner.

Ancillary discovery: I really kind of want a nail gun.

And speaking of houses. The oddest thing happened to me the other day, a thing that's never happened to me before and I expect will never happen to me again. I was flipping through the latest issue of Cottage Living magazine -- it's devoted to New Orleans -- and one of the houses looked awfully familiar, and I realized that it was a house I knew! My friend B, I mentioned him the other day, his brother lives in New Orleans as well (the only one of us still living there, really); he's a residential carpenter and restores blighted houses for a living (as you might imagine, he has quite a bit of work lately), and his house was featured in one of those isn't-this-awesome multi-page spreads with pictures of him eating sandwiches and posing casually with his cell phone and stuff. And man, I have to say. I'd forgotten how beautiful his house is, exactly the sort of thing I love best, an eclectic mix of old and new and newly-minted references to the old, light and airy, not too cluttered. And how weird to see it, and M, in a magazine. I can't quite get over it.

Seeing M's house has been reminding me of some of the things I miss about New Orleans, the people and the atmosphere and the music and the food -- god, the food -- but also this week I've been thinking about the things I'm not missing at all. As a summah-hata, I've been relaxing in the past week or so, as the nighttime temperatures dropped into the fifties and the daytime ones climbed up into the low eighties, and as I've been enjoying the lovely weather, at the back of my mind is the knowledge that this easement couldn't be expected for at least another month (and very likely more) in New Orleans. And honestly, that's more than enough to make up for all the things from there that I miss.

I also wanted to post updates about Miss B and Normie the Boston Terrier, but now that I'm previewing this, I think I'll wait till tomorrow for those; somehow, this doesn't seem the right place.

constance blackwood