house and home

I visited the doctor this week for a followup, and with the CPAP machine, my body has largely stopped freaking out: my blood pressure and resting heart rate have returned to normal-for-me. I don't bother talking to doctors about what's normal for me: they are uninterested in a blood pressure of 140/90, even if it's been 120/75 for a couple decades now. They won't bat an eyelash if my heart rate is 76, even though my entire adult life, it's been 62-67 at most, when I'm not heavily exercising. Most people don't actually listen: throughout the past couple years, when I have known down to my core that something has been wrong, my favorite response was "Well, you are getting older." Thanks, genius. Not only do I know I'm getting older, but I've been paying attention as it's happened. I know my body well.

Anyway. I try to avoid going deeper than "I've been dealing with some health issues," and I'm a lot happier that way.

It's hard to believe we haven't even been living in the house for a month yet. It's such an incredibly pleasant space to be in, and there's so much of it. We get to where we think it should end, and wait, there's another room! And a giant garage! And a shady back patio! And a driveway the size of Texas! We're adjusting to not being able to locate everyone by sight or sound at all times.

It's fun to putter around. The nice thing about a fixer house is that no matter my level of energy or interest, there's always something that needs cleaning, demolishing, re-arranging, or re-attaching. Last weekend I got the well running again, just because I have a well, and why not? We haven't quite decided if it's worth bringing it up to code; if the water tests clean enough for irrigation, we probably will.

Anna has covered the most important windows with blinds and curtains. She likes fixing things, and her repairs are much, much better-looking than mine, so she does most of the interior work, as I have shown myself repeatedly unable to hang anything level on the wall. (Yes, I've used a level. Yes, I screwed it up anyway.)

We're slowly developing plans to nuke the yard and turn it into something we actually like. We're getting to know our many trees, which now mostly surprise us when they're not fruit trees. Cherry plum, fig, orange, lemon (not fruiting, for some reason), peach, and apparently an apple tree, and then something in back that's starting to fruit, but we still haven't identified it. It's quite a nice large orange tree, but we won't get more fruit until next year, since either the tenants or the sellers completely stripped it before we took possession.

Not all of these trees are nice, or in appealing places, or pruned in sane ways; but we'll see what we can do.

I had set aside the idea of getting a pool table, but then this one turned up. I wasn't considering a bar table, but it rang all my memory bells and I'm pretty certain this the model we had in the basement when I was growing up. Newer, and in quite better shape, but I very much remember the design of the pockets, and that weird slot for storing cues. It's a robust table, able to to survive life in my garage and use by a grade-schooler with erratic motor skills. Also, cheap: bar tables are definitely on the "please get it out of my garage" end of the price spectrum.