Furniture and Flowers

So the big question is always where to start...  Do I go back and catch up the significant events/posts I should have done, or just start fresh from today?  Sometimes (often) making decisions is so disabling to me that I am absolutely unable to act at all. I will start with what kept me awake most of last night and then try to back fill the highlights in other posts.

We got "new" furniture for our family room last night.  The furniture we had down there--loveseat, couch, and huge ottoman--should have been replaced about ten years ago, but I had some trouble making decisions and did nothing. The configuration of the furniture was absolutely perfect for our family/animals and it was (once upon a time) extraordinarily comfortable.  I bought the furniture with the house 19 years ago!  I really liked it, it was comfy, fairly new, a good price, and I didn't need to move it.  When I got new living room furniture, we moved it down to the basement to our family room.

That furniture set was heavily used by countless humans and animals.  Through the years it has become stained, holey, and less than comfortable (springs stick out, weird sink holes that kill the lower back, etc.), and we often talked about replacing it.  It was hard to find something just the right size and configuration.  It had to comfortably accommodate the humans and all of the animals, and fit nicely into the space, and that was not easy to find.

I started shopping and researching, and about five years ago found the perfect replacement.  We custom ordered it and had it delivered to our home.  It was rather pricey, but I figured it was a long-term investment, and was hoping to get 20 years out of it as we did with the other set.  That didn't go so well.  Mark and I will go to our graves forever disagreeing about "The Incident."  He swore that it wouldn't fit in the door--they tried for a time but couldn't get it.  I was (am) certain that it would go if they could get the angles right.  Eventually I got really angry at him, called our daughter, and told them to come pick up the new furniture set for their new house.  They are still enjoying the lovely set.  I declared at that time that I would never replace the furniture, and we would use our current set until it fell apart, at which time we would sit on the floor.

I meant it.  I stuck with it.  Until...L started having a social life.  She was bringing friends home for movies/sleepovers and not happy about the formerly white, holey couch with springs that attack and duct tape over the parts the dogs chewed up.  While I do enjoy sitting stubbornly on a mountain of moral superiority and holding my ground, I also empathize with a teen who has friends who don't understand that shitty couches=moral high ground in an argument, so I had recently been ruminating about replacing them.

Furniture shopping (shopping of any kind really) is quite difficult.  I have to research the companies, materials, political affiliations, etc. The only vote or power we have in this country any more is how/where we spend our money, and I take that very seriously.  I'm boycotting at least half of the major retailers and manufacturers, so shopping is quite difficult for me. That combined with the fact that our big dogs are really hard on furniture, make me lean strongly toward buying used whenever possible.  The bedbug epidemic has made that problematic for me, though.  So again, I've been stuck in the indecision and inactivity on this.

I noticed last week that our neighbors had furniture in the back of their truck in the driveway. It looked like a similar size/configuration to what we currently have, but it was a different color/material.  As it turned out, they were selling it.  We bought it and moved it in last night.

Oriental Poppy

I have to point out that Mark and I moved it into the house, and it was rather challenging.  We really had to work at it and get just the right angle.  While I am not at all spacially intelligent (it's my biggest mental weakness, as a matter of fact), somehow I am good at knowing just how to cram/stack/pile to get things to fit in ways most people would deem impossible.  He was ready to give up, but I knew it would go in if we did it a certain way.  I was right.  I point that out only as evidence that I was right about the last set of furniture, and he was wrong.

Anyway, it's in the family room, and it is comfortable--no sink holes that make me sit at a weird, unhealthy angle, it's clean (and vegan leather, so it's easy to keep clean), and looks 100% better.  It's different, however, and we can't all fit the same way that we're used to.  I can't reach things as easily as I could before, because the sides are a little higher.  It was very traumatic; so much so that I couldn't sleep last night and determined that I would go back to the original old couches.  My family soundly shot that down today. They would rather burn the house down that sit on the gross couches ever again.  They love the new ones, so we are keeping them.  I will continue to move things around and try to tweak and adjust until it works for me.

Same oriental poppy, 2 days later

I was really, really grateful for the easy to clean material last night.  M & I were hanging out down there after a very long day.  It was close to 11, and we were finally getting time to relax and chat.  I was tired, headachey, and thus, not very bright.  I absent mindedly shook my post-workout smoothie, only to discover that I had already removed the lid.  My delicious deep purple protein smoothie went all over the couch, me, the laptop, etc.  It was horrible.  So horrible.  The awesome part was the couch cleanup, though. It wiped right off, we sprayed with vinegar/ water to clean up and prevent stickiness, and that was it.  That would have been a complete disaster on our old (white-ish) couch.

*The photos are from our garden this year.  This is the first year that I haven't posted our garden photos from the first spring bulbs on through the summer.  They're much more interesting that couch pictures.

An old, unpublished, unfinished post...

I was doing so well for a while.  My Dropbox was clear and caught up.  (This is where the students submit their assignments online for me to grade.  I love to see the Dropbox for all of my classes showing 0 items to grade, but that's pretty rare.)  For a brief, shining moment, I was caught up.  Then Friday happened. My C++ programming students submitted the two programs that were due, my Java students submitted their programming assignments, and my MIS class submitted their Excel workbooks.  I am so far in the hole, I feel like crying.  I am grading every spare minute I get.  Additionally the programming students are continuing on with their next assignments, so it takes a great deal of time to answer their questions/emails/and get them "unstuck".  I love my job, and I enjoy these tasks for the most part, but it can get extremely overwhelming. It's especially tough to take when then piece of shit uneducated governor, who makes way, way more than I make and works 1/10 as much/as hard, makes statements about UW professors needing to do more.  I guarantee the cheating dropout couldn't survive my schedule or workload for a week--not even for two days, I'm betting.  I'd love to see his face after trying (and failing) to keep up, he saw the salary

When it rains, it pours, so of course we have sick animals now, too.  Petey (cat) has an anal gland infection.  He had this a few years ago.  We caught it early, so he just needs a round of antibiotics, but wrestling pills into a cat twice a day isn't the most enjoyable task.  More distressing, our Fergus (rabbit) is quite ill with pasteurella.  He may or may not live through it.  It will be a dicey few days.  He's on several different kinds of medication for it.  The biggest risk right now, though, is that he stopped eating (from nausea), and that can quickly become a death sentence in rabbits.  I'm hand feeding him with a syringe round the clock.  He's not very cooperative about eating, so I'm not getting a great amount into him.  I only hope it's enough to keep him alive long enough for the drugs to kick in.  It's hard to eat or sleep or focus on anything, knowing he is so uncomfortable, and his life is hanging by a thread.  I'm tired and quite overwhelmed by life right now, so I'm having a hard time handling this.  I'm constantly on the verge of crying and just want to curl up in a ball and pretend this is not happening.

The only reason I'm able to squeeze in a blog right now is that I'm stuck in my classroom, giving a midterm, and the PC will only boot Windows in Safe Mode.  I don't have the rights/access to fix it, and our IT dept. is apparently gone for the day (WTF?!  We have evening classes that rely on technology).  I can't load Visual Studio or Eclipse in Safe Mode, so I am unable to do my grading.  It's extremely frustrating, because I counted on this chunk of time to get some work done.  I was hoping to grade during my two office hours today, but I had students who needed programming help, so that window was closed as well.  I woke up with a migraine Monday which continues on and feel like yesterday and today have been a nightmare of disasters. Next week has to be better.  Enough whinging.

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I opened my poor, neglected blog today, hoping to force myself to start posting again and found this unfinished post that I had started back in March.

It was a brutal semester.  I got out of the habit and so far behind that it's hard to get back into it.  I'm trying.