mudrooms are my fantasy these days

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Friday Randomosity: I Hate Mud and Phone Calls Edition

Meal planning, grocery store reports, and randomosity. Seems like that’s all I can dredge up for a blog post these days. Thank you for reading anyway.

(Perhaps you could use one of your over-long randomosity bullets as its own blog post! you might suggest. Ah. If only my brain were capable of processing posts in manageable bite sizes instead of epic book-length tomes.) 

  • I finally got my hair cut and colored this week. My original appointment was a month ago. But the day before I was scheduled to see her, my hair stylist canceled because she had Covid. And then the day before I was rescheduled to see her, I thought I had Covid. My hair was very, very grey and now it is very, very brown and I am deeply grateful to my hair stylist. This time, she also dyed my eyebrows. You will have to trust me when I say that I currently look exactly like Uncle Leo. (The dye has temporarily adhered to the skin beneath my brows, and my hair stylist promises it will wash out in a day or so. Until then, I say, “Hello!”)
The resemblance is uncanny.
  • (This is not a new bullet, but WordPress disagrees.) Aside from the absolutely ridiculous name, I love it. It has the base primer, which makes my lashes super long. And then it has the top layer. And it’s waterproof so it never runs or smudges. It is a little difficult to remove, but it stays on so well I don’t mind. Since we are all wearing masks for the next FOREVER, it is my new best friend. I wore it skiing the other day, when it was snowing so heavily that my family and I were human moguls by the time we reached the top of the chair lift. And I made the mistake of putting my goggles on top of my helmet, where they immediately became crusted with snow and ice, which rendered them completely unusable, so I had to spend the rest of the day with snow flying directly into my face. My mascara did not budge.
Yes, that is a sliver of my actual forehead. Titillating.
  • Who was it that recommended I watch Sex Education? My husband and I just finished Season 2 and I love it. The first season was good. I wasn’t crazy about the premise: Otis, son of beautiful sex therapist Gillian Anderson, starts offering a sex advice clinic of his own at school, with the help of prickly bad girl Maeve. For the entirety of Season 1, I had to suspend a LOT of disbelief, and plus the advice that Otis charged for seemed really basic – like no one could simply google their issues and get the exact same solution? But the characters were interesting, and I became Very Invested in a couple of the side stories, so we went straight into Season 2. And it was GREAT. The cast of characters are so fun and interesting. Everyone is complex and has their own inner struggles. I love how diverse the cast is (although there could be a little more size diversity), and I love how plainly and non-judgmentally a wide variety of sexual preferences are portrayed, and I love the friendship between Otis and his best friend Eric, and I love Gillian Anderson even though her character can be kind of irritating. Anyway: it is a really different, interesting show and I am hoping my husband will be up for jumping right into Season 3. (This may sound like “no, duh” advice, but if you aren’t interested in seeing/hearing about pretty graphic sex acts, I would skip this show.)
  • Has it been cold in your neck of the woods? It’s been cold here, but nowhere near as cold as it COULD be. I grew up in the land of Minus Sixty Degrees, so I am pretty blasé about our current in-the-teens temps. We do have some pretty serious icicle action going on though. These guys are all come at me bro and I want to say, Whoa, whoa, whoa. Chill out, my dude. No need to get so defensive.
These are two separate icicles from two separate sides of my home. Which is apparently ready to defend me from enemies.
  • Where I was originally going with the previous bullet was that my office is quite frigid lately. I used to have a space heater, one that’s so old I can’t remember when or how or why I acquired it. It died last year. Is it still sitting forlornly in the corner of my office, mourning its inability to fulfill its life purpose? Yes. Despite my sympathy for the defunct space heater, I decided to buy a new space heater and I found this little guy. So far, I really like it. I park it in the middleish of my office and direct it toward my desk, and it definitely makes the space warmer. I think it would be perfect for a cubicle or a small office. It has a little handle, and it is very sensitive to being bumped, and I really like it. It’s little, too – about the height of a hard-bound book, and a very cute little fella. Because as we all know, cuteness is a key factor in which space heater to buy.
  • Not that I’ve been in my office a whole lot this week. Even though I am supposed to be doing revisions, I have instead been traipsing all over hither and thither for all sorts of stupid appointments. Annual gyn appointment. Annual mammogram. Routine physical to establish with a new PCP. Hair appointment. Financial advisor appointment. PTA meeting about something I volunteered for. And then I just had to make a bunch of phone calls (UGH) to set up more appointments. Eye appointments for me and Carla. Dental appointment. Car maintenance appointment. Ugh ugh ugh. I hate being on the phone and I feel like my schedule is BOOKED for the rest of the year. 
Actual text between me and my husband. He is very accommodating.
  • May I complain a moment about the central scheduling system my healthcare provider has? I spent a very long time on the phone with a scheduler, trying to set up eye appointments for myself and Carla. And while I am grateful that I could call one number and get appointments for us both, with different doctors, I am… a little concerned. I explained my time/date parameters, and she found a time and a date. So I plugged them into my calendar on my phone. And then she said, “Okay, I have you scheduled on DATE at TIME.” But… that was not the date she and I had agreed on! So I asked her to double check it, and she confirmed the original date and time, in a tone of voice that indicated I should have been paying closer attention. And then when I scheduled Carla’s appointment, she said, “Oh, I have an appointment on the same day as your appointment – DATE.” But the date she said was not the date we’d agreed on, so I had to ask her to double check it again. Also for Carla, I picked a specific location near our house, and a specific time of day (after school, because the doctor will need to dilate her eyes). The scheduler set it all up, and then said, “Oh, I scheduled it for DIFFERENT LOCATION. Is that okay?” I said no, could we please find a date at the nearby office. And she said sure, and then offered several early morning times… when we had just discussed that the appointment needed to be in the afternoon. FINALLY we got it scheduled, and then she told me the date and time, and they were different from what I had just plugged into my calendar! It was a very confusing call, and I really, really hope that Carla and I are scheduled correctly. 

  • In my never-ending quest to find ways to use the bananas that eventually soften into mush before anyone (ahem, CARLA) eats them, I attempted a new recipe. It was a MAGICAL recipe, let me tell you. Elisabeth posted it on her blog, and it sounded ideal for my particular child: it contains oats (which she will eat RAW by the bowl), bananas, and chocolate chips. It also used dates, which I had on hand from the sticky toffee pudding we never ate. No liquid though, which I felt was surely a mistake. But no! As soon as I turned on the blender, the banana liquified and the ingredients morphed into a beautiful, uniform batter. I was generous with the chocolate chips. The cupcakes were so easy and seemed so wholesome. And none of my family members liked them. HUGE WEARY SIGH. [CLARIFICATION: They are not dry. They are perfect. If they didn’t have a banana flavor, which I cannot stand, I would have eaten them myself.]
I think they LOOK beautiful, but apparently they are “too DRY, Mommy.”

  • I need some advice about my “mud room,” even though I am pretty sure that my situation is un-fixable. As I have complained about at great length in the past, my “mud room” is a teeny tiny square of space between my garage and kitchen, with a shoe closet on one side. We come in through the garage, remove our shoes, toss them in the general direction of the shoe closet, and then enter the kitchen. It’s not great normally, but currently, with the deep snow we find ourselves in, it’s reached a fever pitch of untenability. Our feet are wet and muddy, so the floor gets wet and muddy. And there’s no easy way to remove one’s shoes and then step into the kitchen, so mud and dirt inevitably get tracked into the kitchen and then all around the house. I am zooping things constantly. I am spraying and wiping the floor constantly. And then, multiple times a day, the floor is a filthy mess again. Plus, the shoe closet is FULL. There is NO ROOM for all the snow boots that have assembled. The other closet, where I store the snow boots in dry weather, is too far away for us to reasonably store the boots in between wearings. And because some people like to wear normal shoes when it’s not actively snowing, I can’t simply stow the regular footwear in the other closet. I guess I could move SOME of the shoes, so that we could put our boots INSIDE the closet, instead of outside. But that still doesn’t resolve the Mud and Dirt issue. I would love to get a boot tray… but the “mud room” is so small that a boot tray would make it impossible to open the door. I don’t think a boot tray would fit inside the shoe closet, either. It’s tiny, plus we already have a shoe shelf in there, taking up most of the real estate. You will have to believe me that there is no In the Garage Solution, either; our garage is tiny, and there is barely enough room to squeeze past our cars to get inside. We cannot remove our shoes outside before we come in. So. Is there some obvious solution I am overlooking? Or is this just a Grit Your Teeth and Keep Zooping situation?
The reality is SO MUCH WORSE than it appears here.
  • This may be really silly question, but if you track your reading, and you also have children, do you track the books you read with/to your children? I track the books I read on Goodreads, and I never used to count the books I read to Carla. (Mostly because my husband is the primary bedtime reader in our household – his accents are MUCH higher quality.) But I have making an effort to read to her more often outside of bedtime, and we just finished Frindle and I tracked it. I mean, I read the entire thing. Out loud. So I want credit. Credit that matters literally only to me. 
  • By the way, have you read Frindle yet? It was seriously such a good book. It’s about a boy named Nick and his teacher Mrs. Granger. As part of an effort to distract Mrs. Granger from teaching/assigning homework, Nick decides to make up his own word for a pen (frindle), and then launches a campaign to make frindle the real word for an ink-filled writing implement. It was a fun book about how words come to be, and how students can make a difference, and how important good teachers are. My voice was wobbling all over the place as I read the last two chapters. It was really such a lovely, fun, moving book. Carla liked it too, but being a child and not a parent/former child, she didn’t fully understand the beauty of the Nick/Mrs. Granger relationship. 

That seems as good a note to end on as any. I need to go gear myself up to make yet another phone call and schedule yet another appointment. And then I have two meetings today. Blech. 

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Imaginary House Hunting + Things We Love & Hate About Our Homes

My husband and I have a general plan to look for a new house sometime in the next couple of years. The thing is, there’s no REAL reason to leave this house. It’s a good size for three people (even if it feels MUCH too small for all our stuff), it’s got everything we need (three bedrooms, two office spaces, a laundry room, a non-creepy basement), it’s close to Carla’s school and my husband’s offices, and, most important, it’s in a lovely neighborhood with lovely neighbors who all have dogs and who are all extremely generous with their time (and their dogs’ time). 

And yet sometimes we do dream about finding The Perfect House, the one with allllllll the things we love about our current house and all the things that would make it so much better. (Recognizing, of course, that owning a home at all is a privilege and having enough space for our small family is a luxury that many, many people do not have.)

One of my biggest wishes for a new house would be a real, honest-to-goodness mudroom. Right now, all we have is a tiny square between the garage and the kitchen.

It has a small closet (although the door no longer works) and that’s it. Our shoes and bags and coats are always spilling out of it. My husband stores his work satchel on the floor of the kitchen because it doesn’t fit in the entry space. My daughter’s backpack is usually on the floor as well. There’s no space for grocery bags or my purses or anything, really. So I would love a beautiful single-purpose mudroom. Maybe one that has those tall cubbies, with individual hooks for coats and cubbies for shoes. But my ideal mudroom would also have a closet or shelving for storing hats and mittens and sports gear, and it would have a hook for my purse and a hook for Carla’s backpack and another for my reusable grocery bags (which inevitably hang on the garage door knob until I return them to my car, falling off the knob and onto the floor several times per day). 

Droooooooool. (images from sebringdesignbuild.com, thehappyhousie.porch.com, and elledecor.com)

Another wish would be a separate space for Carla. If money were no object, I would want her to have a playroom and a separate craft room with a long table and lots of storage. Her bedroom is fairly small and she has WAY too many toys, and they spill into the dining room, living room, basement, kitchen. I am constantly bothering her to clean things up. Maybe if she had a designated room for her stuff, I could simply shut the door. 

In general, I don’t think I have overtly extravagant, MTV-Cribs-style wishes for my dream home. I don’t need a movie theatre. I don’t want a bowling alley. But I would like a swimming pool. Only since the pandemic began have I understood the value of having a pool. Before the pandemic, I would have said never in a million years. But now that we are home so much more often, and now that the preferred way of interacting with other humans is in small groups in outdoor spaces, I totally want a pool. In my ideal, make-believe world, the pool would be in an enclosed, heated space for year-round swimming but could be completely opened up for entertaining. 

While we’re dreaming, I would like a dedicated library. Happy sigh. A room with shelves and shelves and shelves of books… and some comfy, well-lit seating areas… heaven!

Oh, and it would be wonderful to have a separate space for guests. A real mother-in-law suite (or, why the hell not, mother-in-law outbuilding) with a small kitchen, a full bathroom, a bedroom, and a small sitting area. Our parents stay at a hotel when they visit, for a variety of reasons, and it would be lovely to be able to have a separate place for them to stay with us.

Of course, no house will ever be Completely Perfect. I doubt that any house at any price has the exact specifications I would want (not to mention what my husband and Carla would want) in my dream home. I think even if you designed and built your own house, it wouldn’t be perfect perfect. Some of the things that end up driving you nuts don’t reveal themselves until you have lived in a space for awhile. Sometimes you don’t realize just how much you want a big, beautiful mudroom until you find your entire family crammed into a tiny square, all trying to remove their muddy boots at one time.

I want to know the things you dream about, in your wildest house hunting dreams. And I also want to know the things you love – and hate – most about the place where you currently live. 

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Walking Thoughts

The weather is so perfect right now. I feel sorry for my parents, who are expecting a winter storm. (This also makes me worry about Nicole. Hi Nicole!) Today was hot and sunny with high, placid clouds lolling around in all the endless blue. The humidity was low and it was breezy, which made the heat lovely. And with every flourish of the wind – darting forward with a curtsy; retreating with a bow –: a thin ribbon of cold rippled along its edge; a fleeting portent of fall.

My family and I live in the suburbs, an area I find very pleasant for walking. An elementary school nearby is surrounded by calm, quiet streets, so (when my husband is home to hang out with Carla) I do a four-mile loop through that neighborhood. I love engaging in the house equivalent of people-watching as I walk – checking out who has already swapped out their peonies for gold and mahogany mums, how many houses have autumnal wreaths on their doors already, which homes are proudly – or grimly, who am I to know – proclaiming their political affiliation with yard signs.

There are blessedly few political signs in my area – at least, for now. They seem to crop up in little pockets, often right next door to each other, or across the street. And it seems, often, that if there is one for one candidate, there is one for his opponent nearby – a little call and response, a hoisting of the banners. It’s almost (almost) amusing; the two Trump signs one on side of the street, facing two homes boasting Biden signage directly opposite. I wonder which comes first, the Biden or the Trump? 

Recently, on my way to one of the parades that seem to be the enduring method for celebrating pandemic birthdays (for the elementary set, at least) I drove past an entire (short) block of political signs. One small Biden sign. Then, next door, an ENORMOUS “Trump – no more bullshit” sign, then another Biden sign, then two yards with Trump signs, then another Biden sign. I guess it’s natural, with such a vast divide between the parties, to feel like you have to counteract your opponent with a sign of your own. (As an aside to my aside, one of the many, many things I don’t understand about Trump is this type of messaging: “No more bullshit.” Doesn’t that imply that there is, currently, bullshit – bullshit that only Trump can end by being re-elected? And yet… HE is the current President, so wouldn’t hebe responsible for – if not the cause of – any current bullshit? I don’t get it. If there is all this bullshit now, under his administration, why would extending his presidency be the solution? I suppose it is like arguing with a two-year-old; you are never going to fully grasp the argument and you are never, never going to win, and there will be tears and yelling.)

The neighborhoods I walk through are so lovely. The homes are all similar in size and shape. The lawns are neat and manicured. I love peeking through to the backyard (from the sidewalk, as I walk along – I am not trespassing except with my eyes) to see if I can glimpse a firepit or a pool or a playground. So many homes have a backyard shed, often designed to look like a miniature version of the house, which I find so charming. Few homes have fences, which broadcasts this neighborly feeling of openness and welcome. It’s fun to think about all these people living so near to me, so similar to me yet so different. I wonder what they do all day, how they earn a living, if they are married or have children. I walked past one row of houses that had extra deep backyards. In one of them were several kids, taking turns on a zipline that spanned the length of their yard. A zipline! So fun! Many of the driveways have multiple cars; our neighborhood is full of big families, so I am assuming everyone has four or five college students at home, not that they are hosting wild parties. There are lots of American flags; they don’t seem to correspond to any sort of political candidate, which makes me feel tender and grateful. 

I have taken to ogling garages (still, as I am walking on the sidewalk). I think I mentioned recently that, alongside wishing for an actual mudroom, my biggest regret about our current house is that it has a small garage. Now, I know I shouldn’t be greedy; we have an attached two-car garage that fits both cars at once. But it’s a tight squeeze. If I could buy exactly the house I wanted, I’d get one with a four-car attached garage. Or, better yet, a three-car attached garage and then a separate detached garage that could hold two to three cars. This is because my father rebuilds cars; he rebuilt one for himself that he originally intended to pass down to my brother, but my brother no longer wants it, and he has just recently rebuilt a car specifically for me. (I am not what anyone might call a Car Person, and yet I cannot bear the thought of those cars being sold/given to anyone else. My father has put literal years into rebuilding them, and they have become so intertwined with Him that I could easily see myself, long after he has left this mortal coil [in many decades, still, God willing], talking to the cars as though his spirit exists within them.) Moving on from Possible Therapy Discussion Topics: I imagine at some point Carla will want to drive a car (GULP), so I am not being greedy, I am being practical. (Ha.) 

So I ogle garages when I walk past. I love it when people leave their garage doors open so I can peek inside. Some are neat and tidy, lined with shelving units and cabinets. Some are completely, inexplicably empty. Some are packed so full of furniture and paint cans and odds and ends that cars cannot possibly fit inside. One house I passed had turned their garage into an outdoor living room, full of chairs and end tables. Some look rather like ours, fairly clean but stuff jumbled along the edges. A lot of garages have a refrigerator.

My Dream Garage would definitely have space for a refrigerator. Or, better yet, a deep freeze. My parents had a deep freeze in their mudroom when I was growing up. The mudroom was pretty small (though cavernous compared to ours): just big enough for a tangle of shoes and boots, a few hooks where we could hang our coats, and the deep freeze. Each summer at the county fair, my parents would buy a half a steer from one of the 4-H kids, and so our freezer was permanently stacked with various cuts of beef, all wrapped in clean white paper. It was almost miraculous, how my mother could ask me to go get a package of ground beef from the freezer and there was always a package of ground beef in the freezer. 

We also always had popsicles in the freezer. Twin-pops – the ones that had two popsicles joined together. I could never cut them in half properly – they’d break in a jagged line so that one half would be too heavy for its wee stick to hold, and the other would be a curve of flavored ice gripping tightly to the wooden stick you could see peering out of one side – so I’d just eat two at a time. Let’s blame my frugal father for always buying the variety pack. Cherry, grape, orange, and banana. I could eat cherry and grape all day. Orange, in a pinch. But banana? Yuck. At the end of the summer, you had to be really desperate for a popsicle because only the banana ones were left. 

We also usually had a big bag of Dilly Bars snugged away in the deep freeze. My dad and I would go to the Dairy Queen early in summer and get a king’s ransom of them – 16 or 24 or some other obscene amount. When I got old enough to order them myself, the (teenage) cashier would always goggle at the number I requested. “I don’t know if we have that many… I’ll have to check with my manager.” (What? We lived in a Very Small town.) (The Dairy Queen was the only ice cream shop in town, and it ONLY sold ice cream. It was a single room with enough space for maybe three people to stand in line behind one another, and then a counter where you could order, and then the space for the staff to work.) (Once I spilled an entire blue raspberry freeze on the floor of that Dairy Queen.) Our Dilly Bar bag would usually contain a selection of chocolate, cherry, and butterscotch Dillies. I think my dad was the only one who enjoyed the butterscotch. Although, I can taste it, just thinking of it, so I must have tried one out of desperation a time or two. Once in a great while, we’d get Dilly bars with chocolate ice cream and chocolate coating, but those were rare. 

There’s almost nothing better in the summer than a Dilly bar: cracking through the shell with your teeth, hurrying to lap up the ice cream before it slumped down the stick and over your hand. And, when it was all gone, scraping the last bit of chocolate or cherry coating off of the stick with your teeth. I used to try to remove big chunks of the shell and save them in a bowl, to eat them last. 

(Do you remember the freezers of your childhood? The summer treats? The refrigerators in your friends’ garages, so novel because you had a freezer in the mudroom, and they had six-packs of Koolaid Burst and chocolate pudding in their garage fridges, just for snacks, while your parents’ idea of “snacks” was a half-empty box of Nilla Wafers and a case of Shasta?) (I only got Koolaid Burst and chocolate pudding when we went on a school field trip and had to bring a lunch.) (To be fair to my parents, we did usually have variety packs of chips, from which the Doritos and Ruffles would disappear quickly, leaving only dejected packs of Fritos. We also often had Zingers — a cousin of the Twinkie that came in chocolate with chocolate frosting or yellow with lemon frosting. No matter what flavor, I think, they each had a glut of white frosting in the center.) (And pickles. I remember that being the Snack of Choice for me and at least a couple of friends.)

September has barely begun and I am already nostalgic for summer. This summer; summers past.  This has been, perhaps, the longest summer of my life. It’s been, in many ways – if you are practicing the well-worn art of denial – the most relaxing. No trips to plan for or execute, no camp or summer sport schedules to keep, no dinner parties or visiting family to host. I think back on it and I think of all the popsicles we’ve eaten (the good kind, not the twin pops), all the hours we’ve spent melting pleasantly in the sun, all the catch we’ve played and bubbles we’ve seen blow into the sky, all the books we’ve read and walks we’ve taken and meals we’ve grilled in the backyard. It’s a dangerous, giddy sensation – that back-to-school, summer-slipping-away, not-quite-fall feeling that makes everything seem almost… normal. 

It’s not, of course; nothing is normal. But if you close your eyes and take a deep breath – fresh cut grass mixed with the smoke of someone’s backyard wood fire, sunsoaked pavement and the damp-rock scent of newly watered lawns – you can almost imagine, for a moment, that this is any old summer, meandering serenely toward fall. And for this one, beatific afternoon (you have to grab tight to them when they appear), I am holding onto it.