Sunday In My Pajamas

It is now 9:40am on a Sunday morning.  I’m sitting in the living room, still in my pajamas because I refuse to get showered and dressed before 10am on Sundays.

There is only one closed kitchen door between me and two strange men painting my kitchen.  Other than one sleeping daughter upstairs, I am alone.

They sing in weird voices and one of their paint rollers has an annoying, repetitive squeak.  My cat is as equally on guard as I am.  She’s under the table staring towards the kitchen, on high alert.  Don’t you dare come through that door, she’s thinking.  Me too.  I’m in my pajamas.  I want my Sunday morning to myself.  One of them has started whistling.  They are equally as good at whistling as they are at singing. I realize that they have brought in a radio tuned to some kind of rock station, which explains the singing.

I have run out of coffee.

It is now 9:50am.  I only have to hold out for ten more minutes in order to achieve my goal of not getting dressed before 10am.  I just heard the back kitchen door close.  Are they gone?  Ah, nope. More whistling.  I want to take a peek at what the new paint looks like.  I hear the door close again and it becomes silent once more.  I walk gingerly up to the one door between myself and the men in the kitchen.  As I pass the dining room window, I see one of the painters outside, checking his iPhone. Maybe they are both outside. The cat cautiously approaches the door with me.  Do I dare?

I put my hand on the knob, slowly turn it, and open the door a crack.  And a bit more.

I take a peek.

Wow…it looks fabulous!

10:05am.  Time to shower.

IJ

From Rags To Kitchens Part 4

Funny how the horror stories come out when you start talking about home renos.  We’ve been hearing all kinds of them from everywhere since we started talking about our kitchen reno…nobody tells you about the time something went perfectly and like clockwork…it’s always disaster.

One guitar student of mine relayed his reno story, explaining how their renos were so extensive that they moved their young family out to the in-laws while it was being done.  He decided to go to the house and check up the day after the demolition, only to find beer cans strewn about, cigarette butts and used chewing gum stuck to walls.  The door was left unlocked too.  What a nightmare!

The only glitch for us so far has been the timing of the cabinets, although that one glitch has changed everything.  We were originally expecting them the week of October 13th, and found out that they wouldn’t be arriving until the week of the 21st.  I had to re-book the delivery of the appliances for after the cabinet installation, which wasn’t a big deal. But there will be a bigger gap between the prep work and the cabinet arrival.  And that also delays the quartz counters, which are installed after the cabinets because the counter installers have to take a final measurement only after the cabinets are in. Then there’s another 1-2 week wait for them to be made.  And you can’t have a sink in until the counters are in, so we’ll only be able to use the kitchen in a half-assed way.

In spite of the cabinet delay, the kitchen demolition and re-design began this week anyway. Wednesday morning my husband and I stood in the kitchen, now completely stripped of everything except the cupboards and appliances, wondering how we were going to feel about the next month or two. ( I say “or two” because everyone tells you that whatever time you expect it to take, double it.)

Here’s one corner of the kitchen as it appeared early Wednesday morning:

And here it is at the end of the day:

The first thing that had to be done was to move the fridge into the dining room and the stove outside.  We have sold them to someone my husband works with, and at this writing the stove has already been delivered to him.  We’ll hang on to the fridge while we still need it. It took about 4 hours to tear down the old cabinets, counters and an old-fashioned pantry, along with the removal and clean up, which was pretty close to what our contractor estimated.

Day two, Thursday, was a little crazier, and certainly longer.  The electrician came in with his two guys and then the process of figuring out all of the bits and pieces that had to be done began.  The stove will be in a different place, the baseboard heater moved, new outlets, pot lights under the upper cabinets, decommissioning old outlets, moving old wires around or replacing them entirely.  Will this fit there?  What height should the outlets be?  Do you still need this here?  That there?  How many? The questions were coming at me fast and furious and after having not slept well for several nights, I was hoping I was answering them all intelligently.

Thank goodness for our contractor Steve, who helped me think through some of the choices.  For instance, do you lower the light switches to what is now a standard height?  He suggested that since the outlets in the rest of the house were still higher, it would make sense to keep them all that way.

As the electricians were working, Steve was on the phone talking to the plumber and drywaller. He had them come in and checking things out while everything else was in progress. The plumber did some preliminary work on the pipes for the taps, moving them from where they were, protruding out of the wall as old taps used to be, to coming up from below. At one pointed I counted six guys working in our little kitchen. This was just three of them, the other three were to the right, out of the shot:

On Friday morning before my husband left for work, we poured over the kitchen and all of the changes that had been made.  We still had some questions about the plumbing and drywall, so I made a mental note and when Steve arrived to do some work on his own, I bombarded him again.  We have some friends who had gone through their kitchen renovation in a more do-it-yourself manner, basically doing what they could on their own and hiring labourers for things they couldn’t do.  I think having a contractor has worked better for us simply because we don’t have the experience to know the process well enough.  If you have a misstep, you might have to back-track or re-do something you weren’t planning to.  Not that I expect everything to go completely smoothly, but there’s less of a chance of us screwing it up!

I found out that the ship carrying our cabinets had broken down in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, and that’s why they were delayed.  They actually had to send another container ship out to the broken down one, and transfer all the containers over.  That takes at least a week!  Can you imagine the logistics of that?  What a nightmare.

Anyway, besides that, everything has been relatively smooth.  The only inconvenience is our makeshift kitchen in the dining room.  It took us a couple of days to get used to the temporary configuration and we’re still tripping over each other a bit, but besides the mess and clutter, we’re just fine.  We wash our dishes in the bathroom sink with a neat little scrub brush that has a handle holding detergent in it.  I think it’s a camping gadget, but it’s perfect for our situation too.  Everything is washed as soon as it is used.  We got a cheap little hot plate and a used toaster oven so really, there is nothing we can’t do.

Except a turkey. Fortunately, we have generous friends who have invited us there for Thanksgiving 😊  What more could we possibly need?

IJ

My Search For Meaning

Many years ago when I worked in the Sociology Department of the Vancouver Public Library, I came across a book called “Man’s Search For Meaning”.  I never read it, never even took it off the shelf to get a sense what it was about.  It was just the title that stood out for me.  The idea of our search for meaning.

Not that long ago, I remembered the title and looked the book up online.  I was disappointed in some respects to discover that it was about Viktor Frankl’s experience in Auschwitz. Not that there’s anything wrong with that but I had always assumed that the book was a much more general study on the perpetual hunt for meaning and sense in this life.  The reason I looked it up again was because of my own search for meaning over the years, and the recognition that this is a part of our humanness; to find meaning in our daily lives and purpose in our existence.  I wanted to know more about where that search comes from and why it is and I was hoping the book might give me a starting point.  The book is still amazing and offers great insight and wonderful thoughts about the meaning of life, don’t get me wrong.  It just wasn’t what I thought it would be.

When you are without a religious framework to explain your life on this earth, as I am, you are left wondering if your existence is anything more than just a random fluke.  And perhaps it is.  But that is a very unsatisfying conclusion to come to.  Human beings have evolved a consciousness awareness that no other creature on this earth has.  My cat doesn’t wonder why she’s here and what the purpose of her life is.  She simply lives it.  Oddly enough, sometimes I envy her.  So this past week when a member of my extended family passed away, it brought back those age-old questions;  why are we here?  What are we doing here?  Are we just born, live our lives and then die?  And even more importantly, what is the point of my being aware of all of this in the first place?

For years I would say to myself that everything has meaning, that every life has a purpose and we’re here for a reason.  And I believed it whole-heartedly.  I also believed in some kind of higher power, God, if you like, even though I didn’t belong to any particular church or religion.  So even though I didn’t have the answers to the big questions, I was satisfied that I didn’t have to.  But when I had a major paradigm shift in my beliefs back in 2000, that context was suddenly gone.  Once I caught my father hiding the Easter eggs in the back yard, I couldn’t believe in the Easter Bunny any more either.

For awhile I missed it.  The phrases that automatically came to mind like “there’s a reason that happened” suddenly didn’t fit my new model.  I didn’t even have a model, I wasn’t sure how to put life in context and I was always looking for something to fill that empty void.

I notice that about myself;  my mind is constantly looking for patterns, for connections, for underlying causes.  We all seem to do that.  When I wrote about my recent visit to emergency, I heard from all kinds of people.  Most of them were trying to figure it out for me, trying to possibly explain what might be going on with my heart.  Some of them had similar experiences, or knew someone who had.  And of course, I myself was on the hunt for some kind of explanation, researching symptoms, analyzing what had occurred before the incidents.  What is something I ate?  Something I did?  Was it stress?

Biologically speaking, there’s a darn good reason why we are so analytical.  Our lives have literally depended on that since human beings began.  We had to think of new ways to survive, to eat if our source of food was suddenly gone, to protect ourselves from bad weather, to heal our physical wounds.  Either figure it out, or die.  We still experience the effects of “fight or flight” in stressful situations, where our bodies suddenly become acutely attuned to our surroundings, adrenaline kicks in, in case we have to run, blood pressure goes up, digestion slows or stops, among many other physical symptoms.  All so we can save ourselves from a potentially dangerous situation.

Homo sapiens survived because we figured out how to.  But are we only here because we got the combination right?  Yes I think so.  However, I also think it’s up to us to procure purpose or create meaning from this amazing gift we have been given.  The fact that we are here is literally awesome. How these bodies of ours survive, heal and even thrive is astounding.  The idea that we came into being only after eons of shifting, colliding and changing particles blows my mind.  I am the result of billions of years of trial and error.

So I don’t want to waste the time I have left, I want to make sure I experience every moment, good, bad or mediocre, and find new was to appreciate the very real miracle of life.

I’ll keep you posted 😊
IJ

To The Heart of the Matter

Well, I had what you might call an interesting experience a couple of weeks ago.  It was a few days after my birthday, I was still on my “stay-cation” and we were planning to go kayaking.  If you’ve read any of my other posts, I did have a kayaking experience in Hawaii back in February, my first one, which was just fine except for the re-entry into the kayak, which I won’t embarrass myself in describing again.

For some reason, I was kind of nervous this time about the idea of going out in a kayak again.  Down at the inner harbour here in Victoria, there are a couple of places where you can rent kayaks and canoes and just spend a couple of hours out on the water.  Our plan was to do just that.

I was a little worried about getting in and out of the kayak, since I had done it from shore but not from a dock, so I started watching some YouTube videos on how to do it.  As it turned out, the first day we planned to go, it never came to pass, so we decided to do it the next day.  I woke up early, had my coffee and watched more videos.  At about 7:30am I felt the first rumblings of heart palpitations.  I’d had them before like that, sometimes they’d go away after awhile, but on a few occasions they hung around for hours.  On the day of my Dad’s Celebration of Life, I had them all day.  I was sure it was stress.  My husband said it was because I hadn’t eaten anything beforehand.  I’d spoken to my doctor about it and she said to try and go in to a lab and get an EKG done the next time it happened so she could get a fuller picture of what was going on. But it only seemed to happen at inconvenient times or when the lab was closed, so I never did that.

This time, however, the palpitations went on long enough that I decided I was going to go into a lab not far away from where we live and see if I could get an EKG.

No dice, they said, unless they had a standing order from my doctor.  So I went home, called my doctor’s office and the office assistant said she’d pull my file and fax the requisition over to the lab. Great, I thought, and decided to go back to the lab and wait.

So I did, and I waited.  And waited.

In the meantime, I noticed my palpitations had subsided somewhat, but my heart rate was definitely high.  I waited some more and finally called the doctor’s office again, but no one picked up.  I tried a couple more times and figured they must have been exceptionally busy for whatever reason.  I decided to leave, so the lab tech gave me their number and told me to call in before I came back, to check to see if the requisition had been faxed in yet.

I went home and tried to relax.  By this time, the palpitations were hardly there at all and I decided to lie down for a bit.  When I woke up not long after, my heart rate was still really high.  I checked my pulse and couldn’t believe how much my heart was racing, so I used my blood pressure monitor to double check.  154 beats per minute.  This was getting scary.  I was supposed to go golfing that evening and I didn’t want to miss that, so I went outside and watered the garden, because I was convince that, like all of the other times, my heart rate would come down on its own.  It didn’t.  I cancelled golf.  I hate cancelling golf.

This time my husband suggested we go back to the lab, which we did, but still no word from my doctor’s office and the lab was about to close.  So my husband suggested we go to emergency.

I felt that little bit of hesitation.  You know, like you don’t want to cause a fuss and you don’t want to waste anyone’s time.  But it had been hours with a high heart rate and I knew that wasn’t good.

When I checked in at the local hospital and had finished registering, they had me come into a side door, bypassing a large waiting area.  I didn’t realize it at the time, but they were rushing me in past a whole bunch of people who were waiting just because it was my heart.  Next thing I knew, I was in a hospital gown and hooked up to a monitor.  They were taking my blood, my blood pressure, inserting a catheter, doing EKGs…and all I could think of was how I missed the tee off.  I hate missing a tee off.

The emergency doctor was trying to assess what was causing the high heart rate, asking me questions like how much coffee do I drink, do I have diabetes, do I smoke, how much alcohol do I consume.  He gave me a couple of things to do to try bring it down on its own.  One trick is to massage your jugular vein, the other is to bear down as if you were giving birth, and holding it for 15 seconds.  Nothing worked.  Eventually it was decided I would be given an intravenous drug to do the job.  The first attempt didn’t work. Apparently I have very small veins and the nurse was having trouble getting in.  She tried a few places, finally thinking she had it.  The drug has to be given slowly, over a couple of minutes.  Because they don’t want to actually stop the heart, right?  Just slow it down.  She started slowly injecting the drug, looking at her watch.  It hurt.  I held my breath, trying to suck it up.

I didn’t realize, and neither did the nurse until she was most of the way through, that the needle wasn’t inserted correctly and the drug had just flushed under my skin, swelling my arm up.  Then she was able to find a good vein in my hand and we started over again.

I felt my heart flip around a few times, but over the next ten minutes, the nurse and my husband watched the monitor up behind me as my heart rate finally came back into normal range.  They kept watch over the next twenty minutes or so to make sure it stayed down.  Finally, with a few more checks of my blood pressure and another EKG, they gave me the name of a cardiologist, booked an appointment for an echo cardiogram and told me I could go home.

So.

It took me awhile to realize what really had happened.  And when the full impact finally hit me, I started wondering “Maybe it was something I ate?  Maybe I’m just stressed, or it was an anxiety attack?”  Your mind goes round and round trying to find a cause.  But the fact is that maybe there’s some underlying cause that I will have to be treated for at some point.  And the reality is that it could take up to a year for me to get in to see the cardiologist.  My echo cardiogram won’t be until September 25th.  I have an appointment with my regular doctor coming up but I’m not sure that she can expedite anything. I’ve given up caffeine, I’ve started meditating again. I’m walking more regularly, drinking less wine (now THAT’S heartbreaking!), watching my diet even more carefully, and still not sure if any of that is making any real difference, but it can’t hurt.

And what did I learn from this, you may ask?  Or maybe you wouldn’t ask, but I’ll tell you anyway.

1. Emergency wards are kind of handy when you really need them.
2. A male nurse setting you up for an EKG is very different from a female nurse.  I experienced both.  The male nurse was exceptionally discreet, the female grabbed my boob as if it were her own.
3. Drugs that do not get into your veins, get absorbed anyway.  Eventually.  And then you bruise. A lot.
4. “Just a little sting.” can often be an understatement.
5. I’m not dead yet.
6. I will take my heart palpitations more seriously. I will take my heart palpitations more seriously.  I will…

There is no history of heart disease in my family that I know of.  I don’t even know if I have it.  But I guess I’d better pay better attention.

Arrgh!  Where’s a glass of wine when you need it???

IJ

Rags To Kitchens Part 3

On our “stay-cation” my husband has been hard at work doing some of the tear downs, such as this bulkhead above our old cabinets.  There was another type of bulkhead that created a partition between our kitchen area and the breakfast nook that was removed, an old built-in ironing board and another built in cupboard that was pretty much just wasted space.  That particular cupboard will be covered with a new pantry cupboard.

The house is very well built;  in fact, we bought it from the original owners who had it built by the woman’s father whose construction company also built the house across from us and the Bay Street Bridge. Somewhere in the basement we have the original blueprints for the house, not something every homeowner has, certainly not from 1938!  So the construction is very solid, and a lot of work to remove.  On top of that, everything is plaster and lathe, which is pretty messy stuff to work with.

Aside from the tear downs, we have pretty much finalized the choice and number of cabinets and we are now just waiting for the final tally before the order is put through.  It will take 8 to 10 weeks for the cabinets to arrive, and we’ll be given a heads up as to when the time approaches so we can time whatever other work has to be done before then.  Yes, timing is everything.   And I’m very well aware that it doesn’t always go that smoothly.  In fact, I’m counting on it!

In order to get the proper measurement for the cabinets, we also had to order our appliances. We had been mulling about different appliance stores, trying to get an idea of what we wanted and what we needed in the past few weeks.  Of course we were also looking for the best deal!  My husband needed some convincing to take the final leap…that’s a lot of money!  But he did and we will have them delivered when everything else is more or less ready.

And finally, today we met with a handyman who was highly recommended and who will be doing the wiring, plumbing, flooring, some of the tear down and removal of the old cabinets, and any other bits and pieces that have to be done.  He’ll be giving us an estimate of his labour costs within a few days so that we can make that commitment as well.  He didn’t looked too surprised or phased at anything we were asking him to do, so I hope that’s a good sign!

So!  Two more things to finalize, then we wait.  All I can think about is that I still have to clean the crappy kitchen, and next I will have to figure out how to live without one for heaven knows how long. And finally, without too many bumps, we should have our new kitchen.  Can anyone out there just knock me out for about ten weeks so I don’t have to live through the mess?

IJ

Rags To Kitchens Part 2

It’s really all too much.  I mean, how do you choose, how do you know what you’re going to be happy living with for the next 10 years?

Sorry, I’m not talking major life event…I’m talking the next chapter of our kitchen renos. We put the thing on hold for a few weeks because of other things, but a couple of weeks ago, Amy came by and brought out some samples.  Wood, counter tops, colours, textures, quartz or laminate;  too many to choose from!

We also went to a few places on our own to look at floors, back splashes, paint colours.  And kitchen appliances;  should we buy new ones or are we good with the old ones?  OMG.  We have no idea what to decide.  And then the first estimate came in.  OMG again.  It is going to cost a small fortune.  I guess we kind of knew that, but when you look at the cold, hard numbers, reality slaps you in the face.

Should we go dark on the floors, light on the cupboards, dark on the counter tops?  Should we go light on the floors, dark…well, you see what I mean.

One of the things we definitely decided on was to not change too much about the shape of the kitchen…one option we were presented with was to tear down a couple of walls and open one door way into the dining room to almost twice the width.  We opted to keep it more or less the way it is, not only saving money, but.  Well, yeah, saving money.

Fortunately for us, Amy is a wealth of knowledge when it comes to what choices work best with each other. There is so much we would not have understood, such as how the type of flooring you choose can affect when you put it in, either before or after the cabinets are installed.  This texture works with that one, but these two will fight each other.  Decide on one thing you really like (ie counter top or flooring) and then build around that.  Take inventory of what you have so you can choose which types of special additions you might need for them.  For instance, I didn’t know you can have a special, slotted shelf for cookie sheets!  Who’d a thunk it?

The floor plan is pretty straight-forward, but of course it’s an old house, built in 1944, so everything has to be custom built in order to fit.  Right now, the stove and fridge are right beside each other, but the stove will be moved to the south wall. That means installing a vent too, which will be another expense, on top of the electrical stuff needed to install lights under the cupboards.  Right now there is an old pantry which will be demolished and give us more counter space and cupboard space below.  And on each side of, and above the fridge we will have more cupboard space too.

The nook will be re-purposed for more counter and cupboard space.  And we will have a moveable island, just a small one, that will sit in the nook area when not in use.  I like the idea of a little island to pull into the middle of the kitchen when we do our gingerbread cookies!

This photo is more or less the way the kitchen was when we first moved in, compared with an update we did with the sink and windows on the left side.  The only thing that is different is that we changed the counter top laminate to a black one.

The new kitchen will look very different!

We have been back an forth to a few places to try to come up with back splash ideas, flooring ideas and the rest of it, but it is so utterly overwhelming.  Aaarrrghhh!

I’m okay now.
IJ

My Mother’s Voice

When I was about 11 or 12 years old, I got a tape recorder from my parents.  It was a cassette recorder with a little flip up plastic top and an external mic, something similar to this:

I loved that thing…I even took it to bed with me the first night and recorded myself until I fell asleep!  I don’t know why my parents bought it for me or even what the occasion was, but it was the beginning of a whole new world.  I got another tape recorder when I was 15, and eventually I moved up to a reel-to-reel 8 track, then a 24-track, and now I have a digital studio where I’ve recorded many projects.  I wonder if I would have had the ambition or drive to get into recording if it wasn’t for that first little tape deck.

I have a couple of old cassettes from the first years with my tape deck that I never got rid of.  My daughters discovered them when they were in elementary school, and loved being able to hear their mother talking at the same age they were and fooling around, recording my friends and my songs.  And my parents.

Recently, I realized that with both my parents now gone, it might be a good idea to preserve those tapes, so as part of my “staycation” I decided that it would be one of my projects.  Preserving memories in various ways are the kind of  tasks we often have at the back of our minds, only rarely making the time to actually get them done.  So I happily pulled them out (thank goodness I knew where they were!) and set about recording them in digital format on my computer.

First I had to locate a tape deck.  Who has those anymore?  I knew that there was one around somewhere and it took me a half-hour digging around in the basement, but I finally found it.  I hooked everything up and put the tape in and excitedly hit the “play” button.  Nope.  The cassette was so old (45 years or so?) that it wouldn’t roll properly and I nearly ruined the thing trying to make it play.  I tried again and again, and finally, the tiny tape got all tangled onto a little reel inside the deck and it took me another half-hour just to unravel it.  It was a mess.  I was beginning to wonder if I should perhaps find someone else more experienced to do the task, so I went online and started Googling ‘cassette tape restoration’ and any other query I could think of.

Finally I found a message board where someone had suggested that you could transfer the tape itself from one cassette casing to another.  Maybe it was the casing that was the issue and not the actual tape.  I had a few newer cassettes around, so I took the old cassette apart first:

Then I took apart the newer one and painstakingly tried to put the older tape inside of the newer case.

Stupidly, I didn’t check first to see how the tape fit in properly, so I took apart yet ANOTHER case, just to see that.  Eventually, I got the old tape into the new casing and screwed it all together.  I took a deep breath, put it in the cassette deck and hit play.

It still took a few rolls, stops and starts before the old tape began to roll more smoothly.  And then I had the delight of listening to myself, my parents, my Aunt May when she came to visit us from Denmark, my friends, and even my little budgie Blueboy chirping away in the background.  I laughed, I cringed, I reminisced.

When I got to the end of the tape, it promptly broke, and in order to listen to the other side, I had to spice it back together with scotch tape.

I flipped it over and held my breath again.  Phew…it worked.

I have video of my Dad because he lived a lot longer than my mother who died before video cameras were invented, so all I have are old pictures of her.  And now I have her voice.  At one point, the three of us and my friend sing a Danish lullaby.  My mother decides to do a high harmony and she is beautifully pitch perfect.  What a wonderful thing to have in my possession and to pass on to my daughters;  the sound of my mother’s, their grandmother’s voice.

IJ