Too many irons in the fire, what with frenzied chasing of a lot of stuff for the house right now.  The tile sample was late arriving; the tile sample is too dark.  Works with the selected carpet, but too dark.  Couldn't place order anyhow because it had to be authorized by a contractor -- who is basking in the sun in Florida.  [Insert scream here as well as a sigh of relief.]  Desired carpet is a house label at one vendor, price about 30% too high; the other vendor can't find a comparable carpet.

God, I hate this kind of picky bullsh*t. 

Spouse is VERY angry with me about the stone fascia.  The installer is spacing stone much wider apart than desired, at 1/2 inch +/- instead of tighter 1/4 to 3/8 inch spacing.  I know -- but I can also sense this installer is really uncomfortable with this product, would rather have installed brick.  Which is what he quoted us anyhow, seeing as the spouse's drawings showed BRICK instead of stone.  What a mess.  We're simply going to live with it.  Learning opportunity: don't assume the contractor has the best sub-contractor for the job, even if the price is great.  And make sure your drawings are dead-on what you want before you get a contractor, even down to picky crap like mortar spacing.

Oops, water spilled next to humidifier on what was supposed to be waterproof paper laid down in traffic areas.  The paper bled -- a nice shade of dark pink, right into the raw, unfinished maple flooring.  I'm going to be wiping it out with bleach yet today, researching now to see what bleach does to maple (not good on oak, think it's okay on maple, but I've got to cover my butt on this so I don't enfuriate my spouse further by leaving yet another, different colored stain on the floor).

Not to mention the digging up of the front yard yesterday.  The developer did a no-no when he put in the water pipe, has to be fixed before the water department can hook up the water.  The developer left a 10 foot by 10 foot crater in my front yard trying to find the problem.  Fortunately this was found and fixed before the new lawn and sprinkler system were installed.  In the mean time, I have to cart water to the house so the installer can mix too much mortar for the over-wide stone spacing...

Add multiple deadlines related to local party politics, lots of paperwork being passed around in preparation for state party convention in two weeks.  Many meetings between now and then, trying to get people to change their way of thinking, regroup across entrenched positions, rejoin if they have fallen away.  It's going to be a hard slog now through 2006.

Multiple sundry projects in the background, too.  (xian, where are you??)  Also working on a contribution to the "101 Bloggers" project, asking, "Why do I blog?"

I'm still hashing stuff over in my head, rolling it around, trying it on.  I've written about this before, but this blogging thing seems to have evolved over time.  Why did I start to blog, anyway?

Well, let's see...to keep my sanity, for one thing. 

To keep my wits about me.

To be.

To be just me.

For the space and time in which I collect my thoughts and write them here, I can have an island of peace, a walled off place that's just me, even if I'm writing about everything else and everything else is going up in flames..  This is me, right here, in this white space.  It could use a little sprucing up, a little housekeeping, but it's me, it's mine, all mine. 

There's not much I can lay claim to as exclusively mine, being a wife and a mother; if you're a parent, you know what I mean.  It's the next step beyond "mi casa es su casa"; little fingers are everywhere, in everything, needing, wanting, curious, poking, and I'm not even taking my spouse's incursions into my space in to consideration. 

But this blog is MINE.  Nobody enters it without my express intention, or at least my conscious tolerance.

Many, many other women have had this same drive to write, for similar reasons -- wanting a space of their own, to be themselves and not what everyone else demanded or expected of them.  It's a matter of self-preservation, to be defined by one's self, by the merits of one's own thoughts and words, rather than the projection of others' intents and desires.  Men certainly experience similar needs for space, but women, by virtue of the nature of their bodies, the culture built about them defined by their bodies, are continually under pressure to belong to something or someone else.  Being themselves is never enough in this society; they are to be help-mates, childbearers, mothers, grandmothers, people who continually suborn themselves to something or someone else, even relinquishing their names, their identities when they leave the house of the first man in their lives for the next man.  Carrying a child in one's body makes it only too clear that we are not alone in our lifetimes; the years that follow, wherein that same child continues to need its mother's body, only entwine those others more deeply into the fiber of a woman.

It's only by making a conscious point of separating, of staking out and defining a space like this one here in the ether, that a women is herself.

This white space is where I pour the stuff that is myself by choice, by election, by intention. And being able to make that choice keeps me grounded and sane.

Okay, sort of sane.

And now I'm off to solve the crazy problems of the damned tile and the pink stain.

11:41:20 AM    comment []