The All-New Bunrab

I was discussing the phrase "ye gods and little fishes" with boyfriend the other day, and I swear I remember reading a book as a kid, in which a little girl used that phrase frequently to express her impatience with other people. I cannot remember what book it was - this odd notion comes to me that perhaps it was Cheaper By The Dozen??? Could that be right? If not, does anyone else remember such a little girl using that phrase, possibly in connection with walking to get ice cream? It's very odd what scraps the mind remembers.

I am too lazy to go to the library and find Cheaper By The Dozen just to see if that's it.

This year, our anniversary and Mother's Day came on exactly the same dates it did the year we got married, 1985. It would have been our 28th anniversary. I kept busy and didn't think about it too hard, because who wants to ruin someone else's nice Mother's Day dinner by bursting into tears?

My stepmother lost her first husband when she was considerably younger than I was when Steve died - and she had several small children to take care of as well. (If I recall, her youngest at the time was an infant.) I can only imagine how difficult it must have been for her - and I can see why she would have been happy to meet my dad, even though it wasn't that long afterwards, because she must have been so lonely, surrounded by children who were a constant reminder of what she had lost, without being old enough to be useful in helping her cope with his loss. My stepbrothers and stepsisters never talked about their father very much, though I gather he was rather strict, and chronically ill.

Saturday was our condo community's annual group yard sale. Six boxes of books and two boxes of crafts magazines out the door, along with a few miscellaneous items. Steve's three torque wrenches were the first thing to be sold - lots of guys want those, apparently. The crowd, and what they're looking for, is rather different than Austin; fewer books sold than I had hoped (the leftovers went to the charity donation truck that came at the end, not back into my condo) and a lot more people were looking for clothing, which I hadn't even considered bringing because in Austin, it never sold well - only baby/little kids clothing ever sold at all. Here; people who had women's dresses and suits and shoes were doing a brisk business. I did get a few people who each took an armload of crafts magazines, though, and a few science fiction geeks who picked up 10-20 books apiece. Did a bit of electioneering for the condo board elections this summer - I'm serving as an appointed member, right now, filling in a vacant spot, but I need to get elected to a regular term, and, quite oddly for such things, we have 5 people running for the three open spots (usually it's hard to get anybody to run at all) - so I used this as an opportunity to talk to a bunch of neighbors I hadn't met before, and do a few good deeds - things I would have done anyway, of course, but now I mentioned that I was running, after helping people.

I had my quarterly device check today, and it looks like the battery is holding up enough that we don't have to schedule replacement for July - the power level is still a bit above even the "elective replacement" level, let alone the "mandatory replacement within 3 months" level. So we've scheduled the next quarterly check for August, 3 months from now, with the assumption that at that time, the power will have just dropped into elective replacement then, and since replacement is outpatient surgery, it can be scheduled fairly quickly, probably for later that week. The question will be whether I've healed enough to play in rehearsals that start up around Labor Day - I believe the first concert any of my bands have scheduled for next season is something like September 15. By now, my cardiologist is used to hearing that his schedule comes in somewhere less important than my concert schedule :D

Hey, anyone in Maryland: Maryland Community Band Day is June 9, noon to 8 pm, at the Lurman Woodland Theater in Catonsville. Montgomery Village Community Band is playing at 3 pm, and Baltimore Symphonic Band, as the host band, is playing last, at 7 pm. C'mon out and listen!

In 2012, the only resolution I made was to remember to call my friend Cindy at least once a week, instead of always waiting for her to call me - I'm really,  really bad about picking up the phone and calling people, but I managed to keep that resolution. Without any resolutions on the subject, I decided just after the first of the year that I really needed to get out from under the burdens of a largish single-family home, so repaired the home, sold the home, bought a condo, moved. So far so good, right? Also good, that I don't think I've mentioned, is that I've lost nearly 25 pounds in the past year, getting my BMI to just under 25 - that is, within normal instead of overweight! Without any resolutions about losing weight!

I whined here about the couple of tachycardia events that screwed up my summer, and then somehow never got around to getting back here. I think, mind you I'm not certain, but I think, that this new year I resolve to write a few more substantive posts here, rather than depending on 3-sentence Facebook updates to be the only way I keep up with friends or organize my thoughts.

( Playing catch-up )
( More stupid heart stuff )

( More than you wanted to know about my finances )

( I have slightly less of too much stuff )

( A visit to Texas )

OK, that's well enough of a ramble and a catch-up. New Year's resolution: keep up with LJ better, keep up with my friends' lives better. It's not all always me, and when it is me, sometimes it's good to share.

After not visiting LJ in 9 months, I was checking my email and realized I had to come here to delete all kinds of crap comments. So I thought while I was here I'd say hi. I still don't have time to blog regularly, and I still haven't managed to read recent posts of everybody else's. Somehow, managing my day to day life seems to take up all my time. I have been reminded a lot of how very spoiled I was, to have the easy life I had while Steve was alive, to have so much free time to do whatever I wanted. Most people don't have that even if they do have a partner, do they? Usually both partners are still working, and if retired don't have the retirement income Steve did, so that there's still not the combination of time-and-money to do all the frivolous things we did. Or to get computers repaired or replaced as often as we did. I really was very spoiled.

Right now, I am using a borrowed computer, because mine got fried - pretty much literally; I came home to the smell of burning electronics one night after rehearsal a couple of weeks ago. It was the computer, and there's no telling why - everything else plugged into the same surge protector was fine and turned right back on when I reset it. So I've mailed the computer back to HP, and I have ordered a new one, and went ahead and bought the service plan for two years, too, because I seem to be the sort of person who needs a service plan, now that I don't have my live-in geek. I keep thinking that somehow, if Steve had been here, he would have done something differently and the computer wouldn't have fried itself, somehow. He had much better computer juju than I do; things just didn't go wrong as often, and he seemed to do all the right things to keep them running correctly all the time. Anyway, my new one should arrive soon.

Besides that, I am getting the house ready to sell, an incredibly stressful process. I made the decision right after New years to do this, sort of a New Year's resolution. I love the house, but I can't keep managing 2000 square feet of house on a third of an acre of land by myself. I know there are people who can, but I am not one of them. I've given it a fair shot, I think, for a year and a half since Steve died - this doesn't count as giving up without trying, or as making a decision in a hurry. It seems to me that in the normal course of things, it takes a family to manage a single-family residence: at least two healthy people, to manage all the cleaning and the maintenance and the outside chores and the repairs; even just to manage to have someone home for repair people is easier if there's two people to choose from. And I'm not even one healthy adult. And I don't enjoy trying to remember everything that has to be done. Steve enjoyed it - he got a kick out of putting "change the furnace filter" into his PDA for every three months for 6 years ahead, and then having it give him little reminders. He didn't mind talking to 3 or 4 guys who want to clean the gutters, chatting with them and then choosing one. I don't enjoy any of that stuff. So, I want to sell the house, and find a nice condo, about half the size, where not only does someone else do the lawn mowing and snow removal and gutter cleaning and furnace maintenance, but I don't even have to go looking to hire them; it's done automatically as part of the condo agreement. I don't even have to think about it, let alone choose and hire someone to do it. And a smaller condo will be not only cheaper to heat because it's smaller, it will be cheaper per square foot just by virtue of being multi-family housing where other people's shared walls also mean better insulation for me. And most condos are newer and have gas heat, rather than oil. My latest oil bill was $551 for a tankful, and in the winter months, that happens EVERY MONTH. Because this is a huge house, and has old single-pane windows mostly, and still has leaky spots around windows and doors and whatnot, although I have been trying to find and take care of the worst drafts. I could whine for hours about house repairs, and then whine for hours more about what it takes to upgrade this house to the point where it is sellable for at least 60% of what we paid for it - because, of course, we bought it just BEFORE the 2008 economy crash, and property in the Washington DC area, which this counts as, has lost on average about 40% of its value since then. But I'll save that whine for another post.

So, once I get an offer on the house, I'm going to look for a condo in Columbia - about 8 miles from here in Catonsville. I love Catonsville, I love my particular neighborhood, I love my neighbors, but it's not worth continuing to maintain this house and pay taxes on such a large property just because I love my neighbors! Catonsville, being an older town, has pretty much nothing in the way of condos; it doesn't even have much in the way of apartments or townhouses, because it was mostly built out already before those kinds of housing started appearing in suburbs. Columbia, on the other hand, is a planned community started in the 1960's, and a huge percentage of its housing stock is townhouses and multi-family housing of the rental or condo sort. Some of you may remember when we first moved up to MD, we had an apartment whose address was Elkridge; it was actually in a corner of Elkridge abutting Columbia, and all my doctors, and our insurance agent, and our attorney, and stuff like that, have been in Columbia/Elkridge/Ellicott City (another town abutting Columbia and hard to tell where one ends and the other begins) all along anyway. So, Columbia is the logical place to look now. It will put me 10 minutes further from my friend Cindy, but there really isn't anything like what I'm looking for any closer to Cindy, and it will put me 10 minutes closer to the Montgomery Village Community Band, which I'm still playing in.

I'm also still playing in the Baltimore Symphonic Band, where I am the music librarian. I am also playing in the Browningsville Cornet Band, which isn't cornets and is in Damascus, not Browningsville. And recently I played in the pit orchestra for a community theater musical over in Montgomery County, too, and I'm on the list of people they'll call back next time. And speaking of Montgomery County, I am dating a guy who lives in Silver Spring. He's very nice, and very understanding about the fact that I still talk about Steve a lot, and still have hours when I just start crying and can't stop. He is pretty good at patting me on the back and saying soothing things and then reminding me that getting Steve back isn't one of the options and that I have to keep thinking about charting a path forward, because that's the only direction there is. I don't think he's the next great love of my life, nor does he think that I am "the one" but we are enjoying seeing each other and dating exclusively for now, and it's an awfully lucky thing to find someone this agreeable first time out in the dating pool. (Online dating site OK Cupid, if anyone's wondering. And how I got there is a separate story for another day.)

OK, still self-centered as ever, because this is all about me and I haven't gone to read what any of you are doing unless you're on Facebook, too, where the one-paragraph status updates are something that I can almost keep up with on a good day. I know I have a bunch of you as FB friends; if you're on there and want to friend me, my nickname there is bunrab, too, and most of you know my real name to look for me - I've got it listed with my first initial, then the middle name I usually go by, and then last name, if you want to look that way. If you can stand all the whining. Because being a widow still sucks, and I still whine. But nonetheless I would love to hear from some of you whom I've lost touch with.