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Nostalgia

Memory book from Gramma
By On January 31, 2013 In Life With No Comments Permanent Link to NostalgiaPermalink
1975 Zenith Chromacolor II TV

My 1975 Zenith Chromacolor II TV

There are several things I really enjoy doing because of the nostalgic quality of the activity.  They include making cookies using the stand mixer I grew up using to make cookies, making soup in my great-grandmother’s soup pot, sewing on the sewing machine that once belonged to a friend of my grandmother’s and watching movies on the TV I grew up with, a 1975 Zenith that looks like, as my best friend through secondary school described it, “the TV from outer space.”  Mind you, it’s not because of the fact that any of these items–the stand mixer, the soup pot, the sewing machine or the TV–are of exceptionally high quality.  (Although I do think the fact that they are all still around and operating speaks to the fact that they were well-made.)  I enjoy using them purely because their familiarity gives me comfort.

This past weekend, Ben and I spent Saturday night organizing the basement.  Because that what we do.  Our idea of a good time on a Saturday night is assembling shelves, categorizing tools and getting rid of junk that’s been in the basement since the previous owners.  Mind you, we’ve already been through several rounds of divesting the basement of stuff from the previous owners.  I swear this stuff is like sauerkraut in your fridge–it just keeps multiplying.  All kidding aside, though, I really like to organize things and get rid of excess stuff that I don’t need.  It makes me feel lighter, and I get tremendous satisfaction out of being able to find things easily.  In short, I don’t generally hang onto stuff I don’t need.

Except when I do.

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About a Bedroom

Finished bedroom
By On October 30, 2012 In House Renovation, Life With No Comments Permanent Link to About a BedroomPermalink

Earlier this year–okay, much earlier this year–I embarked on renovating my back bedroom.  I live in a three bedroom house, and this bedroom was the final one to be renovated.  I’m making my way through renovating the rooms in my house at an average rate of about one every two years.  I know that seems like it takes a while, but in my defense, I do pretty much all the work myself with the occasional help from friends and family when I do something stupid like break my wrist (but more on that later).  I also had a renovation hiatus of about two and a half years while my sister was occupying one of those bedrooms.  So figuring that in, it’s probably more like I complete a room every 1.33 years.

As I mentioned in my post about my wedding anniversary, the completion of the back bedroom is the final piece in the cohabitation puzzle for my husband and me.  I had been aiming to finish it in time for our anniversary, but somewhere in mid-September I realized that I was going to fall short of my goal.  It was looking like I’d finish it only a couple of weeks late, and then I broke my left wrist playing frisbee.  I was really bummed out, but Ben agreed to complete the rest of the work, which consisted mainly of running electrical and reattaching the baseboards.  And then he tore a ligament in his right index finger.  October was a tough month for the Wittzlers.

I love doing renovation work for many reasons–you get to use your hands, it’s easy to see the progress you’re making, and as I mentioned in an earlier post, it makes me feel a connection to the history of the house.  However, as much as love it, I always reach a point somewhere in the process where I am convinced that I am never going to be finished.  Then I push through, and I fall of the impatience cliff, where I can see the light at the end of the tunnel and just want the damn thing to be done.  It happens every time.  At the end of the project, I inevitably vow to hire someone to do the work the next time, but within several months, I suffer a blow to the head from a large, blunt object and start scraping wallpaper again myself.  (What’s the definition of insanity again?)

But really, in the end, the work is immensely rewarding.  The satisfaction of being able to walk into the room and say, “I did this,” is hard to describe.  And when it’s your own house, you get to experience that joy over and over again for years.  It’s probably why I keeping picking up that stupid wallpaper scraper.

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One Year of Wedded Bliss

Wittzler wedding kiss - cropped
By On October 8, 2012 In Life With No Comments Permanent Link to One Year of Wedded BlissPermalink

Today is my first wedding anniversary.  Unlike this day last year, which was a sunny and warm respite amid an extraordinarily rainy late summer and early fall, today is gray and decidedly fall-like in temperature, giving me pause to reflect on the differences between now and then, the months that described the interim, and the event of celebrating an anniversary.

In some ways, now and then look very similar.  My husband and I have been bucking tradition for the last year, choosing to continue to live in our separate houses.  There are pros and cons to this, and the choice has come with its attendant variety of reactions from people when it comes up in conversation.  They range from the thinly-veiled judging of “Oh, you don’t live together?!?  But you’re married.” to the quiet envy of “That’s a recipe for a good marriage.” to the completely supportive “Good for you!  Don’t let society pressure you to do otherwise.”  It’s always interesting to see what the response is going to be, and sometimes I don’t get the response I expect.  The topic of marriage, it seems, like weddings, causes many people to offer up deep-seated opinions as to what it should and shouldn’t be.

For Ben and me, the decision to live separately was largely logistical.  The house we will ultimately live in–the one Ben lives in right now–isn’t finished.  The kitchen leaks, and the downstairs is a construction zone.  I am unwilling to live there.  My house, on the other hand, didn’t have space for Ben to have an office, which is important because he does consulting work when he’s not working on the house.  When we got married a year ago, we held the (perhaps naïve) view that nothing would really change.  While in a relationship, we’ve lived together, and we’ve lived apart, and we’ve been successful and unsuccessful at doing both, so the state of the relationship and the state of cohabitation seemed to have virtually no correlation.  And not being ones for doing things simply because “you’re supposed to,” we chose to keep doing what we were doing.

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