I have to keep reminding myself of this, because I keep finding myself limiting myself!  I can’t have dinner out because I have company coming – so I guess only one fun thing a night!?  And I just ate out the past two nights – so I guess there’s a limit on how much I can go out.  “Spread it out” I tell myself.  “What the fuck does that mean?”  I tell myself back.  ‘Spread it out’, so it’s limited then?  I know I’ll never be satisfied within a limited idea.  Here’s just another one to be rid of.

I think this limited way of thinking is even worse – it becomes a limited way of doing.  “You attract what you think about,”  I read on Twitter recently,  “Not what you want, but what you think about.”  Wowz, that’s hit me.  I’ll attract limited now.  Great.  Which it felt like I had attracted today.  I feel a bit like I spent part of the afternoon with someone who was repeatedly letting me know in a few different ways, that he’s not available.

I’m never really sure what to do with this information.  I could pull a Meg Ryan in Joe vs. the Volcano, “I have no response to that.”  I would like to at least get to the point where I don’t react to it.  I did start to detach, but then felt bad, re-engaged, and then just ended up pissed.  It felt like it was a no-win any way that I played it.  Maybe it was a win.  Gavin and Emily came over and now I’m chillin and writing; grateful for how it ended up at least – so I must be on the other side of the miracle.

Welllllll, the floor stain job didn’t come out the way we thought so we ended up putting on another coat.  Funny, when we were first talking about stain, I wanted to go with something darker; and now, here we are.  I think it looks sexy.  It’s hard for me to keep positive when someone else  gets upset about it not going to plan.  But, maybe that was the plan, and we just don’t know what the plan is.  God knows that’s been proven time and time again!

And now it’s off to Madison because my sister is on her way from the Zoo(what I call Kalamazoo, MI) and I want to spend Christmas Eve Day bopping around in the holiday spirit and awaiting her arrival.  Mom and Dennis are going to a holiday open house, “evidently not THAT open cos we’re not invited”, she says and we laugh.  So it will be just the two of us and I’m looking forward to some sister time.  With no one else around.  A rarity.

I feel bad leaving Malcolm behind (does going somewhere without someone really have to be called, “leaving behind?”  He’s not a mitten I’ve forgotten in my school locker for the weekend for goodness sake.  We’re having Christmas apart as people who are no longer in a relationship do.  It’s what’s appropriate.  I remember the day my mom texted me to ask if Malcolm was coming, ‘assuming you’re still together’.  At this point, I don’t know why anyone would assume it.  My sister says it’s basically a flip of the coin.  I’m glad she can laugh about it.  God knows she deserves that after all she’s heard me complain about it, and I hope I can too one day.

I am so in the spirit today.  The weather is quite mild, what those in Wisconsin would call mild, and I’m on my own going wherever I please for as long as I please.  The shops all have generous sampling of yum food and wines, everything is decorated and lit up, most people are in an extra good mood….I really groove on it.  I love special things.  I buy lots for the party and a vegan pumpkin pie and coconut whip to take to my aunt’s for Christmas Day.  It feels like a movie.

Later, Sara and I take turns googling restaurants that may be open and candlelight Christmas Eve services.  We’d love to go to Peace Lutheran’s like we always did when we were younger and lived around here, but decide that the drive to Sun Prairie is too long (it’s probably only 20 minutes) and the service to late (it’s at 11) and sometimes trying to travel back in time doesn’t work quite as good as you think it will (this, seems the only valid point and so I give in and go back to googling).  We  end up at a Laotian place in the Atwood neighborhood and have wine and curry.

With some time to kill before the service, we browse through Walgreen’s Christmas clearance shelves – it’s like the only thing open, and even here, we have fun.  My nephew Gavin says that we regress to our 8-year old selves when we get together.  As we get older,  I think that age gets older, but still….we can so easily go back to laughing easily together.

I’m a little behind on stories…the holidays take on their own timeline.  The refinishing of the floors, as scary as it seemed, is complete.  And I think I was being taken down to some original material as well.  So many things were colliding: holidays, family, relationships, the time issue of my sister coming to visit and us wanting to be able to stay there.  And the early holiday party for Julia, Malcolm’s daughter.  This all stirs, but it’s a nice stir.  I see me trying to get it all right, and how that drives me and those close to me nuts; so I stop.  I remember what’s really important; being together and seeing what happens.

Coffee has been renamed “liquid inspiration” as I try to get paint colors right for the back bedroom.  I go from a Caribbean green to several versions of orange to “Afterglow”, a color that is like inside sunshine and accents nicely the trees that you look on out those windows.  In the Fall, it would be breathtaking.  I go the chiropractor and he has to brush himself off after he adjusts me.  “Good thing your appointment is at the end of the day”, he says.  I talk to him about his reclaimed wood floors more than I do my spine.  I move my air mattress from room to room and spend a lot of time bent over, with a paint brush and rag on the floor.  I talk to my friend Peggi on the east coast for hours of it.  We talk about relationships and trying to see what we want, what works, what doesn’t and letting go of what doesn’t just because.   She makes me laugh.  She asks why it’s taken us so long to figure it out,  I say because it feels like it’s pretty new to look at things like we do.  Deeply and honestly.  Beliefs and self-concepts are the carnage that this process can cause and so it takes awhile to uproot such long-held ideas and practices.  For me, it’s like learning to write with my left hand.

I get dressed to go to the holiday party at the High Rock and I can barely keep my eyes open.  I’ve just put the final coat of polyurethane on the two bedrooms and that’s a big step closer to having a real bed and my sister and I sleeping in it when she comes up in a few days.  I run into my boss from last summer and he asks where I’m working now.  I say nowhere.  “I’m flipping a house.”  “You just never know with you,”  he says, “I’d love to have your life.”

I love having my life.  Even though everything is dusty, even though I sometimes have to get dressed in the garage, even though for awhile I had no toilet while the bathroom floor was being retiled, even through all the blood, sweat and tears I’ve put in.   I own appliances!  (Doralee just cracks up when I exclaim that)  I own a house.  I don’t pay anyone for it every month.  It’s mine (well, half mine) and the freedom and creative juice that allows for me feels amazing.  And I want to remember that.  I write to remember.

The other day I was driving to it and Melissa Etheridge came on the radio.  This woman was the constant companion of my early 20s.  She wrote anthems for my life, or so it seemed, and she was taking me back; to college, to boyfriends, fiances, various medical crises, my first nephew Gavin being born and me relocating back to Madison, my life coming together and falling apart in a constant dance.  I was winging it.  And as I came up to the house, all warmly lit from the inside as it was getting dark, I felt my own time warp of all that has happened in the 20 years in between.  What a life I’ve had, how I didn’t know all that was to come….and I hope to share it all with you, by writing and remembering.