LittleWaif

Planted my little raised garden this past weekend.  I wanted to try something new in the vegetable department and saw a fennel plant and said “sure, come to my house”.  It hadn’t been planted about 5 hours when I came back and saw that a bunny had chewed on a couple of leaves and pulled the whole plant out.  So I replanted it.  The next morning, the whole plant was gone.  Mr. Bunny had chewed it all the way down to the ground.  So, if you see a bunny and it has licorice on its breath, that is the one. 

I have been all nostalgic lately.  Life is zooming by and things I had wanted to achieve by now aren’t possible.  I will never be a child actor.  I will never be Miss America.  I will never be able to be Tuesday from the Addams Family for Halloween.  And by the way, never put on a Tuesday costume if you are over 40ish.  I still have nightmares of me in the movie “What Ever Happened To Baby Jane?”.  That is the movie with Bette Davis where she dresses up like a little girl and looks ghastly, right?   Most depressing Halloween ever.

So now I think “Grey Gardens”.  I will be Little Edie, I will be the crazy child-like adult who wears sweaters wrapped around my head and feeds raccoons that live in my attic loaves of bread.  I will dance and march around my house and imagine myself in my glory days, if I ever had some.  Who cares what anyone thinks?  That is the one nice thing about getting older, you become invisible.  I feel like I am invisible.  Like I am screaming at the top of my lungs and no one hears me. 

Back when we bought our brand spanking new built for us house (okay, from a list of features) over 10 years ago, you couldn’t view your house “from space”.  Not from the space station, but from an aerial view like in Google Maps.  Your home buying process pretty much involved looking at a map, driving around the neighborhood and looking at what neighborhoods and/or eyesores surrounded your potential house, and in our case driving down a muddy road to see the home site  (or at least what it looked like before the topsoil was ripped off and anything resembling nature was scraped from the earth).  Now, I can view my house on Google Maps from a tiny little blip on the East Coast all the way down to if I happened to be walking to the mailbox when they snapped the picture, you could tell what color my housecoat was.  Which for a house buyer, is an absolutely fantastic thing. But for a home seller, it can be a nightmare.
Let’s say that you are a buyer driving through a potential neighborhood and wow, the houses are pretty.  Everyone takes such good care of their yards, there are no rusty clunker cars up on cinderblocks mucking up their driveways, the roads are wide and tree-lined.  And the house is fantastic!  Let’s buy it!  But that night, you decide you want to see where the nearest grocery stores are….. or you want to find the quickest way to get to the big highway that gets you to work fast.  So you look on Google Maps.  And you zoom in on that house that you loved, that you already have arranged the furniture in “in your mind”, and find that 10 feet beyond those beautiful trees behind your dream house is…. what is that?!  Is that an industrial site?  No, it looks like a bunch of tractor trailers or something.  Let’s zoom in on that area more.  OMG, it is a scrap yard where they crush old trailers and make them into neat little squares of metal!  No wonder the price was so low on that house!  Whew!  Thank god we didn’t sign those papers!

Now imagine that you are the homeowner that is trying to sell that house.  10 years ago when you bought your house, it was pristine farmland.  Everyone loved the neighborhood, the houses practically sold themselves.   The first people who resold in the neighborhood made a tidy profit.  Things looked good.  Then Google Maps came along. Unbeknownst to you a small industry had been thriving on the land not zoned residential behind your house.  Didn’t really bother you, you couldn’t see what was going on through the trees and you couldn’t really hear any noises from the area, what with everyone out cutting their well manicured lawns every nice day in the summer.  But Google Maps saw the small industrial area.  And snapped a photo “from space” of the industrial area on a day when there was a backlog of work piling up on the lot.  That photo went out on the internet for everyone to see.  No big deal, one of many snapped that day to make our life as consumers and car drivers easier. But now you are trying to sell your house.  And every time someone “Googles” your address, that big old picture pops up and some potential home buyer, before they have even driven by your house, sees the now “huge seeming” industrial area and says “ugh!  Not that house, it is near some big icky factory or something!”

So my advice to you, is look at your house “from space”.  If Google (okay, I am picking on them because they are huge) took a picture on a day when your house/neighborhood/area wasn’t at its best, everyone will see it.  And there isn’t a damn thing you can do about it.  Just make sure your next house looks pretty from space.

I saw some crocuses blooming and the groundhogs are out, could it mean that spring is finally here?  I am so looking forward to nice weather, wearing all this extra wooly clothing makes me feel like I can’t move.

I made this necklace with vintage moonglow beads, plastic and enamel flowers and wired it to the base of some plastic links that my son and I are jointly trying to sell on my etsy shop.  Hope that the links sell, I like working with my son.  He works on inventory control and I work on sales.  Seems like a match made in heaven.

Yes!  My first job in 18 years.  I am so happy.  I am going to be working for Prudential Fox & Roach as a real estate agent.  I might be crazy getting into this profession in this economy, but I figure the whole home sales thing will soon enough make a turnaround and I can actually make some money.  Yeah me!

And I haven’t even checked in. I am stunned and surprised. Well, not too surprised since I am not much of a winter person. I think I pretty much hibernate mentally, readying myself to spring myself on the world once the season changes. I have been painting a bit, but mostly catching up on TV shows and movies that I have missed in 2008.  I have never watched the tv show “24″ or the show “The Closer”, so at some point I will have to rent those and catch up.  I am so bad with keeping up with current tv.  I would rather watch old movies.

We had a great Christmas. Stayed at home as usual. This year we scaled back in the present giving/getting department. Just didn’t seem right in the economic climate to get too much. But I am sure retailers are saying we should have spent more to support the economy. Never quite sure who to please. But I still felt like I got wayyyy too much.

I think for the coming New Year I have some goals. Get a job to match my new Real Estate license. My brain is most times a mystery to me. It would seem at first glance that being a real estate agent wouldn’t be a good match for me, but I feel a strange gut instinct that I am going down the right path. And I have to go with my gut. The gut wins out over brain in most instances. And I need to paint more. A lot more. Don’t know how that will fit in with working at a job, probably not well. And, I really want to start working more on videos and editing. Way back in the land of college. I really, really wanted to go into film. Loved the classes on acting and directing for television that were joint classes between the film and theater departments. The MAJOR problem with taking more film classes was the money issue… when you are supporting yourself through college through loans and work, you can’t just willy-nilly take classes. Class decisions are based on 1) can I afford the books? and 2) can I afford the equipment and lab fees to take the class?. Crap, I couldn’t even afford a 35 mm camera, let alone a book and paying to develop the film I did take. (this was before cheap ass digital cameras…. think ginormous vhs cameras). Now, anyone can make a movie with simple video equipment bought from walls-mart.

What a fun couple of weeks. Okay, really two weeks plus with the flu and its minions. I highly don’t recommend it. Very odd version of flu. Mostly aches and pains and cold symptoms, some tummy problems. I still don’t feel 100%, have a slight fever and stuffy nose and cough. Fully expected it to develop into pneumonia but it did not. But during the midst of it I finished and passed my real estate pre-licensing course so yeah me. So on to the state and national tests. [UPDATE:  I passed the state and national tests!!]
I still haven’t done any Christmas shopping. Usually by this time I am at least half done. And it is very odd that I haven’t done any holiday type art or crafts yet. I am going to guess that it is the combination of the state of the economy, school for me, and the flu. Makes me realize how much “the mom” drives the Christmas holiday. At least in this house. I have no idea how moms with full time jobs even have the time to shop for Christmas, let alone create an atmosphere of festivity. I was super lucky that over Thanksgiving when I was sick, my sweet husband shopped for, cooked, and cleaned up after Thanksgiving. I only had to show up to eat!

I’m a “spill” kind of gal. My usual dialog with people is, “hi, i’m trina. i am a little insane, so don’t mind me”. I think if we were all truthful, we would all admit we are a little insane. My delusion is that I can do art, hence this:

This is weird. Halloween is over and I didn’t carve a pumpkin or make a scarey halloween craft thing. Now Thanksgiving is soon to be upon us and then the buying frenzy we like to call Christmas. It is amazing that one class has cut so much into my making silly stuff time. It isn’t right. I should have better priorities.

Well, I did my civic duty and voted.  It was surreal.  In front of the door to the polling place they had some handicapped spots set up.  There was a car that had the whole backend of it covered in anti-bush bumper stickers.  Like “2009 the end of an Error” and stuff like that.  I thought wow, I bet they are glad this day came.  Inside standing in line waiting to vote behind me was a lady, probably not much older than me who was wearing a filthy ripped up sweatsuit, carrying two stuffed full plastic shopping bags, and wearing duct tape shoes.  I had seen this lady last year on voting day, but at a spot at about 7 miles away. She must have walked all the way here.  She had identification and voted.  As I was on the way out of the building, getting into the car with all the anti-bush bumper stickers was an older white couple escorting a much older man wearing a World War II veteran hat.  I did not expect that.  Oh, and I offered the lady with the duct tape shoes a ride and she angrily shooed me off.

Very strange.