Queen of Swords

Thanks and blessings on a_belletrist's P who drove a considerable distance to check out my electrical problem last night.

Unfortunately, he could not find the cause -- and therefore no solution for -- my dead outlet. The breaker is fine. Other outlets and lights on that circuit work. The outlet box itself appears undamaged. It just doesn't work.

Oh, and our breaker box is in serious need of upgrade. It's rated at 120, and modern houses are rated at 200+.

So the Ex and I had a lengthy telephone conversation last night, and we're upping the priority of getting the electrical upgraded. We've been talking for quite some time about getting the upstairs and downstairs on different breaker boxes, and we've known that we needed to upgrade the wiring -- but we're not looking forward to either the expense or the impact on our walls. (I've just recovered from last summer's plumbing upgrade!)

In the meantime, I have an unused wall socket on the wrong side of the living room, so I'll be investing in a very long extension cord -- which I am promising myself I will not overload. It will support an essential light and the electronics in the living room, on a rotating basis. The computer will continue to live at the kitchen table. The mini speakers and printer will go elsewhere to be used, or the tv and cable box will be unplugged while they are in use.

Why is home ownership such a struggle? We didn't have these problems when I was growing up. Water stayed where it was supposed to. Toilets occasionally got plugged, but never flooded. Eletrical systems were stable and dependable. I never saw a Shop-Vac.

The rains have returned, my drain is backed up. . . and while the pump is working, it seems to want to wait for more water to build up before it stays on for a while, compared to the first time I used it.

It didn't help that I had managed to loosen the hose last week, when I was going to put it away, and had to fight with it for several minutes tonight -- as the water continued to creep up toward my threshold -- before the seals were tight enough to allow a strong draw.

It seems to be working now, but I'm far from relaxed. Which upsets me.
I didn't want to have to worry about this ever, ever again.

The Ex, however, stays up much later than I do, and he has promised to keep an eye on things as long as he's up. If it keeps the water out for the next hour or so, it should be all right for the rest of the night.

Later this morning, southernselkie and her fiance are coming over to help me with my house. My brother-in-law-to-be is going to patch the holes left over from the plumbing debacle, and my sister, who is one of those people who gets spiritual satisfaction from cleaning and used to work as a house cleaner, is going to help me scrub floors, walls, and cabinets. (And yes, I'm going to pay her for her assistance.) My daughter is going to help clean and help wrangle the fiance's little daughter.

Next Saturday, my friend-from-work comes back to hang the closet doors (which were purchased back in March or April!) and replace the two ugly, mis-matched lights in my kitchen with nicer, matching lights and dimmer switches. My parents (and _storyteller_, if he doesn't have another event he needs to go to) are also going to be here to help the daughter and me finish painting my bedroom.

And then I'm going to call Mr. Handyman to replace my toilet and re-tile my bathroom floor, and re-do the bathroom walls which need re-patching and sanding and painting.

And then I'm going to have a party!

This otherwise contentless LJ post is to inform you that this otherwise contentless LJ post is being written in

The Yellow Room!


More writing in The Yellow Room is expected to follow.


We now return you to your regularly scheduled friends page.

After many months of procrastinating due to my perception that I didn't have the funds to comfortably cover the expense, my friend, my daughter and I went to Home Depot last night and purchased the final elements for my new closet: the trim and -- most importantly -- the doors. We also bought the light fixture to go over my daughter's bed (where he has added a light with a dimmer switch) and I picked up two smaller lamps to help illuminate my cave. Grand total was $232 dollars -- $50 of which was the lamps.

He's coming back on Monday to do the installation, which shouldn't take long, and then I'm calling a professional painter to finish painting the room and paint the trim (which is primed, but needs a final coat).

Hopefully, there will be pictures to post early next week of the finished closet.

A few days ago, I wrote that my spiritual observance for Eastertide was riding with the re-alignment of Water and Earth in my house, as our plumbing, sewer, floors, ceilings and walls were being worked on.

Today the Ex's SO told me that the furnace repairman said that our 14 year-old gas furnace needs to be replaced.

It seems that Fire and Air are also getting into the act.

We are going to be so much more balanced when this is over.


(At least, that's what I keep repeating to myself.....)

I am angry tonight.

I can live with the fact that there are holes in my ceiling.

I can cope with the fact that there are no lights in my bathroom.

I can even deal with the fact that there is still only one working toilet in the house.

What I'm angry about is my definite impression that no one who has been working in my house the last few days -- not the plumber, her assistant, my Ex-husband, or his brother-in-law -- seems to have paid more than cursory attention to the fact that someone lives here.

No drop cloths were spread. Nothing was covered to protect it from the dust of ground sheetrock. There are tools stacked around seemingly at random. Thick coats of dust are everywhere. There are bags of debris in various places.

They shut the door to the bedroom after they worked there. They left my living room door shut. They left the yellow room door shut. My Ex moved the piles of old pipe from where the plumber had dumped them in my stairway.

They did take down a couple of pictures. They did move a few things. But overall, they just have acted like this was a construction site, not my home.

And tonight, I am furiously angry, and I don't know what to do with it. Lashing out at the Ex and his BIL at this time of night, when they've been working hard all day doesn't seem like a constructive act, not when I've been in and out of the house over the past three days, and not said anything. I guess I was somehwat in denial.

My daughter is really stressed out, and this dust isn't doing anything for her allergies.

I want to be at peace in my own home.

And even as I write that, I think about how many people in this world are homeless, or whose homes are threatened by far worse than an improvement project run amuck, or have greater reason to feel anger than dust everywhere.

But I am still angry.

Fortunately, his only injury was a large, bloody scrape on his arm.

I have a strip 18" wide cut from my kitchen ceiling, running from the entry to the wall.

There are two holes in my bedroom ceiling.

Plus the aforementioned unplanned hole in my bathroom ceiling.

My small house is full of plumbing materials and scraps of pipe and sheetrock.

The Daughter and I are at my parents' house again tonight.

I have not had a full night's sleep in two days.

I have not had any significant alone/down time in three days.
For an introvert, this is torture, and leads to high stress and grim silences.

Blessings on kateri_thinks and _storyteller_ for their phone calls.

And blessings to all my friends who are celebrating Passover and Maundy Thursday.

My spirituality this week is to find the serenity to ride the tides as Earth and Water are re-aligned in my home.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about being on the jury and seeing, in the two young female lawyers trying the case, one of my own might-have-beens.

Last night, I read a post by queenofhalves about her experience at an academic conference on religion, literature and sexuality. One of the presenters spoke about her conclusion that although the sacred prositute is a widely-discussed figure, and a highly positive one for many people in certain religious communities, such practices are almost certainly mythical. In support she discussed her study of the ancient words used to describe the women so labeled by Western scholars, and some of the ancient texts used to support such a belief.

I just about started screaming. For those of you relatively new to my journal, in 1998 I received high marks on my Masters thesis, in which I made the very same assertions, rejecting the conclusions of everyone else in the academic and popular study of the topic. The ancient texts, while evocative, simply do not provide any evidence of sacred sexual ritual other than the hieros gamos of ancient Sumer, which involved on the the king and (probably) the high priestess (there is nothing which says who the woman was). Everything else is speculation, projection, or being too willing to overlook bias and/or the poetic conventions of the ancient literature.

Don't get me started on Herodotus.

The woman at this conference is evidently about to publish a book on this topic.

I had been wanting to turn my thesis into such a book more than a decade ago, discussing not only the ancient texts, but looking at why the sacred prostitute has become a potent symbolic figure in some spiritual communities today. I even interviewed several self-identified sacred prositutes, a fascinating experience.

Practically knocking my head against my desk, I cried silently last night Why didn't I do it??

This morning, I remembered: because as I was finishing my Masters degree, my marriage was falling apart, and I had a daughter who was not yet three years old. I didn't pursue my Ph.D. for two three reasons. One was that no one had ever talked to me about it, never asked me what I was going to do with my MA, or offered to help me plan, and strategize. I'm not denying that it was my responsibility to start those conversations, but why didn't any of my advisors ever ask me? Isn't that part of their job?

The second reason was that I simply could not face the idea of more years of graduate school, and more debt, as a single mother with a young child.

And, to be honest, the third reason was probably that I considered myself not good enough. I didn't have the confidence in myself or my abilities to take it to the next level.

So instead I ended up separated from my husband and lacking any income except occasional temp jobs until my friend B and his wife offered me a charity job organizing and filing three years' worth of paperwork for their home-based rocket company. And then the company got seed funding for going full-time, and I suddenly found myself working as a marketing director for a direct-to-customer model rocket company, and I was having a wondeful, stimulating, growing time, and academia was a long way away.

And my book never got written.

Until I read queenofhalves's report last night, I was not aware of anyone in the scholarly community who had come to the same conclusions I had. And it's now a decade a later. QoH's comment that I was "ahead of time" is small comfort when I never did anything with it.

That's what my life has been like: I almost never have had any plans. I've been reactive, always moving with the currents, never planning and creating my own path.

Until the last year or so I had no direction. There was nothing I wanted badly enough to actually exert the energy to make it happen. Nothing so important to me that I was willing to take the risks to make it real. Nothing except pursue and marry my now-Ex-husband. Yoiks.

And the plumbers are coming today to do more work in my area of the house, fixing the water pipes in my kitchen and cutting into the ceiling over my bed to put in new pipes, which will remove the accumulated sediment in the old plumbing and restore water pressure.

And if that isn't symbolic -- restoring/releasing the waters around my bed -- I don't know what is.

At my parents' house again last night.

The crew worked on my bathroom yesterday, and didn't finish, and it was still a mess.

However:

I have a new, beautiful pedestal sink in my bathroom, and new plumbing and ring under my toilet.

I also have new sheetrock around the bottom half of most of my bathroom wall where they had to replace it due to water damage.

And my tile now looks nice.

This last is particularly significant. A few years ago, I did my first home improvement efforts in that bathroom. The person at Home Depot in the flooring department told me I didn't need anything but the tiles, so that's all I brought home. No primer. No extra adhesive. No roller. None of the things I found out later were necessary. So after hours of work, I had a new floor. Except that without the extra elements listed above, the tiles didn't stick in place. All my careful measuring and cutting and lining up of edges was for naught. They didn't come out, but they slid, and gaps opened up, and it didn't look good at all.

I was too depressed by my failure to ever get around to fixing it myself -- or hiring someone else to do it.

When we went into the bathroom yesterday evening, I was so distracted by the sink, I didn't notice the floor. My daughter had to point it out to me.

My bathroom still needs a new ceiling (next week sometime), and I have to re-paint (but I had to do that anyway), but I'm going to end up this project with a much nicer bathroom.

This evening, I need to move my bed, because they have to go through my bedroom ceiling to reach the kitchen plumbing upstairs.

And maybe, just maybe (not sure, as I had thought earlier and told kateri_thinks), this plumbing project will open the pipe between my "front door" drain (the one you always hear about overflowing) and the main sewage system. Which would solve my flooding problem.

More dispatches from the home front as events warrant.