Ayn's Multiple World

Brave Soldier ... well Ann type anyway

Good morning … this is me. It’s taken a long time to decide to write this morning, because after waiting a week to think about it … we got back into dreaming about our house. Like 3-4 hours of dreaming this morning and it’s only just after 6 am. Ok, well if you can’t infatuate well, why infatuate at all :)

We looked on the Internet for other houses in Oswego to see how our faired out. On this one site they had 43 homes that were like ours all newly developed for about the same amount we were paying, or a little less. But after walking through all those floor plans, I’m still solidly behind the one I’ve got. The only reservation is that the laundry isn’t on the second floor and that we will want to convert one of the bedrooms to a library loft. Yup yup … No surprises there. Funny, I just stopped to think of my Victorian house in Elgin. That was a big deal too … to convert the one room into a library. It was sooo neat.

It was a T shaped room and in the top of the T toward the door going out to the formal living room there was a nice longish white table from the Garvey’s old farm that I used for the computer and then for the stem part of the T well actually at that point it was more U shaped, but I had shelves on three sides of the walls.

Along the front wall though over the center of the house and downstairs door, there was a high window … under that window I had built a double set of shelving that was more like a desk. And to sit at the desk, you needed to be on a tall bar stool.

There was another major window in the room framing in one side of the long white table. This was a long floor to ceiling window, which had originally been a door out to a little balcony.

I remember we had an awards ceremony and one of my friends who was an alderman’s wife, wrote a poem about me sitting in that big window with the computer typing away. She was an English teacher at a local college so it was a big complement to be thought of as a writer this way. If she hadn’t of said anything I would have never known how visible I was to the passing community, that lone image tickles me to pieces! She made me proud to be me … even though the house was never nearly even close to being finished.

Matter of fact that was part of my thoughts and feelings this morning. I’m building up a separate fantasy in that I can hire my ex-husband to come in and paint so can finally close that loop on never having completed a job in my house. I know he completed jobs for 100’s of other people it’s not that he can’t do it, but it just seemed he wasn’t interested after decorating everyone else’s home to decorate ours.

I thought that was a fringe benefit to marrying a Victorian painter … that someday my Victorian would be painted.

It wasn’t until after we separated that he told me he had been always afraid to paint our house, because he thought then we would not need him and leave. Not sure what to think about that. I guess I would have thought how proud I would have been as I always was to be married to an artist. I think his mother and father did a serious number on him in suggesting that painting was not as worthwhile as if he’d gone into another business like banking. But, that wouldn’t have been the guy I fell in love with. I just couldn’t have guessed how stingy in so many ways he was to become. He didn’t like doing much in the line of spending money, except maybe on poker nights – and there he expected fully to win and often did.

Much of the stuff that comes with a house and dreams was things like finished walls, electric covered, real counters, sanded floors, paint, and then things like clothing and furniture. But, he wasn’t into that. I remember about the time I put the restraining order on him, part of that deal was that he replace the glass in the upstairs back balcony door … It was in the upstairs kitchen area and it hung there for months with broken shards of glass. I couldn’t go up there because we were separated and it was his part of the house, but I remember being so angry thinking that one of my kids was going to go through the house and a shard would come down on him. There was a two other times with ladders left out on the outside of the building while it sat incomplete. One time Joe went up about 3-4 steps and coming down he slipped and broke his leg. He was only 4. The other time Thom and Joe climbed up the 3 stories … couldn’t have been more than 8-10 years old. When Maury came running into the house to get me, I found two younger kids on top of the roof looking to see something special in the sky that night.

My husband was an excellent painter, but a very big jerk. But, as I said before … I would love to have him come in and finish a painting job. I’m already worried he’d rake me over the coals, but in general I know he does very good work and stylistically, he’s the best I’ve ever known. AND, I would not even require for there to be dragons on my ceiling. Yup, yup. Master artist. He painted an oval in a squared off dining room, then on each of the corners he painted one of four – four foot Chinese dragons. I thought there was so much potential for the house to be interesting. But, it never got more interesting than that and various swatches of stains on my bathroom door representing work that would never be finished. I think he could give me some closure here. On the boys side … it would help them feel some sense of closure too.

Ok, ok … you can see where we’ve been drifting here, right? I suppose it’s time to at least get further along so we’re not thinking of the ex.

Before we got back to our house thoughts yesterday, we had been having a splendiferous time. I think I’d told you before, but we went to Indiana with Rich to get his new boat. Wow What a trip! We spent 11-12 hours in the car driving and I never felt it was too much, though I fell asleep the last half hour home, until Rich turned onto our street … don’t know why I woke up then, but I did … I’d been happy almost nearly the entire day. There was a little friction during one part because I had felt I hadn’t talked about the house for over a week and a car ride would be a good time to progress those thoughts. But, Rich was in … hate to use the word here, but in a house stingy thinking mode. I think he’s afraid that if he says anything I will take it to be some kind of promise and get carried away. Likely that would be the case, but I could hold back if he would at least do some dreaming with me. That was the most frustrating part.

But, other than that … we must have discussed hundreds of things, but nothing overly serious or frustrating. I felt the entire trip like I was in the mode of having my inquisitive minds out and they didn’t want to rest or waste a moment of time … we kept looking for interesting corners either in our physical or mental minds. Rich was almost ALLways good company and when I asked him at the end of the day he gave me a little credit for being good company too. I was grateful for the a token.

When we’d gotten out to the boatplace, I found myself not particularly overly impressed with the place, but as to a boat seller … they were fine. I did like that the guy was doing such a thorough job telling Rich about the boat. They walked around it many times as he explained nooks and corners. I thought he had like a zero bar-type personality. Like he could only truly lite-up on Friday or Saturday night. Basically, I thought he was bored and would more likely flip pages on a naked barmaid calendar. But, that’s my idea of that sort of person … doesn’t have to be your idea of him.

He did do his job, but not outstandingly, and in the end when Rich asked about his batteries (there are 5 on the boat), he told Rich they were dead so they through them out, but they did not think that they should have replaced them because they had sold him a boat with 5 batteries. Rich and I talked about it and I think pretty much he wants to write the boss a letter. It’s going to cost him some money to replace them … and I’m sticking with him … The boat comes with 5 batteries and if the two were dead and at least left in the boat he could have traded them in. Just mostly the principle of the thing. You don’t sell someone a $15,000 boat and then quivel with an area you are fundamentally incorrect with. He also didn’t go out of his way when Rich asked for the manuals. He didn’t feel responsible at all.

Someone had told him go out and show the customer the boat … and that’s all he was going to do.

I also didn’t like the three ladies we ran into inside the place who did various things. First they were dressed kind of scaggy, like they were polished up and teased out to go out to the bars without consideration for it being a regular week day at work. Like the one wore a fluffy black scarf and sweater, but the sweat was short and was showing of her back. I don’t think that kind of thing looks very practical. If you are cold enough to wear a scarf, but on a sweater that covers your back! Also she had no personality and did not know her job well. She had to wait around to get instructions on how to apply the paperwork, and she looked like she had trouble counting to $900. Then when she counted the money she left it carelessly about.

Her co-worker working with her directly looked just as nasty as the first, plus the two of them smoked in the office. The third woman up front was more in charge, but she couldn’t even get off her bottom-butt to talk to the customer, she sat at her desk and talked over the space of the room not offering the customer a handshake or a chair while waiting. Just bad attitude people in general. I’m thinking that the boat is going to be fine. It looks good, but mostly that’s because it seems new enough not to have needed any major work from these people. I wouldn’t trust them to walk my cat though. I mean someone owned the business who obviously had great wealth and customer savvy, just I don’t think there was a real talent pool from this size town and location to hire from.

Wow … I didn’t think I had that bad an opinion, but I guess I do. Nothing I would like to take back here. There was one redeeming factor. One of the other customers had brought with them a pretty wild lab puppy about 10 months old. He came in and ran through the place several times asking for pets and kisses. I liked that part.

Good dog. Reminded me how nice it was to be in a dog world. The woman, who was taking care of us, explained she had about 4 dogs and big litter of puppies. Just as I’d figured … she probably had some property and no common sense. For the most part I think if you own more than one or two animals … someone is getting ignored.

You lose the intimacy. Blah!

Ok we’re back … we did a few things like we took medicine and found ourselves back at the house. We went through all the pictures that we’d posted about a week ago.

You know the ones where we walk through the majority of the house. Man … but there is just so much more there.

Hmm, testing something. Just ran off on a fluke. I found a program that’s supposed to help the journaling effort. It will also supposedly post to blogger. There’s a free test of 45 days … it seems stuck in posting though … not sure if there’d be any advantage to changing my style at this point in the game, but it’s worth a little effort. It has templates supposedly that will assist in getting your story down. I haven’t ever done a whole lot on the past as in memoirs. Periodically like earlier this morning I wrote a bit on the ex, but these things come seldom with long spaces in-between. Right now my screen has frozen from the Internet … That’s not a good sign … who is going to risk all if it can’t perform the most basic functions. The program is only $40 though so not sure how much to expect. I’d found it in making a first attempt at finding someone to ghost-write for me. Yup, yup … thinking again about somehow publishing our story. Gotta make those housing options come to life Hehehe.

WooHOO. It worked fine the second time.

Ok … we’ll need to get a grasp on that. It seems like it may have use, but I’m not sure of the real value. It has some templates abilities which might work fine, but at first glance it is set-up for someone who really doesn’t already do a lot of journaling. For $39.95 it might be fun to have around and fill-in some of the extra detail like things. It gives some suggestions and might have a web site that fills in some more ideas. I don’t mind adding to our general story, though I don’t want to get stuck in just that framework. In some ways it operates similarly to One-Note, just a little bit more structured. We’ll see. I have to keep in mind that I’m going to want to save the totality of my work in Word and not a program per-se.

I want to give it continuity like we’re reading a book.

Hmm, they’ve got a couple neat things here – like categories … It presuggests links like tags to pull up information … that might be useful for something though now it seems like work. They have that kind of option on Blogger too, but for the time being … it’s REALLY a lot of work and would have been something better started right away … Now I’d have to read through 5 years of information to make use of it. I have to keep in mind that MS Word has the “find” function so that is really as good as a link though it doesn’t categorize things as well – mainly keep the tags your looking for … this program lists stuff like on a google search page – there is a brief line of what your tag just found and then a hot link back to whichever document it came from.

The programs also got tags along the top like OneNote and from there there’s a topic tree to the side with options to categorize things by either date or movable subject. That could be useful for tracking several similar packages. I’m a little disappointed we have not used continued OneNote more efficiently, but I don’t have it consistently now on all my computers. That can goof you up. Hmm, it includes some things that are more Outlook orientated like addresses timers and to-do lists.

Hmm, testing it now … we set a note … it seems to be leaving a note on top of the entry. It’s supposed to be on the calendar too. That would be helpful in adding an outline that progresses throughout like leaving notes to get back to.

Pswhoo … ok, you know me and shopping. I’m more sold on it before than now, but now I have to put it away because it’s gotten up to $89 with all the extra features, yeah one of those things. I also know though that I wanted to get money together to give kids Christmas presents this year. I don’t think I can do both at the same time and I have the journal anyway for 45 days free trial. That will buy ME some time. Had to really check it over though before I left out … so I knew what I was getting into. I’m pretty put off that I don’t have OneNote and I think I don’t have it on both computers. One of the things I liked about it most was the tabs, but I’ve not used the program for a while. I also liked the ability to move things anywhere on the screen, but usually it had to stay there, because I didn’t really find the program very print friendly.

This program you can’t put your curser anywhere and it has sub-topics as many as you want instead of pages on the right side. I liked the format of One-note better, but at this point, I would have to pay to get something and then I’d wonder if I could put it on both computers. I thought I’ve paid for it several times before … it’s one of those Microsoft things good AND bad … mostly product is usually good cost and support is high!

Ok, back for just a moment we’re checking out a couple things on Outlook and Accounting 2007 from Microsoft. We’d thought if we were going to think about a business journal … might as well check with our own high-tech system. Who knows?

Maybe we could be inspired as a business to even do our bills?

WoW! Ok, let’s not get excited one thing at a time. I saw a banking function going to check that out. If I could integrate accounting AND banking … then that be hard to pass up. BRB

posted by Ann Marie @ 12/15/2008 06:50:00 AM Comments: 0