Temporary Home

Gru, cue "I'm Having a Bad, Bad Day" song.

Most of our days are good, as good as they can be considering our current situation. Most days we can deal with what we've been given. Most days I wake up and thank the Lord for the day, for the sunshine, for my kids, my husband, the roof over my head and the food on our plates. I am sincerely thankful. And even on the days that I'm frustrated I'm still thankful. Every single day we have little challenges that present themselves that would not otherwise present themselves if we were living our "normal" life. Most days I can roll with the punches and I can manage all the little hiccups that come our way. These are the "this situation stinks, but we're gonna be okay, we can deal with this" days. Then there are days that I think "this sucks. this really truly sucks." I don't even like that word. Seems like a swear word to me, so we'll call these the " TRS days. I can't find my tennis shoes, the boys can't find their socks, I'm out of paper towel, the humidifiers need to be filled again, this sucks." This is harder than it should be, this is not fair. This is a TRS day.

Then there are days that totally complete suck and I'm angry about it. The no good very bad day, kinda day...I call those the TFS days. The F stands for a really bad word that I don't even say, but the weight of the word gives you the sense for how rough those days are. Today was a TFS day. Ughhhh. This stinks, this isn't fair, I liked my life the way it was, I wanna go home, I'm so frustrated I wanna hit a punching bag, you get the idea.

To give you some background on our house and to give you and idea of our daily challenges I will include the following..The furnace at our rental house is very temperamental. You put a filter with any sort of filtering ability in it and the thing turns off. Totally off. That doesn't fly with this polar vortex that we're living under.. Our landlord has been super nice and he's been great to try to find a filter that eliminates more dust and allergens, but the furnace just can't take it. So, we choose to live in a house that is simultaneously warm, cold and dusty. The house is like swimming through a lake. Some rooms are warm and toasty, but if you wade a few feet the next room is cold. If you wade further you'll find a warm spot, a little farther you will find another cold spot. We have to crank up the furnace to try to warm the coldest rooms while we practically sweat in others. Some of us are sleeping with lots and lots of blankets on in heavy jammies and others are sleeping with minimal blankets and light weight jammies. Welcome to the lake, folks.. This house is somewhat of an H shape. Two long sides connected by two doorways. The kitchen side houses the furnace so that side is warm. The opposite side of the house isn't as warm. I try to set up fans to push the air from the kitchen side into the living room side to even out the temps. The frustration with the fans is that we really don't have space to spare for them to be sitting out nor do we have extra outlets to use, so we have to unplug that thing to plug in this thing and we have to move the fans to walk past them.

Speaking of plug ins...some work as they should. Some outlets are wired to the light switch so that you can plug a lamp into them and use that as your light for the room. However, you cannot plug anything else into that outlet unless you're okay with the things on that outlet turning on and off with the flip of a switch. Then we have other outlets that are worn out and if you so much as breath on them wrong the plug you have inserted in will fall out. So, if I do the math we have....one to two outlets per room that work on a consistent basis.

And speaking of consistency, we have a neighbor who consistently parks her car on the side of the street at the very corner of our driveway. Honestly there's nowhere else for her to park. After living here for nearly eight weeks we realize her parents work days and she works second shift and they have a one (possibly two) car driveway. They have to do the drive way dance....The annoying thing is that their driveway dance forces our driveway dance. As we descend our steep driveway we have to watch for her bumper so that we don't hit it as we back up. That's not always easily done on snowy, icy pavement.

Not only do we do the driveway dance,we have to do the bathroom dance...No, no. No potty training going on here. It's not that kind of bathroom dance. We have to take turns using the bathroom. Cause not only do we have one small bathroom, but our small bathroom has two doors. Ya, I can stand in the middle of the bathroom, stretch out my arms and close both doors simultaneously. So, you hardly ever get any privacy when you need to take a shower, go potty, brush your teeth, dry your hair..Not to mention the bathroom is right next to the furnace so it's hotter than the dickens...I don't like to dry my hair in there because it's so hot, so I try to dry my hair in one of the colder rooms, but then the boys complain that the hair dryer is too loud. Ughh!!

And speaking of hot....I haven't been able to cook a really good meal yet because my oven doesn't operate on a temperature that I am used to. It's too hot...or is it too cold?? I can't figure it out.. I enjoyed baking and cooking when we were living in our other house. I need to do a lot of home made meals so that I can stay on track with my gluten free, dairy free needs, but this oven and stove have proven to make that more of a challenge that it already is. And then there's my crock pot..I had myself all geared up and excited to make use of my crock pot, but it's been shotty too. The other day Mom put a roast in the crock pot for us (Thanks again, Mom). I got home and checked on it. One side of the roast was 165 degrees the other was 145. Same roast, same crock pot, same thickness. Bad crock pot.

The boys and I have attempted several baking recipes, but in order to have the space for us to bake I have to unplug the microwave and set it on the kitchen table (if it doesn't have toys and papers on it). I also have to be sure to move or clean the dishes before baking to free up counter space. I just want to bake! I want to bake on my island in my kitchen without having to move my appliances and do the dishes in advance.

Keeping up with the dishes in another story. We produce dirty dishes like it's our job. We've reduced the number of dishes we clean by using some paper products, but we still have lots of dirty pots and pans....Side note. I feel bad about using more paper and disposable products. I use to say a little apology inside my  head to Mother Nature at each meal because we are using so many paper plates and plastic utensils, but it is Mother Nature who put us in the position!! . Anyway. Back to the dirty dishes. As I have mentioned before, I do the dishes by hand from time to time, but most of the time I don't have time or energy at the end of the day to dive into that chore. So, the idea is to keep an empty  bin in the kitchen and set our dirty dishes in it as we go. Once the bin is full I take it to our other house and let the dishwasher do the work for me. When the dishes are clean, I wipe out the bin and put the now clean dishes in said bin and haul them home. This is a great idea and it's working, but most of the time, when I reach down to put a dirty dish in the dirty dish box I realize the clean dishes in the bin haven't been put away yet...not to mention the fact that we have to shift the dirty dish box around the kitchen all day to get to our dresser drawers.

Yes, we have a dresser in our kitchen. It's actually quite handy. You might try it. ;)
The dresser serves as a little bit of extra "counter" space, it houses office supplies, plastic leftover containers and winter accessories. Sounds like an odd mixture of things to be housed in one place, but it works..after you move the dirty dish bin outta the way that is.

Putting things away is a theme that carries on and on and on throughout the day. We don't have any extra space for anything. The kids have to put their toys  away so I have space to exercise in the living room. "Please play in your rooms while I exercise so I don't accidentally run into you."
" Please pick up the Legos off your floor in your room so you space to play"
" Please put your clothes away so we can put the clothes basket in your closet so you can walk in your room." We can't leave more than two laundry baskets by the washing machine or we won't be able to walk in the back door. We can't leave shoes or coats sitting out or we won't be able to get into the front or back door without tripping.

We moved our black shelving unit to this house to prevent it from getting damaged during renovations at our other house. It's a great idea in theory, but the unit must have suffered some shifting or damage during the move because the shelves keep sliding off their pegs and dumping their contents onto the shelf below or onto the floor. That happened three times today. Three times! Urghh!!

An interesting note on laundry at this house... You can't run the washing machine while you're taking a shower. Not because the water's temperature will change. Nope. It's because the water from the washing machine will back up into the bath tub and mix with your shower water if both are on at the same time.

We are thankful to have a garage and I'm glad D is letting me park in it (he has to scrape his windows every  morning in this historically cold winter weather), but honest to goodness I think dogs must have been kenneled in the garage. It smells awful! There's gotta be animal hair hidden in the rafters or the walls 'cause it smells like a dog. Dog, dog, dog. The garage has very valuable shelf space, but we can't store anything fabric out there or I'm afraid it will smell like dog. The garage fills up with snow and ice so we have to squeegee it every few days to keep it from turning into a giant slushy mess. Cause you and I both know that slush will make it's way onto our feet and into our house.

Our refrigerator is a standard size fridge or smaller. It's gotta be smaller than standard. We don't have a lot of space for anything extra in it. The freezer is packed to the gills. There's no room for ice cubes in the freezer. I take after my grandma N in that I love my ice in my drinks! the more ice the better for this girl. To solve that problem we buy a large bag of ice and put it in an ice chest in the garage with a scoop in it. If you want your cold beverage you have to step out into the garage to get your scoop of ice. Must be like the olden days.

I typically hang the majority of my clothes out to dry. I have space in the back half bedroom (yes, I said half bedroom, not half bath. Half bedroom is the term used by our landlord. He honestly is a really sweet guy.) However, I cannot hang my clothes to dry in the half bedroom because it's too cold. It is so cold it literally takes two to three days for those clothes to dry completely and that's with a fan blowing on them. I have resorted to putting my drying wrack in the hallway with the fan blowing on it.

With that said. Wanna come over?? Ha!! Should you stop by unannounced you might see my clothes drying in the hallway with a fan on them. But don't trip on the extension cord leading to the fan to the bathroom with two doors with a boy sitting on the  potty with the door open.  Don't trip on my dirty dishes bin and wonder why my microwave is on the kitchen table next to burnt brownies and a science project (we've done lots of those on our six snow days). Don't trip on any little shoes and try to avoid getting stepped on by the exercising lady...Come to the front door and not the garage 'cause you'll go home smelling like dog... Should you stop by unannounced come to the front door and ring the doorbell but give me a minute to move the extra basket of laundry and yellow and black tub of wooden trains. Should you come by unannounced don't be distracted by piles of jet lagged mail (still taking 13-21 days to forward) and crooked wall hangings. For this Mama is doing her best. I'm using pre existing nail holes to hang our pictures to make this place our home. Our temporary home, but our current home nonetheless.

(P.S. I went back and edited the typing and grammar errors and my computer froze up. Just adding to my "Bad, bad day." I better just keep it like it is instead of losing the whole darn thing.)