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Thursday, May 27, 2004

things I love and hate

I've been thinking about one particular question from that survey two days ago, and as a reward to myself for actually making my bed and picking up the hairbrush(es) next to my desk, I am allowing myself to sit down and type a bit about the thoughts I've been thinking.

The question was, "What's one thing that you both love and hate?" My answer at the time was "Keeping house", which is still true, but I've thought of a few other things that would also answer the question.

• My husband's job. It's a great, steady job that pays well with good benefits. It allows us to have a place to live in and food to eat, even allows me to stay home and raise the kids and homeschool and all that. And it's easier on him physically, and more of a challenge mentally, than his previous career in heavy equipment maintenance. So where's the hatred come in? Well, they're in the middle of the project from hell right now. The self-imposed timeframe his boss (who is also his friend and the only other person working in his department right now) had for it has passed, mostly because the boss was totally insane to think they could possibly get it done in the amount of time he slated for it (the logistics are staggering), especially considering all the man-of-the-hour heroic stuff he wants to do to help out other departments, and his absolute refusal to inconvenience other departments in the slightest (and the inconvenience would indeed be slight) by expecting them to partake of his department's services on his department's schedule. This project is sucking the life out of my husband. He comes home exhausted and stressed out. He's tired all the time but doesn't sleep well. And even under other circumstances, without the bazillion-dollar project, the conflict between the boss's idea of the importance of a day job (the boss has actually been heard to say that a job is more important than a family because the family could leave you but the job never will), and T's, causes stress and conflicts. It is to the point where I have actually had heretical thoughts (and to a woman whose life goal was to be a stay-at-home homeschooling mom, they ARE heretical) about putting the kids in a private school so that I could whip through a few years of nursing school (which two things we would afford how?) so that T could then quit and look for something else while I worked. But realistically that's not going to happen. So. I just hope the stress goes back to at least its normal level before long so that my husband can have his happy life back.
  
  
• Living where we live. It's beautiful (most of the year). My family is here. My parents were brought up here so I have that snooty small-town advantage of being a True Local and not just someone who moved here from the big city a mere ten or twenty years ago. The aforementioned stressful-but-better-than-it-could-be job is here and it pays the bills admirably. But it is so, so awfully ridiculously expensive to live in California. Until a few years ago our area was an exception to this, but it's not anymore. And the whole California mindset is so not me. Politically conservative, down-home people (and our area is full of them) are completely disenfranchised in a place where there are two of the biggest metropolitan areas in the U.S., both of which are on the cutting edge of everything shallow and liberal and just basically opposed to the way I want to be able to live. It's getting to the point where I fantasize about living elsewhere. Except I doubt we ever will, because there's too much keeping us here. Oh well; it gives me something to complain about. ;-) And we all need that, don't we.

Wow! I had no idea all that was in there. I feel better now, though. ;-)

In other news, both children have discovered a new obsession, to wit: The Lord of the Rings movies, specifically "The Return of the King", which is the only one they've seen, and which we bought on Tuesday. I thought they would be WAY way too scary for them, and they do leave the room during some of the hairiest parts (like, shudder, the Shelob scenes, and at the beginning with the strangling), but the rest of the movie, they love. They've gone around all day today pretending to be Eowyn or Sam or Frodo or Merry or Pippin, building Minas Tirith out of Legos, building Minas Tirith out of blocks and then bombarding it with blocks. C does quite a decent imitation of Gollum -- but nothing like T's, which actually freaks me out and scares me. At some point I'll have to record him doing it and post it. Very very creepy. [shudder]

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