Summer Recap

So long time no post.  We've been traveling for my work, and busy with Hannah, and she's started sleeping through the night (yay) but winds up getting up at around 6 most mornings (not yay).  Which means that I kind of have to rethink my whole sleep schedule, getting up early to write, how I'm going to fit in The Artist's Way etc.  Our babysitter likes to talk about how she "puzzles" things together, and that's what I'm trying to do.

I was thinking back on the summer, and how it didn't work out at all the way I'd planned.  I had planned to go to Sweden for my best friend's wedding, and North Carolina for my stepbrother's wedding.  Neither of those things happened.  Instead, the following happened.

Memorial Day Weekend: the Saturday morning of Memorial Day Weekend I went to the doctor and got meds for my bipolar disorder.  I took them that Saturday night, felt like a freight train hit me, and slept for 13 hours without waking up once.

Hannah moved into her own room Memorial Day Weekend as well.  It was a big weekend all around.

The week after that I was in New York for BookExpo where I met a lot of publishers, took lots of long walks through the city, revisited some of my old haunts, and ate a lot of Pret a Manger sandwiches.

In mid-June the shit hit the fan with our neighbor when he came pounding up our steps swearing at us (he has some anger issues).  We should have called the cops for disorderly conduct, but we were too shellshocked.  Next day the County comes out and says that:
- we have to tear down the cat shed
- we have to get an inspector out about the home office
- we need to rehome half our cats.

That night I escaped to Seattle for the launch of the Amazon Fire phone and met Jeff Bezos the next day.

When I got home we decided that we were moving back to Pennsylvania by the next summer.  We would swing seriously into Moving Mode, which meant getting rid of stuff, fixing up the house, and yes, rehoming our cats.  I stopped feeling safe in our home thanks for the asshole next door, who also started coming up more often.  Before The Incident we'd seen him twice in 7 years.  Now he's up like every week.

Ok, so we spent tons of time and energy calling cat places and trying to find homes for older cats, which is a tough sell.

Then I went to Vegas for ALA Annual.  It was hot.  That's all I can say about that.  Oh, and the Bellagio fountain show is amazing.

We started Mommy & Me swim lessons the last week in June.  Hannah had a blast with the kids in the water, and even went off the diving board.

By the 4th of July we had homes for the cats lined up, and we were delivering them.  J took down the cat shed, but it took a week because he was doing it carefully since we might wind up reassembling it in our driveway.

The inspector comes in mid July and says that J has to tear down the home office, and has 2 weeks to do so.

I work part time so he has time to disassemble, and Hannah and I spend a lot of time together in the afternoons.

We had our first yard sale on August 2, and made around $70, and got rid of 2 carloads of crap.

The home office was mostly torn down by her birthday, on August 7.  Which she spent in the ER with strep throat.  A 15 hour overnight ER visit.  I'm still recovering from that.

Sometime in there I went up to San Mateo and got pissed off at the summertime tourists clogging up the airport.

After all this, the idea of going to Sweden - just the idea of it - made me nauseated.  I just couldn't do it.  So I bailed on my best friend and his wedding.  So sad.  I also bailed on my stepbrother's wedding.  Too many people got married in August.

Hannah took her first steps August 9.  She was really seriously walking by around the 19th.  Now she's a pro.

This past week we were up in Santa Clara for a big event I do there each year.  The drive through the Central Valley with an antsy 1 year old who can walk was pretty rough.  I had told my boss back in mid July that I was moving, and was going to be working for myself.  I might still stick around with my current job on a consultant/contract basis (and in fact I think it makes sense for me to do so, at least for a year or two), but I'm also hustling for other work next year, and will be going to the Pa Library Association meeting at the end of September.

And today, to nicely wrap up the end of summer in a neat little package, we had our second yard sale and made around $250.  I sold the Asus tablet I bought in 2011 at Best Buy in Upland.  J sold his first guitar.  We're seriously getting rid of everything.  It's awesome and freeing and amazing.

This summer I also started practicing daily meditation, daily writing, and using the loseit app.  I'm within 7 pounds of my pre-pregnancy weight.  I walk around the lake at least 4-5 days a week, with smaller walks the rest of the days.  It's great to start feeling healthy again.  I'm fairly well adjusted to my meds - they don't make me feel like I was hit by a freight train anymore, though I do still need 8 hours of sleep each night to not feel like death.

Hannah is on a good schedule, and I get time in the evenings to myself these days.  Also the mornings, if I can drag my ass out of bed early enough.  Now that it's getting light so much later, the 5:45 alarm seems even more like a medieval torture instrument.

And I've read a ton of books on Oyster.  I heart Oyster.

So that's where we are.  Nothing went as expected, but that's kind of how life goes, and I'm really excited about the future.  Working for myself, however that will go.  Moving back home (which sort of fills me with dread, but is also exciting at the same time - plus J is really excited, so it's great to see him like that).  Really committing to a number of big changes, which I think will be for the best for our family, and for Hannah.  It's been a crazy summer!

Last year, J built a gorgeous home office for me.  We were expecting Hannah, I needed a place to work, and he wanted a building project.  So he leveled out a 12x16 area in the back yard, which took a lot of digging, concrete and bricks to make a retainer wall (since our backyard is a huge hill, so the home office is on much higher ground than our house), and got to work.  We got giant windows from a guy in Fresno.  We got floors at Ikea.  The whole thing was, and is, an awesome space to work.  It looks out over the trees, and in the winter when it snowed, it was so cozy up there, watching the world turn white.  Plus, as an added bonus, we put cats up there once Hannah was born.

Everything was great.

Except.

We didn't get a permit for it.


No big deal, everyone told us.  You don't need to permit that.  If you ever sell the house, they'll just permit it then.  The son of the guy who owns the house next to ours (and is rarely there - it's a vacation home for him, and we've seen him twice in 7 years), and is a contractor, told us that as long as we got along with our neighbors, it was fine.

So apparently in April, the owner wanted a home equity loan on the house, and sent an assessor up, unbeknownst to anyone.  We still had construction debris in his driveway (again, the son told us it was ok), and our Jeep was parked there, and the home office violated setback laws.

The guy calls the County, and they came out in mid June.  The code enforcement officer saw how many cats we had, also a no no.  Plus, the cat house Jonathan built in 2011, on our deck (which was there when we bought the house) is apparently on his property.

We were given 30 days to tear down the cat house, rehome 8 cats, and get a building inspector out to see what to do about the home office.  So we spent most of the next three weeks frantically finding homes for all the cats (successfully, thanks to a wonderful cat sanctuary on the mountain that was able to take the ones we couldn't find homes for), and then J spent a week tearing down the shed.  We had a brief respite when we sold the Jeep, and were waiting for the inspector to come.

He came today.  And the home office needs to come down in 2 weeks.  Apparently the inspector was heartbroken telling us.  Told Jonathan it was a gorgeous building,   And we could have tried to drag it out, but then he probably would have made a giant fuss, and forced a lien on our house.  We just want it to be over with, so we're tearing it down.  Well, Jonathan is.  I'll be working part time the rest of the week so that he can have the afternoons free to deconstruct.

It was strange, going up there today while Hannah was napping.  All the furniture was out, and he was ripping up the floors.  When I was pregnant, I used to sit there with him and read while watching him build.  The night before we had Hannah, I was up there reading magazines on my ipad, and I posted on facebook that I was craving whoopie pies.

Now it's deja vu all over again, only I'm not pregnant, and the house is coming down, not going up.

Lessons Learned:
1) get a permit on everything.  It's not worth it to try to cheapen out and risk having to tear down your work.
2) see above.
3) even if your neighbor is an asshole, if you have a permit, they can't do anything.
4) move away from the assholes

So we're taking this all as a big sign that it's time to move back to Pennsylvania.  It's been on our minds for a while, but after this, I just feel like the rug got pulled out of us so suddenly, and I don't feel safe here anymore.  The neighbor was up the day before the County came, and he stormed up our steps ranting and swearing, and called J a "fucking degenerate" while I was feeding Hannah 3 feet away.  Classy.  Oh, and he's a licensed firearms dealer.  Good times.  Out of nowhere, we had to get rid of our cats under pressure of them being taken away by animal control, and pieces of our home were coming down.

I'm officially over this mountain, and California in general.  We're going back to PA next year.  Where there's history.  And people don't drive quite as crazy.  Now we're in Full Speed Ahead on this move.  Doing it with a toddler is going to be interesting.  The fun is starting with pulling down this building, and on Saturday I have a table at a local flea market, where we're starting to get rid of our stuff.  I've become much more ruthless.  "Do I really want this," has become "do I want to move this across the country."  Much easier to say no to that.