Here are some things I don't think I've posted before.
This is my dog. She's a purebred red and white border collie. She's insanely smart, a trait she uses to mercilessly manipulate my husband. I adopted her when I was at my lowest. I thought I was going to kill myself, but I wanted my husband to have something to buffer him from the shock. She has one blue eye and one brown eye.
We bought our house in 2004. It was a bit of a fixer-upper. The woman who lived here before us gave up on everything. She had bipolar disorder and she committed suicide in the house. My husband still thinks we should have had a shaman come in and sage away the bad energy. We still haven't painted or replaced the missing baseboards, but we've done a lot of other work. The latest project: Interior doors. They still have to be stained. The color will be a translucent pearl so they'll be light but the grain will show through.
You read about my cat Sophie, but I rarely mention her nemesis, Jake. He's big, he's mean, he's kept in line by the border collie.
I love orchids, and right now, all of mine are in bloom. Here is the inside of a phaelenopsis in my kitchen.
Here is a necklace I have named "resentment." Having seen both my pdoc and tdoc this week, (yes, along with the gynecologist, a lawyer, and the ultrasound tech), I can now process this. My mother demands that I make jewelry for her friends. Despite the fact that I've been feeling like crap, she saw no reason for that to stop me from doing her bidding. Really, I need a whole separate blog to deal with my mother-related shit. More on her later. I made the necklace and seethed through the whole process. I doubt she will pay me for it, even though she promised she would. Ha!
Here's another orchid.
6 comments:
Wow.
The dog is stunningly gorgeous! And I love orchids. I would like to grow something, but there isn't enough light in this house. You really make some very nice jewelry. I have seen other pictures with your stuff in them. I wonder, do you sell them? I would love to find a craft or something.
Are you serious about this? "The woman who lived here before us gave up on everything. She had bipolar disorder and she committed suicide in the house." Wow, if you were. Had you already been diagnosed when you bought the house?
Yes, I'm serious about the house. I had been recently diagnosed when we bought the house--our first. We had to piece the story together. It started with the disclosure law that required the agent to tell us the owner (who was 45) had died in the house. Neighbors alluded to what happened, and there was damage where the police had to break in. The woman's ex-boyfriend stopped by to return a key and he gave us more details and allusions without coming out and just saying what happened.
A few weeks after we moved in, I found a prescription script that had fallen into a gap behind a kitchen cabinet. It was about six months old. It was for a mood stabilizer and had been written by the very same psychiatrist I was now seeing. (spooky)
She killed herself in April, the month with the highest suicide rate nationally. We bought the house in June.
When I went on to get really, really sick, my husband kept saying, "It's this house. I'm telling you, it's this house."
That is the super-express short version of this story.
No, I don't sell my jewelry. I started making jewelry about a year ago, as a form of occupational and emotional therapy. Like art therapy with the benefit of helping my brain and my hands communicate with eaach other more effectively. Lithium had a fairly severe effect on my fine motor skills.
When I first started, it seemed like everyone I knew just assumed I would make soomething for them if they simply asked. When I said, no, they immediately offered to pay. I still said 'no,' with the reasoning that then it wouldn't be a hobby. I would be held responsible for quality control, adjustments, custom requests about colors and materials, deadlines--things that would take the spontaneity and joy out of it.
What has continued to trouble me is that with some people, including my mother, there is a sense of assumed entitlement, like, "your unwillingness doesn't apply to me. I'm more special than other people who ask."
I've beeen taken aback by those people to whom I flat-out refuse, and they keep pushing the issue anyway, like my reasons are frivolous and my available time is infinite(they have no idea how long it takes).
It isn't therapy if it's a job. I can sit at the table and play with beads for hours and never make anything. It's very Zen.
I can relate to your husband saying it's the house. Houses are strange. I'm not sure I put any real stock in things such as numerology, but since looking at some basic principles behind it recently, I kinda went, "Hmmmm..."
Supposedly, a person can find out where the focus of energy in a home will be by the house number. Add up the digits in the house number: 723 Oak is:
7 + 2 + 3 = 12
Then take the total:
1 + 2 = 3
3 = creativity
So 723 Oak is a creative place.
Here's the weird thing:
My old house across town where I lived before this is a three house. I told my husband that I didn't think I wanted any more children. I changed my mind after we lived there for a couple of years and we had one more. On the second try! I started writing again there. This time it was novels instead of poems and short stories. I also redid nearly the whole place. The tenant it attacted? She's pregnant! Isn't that odd?
We moved here. I had the mother of all flashbacks that started telling me the story of my life. This house? It's a seven house. House of knowledge.
What number is your house, May?
My house is a 2.
Without giving too much personal information away, our inside joke is that, oddly enough, our house number is also the police code for "mentally disturbed person" or police "psych hold." True.
According to a Feng Shui book that I have, a two house is about love relationships. It seems that a house like yours will support your efforts at a close relationship with your spouse and help bring you closer together. Cool!
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