You enter the dungeon from the upper room, descending into the depths down the darkened stairway. The light from above is your only guide. You wonder how far down it goes, and it just keeps getting darker and darker. Then the light disappears and suddenly you realize that you are all alone at the bottom of the stairs. And you hear whispering in the darkness:
"Are we there yet? Are we there yet?"
No. We aren't there yet. And there's a million miles left to go. So many things left to do, and so very little time left to do it.
That sums up my feelings about this basement. It's not The Neverending Story; it's The Neverending Project.
We started down this path and we work on it as much as we can and it keeps going down and down and down and I'm not seeing much in the way of progress; and meanwhile life happens and other things get in the way and suddenly weeks have gone by and everything looks just as unfinished and miles-to-go as it was before, and depression sets in, and I just want to go back upstairs to my bed and take a long nap.
Because while the basement needs 110% of my attention, there are other things around the house that need my attention. Like the cars that all need brake jobs and rust treatment and tune-ups and random maintenance (and if ignored for too long, they will fall apart at the most inopportune times); like dishwashers that don't work as well as they used to, and refrigerators whose components are failing (fans and icemakes, mostly), and furnaces that need new air filters and air conditioning units whose coils need cleaning; and lawn mowers and weed-eaters that need repair in order to keep the yard looking halfway decent; and yards full of grass and trees with drooping limbs and flowerbeds gone crazy with invasive plants and driveways cracking from winter ice and a back deck that is so dried up that the steps crackle every time someone walks on them.
It doesn't help that my responsibilities at work have been steadily growing ever since the managers discovered that I know my way around a spreadsheet, so instead of hiding down in the lab and playing with the hardware, which had been my earnest hope, I'm being dragged into management meetings to discuss budgets and schedules and metrics, all the things that drove me crazy in previous iterations of my career.
I really don't want a career. I don't want to sit at a desk all day long and keep track of projects and worry that engineers are spending too much money and taking too much time to create technological marvels; I want to sit at a lab station all day flipping switches and wiring cables and connecting widgets to thingamajigs and watching little LEDs flashing in iridescent colors while the gentle strains of Nat King Cole waft through the headphones covering my ears.
Or lie under a car in my garage with a socket wrench in one hand and a flashlight in the other, pulling bad parts off and putting new parts on.
Those are my happy places, the places where I can feel the anxieties and cares of the world falling off my shoulders, where I can breathe free and easy without any tension tightening the muscles around my chest and neck. Where I can just be.
Oh, there is one more happy place.
In my car.
Driving.
::
Speaking of driving, our latest driver finally got her official license in the mail.
Yeah. She looks thrilled, doesn't she? She'd be more thrilled if she actually had a car of her own to drive. But Ruby (the red Subaru) isn't feeling quite up to snuff lately, and has been sequestered in the garage for a while to undergo front drive-axle surgery. And her annual brake-check. And she's been complaining of a coolant leak as well, which has been tracked to the Idle Air Control Valve (IACV).
Oh, well, maybe when the basement gets done, I'll finally have time to take care of all those little issues, and Mary will have her own car to drive!
::
Meanwhile, one of the weirdest things we've done during this little basement project is moving the door which used to be at the top of the basement stairs, down to the closet under the stairs. Because we wanted to put the glass door at the top of the stairs.
"Are we there yet? Are we there yet?"
No. We aren't there yet. And there's a million miles left to go. So many things left to do, and so very little time left to do it.
That sums up my feelings about this basement. It's not The Neverending Story; it's The Neverending Project.
We started down this path and we work on it as much as we can and it keeps going down and down and down and I'm not seeing much in the way of progress; and meanwhile life happens and other things get in the way and suddenly weeks have gone by and everything looks just as unfinished and miles-to-go as it was before, and depression sets in, and I just want to go back upstairs to my bed and take a long nap.
Because while the basement needs 110% of my attention, there are other things around the house that need my attention. Like the cars that all need brake jobs and rust treatment and tune-ups and random maintenance (and if ignored for too long, they will fall apart at the most inopportune times); like dishwashers that don't work as well as they used to, and refrigerators whose components are failing (fans and icemakes, mostly), and furnaces that need new air filters and air conditioning units whose coils need cleaning; and lawn mowers and weed-eaters that need repair in order to keep the yard looking halfway decent; and yards full of grass and trees with drooping limbs and flowerbeds gone crazy with invasive plants and driveways cracking from winter ice and a back deck that is so dried up that the steps crackle every time someone walks on them.
It doesn't help that my responsibilities at work have been steadily growing ever since the managers discovered that I know my way around a spreadsheet, so instead of hiding down in the lab and playing with the hardware, which had been my earnest hope, I'm being dragged into management meetings to discuss budgets and schedules and metrics, all the things that drove me crazy in previous iterations of my career.
I really don't want a career. I don't want to sit at a desk all day long and keep track of projects and worry that engineers are spending too much money and taking too much time to create technological marvels; I want to sit at a lab station all day flipping switches and wiring cables and connecting widgets to thingamajigs and watching little LEDs flashing in iridescent colors while the gentle strains of Nat King Cole waft through the headphones covering my ears.
Or lie under a car in my garage with a socket wrench in one hand and a flashlight in the other, pulling bad parts off and putting new parts on.
Those are my happy places, the places where I can feel the anxieties and cares of the world falling off my shoulders, where I can breathe free and easy without any tension tightening the muscles around my chest and neck. Where I can just be.
Oh, there is one more happy place.
In my car.
Driving.
::
Speaking of driving, our latest driver finally got her official license in the mail.
 |
| Mary's Official License! |
Yeah. She looks thrilled, doesn't she? She'd be more thrilled if she actually had a car of her own to drive. But Ruby (the red Subaru) isn't feeling quite up to snuff lately, and has been sequestered in the garage for a while to undergo front drive-axle surgery. And her annual brake-check. And she's been complaining of a coolant leak as well, which has been tracked to the Idle Air Control Valve (IACV).
Oh, well, maybe when the basement gets done, I'll finally have time to take care of all those little issues, and Mary will have her own car to drive!
::
Meanwhile, one of the weirdest things we've done during this little basement project is moving the door which used to be at the top of the basement stairs, down to the closet under the stairs. Because we wanted to put the glass door at the top of the stairs.
That's all well and good, but this particular old door is very special ... because it is the door where we marked the kids' heights every year.
You can't see it from this picture, but this door contains marks on it for nearly all of the twelve years we've living here in Grand Rapids, marks to indicate each child's height as they got taller and taller (and we got shorter and shorter).
Now this door resides downstairs in the basement, reduced from its former glory to a mere closet status.
But it is the Door to the Closet Under the Stairs. Who knows what mysteries lie beyond that door?
Only the grandchildren will ever know...
2 comments:
You were smart to put the height markings on a door. We put them on a wall. Short of cutting out the sheetrock, there is no way to preserve it. But it won't be too much of a loss when we do have to paint over it, because while I marked the kids' height regularly, I didn't bother to label which kid or the dates. So, they're kind of useless, right?
Somewhere I have a couple of growth charts labeled with some of their measurements. They pretty much stayed on the same growth curve.
Our never-ending story is the endless battle to de-clutter. Today we worked on the garage. We now have space for a freezer, which is good, because I ordered one (yay for sales!) and it was delivered today. Which is really good, because my prickly pear fruit is about ripe, and needs to be frozen before I turn it into jelly, and there is no room in my kitchen freezer. So, Brendon hung up the two bikes and we threw away a bunch of old stuff and made a pile of other stuff to throw out when the trash can gets empty again. And now even with the freezer in place, we can not only park my car in the garage, but open every one of its doors plus the hatch back while the garage door is closed.
But then I go upstairs and see the imossible disaster that is my bedroom/office/library/sitting room/storage area for 17 years worth of garbage.
:-(
We put our marks on the frame of the kitchen entryway, which also non-portable. Dad had the right idea, putting the marks on a stick.
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