When The Husband's Away...

I get to go to my happy place.

The paint aisle.

(I can't help it. It's an obsession.)

 

I'm not allowed to paint while The Husband is around. Well, I can do it. But oh my - the whining and complaining. You'd think it was the end.of.the.world. if outlet covers didn't go back on within five minutes of paint drying.

(Pay no attention to the window pulls that have yet to be returned to their rightful home after the painting of the sunroom. It's only been a year and a half.)

So, I have to take advantage of his business trips to pull out the ol' paint chips. And I have to do it kind of on the sly. At least, I have to pretend I'm not doing it and he pretends that he doesn't know that I'm totally going to do it. Last week's exchange:

From: PM@work.com

To: TheHusband@gmail.com

Hi. Question for you. Do you think you could help me move the hutch in the dining room into the bedroom? And maybe the bookshelves? Also, would it be very hard to take down the chandelier?

No reason.

XOXOXO

So this week he's gone for a looooong time - won't see him around these parts until next Sunday. That is SEVEN whole days of pure paint tray and dropcloth bliss. (Shhhh. Don't tell.)

I've never really liked the colour I chose for the main floor. It's too bad - it took me a long time to do. I think, at the time, anything seemed like an improvement.

Can you see the Under the Tuscan Sun fake marbling effect of the previous paint job? Oy. So marbled. So strangely yellowish. It just didn't do it for me.

I went with blue. It's a nice blue. A perfectly good blue. It matches the couches and the wood just fine. And yet....

I didn't love the blue. I didn't even really like the blue. It took me a long time to admit it, but I just never warmed to it. That's not easy to admit when it's brand new. But now it's been almost two years (craziness! We've been living here almost two years!) and it's time to freshen up.

(Or, as The Girl said when we moved the couch and she saw all the dust bunnies underneath, "Mom, there's a lot of dust under here. You should paint more often.")

From your lips to God's ears, darlin'.

It's gonna be good times this week! I've got five cans, a ton of new rollers, and THREE rolls of Frog Tape. And a deadline - oh my, if it still looks like this when someone's plane gets back, it's going to take a LOT of imagination to pretend that there's really still a couch there.

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The Best-Laid Plans

So much for my "I am so awesome and I don't have to shovel my driveway because I don't have to go anywhere" lifestyle.

That ended today when I called home and The Girl answered, sobbing.

"I was running and I was late for the bus and I dropped my phone in the snow and now I can't find it and it's gone foreeeeeevvvvveeeeerrrrrrr!"

Unfortunately, The Girl's school is not within walking distance. And also unfortunately, a day's worth of sun did not miraculously melt the 10 inches of snow on my driveway.

I thought, maybe I can just barrel through. Maybe if I just shovel that bit from the snowplow at the end of the driveway, I'll be good.

But I took one look at it and knew I wouldn't even get out of the garage.

And so, I conquered my fear:

(With a little help from The Husband, who talked me through all the knobs and gears and pull-thingeys and levers.)

It ain't pretty, but it did the job:

(Apologies to the people/cars passing by. I can drive it or I can aim the snow away from you. I chose driving.)

A pathway cleared, we raced off to school to try to capture the last seconds of daylight. Fortunately, Steve Jobs = awesome and the Find iPhone app told us exactly where to go.

But there was a lot of snow. And knowing the area where it is doesn't help much if it's buried.

Double fortunately, the app also includes a "Send sound to phone" feature. So we tried it, and the snow started to ring.

Triple fortunately, the phone was able to pick up the school's wireless network, and it still had 3% power so it was able to call us with its dying breaths.

Lucky girl.

Not one to put my freed car to waste, I decided we needed to celebrate with Noodles and Company. We had our usual:  chicken noodle soup for The Girl and mac'n'cheese for The Boy.

(She's officially vegetarian. So he ate the meat for her.)

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Snug as Bugs

Apparently I am currently living in a reenactment of Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House on the Prairie.

Including the whole "Pa is away from home bringing the furs to Independence to trade for supplies and about to get caught in a blizzard in which he will hole up in a snowbank and eat the Christmas candy to stay alive."

(Except it's more of a "The Husband is away on another trip" type of thing. And I don't believe there is candy involved. But I could be wrong.)

Here is the current state of my driveway:

See that trudged path there? That was made by The Girl on her way to school. (The other path on the front yard is made by our poor mail carrier. We don't have a front walk. So he makes his own, poor guy.)

That path also equals the sum total of snow-clearing that I intend to do this week.

For one, our snowblower is an absolute monster. Crazy heated handles, two stage, throw the snow into the next county - that kind of monster. I can't even move it, much less start it.

But more importantly, I'm not clearing snow because I don't have to. The kids bus to school. I bus to work. I can see the grocery store from my sunroom as I type. The piano teacher comes to our house. My French class meets at the high school a few blocks away. In short, we can live our regular lives and we do not need to start up the ol' Jetta at all.

A happy accident? Not a bit. I've been extremely intentional about building this lifestyle. We don't do extracurricular activities that require driving. We made sure to prioritize living in a walkable area that was close to bus routes. And we reap the benefits, particularly on days like today, when The Husband is away yet again and somehow everyone needs to eat and get to school and try to work.

Even better when "work" looks like this:

There's been a lot of brouhaha on the interwebs lately about working from home. Yeah, I get that there's a temptation to slack. And I also get that there is a lot to be said about hallway conversations and just being part of the general hum that is the office.

However, being able to work from home allows me to skip the two-hour commute that awaited me on a snowy day today. It allows me to easily accommodate a last-minute decision by the school division to start school two hours late. It allows me to feed The Boy breakfast while I call in to a meeting in Minneapolis while I instant-message someone in Bangalore while I help The Girl make her lunch.

(It also allows me to blog on my lunch break, woot!)

In short, I'm enormously grateful for being able to sit here in my yoga pants drinking coffee while the snow falls and not have to stress about whether to miss work to take care of the munchkins or whether to leave them to fend for themselves while I brave the commute.

It's definitely a work-life balance I can live with.

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