Why I hate having a guest room

It's anti-American, right? To have a bit more house than you need and find it annoying rather than desirable? Nevertheless, the guest room is beginning to piss me off.

When we first bought this house almost two years ago, the "upgrade" from three bedrooms to four seemed to make sense. Knowing that we wanted three kids meant that someday we'd have the option of giving them all their own rooms. Sister wanted to share a room with Bean then which meant that we wouldn't need this configuration right away, but someday the girls would want their own space. In the meantime, we had visions of hosting out-of-state friends in our fourth bedroom and we outfitted it accordingly. We bought a new mattress set to go on the bed frame that had once belonged to Husband's mother when she was growing up. We moved her entire suite of furniture from Atlanta to here--the bed frame, two large dressers, a night table, and a wall mirror. I added a quilt rack with vintage quilts, some toiletries that our imminent guests could use if they forgot theirs, a framed picture, some knick-knacks...

Who have we hosted in the almost two years in this house? Exactly three sets of guests. And one of them was one of my local college girlfriends here for a grown-up slumber party I hosted once when Husband was out of town.

What our guest room is really used for is storage of a lot of unnecessary shit. For example:
--a three-foot square box of unopened mail that is now two years old! I'm not exaggerating here! But Husband doesn't want to throw it away because there might (still!) be something important in there. The cats use the box as a scratching post, though. Perhaps that keeps them from using the sofa arms quite so much for the same purpose? Fucking cats. Fucking box.
--a turntable and two massively heavy boxes of record albums. Will we ever listen to them again? I know I won't listen to my portion of that ancient vinyl, not least because to do so would mean replacing the turntable's needle, lugging the thing downstairs, and routing it through our receiver somehow. Can we get rid of the turntable and the albums? Husband says no. He might want to listen to them someday.
--other electronic stuff. A couple of computers, a couple of old telephones, bundles of wires that belong to god-knows-what.
--a hideously ugly woven blanket that traveled with Husband from Guatemala that he wants to keep as a souvenir. Never mind that we never use it because it's entirely too scratchy to be comfortable and is suspiciously hairy. And did I say super ugly?
--a large plastic box of family memorabilia that doesn't belong to us, that we've been charged with looking through, scanning if we want, and mailing back to the cousin who loaned it to us. She sent it when Bean was born because it contained items belonging to Bean's namesake, the cousin's mother. That was almost three years ago and I'm guessing she'd want it back...oh, 2-1/2 years ago?
--a closet full of out-of-season vintage dresses. If I'm being fair here, I should admit that some of the stuff is mine. I keep telling myself that once my little kids are big, I can wear my gorgeous frocks again without risking spit-up, "washable" paint, and peanut butter destroying them. Maybe I should let this little dream go?

Humph. Maybe we can get rid of the other crap first and then we'll talk.

Countdown til Friday

It's official. I have all the emotional maturity of an 16-year old high school girl. The playgroup mom who dissed us yesterday? She sent an email last night with "I am SO SORRY" as the subject line. She'd been in California and it had completely slipped her mind to let us know she wouldn't be coming to the playgroup. She was extremely apologetic and we're all good playgroup buddies again. Makes me glad I phrased my email to her as neutrally inquisitive as possible, inquiring after her well-being, even. I am NOT a weirdo that other moms try to avoid after all.

But now my mental attentions are straying to the fact that I'm going to the beach this weekend. Husband isn't going. Neither are Sister or Bean. Who IS going? Me and four of my very good girlfriends, (including Mommygoth!) on our annual all-ladies-all-the-time oceanside estrogen-fest. I'm desperately excited about the prospect of 3 nights' worth of uninterrupted sleep, no dinner preparations, no children to entertain (God love 'em), all the grown-up girl talk I could possibly want, walks on the beach if I want, reading trashy novels on the oceanfront porch if I want, cookies for breakfast if I want, and yes, dammit, a glass of wine if I want. Dreamy, no?

But I've got to keep my head down and still.get.through.this.week. Here's what I have left to do:

• 3 more nights of teething Bean waking to scream her head off at least once and probably more times per night. She'll then wake at 6 am, insisting that it is too time to get up.
• 2 afternoons hassling Sister to finish her homework already and get into her bathing suit for swim class across town. Then entertaining Bean in a gym for 40 minutes when the childcare isn't open, and anyway Bean screams her head off if I try to drop her off at gym childcare.
• 1 Brownie meeting, including snack for 15 girls, that's only partly planned so far. I'll probably need to run to the store at some point for craft supplies, too. (Crap, better do that tomorrow...)
  
• 1 baby music class across town, which is mostly fun except that about halfway through the class Bean starts bogarting the laps of any dads that happen to be present. This generally pisses off their own offspring, makes me feel a bit awkward, and makes all the other parents stare at me as if I am secretly doing things at home to make Bean scared of me.
  
• 6 dog walks, 6 animal feedings, 3 dinners to prepare, 3 toilets to scrub, many loads of laundry, etc.

But after that, I'll be hitting the road around lunchtime on Friday, the car stocked with my favorite road trip CD's, the windows down, leaving Bean with her beloved Papa and Sister to be picked up from school by my Ex. They'll all be fine and will miss me. I'll miss them, too, of course.

But I can't frickin' wait!

Garden, take 2

I just returned from a late walk with the dog, doing the usual circuit around the block to get him settled in for the evening. As I approached our old house in the dusk, our former next-door neighbor approached from the opposite direction, smiling at me in the semi-dark. The first thing she said to me was, "Boy, I bet you're sad to see so many of your plants dying there. I don't think they've watered them at all!"

My poor garden! There are several things crisp beyond hope now: a variegated hydrangea that brightened up a dark corner of the yard under an old crepe myrtle, my huge, purple-flowered butterfly bush, a large (and expensive) angel's trumpet that I put in just this year, a stand of lavender-flowered phlox, a perennial geranium...and the list goes on.

Husband ran into the new owners on the street last week and actually volunteered to loan them a sprinkler. They declined, saying they had one, but were just so overwhelmed with the move that they hadn't gotten to it, felt terribly guilty about it, planned to water everything at their first opportunity, blah blah blah. It's been 2 weeks now and my beautiful garden is probably at least half-dead. If I'd know they were going to totally neglect it I would have dug some stuff up and taken my chances with replanting in the summer heat at the new place. At least I would've watered them! This is very sad to me.

Today I went into the way-back of our yard for the first time ever. For some mysterious reason, the previous owners of this house fenced in only part of the full back yard, excluding a good third of the space back there--very puzzling. Anyways, it's a small jungle behind the fence, as I verified this morning. The to-do list we'll have to get started on to even make the space for a new backyard garden is too overwhelming to even think about for very long. It goes something like this:

1. Pull up poison ivy while it still has leaves and can be identified easily.
2. Bushwhack all the seriously self-seeding poke weed NOW before the seeds ripen and drop and we have to do it all over again next year.
   
3. Bushwhack horrible, prickly blackberry brambles.
   
4. Somehow kill all the other noxious weeds carpeting various large areas along the fence. Husband wants to use herbicide, but I hate to do it with the kids so close by. On the other hand, there's a LOT to have to weed by hand, and I don't usually mind weeding.
   
5. Hire someone to take out lots of youngish pines.
6. Rip out all the chain link fence and have a nicer fence built that includes the whole backyard.
7. Have a dumptruck load of topsoil--or maybe two--delivered so that we can level the yard some and route drainage around the house rather than directly to the foundation.
8. Build a retaining wall to hold said topsoil back and border a path around the back porch.

And maybe then we can plant something.