The problems with getting to check out this year’s Sunset Magazine Silicon Valley Idea House are the following:
a) It is actually, literally perfect, and the ideal blend of design and function.
b) It makes you want to pack up your current house and move into this one immediately.
It’s the most wonderful time of the year, according to my children: Sugar Month. Yes yes, Halloween is technically one day, but that little detail appears to have escaped my two sugar monsters, who are under the impression that the second those first leaves fall, it’s all-chocolate, all-the-time. (I blame grocery stores; can we PLEASE put those ten-pound snack-size assortment bags on shelves beyond the reach of a four-year-old? …Please?)
Herein lies the problem: When children know that candy is (allegedly) on the menu, they’re not super interested in anything else, and especially not in coming inside because dinner is ready. No, they’re very, very busy hiding on the front porch with the trick-or-treat buckets that they pulled out of storage sometime in August and filled with pilfered munchies, thinking that Mom doesn’t know what they’re up to. (Spoiler: Mom knows everything.)
Relevant to yesterday's post, here is yet another example of why women (and moms, specifically) are set to just go ahead and run the world: Because we come up with genius inventions not just "because" (or just because our egos need a little stroking; ahem, Elon Musk, love you but dude, the "kid-sized" submarine?)...but because they are needed.
You've heard me whine and whine and whine here for yearrrrrs about my simultaneous love of throw rugs and total rug-related phobias and/or catastrophes. I love the way rugs look; I love the way rugs feel. I do not love that they specialize in attracting dogs that want to pee on them and babies that want to throw up on them, because any rug that lives in my house must be pristine, or the aforementioned phobias come out and I have to sidestep around its borders like a weirdo.
I've bought cowhide rugs. Tossed them. Fluffy rugs. Sacrificed them on the altar of Virgil. Gorgeous woven rugs. Moved them to a "cleaner" spot, then to another, and then gave them away. And now I've landed on a semipermanent solution, using outdoor rugs indoors...except a) that seems wasteful, given that I have to replace them once a season, and b) that still does not solve my sidestepping-around-the-borders-after-a-pee-speck-touches-them problem.
Fact: When life gets tough, kittens help.
Weirdly enough, I haven't been crying much about moving - the actual fact of leaving this house and going to another one. Don't get me wrong: I've been crying about other things - oh god, so much, to the point where I wake up at 2 o'clock in the morning and have to mainline six glasses of water because my body is fresh out of fluid - but about the house itself, I've tried to be relatively all-business, all-the-time.
I mean, we're in escrow. I have solar panel lease transfers to sign. Boxes to pack. Schools to notify. Children to keep safeguarded from everything that's swirling around them. We have to be out of this house in three weeks.
Many things about me have changed over the years that I've been writing this blog. My interest in wearing high heels, for example. My waist size. My willingness to stay awake past the hour of 9PM.
One thing that has never, ever, ever changed - the tenet to which I have held steadfast, in vocal and furious opposition to any and all attempts to sway me:
