It's A Disaster

[I found this draft post today; it was supposed to have gone up a couple of weeks ago, so sorry if it's dated. It should have gone just before or after this one.]

See, it’s not just me who’s become disillusioned with the whole process.

The problem with spending a lot of time navel-gazing about your house, your life, and your universe, is that eventually you start thinking that everything relates to you. I know, very narcissistic. Song lyrics are the worst. What started as a midnight raid on the last of the Christmas Krumkake with a glass of milk ends up with you cackling like the Mad Hatter in with a mouth full of cookies because you have found the theme song to your home improvement efforts:

"It's a disaster
It's an incredible mess
But it's all we've got now
Yeah it's all we got
Howling with laughter, panic
alarm, and distress
But it's all we've got now
Yeah it's all we got"

Fortunately (?), no one was home at the time.

While I'm on the topic of the many moods of home improvement, I can’t help but wonder if there is a cyclic timeline/pattern that all home improvement projects move through. Something like this maybe?

Year 1: Euphoria of acquiring said house and beginning work with naïve gusto.

Year 2: Saddled with the realization that this is going to be much harder than you anticipated, you still manage to dig-in and keep working hard. On the upside, if you haven’t accidentally killed yourself, your skill level should be steadily improving at this point. It’s definitely a small bonus, no?

Year 3: You can feel the cosmic screws tightening on you. You work harder out of a sense of desperation and secretly begin wondering if this really was such a good idea.

Year 4: You are so fucked and you know it. You might manage one last desperate push to end it all, but chances are you fail. If you have any luck, the house is mortgaged and you have enough money to make your monthly payment. If not, foreclosure might be a blessing.

Year 5: If you’ve made it this far, you’ve abandoned belief in lists, plans, budgets, or organized progress at any strategic level. To save you sanity, you’ve come to embrace the beauty of tactical victories. If you can make yourself tackle one tiny project at a time ad infinitum, you may finish. Self-medication or prescription drugs may be necessary to maintain you calm.

Year 6: You list the house for sale whether it’s finish or not. Or, you resign yourself to the fact that you are work not on a home but a mausoleum. The house will never be finished and you will die here. And, you are okay with this.

Year 7: Success is not an option. You move on with your life. Hopefully this involves a substantial inheritance, winning the lottery, and a book or movie deal. Bugger the house.

Some of you have been at this old house, DIY thing a lot longer than me. What do you think? Does this sound right to you?

Modus Operandi

A Happy New Year to you all.

I know I’ve been away for a while, but no shabby apologies or promises of future fidelity. We both know better than to believe that now, don’t we?

As you have probably anticipated, we here at the Devil Queen have been thoroughly entertained with the end of year holiday season. Christmas was a success. Without hyperbole, I can confidently state that it was so good that Gideon nearly peed himself Christmas morning.

New Year’s Eve was uncommonly good too. The last several years, even predating the Devil Queen, were relentlessly circling down a death-spiral. Every New Year’s Eve, we’d hope for a better year to come only watch that year become even worse than its predecessor. There seemed to be no end to funerals, financial troubles, and perfidious ankle-biters. And, strangely enough, I find this year may be no different in some regards, but I’m without my black uniform of dread and woe. So, what is different?

I think attitude is great part of it. I know most people relegate their introspective navel-gazing for the run up to New Year’s Day, but I had an early start this year, think early November. Ever the man of extremes, I’ve given myself a pretty hard ride. After years of trying variations of the same thing, I finally came to the belated conclusion that my modus operandi was not working. In fact, it was eating me alive.

I’m not sure if there is a good way to parse this beast out into its base parts. My drive to finish the Devil Queen at a racecar’s pace had burned me up and out. I’d been reduced to an ill-tempered, high-functioning zombie. My tires had long since blown, but I was spinning the rims as fast as I could. They bit deeper into the road until the car ground to halt. No amount of swearing and wicked mojo could get it moving. The time for something new had come and gone, but, miraculously, it was still waiting for me.

Then an email from the good folks at Houseblogs.net requesting our New Year Resolutions made me do some thinking. My first thought was, “HA! Resolution? Easy! Finish the Devil Queen!”

Then, I spent a couple of days thinking about what it would actually take to accomplish this feat. An easy, pleasurable frolic with sunshine, butterflies, and woodland nymphs with a little, “refinishing floors, painting a few rooms, and landscaping,” on the side soon became a bleak, five-page list of winter without end. Every room needs something. The flight back from the sweet fantasyland of denial did not end with a smooth landing. Hell, the plane didn’t even crash in the right country. My remains were fished from the forest’s canopy and crammed into an oversized picnic basket.

A generous estimate is that it would take the better part of 2008 to “finish” the Devil Queen.

Instead of the usual gnashing of teeth, the whining, and general woe-is-me carrying on that I usually do because I want it done NOW, I decided that something else was in order. Angst had not finished the house nor made the process move any faster. Instead, it had made me very tired and unhappy. So, bugger the Devil Queen. Finishing the house would no longer by my number-one preoccupation. Instead of complaining about how I didn’t have time for this, that, or the other because I “need to work on the house,” I will now do what I want, when I want without guilt. Then I’ll see about working in some home improvement time. Since I haven’t done much of anything except fret about the house for the last few months, maybe more will actually get done this way, right?

This has been my circuitous way of saying my resolution 2008 is to have some fun and to try finishing the Devil Queen with out being evil. Getting a convertible would be nice too.