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I just did some baseboard priming where the fishtank will end up being.  Funny really … I was thinking I had to go back to Home Depot to buy some painter’s tape, but after I started without it, I remembered I don’t need it — I’ve got some degree of kung-fu in house painting, after all.  I don’t even need to wear painting clothes … though having them on is more forgiving if I need to wipe off something, and it makes my wife less nervous about ruining good clothes.

So why do I blog about such things and not others?  I neglected a few relatively less “trivial” things, such as the death of a friend, but then again, I’m setting up a video eulogy for that.

Anyway, the last several days seem to have brought out a list of people — some of whom I hardly know — talking to me about deep spiritual questions.  I’m learningthat there are many people like me out there who are … isolated, I suppose the term would be … with no one to really talk to about such things.  More hints of my calling I hope to achieve coming up shortly.

And that’s something I should probably have blogged about already …

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It’s been snowing more on than off for so many days, i don’t remember when it started.  We had a brief thaw, then back to adding a couple feet of white all around.

I haven’t done much house stuff in spite of buying the 60-gallon aquarium to replace our aspirations for a wood stove.  We finally ordered the last of the jacks we need to level the house, and that will make a list of other projects easier, including the base of said aquarium.

I’ve been busy with helping BuffNet refugees, and landed a few new accounts from the stack, including a customer I’ve waited on for years to need my help.  It’s forcing me to be more organized, and in spite of some recession I’ve heard rumors about, I’m getting lead after lead for new business.  If it all falls into place, I’ll really be caught up on things.

Tonight, I am holding a group interview for a salesman with my professional coach, Bill Knoche.  I’ve been praying about it, as even one new client a week would change my life.  It’s about time I get some growing pains.

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We finally gave up on the wood stove.  Too many delays, and them not knocking on the door loud enough for three adults and a dog in line of sight of it to know anyone was there (and hence missing any opportunity for them to finish beyond deconstruction) … we just asked for our money back, and got it.

The house is well insulated and the furnace is really efficient; managing wood and the stove itself would be more of a pain on afterthought.  It would have been worth the trouble for a fireplace, but the chimney wasn’t built for it.

We’re going with a fish tank.

Side note: When they deconstructed the faux fireplace facade, we found a lot of interesting things.  Photos, a pay stub for Seneca Red Hots, a $100 US Savings bond (1985) owned by someone with an address on the next street, an add for a free dress with purchase of laundry soap, random playing cards and a die … we’ve offered to return the stuff to the previous owner and haven’t heard back.

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We had a horrific discovery yesterday — the box with all our Christmas ornaments is missing.  We last saw it packed up for the move, and know it is neither here nor there.  We don’t see them being stolen, and I wonder if they got caught up with donated items in all the confusion in early August.

But this isn’t about “decorations” — it’s about ornaments from the Old Country, the Great Depression, two world wars, relatives that passed, trips and travels, childhood memories, small photos, gifts on our first newlywed Christmas, and the signed cards from our wedding that Merry turned into ornaments.  Even the traditional pickle that was hidden on the tree since long before Merry met me as a multi-generation family tradition.

We have some money to buy new ones, but few of them could come close to ever being replaced.  It’s times like these that the impermanence of things falls around you, and you want to cling to memories that you know may someday fade as well.  And now looking at a Christmas tree will never be the same.

Our first Christmas here in the new house … the excitement of Merry buying me a Santa Fe train like I had growing up and setting it up under the tree is bittersweet.  Nothing is ever the same as we remember it.   And we walked a mile or so each way in the snow with a wagon last weekend to buy a real tree down the street, picking one that had room for the huge collection of ornaments that are now … it’s hard for me to say it yet … gone.  We can only hope to fill them in with equally memory-invoking items over the years and pass down what’s left.

It makes me question all the silly things that I’ve saved over the years — paperwork and records that are factual but not really about life, in comparison to things that are worth remembering and retelling to the people you Love.  Hopefully this will be a sort of fresh start for the better in some small way.

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I’ve never been so happy as I am now at this time in my life.  By happy, I don’t mean ecstatic or exuberant, but blissfully content.  Apart from a few snags here and there, Merry shares in our occasional questioning, “Why are we so HAPPY?”

Having a house is just a thing, but having a home … that is a place, a platform from which to reach from, psychologically, emotionally.  We have a place for each other that we can call our own — something to work for and work on together, building all sorts of dreams that suddenly seem so much reachable.

So when I went upstairs and looked out the window, it took me a moment to see it wasn’t rain but snow, and that the ground was white, not green.  I went downstairs, shouting to Merry to look out the window.  We met at the foyer, and in eachother’s arms, it was like we saw snow for the first time.  “Why are we so happy to see snow?”

Some questions answer themselves, silently, beyond words.

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I was walking around the house with a sweater yesterday and wondered what the temperature was, as I was pretty comfortable, but knew it had to be getting colder.  The indoor thermometer indicated 58 degrees!  Usually I start to go into hibernation with anything under 68 degrees.  Merry’s been conditioning me for years to become a qualifing member of the ChukChi.

And we just realized that neither my wife nor I know how to turn on the furnace … I sure hope that wood stove project comes about soon.