Who Needs Shelter?

“Good day sunlight. I’d like to say how truly bright you are. You don’t know me but I know you. See, you’re my favorite star.”

That is the opening to the song title which is being borrowed as my blog title. I am using it as my mantra now. I have to. Thanks Jason.

As the moat around my new apartment grows, I am taking some time to put together an iTunes playlist which includes only songs that have lyrics about the sun, summer, good weather or the word sun in the title. Oh summer, how I will try to encourage you to show up by playing this wonderful collection of awesomeness at top volume.

It is also imperative that I follow the old adage ‘Jesus Saves’ and depress that little icon here in the upper left corner of my Word doc every so often. Normally a little rain (OK, a lot of rain) would not have me paranoid about losing power but earlier this morning I actually heard a sizzling sound outside the window and as my head reacted so my eyes could see what it was, I turned in just enough time to watch lightning brighten up the entire sky. Simultaneously thunder clapped and a car alarm only a few houses away went off. Fuck. That one even scared me a little and I love storms. Ever since that happened the lights have been dimming every five or so minutes, even though the lightning has, for now, moved on.

So for the rest of you who are also enjoying the throes of SAD, I present you with my ultimate “kick rain’s ass” playlist! Rock it with the windows down, it’s probably time to wash the inside of your car anyway and why not take advantage of all this free water right? Now if only I could figure out where to pick up some free soap…

Sunshine Day -- The Brady Bunch

Who Loves the Sun -- Velvet Underground

Summertime -- DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince

Summer Wind -- Frank Sinatra

It’s Magic -- The Cars (“Summer. It turns me upside down. Summer, summer, summer, it’s like a merry go round.)

Ain’t No Sunshine -- Bill Withers

Black Hole Sun -- Soundgarden

Summer of ’69 -- Bryan Adams

Staring At the Sun -- The Offspring

Cruel Summer -- Bananarama

Don’t Let the Sun Go Down On Me -- Elton John

All for Me -- Melissa Ferrick (Standin’ on my front porch, sun in my eyes. Perfect iced coffee, smilin’ all over my insides.)

Sunshine on My Shoulder -- John Denver

You Are My Sunshine -- Elizabeth Mitchell (Might be original)

Ray of Sunshine -- Jason Mraz

Stay (Wasting Time) -- Dave Matthews Band (And it was so hot outside, oh, you could fry an egg)

Under the Boardwalk -- The Drifters (Where the sun beats down and melts the tar up on the roof)

All Summer Long -- The Beach Boys

Margaritaville -- Jimmy Buffett (This song is summer!)

Island in the Sun -- Weezer

Summer Nights -- John Travolta & Olivia Newton John

I Can See Clearly Now -- Jimmy Cliff (It’s gonna be a bright, bright, sunshiny day)

Walkin’ On Sunshine -- Katrina and the Waves

Saturday In the Park -- Chicago (I think it was the fourth of July)

Boys of Summer -- Don Henley

Those Lazy, Hazy, Crazy Days of Summer -- Nat King Cole

Endless Summer Nights -- Richard Marx

Summer in the City -- The Lovin’ Spoonfull

Here Comes the Sun -- The Beatles

Blister in the Sun -- Violent Femmes

I could go on for about sixteen hours with everything I have in my collection within these criteria. Never mind the fact that I have a CD called ‘The Sounds of Hawaii’, tons of ukulele music and a library of other music that screams summer to me (think Brown Eyed Girl, the Beach Boys, Jimmy Buffett, etc). Funny, since I started writing this the rain has stopped and it looks like it could even get a bit bright outside.

Here is to the power of positive music! What are your favorite summer songs? I want to add them and up the chances of that season making an appearance this year.

It’s on like Ping Pong

All our boxes are packed…we’re ready to go.
We’re running quickly out the door.
It can’t come quick enough…
I say…GOODBYE!

Within the next few hours the cavalcade of moving joy begins. Right now feels like that calm before the storm where we are up and drinking coffee, tripping over filled boxes everywhere but not acknowledging that there is anything going on just yet. The wind is just starting to pick up a little bit.

Matt and I have moved so many times it is almost not even worth mentioning anymore but I feel compelled to get excited about this one because we both feel really good about this move. This is the first time in almost seven years we are moving to a place for no other reason than we wanted to.

When we first got together I was living in a little studio apartment in Malden, Massachusetts and he was living in Columbus, Ohio in a similar sized place. If you haven’t read the story about how we met and all that squishy stuff you can do that now. I’ll wait.

Tap, tap, tap. Tap, tap, tap.

OK ready? Good. Now where was I? Oh right, Malden.

So once we decided to move in together the studio was not going to cut it and we found a place a few blocks away, also in Malden. It was the second floor of a typical Boston two family -- three bedrooms, one bath, eat in kitchen, hardwoods, single pane windows, no insulation and a boiler from 1850 -- it was huge and we were getting a super deal on rent because Matt knew someone who knew someone. Then they told us they were selling and all of this moving for other people and other reasons began.

We bought the fixer in June of 2002 and by April of 2003 we actually started to work on the place. Just before that was when they sold the house in Malden we crashed for a while with a family member until the house in Springfield was almost ready to be inhabited, but not quite. We went to a motel for ten days while we put up walls in the bathroom and bedroom. Enough that the cat could be safe and we could shower. We lived in Springfield for three years too long but neither of us ever wanted to live there. We just went with the flow of circumstances so when a job opportunity opened up in New York, we figured it was worth looking into.

I was dying to give Manhattan a go. I have always loved The City and could not wait to get there!

So of course we ended up living in my cousin’s basement on Long Island. For over a year. With no windows.

We made the best of it because New York is freaking expensive and we were still paying bills on the Springfield house and trying to sell it. But East Meadow was not where either of us wanted to live. One morning after a particularly heavy rain storm the basement flooded. We had been discussing possibly moving so we would not turn into moles but had not entirely planned on doing it just yet. The house next door belonged to the man my cousin had been seeing and he had just moved into her slightly larger home.

Off we went to his place that day. Like within an hour of the flood.

That house was actually one of the best places we have lived even though we didn’t see the move coming. A cute little 900 square foot, single family, two bedroom ranch with a nice big living room and a kitchen with a dishwasher. We had a couple friends on the Island who would come over and we would hang out on the back deck and drink beers and laugh all night. It was actually not too bad.

Then the housing market imploded.

Our friends had worked together (at a substantial sized mortgage company) and were out of work on the same day. With approximately 5,000 other people. Six or so other small to mid sized companies also went down and Matt too ended up having to find something. There were about 10,000 people all fighting for the same fifteen jobs on the Island and our friends hauled ass out of there and headed for Texas. Matt’s boss at his former company loved him to death and got him into her new place per-diem but we both knew he was on borrowed time.

So we put on our rose colored blindfold and moved back to Massachusetts.

There is a whole lot involved with this move and a very lengthy story surrounding it all, which I may tell at some point but today is not that day. Let’s just say there are three sides to everything and that we moved back here so Matt could pursue a career change, which instead turned out to be a life changing experience for both of us, and we encountered some major financial hardship due to the culmination of everything up to this point. Yes, I think that sums it up rather nicely.

When we first moved back we were crashing at the beach cottage in Humarock. The day I become a wealthy woman I will own a home on both coasts -- a hip loft in downtown San Diego and a home in Humarock. That place is one of the most amazing places on the planet for me, something magical happens when I cross the river; I feel at home. But living in a family house that is opened up every summer means, again, living on borrowed time so this was never meant to be something we could treasure; it was transitional at best. Bringing in 75% of the pay we were making in New York also meant we were limited in where we could even look, not to mention the fact that saving a couple dimes was next to impossible.

I had started Chucka Stone Designs as soon as we arrived and was beginning to roll along with a few great jobs through 2008. That spring the family house in Damascus, Maryland needed to be freshened to be put on the market and I was hired to do so. That job was the most physically exhausting I have ever faced but one of the most rewarding in so many ways. And I came home with our moving money.

We had settled for an apartment in Arlington that was excessively overpriced for the size, but it was Arlington. Now I should explain, as much as Humarock feels like home, I have about as strong feelings to the opposite about Arlington.

The funny thing about Boston is that even the crappiest of areas are overpriced so we figured, why not at least move to a safe town. And so we landed here.

I grew up here from age seven to about nineteen and frankly I am not a fan. There is nothing inherently wrong with this town it is just that I am one of those people who 1. knows when something feels right or wrong and 2. enjoys leaving my past in the past. Even as a kid I never felt like I fit in here. Moving back here caused my past to come running right up to me to punch me square in the kisser; I knew it felt wrong. But when we were looking there was not much of an option and after three years in Springfield I refused to live in another crime ridden location simply because we could afford it.

I have shared some of the hilarity about this building -- the smell of dead cabbage cat, neighbors who sunbathe in the parking lot in a thong, the rabid animals that live in the dumpster, the claustrophobia upon entry -- but I really must admit, despite all of the crap, our landlord has been wonderful and Matt and I went through very distinct, positive transformations here.

This time, there was no pressure to move (even though we were both interested in doing so eventually). No major life changes were occurring which were forcing our hand, neither of us figured we would be going anywhere for at least a couple years. Then one night out of the blue we heard about what will now be our new place.

It is only one town away but it feels like the other side of the Universe to me. With so many positive things going on in our lives right now this new place kind of feels like the culmination of dragging ourselves back up from a very, very dark place that we lived in for a very, very long time. We don’t own it, it is not all that much bigger and who knows what the neighbors will be like but something inside both of us is saying that this time we were actually waiting at the right platform when the right train was pulling in and finally we are headed in the right direction.

I haven’t even set up an appointment for internet access to be hooked up yet. For the first few days I simply plan to unpack, make curtains, explore our new neighborhood, sit in the side yard and read the Kerouac novel I just took out of the library, set up our place and enjoy the surroundings. I don’t know when I’ll get back online to read, write and connect, but even though there is a lot of heavy lifting to come over the next few days, I somehow feel like I will be more refreshed than ever once I get back.

♥love♥

Trash Talkin’

This morning at ten minutes after seven I was sleeping, minding my own dreamy business and waiting for Matt to come in and kiss me goodbye because generally I do not get up until 7:15. A kiss is a fairly pleasant way to be woken up; just ask Sleeping Beauty. Her Prince leaned right in and gave her tongue after she had slept for 100 years and she rose, completely renewed, with a big smile on her face. Not sure how good that was for Prince Charming though. Although in the fantasy world I suppose none of us ever have morning breath right?

At any rate, if for some reason I do not make it all the way to fully conscious after my own charming prince lays one on me, then there is still an alarm clock set to spring me into action at 7:30. Most mornings I do not use the alarm clock because I drift awake just as he is bolting the door at 7:15. This morning I was cozy, snuggly and warm, fully relishing in the last five minutes of my all too important sleep and waiting for my smooch. Then the garbage man showed up.

We live in a building with twenty four separate apartments, three floors that receive daylight and one subterranean level. Our apartment is on the second floor and my bedroom window has the scenic vista of the parking lot in the back of the building. The driveway entrance to get into our lot is shared by the almost identical building next door. Our landlord likes to share lots of things with the owner of the building next door. I think someone once told her that “sharing is caring” or something because we also share the parking lot itself as well as a few angled spaces that run the length of the driveway. Not to mention the plow guy in the winter and the all important dumpster and recycle bins.

The dumpster and bins are located at the far back side of the parking lot and are a straight shot from the entrance of the driveway. I suppose this works out pretty nice for the trash collectors as they simply back in with their little bleepers blaring, pick up the dumpster by scraping metal across metal, shake it as if gravity does not exist for trash, slam it down on the asphalt, pick it back up, shake, slam and repeat at least six more times.

Now I have no issue with the oversized, smelly, metal eye sore being completely emptied because after the stint last fall where “someone was on vacation” and our bin was not emptied for close to a month, I actually thought the raccoons were going to build little huts and start paying rent to live next to the thing. My issue is the part where they arrived at 7:10 AM to perform their little heavy metal concert.

Just after their bin was slammed down for the last time and the still beeping truck began pulling out of the driveway, Matt came into the bedroom. Our conversation went something like this:

Matt: [smooch] I love you.

Me: Hey on your way to the bike path please hunt down that garbage man and pop a cap in his ass would ya?

Matt: Yeah they were kinda loud huh?

Me: Kinda loud and seven AM are not a good fit for me. In fact it’s not a good fit for flipping anyone.

Matt: I can hear him still heading down the street; I’ll chase him down for ya and send a camera phone picture of him lying in a big pool of blood.

Me: Well that might be a little extreme, and graphic. Be safe babe.

As I tossed the covers off, upset with my loss of the five most precious moments of slumber, it occurred to me that I could do a few different things with this simmering emotion of gobeldy gook I had ready to rise up inside.

I could call up the Arlington DPW and scream at them that if they had made it to my house by that hour who knows where else they had already been, waking up the other neighbors. I could find out where they live, stalk them for a few weeks, determine what time they get up in the morning then five minutes before they are due to rise start banging the lids of two metal trash cans together outside their bedroom window. I could do nothing but then let the evilness swirl around inside my head until I snap on some innocent person later. Or I could take it in, recognize it and use my blog as the best place to vent out my frustration through my own charming wordsmithing.

So that is what I decided to do. Besides, Matt has my back on this one.

I’m still waiting for my picture.