It’s been a long time since we talked, eh?

Yeah, I’ve been pretty busy. It feels like summer flew by. June disappears every year on the frenzy of getting ready for dance performances in July. And then we promised ourselves we were only going to do maintenance work on the house this summer – no new projects. But that still involved cleaning the eaves, cleaning out the garage, sealing insulatory gaps in the house, maintaining the garden, building a new fence. Where did that summer go? There were some lovely lake-times and drives in the country and even a road trip and family wedding, so there’s that.

I can’t nicely segue from the minutiae to anything deeper, so I’ll just stick with minutiae for today and maybe I’ll actually write again before four months have passed or something.

So, Christmas is less than two months away and I’m getting pretty excited. Except also we have to replace our main sewer line right away here and that’s going to involve jackhammering up concrete in our basement, digging up the line (which is probably a thousand pounds of cast iron or clay pipe) then replacing, burying, pouring sand and pouring new concrete. Oh also, that line goes right under the stairs to the basement, so we have to rip out two walls and our stairs and will have to use a system of plywood and ladders to get in and out of the basement to work on it. I told Ian I’d lower him food regularly. Yeah, I’m a little scared it won’t be done before Christmas. And we’ll be like, “sure everyone come over for Christmas breakfast, just don’t mind the sewer smell and also you can’t use the bathroom.”

It won’t be that bad.

I have a million projects going on, as well as many, many queued projects (like for Christmas, OMG I need a million more free times).

Ian and I are working on programming an android application. We’ve been discussing this one for a long time, and now they have a big mobile app project at work and he’s supposed to be the android guy, so he needs to be learning it. I have slowed us down considerably by insisting on learning too many new things for the development of this app. We are, finally, kind of motoring now – though the motoring part is on the web services that the android app will eventually use. Not motoring on the actual android development itself just, just yet. Still, it’s exciting. We manage to work on it for a couple of hours in about half of our evenings, and then I go to bed (around midnight) feeling nicely accomplished.

Somewhere around that, I am supposed to be sewing some belly dance cabaret dresses for my Belly Dance Friends Forever (BDFFs). They are designed, and most of the materials are purchased and I have started on a prototype for one of them to make sure I’m getting the skirt shape right. Oh yes, and I get together with my BDFFs every Monday in order for us to work on teaching ourselves a choreography as well as attending regular Thursday classes every week.

I’m not sure how any of this is going to stay moving once Ian disappears into the hole to dig up our basement. I’ve considered that I could be doing the work on Christmas projects – but, more likely, I will be handling the maintenance of the household on my own, and should be making extra sure to stay on top of things like laundry, since we will not have access to our own washer and dryer and will either have to visit my mom or go to a laundromat so there will be no more “heading to bed. Oh! No clean clothes for the morning, I’ll just throw a load on now.”

I keep saying to myself, “well you should just put all your projects on hold. I know if you put as much time into organizing the house as Ian is going to have to put into digging up the basement, the upstairs would be so lovely and clean.” And I get a little bit excited about that. But then I remember all the projects I would have to NOT be working on, every evening. And I might be constitutionally incapapable of going projectless for eight weeks or however long this is going to take.