Indie Designs Online

I look to the right (west), and see this:

Every once in a while, for just a brief while, it seems OK.

Then I turn to the left, and I see this:

And real life comes crashing back!!

Just sayin’…

Friday night at the East Rockaway Trailer Park: hunting mosquitoes with a fly swatter.

(Wish I liked beer.)

Yesterday, the gas co. was supposed to reconnect the gas to the house – hot water, heat (tho not needed yet) and cooking (stove). The operative words here are “was supposed to”.

Guess what didn’t happen!?

The worst? Move back into the house, w/o hot water or stove, when the trailer goes away on 9/27. (We can pretend like Sandy just came!) Neither one of us wants that scenario to come true, but we may have to deal with it nonetheless.

Are we having fun yet?

Well, at least this year, 9/11 didn’t dredge up PTSD symptoms since there were other things that prevented me from reliving the terror felt those days. (I was living in Brooklyn at that time, and watched it from my rooftop. In fact, Sandy forced me to throw away the pics I took that day. When one of the towers came down, the whole region lost connections for phones, computers and TVs, and I couldn’t contact anyone here or in the rest of the world. I was alone. This time, Bear & I were able to keep each other sane in another horrible situation!)

As for these setbacks? We’re both ready to run screaming from the state.

Today’s rhetorical question: When, if ever, is it just time to cut one’s losses and run?

I look forward to the surreal Christmas-slash-PTSD experience I’m sure to have when we move back into the house and I get to unpack the boxes that contain all our other worldly possessions. Then I get to relive the the whole throwing out & cleaning up process.

Oh joy.

Can’t wait to finally see what did and didn’t survive. (Right now, I can still think that maybe-that-thing-is-in-a-box-in-the-garage. Afterward, the denial kicks in for real. Oh, yeah, and then the shame about the denial. And so on. It’s a slippery slope.)

I can’t begin to tell you how excited I am.

How do you know that you have existed? In time? In YOUR lifetime? Most of us keep mementos: photos, ticket stubs, programs, cards, that sort of thing. But along with everything else, I lost all of those things. From 30someodd years! (The easiest to give up: journals. 75lbs of bad, teen-angst writings! Best psychological diet I ever tried! The hardest: photos.)

So, kids, the rhetorical question here is: once the proof of your previous existence vanishes, did you exist before?

I fell out of the trailer the other day. Sounds hard to do, doesn’t it? It’s surprisingly easy though. (I was completely sober, by the way.)

There’s not a mark on me, no broken bones, no one witnessed it. (Not even the cat!) (I could explain how something so ridiculous could actually happen, but that would take the mystery out of it!)

But it shows you how dangerous trailer living can be! It’s not all about tornadoes and stuff! Just last week we had a sewer gas back-up that would have killed us if the overpowering STENCH wasn’t present to tell us something was “wrong”!!!!

This place will kill us yet – and we haven’t even seen the electric bill!!

But we’ll be out of it soon. We had the 1st floor electric in the house changed. Now we have to wait for the gas to be turned on in about 2-3 weeks (or “whenever” they can get to us, but it’ll cost $$ since the house wasn’t actually demolished, which of course we’ll fight,…sigh…why?).

THEN we’ll move back into the house.

Hey, at least it kept things moving, or SEEMING to move anyway! I mean, look at it this way: No, we had no idea it would – or even could! – progress this way. But otherwise what would we have been doing? Sitting in the house. Waiting. At least this way, we were kept busy.

Nah. I could do w/o this!

We may, in fact, get flooded again this year. But what else can we do right now? We’re just thinking about comfort. And money. Comfort and money. And, of course, space. But I guess that comes under the heading of comfort. So, yeah, comfort and money.

The trailer is made out of tin foil, is all electric and costs a lot to rent. We were comfortable in the house last winter, so we’d rather just do it again. (We’ll just replace electric wires and pipes that may have been compromised by salt water so that we don’t start another disaster!)

Then we’ll continue to plod along as the mountain of paperwork continues to grow, until we actually get a check put in our grubby little hands so that we can actually hire people and get things actually started! (Tho by then we’ll have to alter our plans b/c we can’t afford the potential taxes on a new-build, so we’ll have to modify plans to make it a re-build instead, which will add 6 months to the process b/c, well, paperwork needs to be filed!)

Just kill me now.

Meanwhile, I’ve just come across a bunch of pix to remind me that, yes!, it may yet flood again this year!! What fun!! Also, now that the house is stripped down to it’s ribs – again – I’m reminded of all the fun things we discovered in the walls, as well as the “artifacts” we’ve dug up from around the rootball.

Meanwhile, I’m too old and achy to STILL be doing this! Really, can we stop now?

This week, we’re meeting with an electrician to redo the house so that we don’t start a fire when we move back in. (I told you, I’m not much of a gambler. There was just too much else last year, but we don’t want to push it another year!) And we have a plumber coming too, to look at our pipes. (Primarily the gas pipes.) Salt water compromises a lot. So Bear tore out all the new insulation we put in (in order to expose the wires) and we’re back down to the ribs of the house.

We’ve gone exactly nowhere in all this time.

But besides that, I’d like to know: with all the stuff we had to throw out, how is it we’re still able to furnish ourselves? Granted, we’re surrounded now by crap, but still!

Is it global warming? Are the waters rising? Are we just cycling in our geological era?

How much of a gambler are you? Me, not so much. Will it flood this year? The Irene surge, in 2011, filled our 4 foot crawl under the house but didn’t breach the living space. The Sandy surge from 2012 produced 3 to 4 feet of saltwater on the first floor of the house. (The second floor loft runs the length of the oldest part of the house, which was added onto, several times thruout the years. Oddly, I have always referred to the back part of the house as the trailer b/c that’s what it looks like. Odd b/c we live in a trailer right now. Ironic. Odd. Same thing, really.)

We have no choice but to hope that the weather trend will not give us a surge this year – before Irene, no one around here remembers it flooding recently.

Hopefully El Nino/La Nina has been calmer this year.

I know, hope makes me sound incredibly naive, but really what else is there?

Besides, we’ll know what to do this time!

Taxes. New builds result in a tripling of tax charges each year. That decides it.

We’re actually being PREVENTED from rebuilding after the storm. Now what?

I suppose I should be relieved that we found all this out BEFORE we forced ourselves out by rebuilding. Where does that leave us, you might ask? (And even if you didn’t wonder…) I’m not sure, but it will probably be in the general vicinity of fixing the electric so that we can safely move back into the house for the second winter.

Then, who knows – maybe we’ll start over by looking into a remodel instead, where we’d keep part of the old house and build onto it. Or maybe by then, he’ll be so disgusted with the entire process that Bear will finally agree to start looking into non-Long Island/New York parts!

I can only hope.

We were flooded with salt water. It corrodes everything in its path. Everything man-made, that is. Like pipes, cars, electric wiring, nails. That sort of thing.

So it’s been most interesting to see which plants came up this year. As well as which ones, now, seem to be dead. Most of the bulb flowers came up as usual. Some of the perennials didn’t come back, like daisies and purple coneflowers. (But truth be told, they could be choked-out this year by the flowering weeds that I’ve not bothered to weed from the beds.) My many-year-old lavender seems to have drowned, as have all the evergreens in the immediate vicinity, including the 75-foot blue spruce in our front yard. Do evergreens just play dead, and then resurrect? (Doesn’t matter with the Christmas tree out front – it’ll have to go if/when we demolish. I’m so sad!)

The rootball is no longer a huge open wound. It is now a scab. Bear has had at it with a shovel and a Sawzall and has greatly reduced it. But we are going to have to get rid of the the stump and the tangle of roots if we’re going to do anything to the yard some day. Perhaps a spring-flowering tree?

What grows good in salt water, in case this happens again?