Motivation, or lack thereof

The dissertation work continues in fits and starts.  All the books (Write Your Dissertation in 15 Minutes a Day!, etc.) say that the key is consistent, daily work – even just a little.  I believe this – I really do.  It’s just that there are days when the almost-2 yo is screaming and screaming and screaming, and the 4 yo is bugging and whining and bugging and whining, and the laundry is piling up higher and higher and higher, and the food…is not being prepared.

And motivation, such as it is, just up and leaves the building.

Today is one of those days.  I’m rapidly running out of time to meet my latest pushed-off deadline, and I’m fairly certain my advisor is reaching the limits of her patience with me.  There’s actually some progress on the conceptual side of things, but I hit a snag about two weeks ago (which happened to coincide with having to scramble to get the kids their (round 1) H1N1 vaccinations and deal with a serious car issue (misdiagnosed fuel line leak)), and I’m having a hard time getting back up to speed.  Or, you know, getting back up.

In the meantime, I’m still letting the TV raise the kids, still wondering how to fill all the interminable hours with them, wondering what to do with myself and my life…

I have good days – ones when I am bursting with have some energy and can actually accomplish things I set out to do – but these dull, darkish ones seem to be in the majority, even now.

Current Challenges

1. Parenting two under the age of five.  One talks pretty much every waking hour of the day.  The other just screeeeeeeams.

2. The neverending dissertation.

3. I seem to be perimenopausal.

I realize that none of these are horrible, and one of them is actually very excellent (although I could seriously do without all the damned screaming), but I’m good.  I don’t need any more challenges right now.  Thank you.

Johnny’s 10 point blog bio

Johnny is passing around a meme wherein you write your blog bio in 10 bullet points, and I have never been one to pass on a meme:

1. Met M. through Match.com in Tokyo
2. I was there doing dissertation research; he was working for Giant Transnational Telecommunications Firm
3. We spent one year apart, when I came back to the US to finish up coursework and do comps
4. He returned in July
5. By October I was pregnant with M2
6. We were married the following January
7. M2 was born that May
8. We moved closer to my parents for help with M2 while M. worked and I wrote
9. C. born two years later
10. Still trying to write my dissertation, the deadline for submission of which is 19.5 months away.

We’re getting an old person!

That’s awfully flippant – sorry.  I’m usually much more deferential and respectful towards my elders – especially ones I haven’t met.  But I couldn’t resist.

It’s true, though – we volunteered to host a woman who survived the atomic bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima while she’s here for memorial and educational activities.  We don’t have a big house by any stretch of the imagination, but the girl’s bedroom is fairly large (in the old house, the same room – since our old house and new house are the same basic model) and has a proper twin-sized bed.  Girl can come sleep in our room while she’s here (Girl loves sleeping in our room anyway), and we just need to provide breakfast and some other meals – her transportation and activities have already been arranged.

She arrives on Monday.  My house is a disaster.  Maybe I should paint the walls in the living room or something?

It occurs to me…

I never finished telling the story of the house purchase, did I?

It went something like this: the house appraised low.  Very low – as in $30,000 less than the original price/first assessment.  This was because, according to the place that did it, it’s becoming more acceptable to use foreclosures in calculating comparable properties, and one had sold on Dec. 31 for a low price that affected the second appraisal.

We figured there was no way in hell that FM would ever, EVER accept an addendum asking for the price to be dropped $30,000, but our realtor, bless her heart, basically said “What do you have to lose?” and drew up an addendum that asked for the lower price and also asked that the per diem ?fine? ($100/day, which was racking up quickly at this point) past the agreed upon closing date be waived.

And damned if they didn’t take it.

So, for the inconvenience of waiting a month (30 days, to be exact) in limbo while all of this was going on, we made $1000/day.  We figured it had a lot to do with FM wanting to be done with this property; the moratorium on foreclosures was about to expire, and they were anticipating a slew of new foreclosures to come on the market shortly.  We figure they just didn’t want to have this old listing remaining when the new foreclosures arrived.

We closed on Jan. 31, and my parents embarked on a whirlwind of renovation for a month.  They were scheduled to leave for their annual trip to HI on Mar. 1, so they gutted and rebuilt the kitchen, upgraded the electrical wiring, installed canister lights in three rooms, refinished the beat-up wood floors, and painted most of the house in the space of 28 days.  When they returned, my Dad re-sided the shed out back, put in new insulation in the attic, relocated the attic access ladder from the ceiling in the middle of the living room to the linen closet, installed exhaust fans in the bathroom and kitchen, finished up the canister lights, repaired a bit of roof (which will need to be replaced sooner than later), and oversaw the crawlspace project (removal of old, wet insulation, treatment of space for mold, reinstallation of new insulation).  He also spackled…everywhere (there’s still dust on stuff) and just generally took care of everything we needed for Round One of the house improvement project.

There’s still stuff that needs to be done: the living room is still unpainted, and I’ll probably have to repaint at least part of the kitchen where I’ve left painter’s tape up for several months now.  The linen closet also needs painting, pictures need to be hung, area rugs need to be bought, and window coverings are required in several rooms.  But we have a house, the base mortgage payments (before taxes, etc.) are lower than the rent in our last house, and the kids each have a room.  That last one is the best part.

The House Across the Street

…is a complete and total mystery to me. At any given time, there are three people who come and go with regularity: two men, one woman. There seem to be three cars involved, and any one of them drives them at any given time: a Prius, a VW bug, and a new Tacoma truck (this last one was apparently wish-fulfillment for the ‘main’ resident – the one who seems to be there the most and who walks the dogs – who had truck-lust after he saw my Dad’s truck here while he was renovating).

Is it a home? An office? Both? I seriously want to just go over and satisfy my curiosity by asking what the deal is…but it would probably be inadvisable.

Aaaaaaaagh.

Totally burnt-out, and I have a hellish summer to get through. Bought a house, now have two dead baby birds in the molding above the front door. And many little tiny bugs going to and from their little dead baby bird carcasses.

Dissertation: have a deadline for two chapter drafts, don’t see how it’s ever going to come together, given that I currently have no help with the kids and #2 is rather needy.

Kids: TV is raising them.

Me: Utterly exhausted – literally. I can’t sit down without passing out. Except at night, when I can’t sleep for worrying about the dissertation, crappy parenting, and dead baby birds.

Cardiac episode: Probably imminent.

“It’s a buyer’s market” and other half-truths

Project homeownership hit an unexpected snag shortly before New Year’s Day, when our loan broker (conventional 30 year, preapproval still valid) informed us that, because the house we’re trying to buy is listed as being in a “declining market,” the bank wanted another 5% on top of our planned downpayment.  Needless to say, if we had another 5% we would have offered it upfront; we don’t and so we said farewell to that loan and our hopes of buying the house.

We spent a blissfully quiet next few days.  On Jan. 2, we called our realtor to follow up on the email I’d sent telling her the news, and she asked if we were interested in pursuing FHA funding.  Since we were still interested in the house, we gave her the go-ahead to talk with her broker; in the interim, I drove M. and his parents out to the Indian casinos of northern San Diego County.  Some business was conducted by M. on our cellphones while I drove, and we spent the first two (of seven) hours at Harrah’s standing outside the entrance in the cold trying to talk with/send documents to the broker, all using M.’s useful PDA-style cellphone.  We even went over the Good Faith Estimate pdf on the microscopic screen (although it helped that my Dad was back at home doing a comparison of the new GFE and the old one from the previous loan).

So, at present, we’re waiting to find out if the house will appraise (AGAIN) for more, less, or equal to our price.  If it’s above or equal, we should be able to move on to settlement; if it appraises for less, we’re back up a creek.

It’s funny.  All I read is that the government wants people buying homes again; yet, the current climate is such that if you qualify for the most direct loan, chances are you already have a home and don’t need another one.  The same could be said, I think, for people trying to refinance.  The time, we’re told, is ripe; but what they don’t mention is that you have to qualify for the lower rates, and the reasons you may not might have nothing to do with your financial behavior and everything to do with banks that are trying to find ways to weasel out of stupid mistakes they made (my brother’s situation).

Christmas Eve

And I’m still three presents short – two (for my sister/brother and respective spouses) are little homemade things that will not be done by tomorrow.  One is an Ebay purchase that shipped via USPS on the 17th and has yet to surface – and it’s for M2.  Oops.  She’ll have things to open tomorrow, and this one was a spur-of-the-moment kind of thing, not something she’d asked for, but still.  Of course, this is what happens when you buy so close to Christmas, so there’s that.

Since M2 is only 3 and our lives have been chaos almost since she was born, M. and I still haven’t quite figured out how to ‘do’ Christmas.  Since we’ll be at my parents’ house this year, and my sister and her family will also be there, we’re doing what they do (which is how my parents did it when we were kids) by default.  This means the usual cookies and milk for Santa, fairly modest stockings, and (the one M. can’t quite wrap his head around) leaving the present for Santa unwrapped and sparkling in the early morning light on Christmas morning.  For some reason, M. thinks this is weird, but he has yet to give me any kind of definitive answer about what they did when he was a kid (was there Santa?  Did he wrap presents?  These are things I’d like to know).  I wanted to be much more organized this Christmas, but I feel like I’m even less on top of things than I was last year, when I’d just given birth and was recovering from a C-section.

I’ve gotten my Christmas present, though: project babyweaning is going swimmingly, and I’ve been basking in blissful sleep ever since we started.  C.’s still waking up a bit – mostly in the early morning (3 am – on), but he’s also been putting himself back to sleep until 7 am or so.  The result is that I’m an entirely more pleasant person – I smile!  I laugh!  I put things into perspective (more or less)!  It’s been great; we’ll see what going out to California on Friday does to the project.

Peace and Quiet

This is the first morning since C. was born that I’m up before anyone else, having spent the entire night in bed. It’s pure bliss.

C. had a fitful night: woke up at his usual appointed hours, and he was Unamused (in the Queen way) when M. went in, told him gently-but-firmly “Go night-night, C.” That engendered much screaming, complete with baby expletives (you could just kind of tell that he was swearing) and much jumping up and down. But he did finally settle down, and when he woke up at his usual times after that, he settled back down even more quickly than the time before. He stirred and cranked a bit at 7 (it’s 7:40 now), and then went BACK to sleep again.

So, Best Night Ever.

In the meantime, M2 spent half of yesterday afternoon saying, “I’m going to have a good sleepover, Mommy. But I’ll be sad because I’ll miss you. But just a little bit.” She was having dinner when we left, and just before we took off she insisted on having a tissue from the box, so she could blow her nose and wipe her eyes of tears when we left. Which she did. Repeatedly, as we kept not leaving (quote: “When are you going, Mommy?”). M. said, “Great, we have a drama queen.”