Tag Archives: divorce

Construction: My Almost Finished Living Room

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A video tour of my living room, which is now almost done.

Yesterday morning, I made a video of my living room setup. Thought I’d share it with folks who want to take the tour:

On May 20, 2014, I began blogging about the construction of my new home in Malaga, WA. You can read all of these posts — and see the time-lapse and walkthrough movies that go with many them — by clicking the new home construction tag.

I admit that I sometimes refer to this as my “trophy room.” That’s because the red leather sofa, TV, and stereo surround-sound system came from the condo my wasband bought as a place to live during the week when he worked in Phoenix. To this day, I’m not sure why he agreed to let me have them. The only reason I included them on the list of personal property I wanted was so I could give them up in the bargaining process. But he agreed to the whole damn list — after stewing on it for months — in exchange for me moving out of the house. Joke’s on him: I had to leave anyway for my summer work and my RV and helicopter were already onsite in Washington.

My Living Room
My almost-finished living room; a very pleasant place to hang out.

The leather sofa is very comfortable and has a sofa bed tucked into it. My ex-sister-in-law, who I’m still in contact with occasionally, gave me two of the four pillows on it as a housewarming gift. The rug, storage “bar” behind the sofa, and black leather cushions on the chair are new from IKEA. The lamps are heirloom items — more on those in a future blog post. The rest of what’s in this video are a mix of new items I bought over the past three years and items moved to Washington from my old home in Arizona.

The room is almost done. I just need two things:

  • Windowsills. I have temporary window sills in place under most windows. I was going to make them out of 1×12 lumber and actually finished a few of them, but my friend Don offered me slabs of wood that match the tables he made for me. I can then make windowsills out of that. Trouble is, Don needs to get his friend with the bandsaw on the program to get me the slabs. Then I need to cut, stain, and finish them. It’s a big project and I don’t expect to have it done anytime soon. So I have trimmed 1×10 and 1×12 planks for temporary use. I probably won’t bother staining them, so I can use them for something else in the future.
  • Coffee table. Don made me custom TV table and end tables. They were cut from power poles that survived a fire back in 2010 or 2011 near the Rocky Reach Dam, upriver from Wenatchee. They have a lot of personality, with actual scorch marks on the live edges. I like them so much I’ve asked Don to make me a matching coffee table. We discussed it in some detail yesterday. I hope to get it within a month or so.

The jury is still out on the rug. I bought another one at Pier 1 that I’d like to try. This one might be okay with a coffee table over it.

And yes, I know I should get a universal remote. But honestly: I don’t watch very much television. The view out the windows is much more enjoyable.

The place is coming together. It’s already a far more pleasant home than the one I left behind in Arizona.

A Ghost in the Machine

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Traces of a past best forgotten pop up in the most unexpected places.

This morning, I unpacked and installed my HP color laser printer. I’d been using a cheap Brother laser printer — the one I’d bought years ago for home when I moved my office to a condo in Wickenburg for a few years — since moving to Washington state two years ago. The Brother is very fast and reliable with perfectly fine print quality for the limited amount of printing I do. But I needed a color printer to print some satellite images for the pilots who will be working with me this summer and since the HP was packed in its box in my shop storage area, I figured I’d bring it up.

I honestly can’t remember where the printer was when I packed it. I’d had it in my office in Wickenburg for quite a while but in 2011, in a failed attempt to appease my husband (now wasband), I’d moved my office to the condo he was living in during the week in Phoenix. The idea was to spend more time with him, which he led me to believe he wanted.

But that move also came with a lifestyle that had me shuttling back and forth between Phoenix and Wickenburg every week — weekdays in Phoenix, weekends in Wickenburg. After spending the whole summer living in an RV every year, I wanted to be home. In one home. With my office in Phoenix, whenever I had a book project, I needed to be there. And I work weekends when I have to. So instead of spending most of my time in my comfortable Wickenburg home, I wound up spending most of my time in a dark, depressing, noisy, and privacy-free condo in Phoenix that I never even liked. Meanwhile, he kept going home on weekends, making we wonder, at times, why I’d moved at all.

Anyway, I don’t remember if I moved the printer down to that office. I might have. If I did, it was likely one of the possessions I had to beg him to let me have back when he and his mommy/girlfriend began their reign of harassment in the early days of divorce proceedings. In any case, I still had the original box — I kept all boxes in my hangar — and I packed it in its original foam. I’m pretty sure the Brother was in the condo — it was in the cabinet under the TV — and I can’t remember if I got it the day I came to retrieve my possessions or before that.

Honestly, the whole thing is a blur and that’s probably a good thing.

Today, I moved the Brother off my file cabinet — another possession I had to ask for — dusted the cabinet’s top off, and set the HP in its place. It uses the same cables, so I just hooked it up to power and USB. It immediately came to life with a Paper Jam error message.

I opened the printer’s big front door. The sheet of paper was clearly visible and easily removed. As I pulled it out, I wondered why I hadn’t removed it when the jam occurred. Then I looked at it and realized that I hadn’t printed it. My wasband had.

Email Jam
The ghost in my machine was a jammed email message printout.

It was an email message I’d written to him back in 2007. It had two attachments, one of which was a PDF of my flight plan. The message told him that I was flying from Page, AZ up Lake Powell and into Canyonlands National Park. I was apparently on a charter flight — probably a photo flight I did with a photographer trying to get images of certain landforms from the air for an advertising poster. I vaguely remember the early morning flight and the photographer holding a camera sitting on a Kenyon gyro. I could probably track down more details in my log book.

I know I’d used the printer after 2007. Heck, I’m not even sure if I owned the printer in 2007. That meant my wasband had printed a long-saved email message while I was gone, probably in the summer of 2012, when he hooked up with his girlfriend/mommy and his delusions went into full swing.

I have an idea why he might have printed this old email. In his deluded mind, he was convinced that he had helped me build my helicopter charter business. That’s how he justified going after half its assets in the divorce. He was unable to prove his case in court — most likely because it wasn’t true — but I assume that he was collecting email messages related to that business as part of his case.

Of course, the reason I sent him an email message with my flight plan that morning at 3:06 AM was because he was my husband and I thought he’d care about my route. At that point, before his delusions began, I think he really did. He might have even still loved me back then.

But mental illness does funny things to people. Once the love was gone and the greed-fed delusions took over, he saw everything even remotely related to my business as evidence of me using him without compensation. I’m sure his lawyer(s) got a stack of email messages from me to him that he thought could help his case in court.

Printed on my printer.

Finding this message jammed in my printer makes me even sadder for him than I already am. His illness, fed by bad advice by manipulative people he trusts, caused him to throw away so much — not the least of which was a friendship and a ton of money. I doubt anything remains of the good, honest man he once was.

I’ll throw this ghost into my recycle bin. Another reminder of a lost life swept away.

Unpacking My Kitchen

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What was I thinking?

Yesterday evening, I planned a little get-together with girlfriends to keep me company while I unpacked some (or all?) of my kitchen boxes. I’d packed well over a dozen kitchen boxes during my final months in Arizona and now that my kitchen cabinets and countertops were in, I didn’t see any reason why I shouldn’t start unpacking them and putting things away.

The Backstory

For those of you who don’t know the circumstances under which I left my Arizona home in the spring of 2013, let me give you a tiny bit of backstory. In 2012, while I was away in Washington for work, my husband told me he wanted a divorce and began living with a desperate old whore in Scottsdale. When I returned to Arizona, I found the locks changed on my home. I broke in, got the permission of the court to live there without him, and began what would become an extremely ugly divorce battle. My future ex-husband seemed anxious to get me out of the house — which he claimed he wanted to keep — but refused to agree to a reasonable settlement and even pushed back the original court date to delay things, mistakenly believing that I was as anxious to leave my only home as he was to get me out. (To this day, I have no idea how he could have made so many stupid mistakes.)

Meanwhile, other than making a few trips to visit friends and family and start a new job, I was pretty much stuck waiting at home, heartbroken, bored, and angry. I filled my time by packing up things I’d bought throughout the years — things I probably would have left behind if the bastard I’d married had settled. I blogged about this here. (Of course, if you want the dirty details on my divorce ordeal, you might want to read about my upcoming divorce book, tentatively titled Expensive Delusions: A Midlife Crisis Gone Horribly Wrong.)

Anyway, the longer I was stuck waiting, the more I packed. I was finally set free when he agreed to a list of the items I’d leave behind in exchange for me leaving the house. Agreeing to that list was the first — and so far only — reasonable thing he’s done in the past three years.

Nearly two years later, I have dozens of boxes stacked on pallets in my RV garage, waiting to be unpacked in my new home.

Kitchen Unpacking

The kitchen unpacking was the obvious place to start. With the installation of the cabinets, appliances, and countertops, my kitchen is 95% done. All I need to do is finish the flooring (which I’ll likely do today), add the trim, put shelves in my pantry, and get my kitchen sink and dishwasher hooked up (which will be done Monday). I was already using the refrigerator to store some of my food and the stove and microwave to prepare some of my meals. It would be nice to cook with my good pots and pans and eat on my good plates. These were among the first things I packed — the things I knew I wanted with me when I built my new home — and I hadn’t laid eyes on them for well over two years.

I spent most of yesterday laying Pergo in my great room. I was really hoping to get the whole room done before my guests arrived, but by 3:30, I still had the far end of the room and much of the kitchen to do. I spent another half hour cleaning up and starting to bring up boxes. Then I took a shower and prepped to receive my guests.

Great Room
Here’s what my “great room” looked like before I brought up the kitchen boxes. I like to think of this as the calm before the storm.

Although I was hoping to do all of the unpacking and let my friends just keep me company, they dug right in. Soon, the floor was full of empty boxes, wrapping paper, bubble wrap, and unwrapped kitchen items. I was extremely happy to get those every day dishes and pots and pans unwrapped and put away. And pleased to find many of the things I’d forgotten all about — various vases, my canister set, hand-made serving plates, glass mixing bowls, stainless steel measuring cups and spoons — basically everything I’d need in my new kitchen. And even a few things I don’t use often but really like, like my three little teapots, which will look great on the shelves near my window.

I found my immersion blender, which I’d been searching for months ago, in the bottom of the box marked “Last Kitchen Box” — just where I thought it was. That’s also where I found the last bunch of things I packed: two coffee makers, my coffee grinder, a few mugs, and various things I was using right up to the last day I lived in my old home. Some of those things duplicate what I’ve been using while living in my RV; I’ll take the items that are in the best condition for my home and put the duplicates back in the RV.

But I also found things that I can’t believe I packed: a microwave rice cooker I didn’t use in Arizona and won’t likely use here, a sprouts spouter I hadn’t used in at least five years, several tiny milk pitchers, at least ten extremely uninteresting serving plates and bowls — the list goes on and on. There’s the white marble lazy susan that’s heavy and ugly. There’s the glass plates shaped like fish, which I remember once thinking that I had to have and then rarely used. There’s a pair of desert dishes shaped like a bunch of grapes. There’s a pair of very large Starbucks Christmas mugs. There are also duplicates — I can’t believe I packed three cutting boards, even though I know I left at least one or two behind.

I know I got rid of a lot of my things before I moved — the local thrift shop could have opened a whole room with the Jeep-loads of things I dropped by every week — but I definitely packed stuff that should have been given away.

And now it’s here.

On Being a Packrat

My friends and I got through most — but not all — of the kitchen boxes. This morning, I came back upstairs to the crazy mess I’d left the night before. As I sipped my coffee and gazed out the window at the brightening landscape around me, I gave it some serious thought.

Unpacking Mess
Looks like I have a lot of cleaning up to do this morning!

I know I live with a packrat mentality — it’s one of my problems. I think it comes from my early years, back before I was able to afford the things I needed. Back then — especially in college — I became a scavenger, always looking for things I could use in my life. My dorm room was a perfect example, with furniture, lamps, and even a rug that I’d scavenged from the trash area on moving day.

Plates
Nice plates, but do I really need them?

Even years later, when I lived in Arizona, I’d often encounter items I thought would be useful and save them. For example, I remember buying frozen crème brûlée that came in very nice flat ceramic plates that had a terra cotta look. I couldn’t see throwing out those plates. So here they are, in my new home, making me wonder what the hell I’m going to do with them.

Even today, it’s hard to pass up an item I can use as is or modify to repurpose for another use. As I type this, there’s a load of eight pallets in the back of my pickup truck. I use them to create things like raised bed planters. I have lumber and scrap metal left over from the construction of my building — I’ll use them to redo my chicken coop this summer. And don’t get me started on the empty wine, cider, and beer bottles — all raw materials for my glass work.

Anyway, last night I’d tried to put away all of the things I packed, but with the clarity that comes after a good night’s sleep, I realize that less is more. It’s time to unload those extra things — the things I should have gotten rid of while packing.

I don’t want to continue my cluttered packrat habits in my new home.

Besides, I have a lot more boxes to unpack.