On the brink

Hello and welcome to An Altitude Problem, where yours truly thinks she might be able to be creative enough to come up with titles for her posts if she just gets a bit more committed. I have been organizing all week, trying to make things easier to find. Why should the blog be any different?

I sit in a clean house. Possibly even clean by other people's standards. The carpet cleaner still sits in the back room awaiting use, because the day I had set aside to use it was the day we discovered it was missing a part. I brought home the part the next day, but by then I had moved on to other projects.

The spare bedroom is clean, and the closet is filled with only camping gear and sports equipment, instead of being an avalanche hazard of art projects, sewing projects, a Christmas tree, various bedding, bike gear, home decor trinkets, etc. Most of the latter list has been taken away to Goodwill and consignment.

The office was clean, although the cleaning project in there is like the Olympic torch- it's always going.

Our bedroom is clean, and all the laundry done. The kitchen is clean. The cluttered corners of the dining room are clean, and the everything-basket has been emptied and the basket given away.

Christmas cards from the last three years, gone. All my shirts that no longer meet my pants (I can't seem to be able to buy clothes that don't shrink more with each wash), gone. All my paintings, gone. Cast-off bedding and wall art from redecorated condos, gone. The remote control, gone. (Oops.)

And, since I cannot seem to be able to clean without also rearranging (which drives B absolutely nuts, but makes everything feel wonderful, clean and new to me) the living room, office, and bedroom are no longer familiar, but the furniture has been moved to new locations to suit my whims. I try to tell B that we do not wear the same clothes every day, so why do we arrange our spaces once, and never again? Once it gets to be the same old same-o, I lose all inclination to keep it uncluttered.

I have two new mantras, which I have repeated to myself many times this last week. "If you don't use it, you need to lose it", and "A place for everything, and everything in it's place." There are two items that are actually bothering me a lot, because I absolutely cannot find a good place to put them. One is a wake board, bought in Missouri on our last vacation with our boat in anticipation of many more days on the lake, used three days, and then, when we decided that winter to sell the boat, stored. We have stored it ever since, reluctant to take it to consignment, because we will take such a loss on it. The other is a box of wrapping paper. I stuffed a mattress in one of my closets, to be taken out when the office room needs to be turned into a bedroom, and without that closet, there is simply no place for those two items. Every single other item in this house has a home. I am feeling quite good about that. You try to run a lodging company, storing all the tools needed to do so in your home. A double-wide trailer house could burst at it's seams with tool boxes, paint cans, cordless power tools.

And in a year, we may need to give up our home office space to a roommate. Yes, we have a new plan. Wanna hear it? But of course you do.

Right now, the Lord willing (and the creek don't rise) we plan on leaving for Maui about next April 1st. For 4 months, we will enjoy a slacker's life on a Pacific island, yours truly using the idyllic weather and lack of a job to train hard for mountain biking when we come back August 1st, B getting PADI dive certified and following his dream of exploring the last frontier- underwater. Then we will come back home and face the music, run the company, and enjoy the last two months of summer in the mountains while B's sister spends the next 4 months in the house we will have rented there. Then, for the remaining 4 months of the year, we will sublet our house in Maui (we have a few leads on people who might be willing to take one for the team, make the sacrifice and spend the winter in Hawaii in a cheap house with a free vehicle) while we all live together in Summit County and manage the company through the 4 busy months- December, January, February, and March. Since rent there is slightly cheaper than it is in Summit County, between B's sister and us, we will still be paying the same amount as we are right now for housing. The sacrifice will be coexisting in the same house through the busy season, but it seems an easy one, since the pay-off is four months off. It's the best way we can think of to have our cake and eat it, too. We do not need to lose our job security, can maybe delay the inevitable burn-out that everyone experiences with a lodging management job, keep from going insane from being too cold from too long, get to add a great adventure to our life's story, and, by operating half-staffed eight months of the year, we will all work longer days, and the extra hours each day add up to enough to allow us to take those four months off.

I give us two years. I really think after two years max, we will be so sick of moving Andy to a rabies-free island, and jumping through all the hoops to prove that he is rabies-free. We will have the island thing out of our system,and be ready to move onto the next best thing (which, truthfully, some days seems like an even better idea than Maui). And what is that, you ask? The next best thing involves losing all ties for four months, an open road, me and you and a dog named Boo, travelin' and livin' off the land. Actually, Lobo's dog was named Boo. Our's is named Andy. Gonna have to write a new song, one that rhymes with our dog's name. Our plan involves a 20-ft home on wheels hitched to our pickup truck, 14 days in one spot(the maximum amount of time one is allowed to stay in one spot on National Forest land before one is considered a squatter), chasing dry trails through the U.S. of A. This plan is more conducive to the having of kids than the Hawaii plan. If something should happen to get conceived in the meantime, accidentally or on purpose, the Hawaii thing would probably get cut short.

Of course, it could happen that we would decide we really like it in Maui, and the perfect jobs would fall into our laps, and we would just decide to stay. Or we might decide we hate it, and would rather hit the road for 4 months out of the year. Or any number of other options. All we really know is we don't know if we have tomorrow, let alone next year, and in this one area, B and I are reading from the same page. The world was made big and beautiful for us to enjoy. A life lived happily is far better than dying wealthy. We talk with big words and big gestures about grabbing and enjoying every day like it is your last, because it may be. Going ahead and crossing off all the items you can from your bucket list while you are young. If you make it to old age, having stories to tell that your grand kids are actually interested in, and having enough of them that you don't have to keep telling the same ones over and over. Wondering if something is wrong with us because the older we get, the less we want to settle down, spend the rest of our lives in one place with side-by-side rocking chairs on the front porch looking at the same view we have seen every day for the last sixty years. The word "tied-down" induces nightmares, and we get dreamy-eyed at the thought of seeing, being, doing. And suspecting that the fact that we are polar opposites in every other area is probably a good thing, because if we get this crazy in the one area we agree on, it is probably best for our equilibrium that all other areas are balanced by our own version of yin and yang.

As far as our present goes, it is looking up. The winter, the horrible, hellish winter, is over. Already the memory of the mad rush, the stress, the hysterical tears (okay, it's quite possible I was the only one who actually resorted to such measures of stress-management, and then only after total exhaustion had set in), the short tempers and the phone that rang with perfect timing to make relaxing impossible, all is fading, being blocked by our minds, our subconsious kicking in and repressing, compartmentalizing, minimalizing like the good little coping mechanism it is. It is slow time. We are ready for summer, in spite of the fact that we have gotten over a foot of snow in the last week. Yes, now that winter is over and the skiing conditions were dismal, now it can snow. No longer are trails dry. Mud season is official. And we are getting outa here. Moab with my parents for a few days, Mexico for a week. Definitely looking up.