Thursday, March 31, 2011

Bed and Breakfast

Warning: There's  picture of a dead squirrel so be fairly warned before you scroll down!


Last night was my first night in the new place. I got a big dose of Northern MI kindness when the landlord offered to help me move my sofa, bed and Wally. At the moment that's all the furniture I own so moving wasn't really all that difficult. Although we did look a bit like Sanford and Son on the way to the
"chalet."

In case you were wondering, yes, that's a water-ski tow rope. Hey, whatever works.

I'll be honest, I liked this place so much when I first saw it, I didn't even really bother to check out the details. Thankfully there were no huge surprises. There's a bathroom. There's hot water. The best surprise, in fact, was this:


I'll never need to look for a bottle opener as long as I live here! I decided to call the place The Man-Chalet after I found it, because clearly a man remodeled this place. Or lived here before me. Or  both. 

Surprise number two came this morning. The sun woke me up, which is a good thing, because it meant  it was too quiet for anything else to wake me. I walked out on the front porch to find this:
I burst out laughing. The landlord has been telling me about this flying squirrel that was causing some ruckus up in the roof while he was fixing the place up. He was determined to catch the thing so it wouldn't run around in my roof all night. Of course he's been trying to catch it for weeks and it finally takes the bait on my first night! Poor little guy appeared to just sort of fly right into the trap. Good thing I've been well conditioned to tolerate rodents after my stint in the rat shack years ago:
Although I'll admit I'm sort of hoping we're done killing things on my front porch for awhile. I prefer bacon for breakfast, thank you. 

Friday, March 18, 2011

Livin' the Dream

If you ask me what I came into this world to do, I will tell you. I came to live out loud. Emile Zola

Finding the words to start the blog back up again has been difficult. As most of you already know, my mom was hit by a truck and killed while riding her bike in January. I've done a lot of writing since then, but when it came to the blog, it was hard to find a way to go from a blog post that said, "I came to live out loud," to one where I write about my mom dying. 

I knew the words would come at some point and today they did. Most days I do pretty well, but today was a rough one. I spent the morning hitting up garage sales looking for furniture for my new place. From out of nowhere it hit me-  

My mom will never get to see my new place. 

A friend who lost her mom years ago told me that "firsts" will be the hardest. The first Mother's Day. The first Christmas. The first new anything. 

My tactic on the rare rough day is this: find a way, any way, to embrace the sadness, then let it go and move forward. Today my way was this: I remembered what my dad said about the day she died. He said she was singing while she got ready to ride her bike because she was so happy to go enjoy the sunny day. 

Simply put, she was living out loud. 

So, I'd better get on with it then and get back to some noisy living too. Next week, I move into this place:

Ski and run trails out the back door. A short walk to the beach. A bike path out front. When I sent a friend the pictures, his response was, "Living the dream." 

So here's to living the dream. Out loud.