My Free Dog

As you remember from a couple posts back, we have a new dog, a 4-year old Lab named Milo. He came to us for free about a month ago because the couple across the street split up and neither one could take him. I have wanted a Lab for years, and now I have one. He even came with a crate, his own dish, and a nearly-full bag of dog food. What a deal!

He’d also never worn a collar, been outside his house and yard, gone to the vet, or had any training. He was only neutered because he ran away as a puppy, and after Animal Control picked him up, they performed the procedure as a condition of returning him to his owner. They also microchipped him at the same time.

The day we decided to keep Milo, I made an emergency run to Petsmart. Since he didn’t understand instructions, he definitely needed a collar. (It’s not easy to persuade a large dog to move when the only thing you have to hold onto is the scruff of his neck.) I also picked up a head collar for going on walks, an i.d. tag, and a couple other small items. Total: $52.

Then we were off to the vet. She checked him over and declared him healthy. The exam, vaccinations, nail trim, bottle of ear cleaner, and fecal check (to make sure he didn’t have worms) came to $127.

The microchip monitoring company was happy to record Milo’s new name and ownership — for a $19 fee.

Now that Milo had a current rabies vaccine, he also needed a license. That cost $16.

Meanwhile, the walks were going…well, “badly” would be a gross understatement. The War on Poverty is going badly. This was worse. The head collar had seemed like a solution initially, but the more comfortable he got with us, the less effective it was. Before Milo, walking the other two dogs was relaxing and a good way for all of us to get some exercise. But because Milo had been living behind a fence for four years, the sound of a barking dog was a huge trigger for him. Responding in kind was probably his main source of entertainment.

So although we tried to alter our routes to avoid other dogs (ha!), whenever Milo heard barking from inside a house or behind a fence, this otherwise calm dog turned into a complete lunatic. As the frenzy built, he’d be up on his hind legs, barking, whining, pawing at the head collar, and spinning around like a tornado. The strength of a determined adult Labrador is quite impressive, and it is also scary. It would only be a matter of time before he got away from me or took me down. We tried positive reinforcement with treats, but he ignored them. We tried running him past the barking dogs to distract him, but he’d spin around and tangle himself in our legs. No reward or distraction was as exciting as the adrenalin rush he got from struggling to get to the other dogs.

I’d like to report that I dealt with the situation calmly, but that would be a lie. With each episode (and there would be several on each walk) I’d get afraid, the fear would piss me off, and then both of us were worked up. This was not a pretty sight and more importantly, it was counterproductive. While we waited for the first available appointment with a trainer, I let Mike handle Milo on walks while I took the other two dogs. The crazy behavior continued every time Milo heard barking, but Mike is blessed with an overabundance of patience.

The trainer came this past Monday. After hearing our concerns and our failed solutions, she agreed that this behavior needed to stop. “It’s dangerous for you, and it’s not good for Milo’s character,” she said. Not good for his character. I loved that. Spinning around like a top and creating a scene every time he hears barking might seem like fun to him, like a weekend of binge drinking feels to college freshman, but it’s not good for him. He just didn’t know how to stop on his own.

To that end we dumped the head collar, which he clearly hated anyway, and chose another type of training device: a prong collar. If you’re having a negative reaction to that idea, so did I. They look terrible, and I’ve always associated those collars with a certain posturing by dog owners, like, “Look how tough my dog and I are.” However, we were dealing with a large dog who was endangering his own safety and ours every time we took him for a walk. Since positive reinforcement didn’t work, we had to get his attention another way.

Within ten minutes of walking with the new collar, Milo was a new dog. No kidding. He decided that the pinching sensation on his neck was not worth the thrill of flailing around, and he stopped. It’s been five days now, and walking the dogs is back to being a delight. Milo seems more relaxed, and his tail wags the entire time we’re walking. He’s gotten the dreaded head collar off his face, and he walks on a loose leash like the other two dogs do. He doesn’t feel the prongs unless he tries to take off in his own direction, which rarely happens. He still whines when we pass a particularly barky dog, but that’s okay. The rule is No pulling, not No whining. And we’ve decided it’s better for all of us if we modify our routes to avoid the worst temptations, like those two hounds who howl simultaneously as we pass. Milo is still learning, after all.

For an hour and a half of the trainer’s time, plus the collar, we paid $219, which is certainly cheaper than a trip to the ER.

This morning I noticed that we’re almost out of the food Milo came with, so it’s time to transition him over to the good stuff that the other dogs eat. A bag of kibble runs $51, and we’re going to need to buy it 50% more often now that a third dog will be eating it too. Milo cost $533 in his first month, which was not exactly in the April budget. But you know, I am so completely in love with him, it doesn’t even matter. Once again and purely by luck, we have ended up with an excellent — if not entirely free — new dog.

Black dogs are hard to photograph, especially when they won’t stop moving.

What Could I Do With That?

Someone left a little chair on the side of the road, a throwaway they didn’t want to haul to Goodwill. It needed glueing, the paint job was terrible, and the fabric on the seat was stained. So I took it home.

It’s got potential, I just know it.

I love real wood furniture, even the beaten-up kind. Also, the chair is smaller than average, which appeals to me because so am I. And it was free. Where in my house will it go when it’s fixed up? I have no idea.

I took the fabric off the seat, planning to toss it, but I really liked the pattern and decided to give it a little soak instead. If it came clean, maybe I could reuse it.

Will Oxy-Clean work on this?

It did.

About a week later, I noticed that the window in the hall bathroom looks out onto — well, nothing, really. If you’re showering in there, you see the rafters from the overhang outside, plus some of the inner workings of the laundry room. (Whoever built the laundry room before I lived here wasn’t big on attention to detail.) I could go out and buy a valance to cover the window. Or I could make one.

It just so happened that I had snagged a trash bag full of fabric scraps for $4 at a yard sale the day before. I didn’t have enough of any one piece, but maybe I could patch several of them together.

Seat cushion fabric reincarnated into window cover-up.

It took some time to make, certainly longer than it would’ve taken to go shopping. But since I’m trying to teach myself quilting, this little project was perfect for learning about piecing fabrics together. It’s the exact size of my window, in the colors I wanted to use, and again, free.

Several months ago, I made a small quilt for our grandson for Christmas out of fabrics I already had.

Semi-crazy quilt

Then I knitted a rug out of t-shirt strips.

T-shirt rug

And you’ve already seen the $5 credenza.

Salvaged credenza

Our granddaughter said her favorite colors are pink, purple, and blue, so I pieced together a quilt top for her using what can only be described as the Random Method. In it, there are bits of other projects I’ve made, along with some scraps I bought on etsy and some more out of that yard sale bag. It’s so bright that it’s probably not safe to stare at it without eye protection. It looks like the candy store blew up, which wouldn’t work for most adults but is just about perfect for a 6-year-old girl.

Maybe a little TOO cheerful?

Everybody needs a hobby. Mine is that I like to make stuff. I especially like to make something usable out of other people’s discards. There’s something satisfying about the process of taking an object from junk back to functional again. I don’t think of myself as particularly creative in this arena, since I don’t know much and constantly have to consult the internet so I can copy other people’s successes. Honestly, what would I do without Google? How to piece batting. How to use Mod Podge. How to glue a wooden chair.

How to paint over laminate…

Neighbor’s discarded coffee table is my next project. It came with a free Labrador Retriever, too.

Milo Update

Milo

It’s been about 10 days since we took Milo in, and he seems to be adapting to his lifestyle makeover. He doesn’t even seem to mind that we changed his name, which I would really resent if I were him. It must feel like he’s landed on another planet. A really nice one, but still.

Milo arrived a little pudgy and out of shape, so instead of one big unmeasured bowl of food, he’s on rations twice a day. We feed him in his crate, which helps him hate The Box a little less, and he goes for a walk twice a day, not just for the sake of his waistline, but for our sanity. All dogs are happier and less annoying when they get regular exercise. Last week, he was dragging behind after about four blocks, but his stamina improves every day, and he keeps up with the rest of us now.

Because walks are a relatively new experience, though, he overreacts to the sight or sound of dogs he doesn’t know. I think it’s fear, rather than aggression, but it’s a monstrous pain in the ass either way. It’s payback for the superior attitude I’ve had about other people’s dogs barking their heads off as we pass, while mine just trot along and ignore them. Now I’m the one with the wacko on a leash, and it’s embarrassing. We try to refocus his attention by coaxing him into a jog when he’s freaking out, but if he’s still having this problem after a month, I’ll call a trainer for some professional advice. One of my friends got tripped by her big dog recently and, with no hands free to break her fall, her head hit the pavement. Twice. No thank you.

He’s stopped marking in the house, and I’m glad that phase is over. It wasn’t so much a matter of needing to pee as it was a way to say, “I live here now.” Another adult dog we adopted did the same thing. We call it stealth peeing. You can usually catch a puppy who’s getting ready to have an accident because he’ll sniff around on the floor first; but a grown dog will casually stroll past your bookcase, lift his leg, and be done with it before you even know what’s happened. Nature’s Miracle is our friend.

We put him in his crate when we leave the house (and sometimes just for practice), and although he complains about going in, he’s calm and quiet once the door closes. We haven’t tried leaving him in the yard while we’re away yet, but that will come after he’s gotten more settled here.

Black dog hanging out in the previously-hated crate.

I’d forgotten what chow hounds Labs are until the first time he ate a chocolate chip cookie someone had left at Milo-level. He must have liked it because he ate another one out of Mike’s packed lunch a few days later and gave the sandwich a good lick just before I caught him. Another day, I found Milo standing with his front paws on the counter, helping himself to the butter. Tubby dogs do not eat butter, I told him, and they definitely shouldn’t take food without asking. He was very apologetic and swore never to do it again, but I doubt his sincerity.

The weirdest thing about this dog so far is his sweaty feet. I’ve never seen this before. His pads sweat all the time, even when he’s been resting and it’s cool out, so everywhere he steps, he leaves this little enormous footprint. You can imagine what my floors look like.

Mr. Sweatypaws 

The only other concern is that Karma is experiencing some sibling rivalry. She makes Fang Face at him when we get up in the morning, when it’s time to eat, when he’s too close to me, or when he passes her in the hall. He generally leaves her alone, but she will follow him around just to assert herself. I can almost hear her saying, “And another thing…” Dogs do not believe in democracy or equality, so she wants to make sure Milo knows who the Big Dog in this family is. Again, this may resolve itself with a little more time.

“You’re STILL here?”

Adopting an adult dog is, in many ways, more challenging than starting with a puppy. We got to skip the housebreaking and chewing-things-up stage, but an adult dog’s habits, however weird they might be, are less malleable. Not impossible, just not always a perfect fit. It helps that we’ve done this before and that I have the time to invest in helping Milo adapt to our household. It also helps that he’s a willing student. Our house is, after all, not such a bad place to be.

Lab Accident

Our neighbors across the street have gone their separate ways, each of them moving to a new place. They’re a young couple, and it’s always sad to see a family break up, especially when they have kids. And a dog. Every so often, their goofy black Lab would work his way out of the back yard and sit patiently at the front of the house until I put him back where he belonged. He was a good boy despite being essentially untrained. When the wife moved out and took the kids, I felt sorry for the husband — but at least he’d get to keep the dog.

I have a soft spot for Labradors. They’re just so damn happy. The bigger and more outgoing they are, the better I like them. When our daughter was growing up, she belonged to a puppy-raising group for Guide Dogs for the Blind, so we had lots of little Labs in and out of our house during those years. They were charming and easygoing, even though they were specifically bred to be working dogs, and I fell in love with the breed. A few years ago, I lobbied hard for a Lab puppy, but Mike vetoed the idea for all kinds of sensible reasons. We had two dogs already, puppies are a lot of work, blahblahblah. He was right. I hate it when that happens.

The neighbors moved out of the house across the street a couple weeks ago, but their dog was still in the  back yard. I went over to make sure that he had food and water, which he did, and he bounded around the yard with joy at the unexpected company. Three days ago, the husband’s parents were at the house loading up some stuff. I asked when their son was going to pick up the dog. They were heartsick, they said, because the dog was going to the pound the next day. Nobody could take him. Did I want him, they wondered. I did.

This was all kinds of bad timing. My small house, as you may recall, is permanently occupied by Karma and Lily.

Karma. Photo by Dan Wilson.

Lily. Photo by Dan Wilson.

They have been sharing the place with my daughter’s Terrier puppies since December, an arrangement has been challenging in its own right but will end next week when Tessa moves into her new apartment. Lily is old and beleaguered and deserves some rest in her last years. Karma and I are like this.

So the least sensible thing to do is to add another dog — a big, untrained one at that — to the mix. But here’s how I presented the argument to my reluctant spouse:

I live an obnoxiously straight-laced life. I do volunteer work. I floss. I pay the bills on time, and I exercise every day. I don’t smoke or go on shopping binges or drink to excess. I try so hard to do things right that I hardly have any vices left at all — except that every few years, I bring home somebody else’s discarded dog. This is my weakness, the gotta-have-it that grabs me so hard now and then that I just have to do it. Maybe if this Lab went to the pound, someone would adopt him. But he was being offered to me. This is how our dogs arrive. They come unbidden, at a time that is inevitably inconvenient, and turn into the best pets anyone could hope for.

Mike thought about it for several hours while I worked at keeping my mouth shut until my jaws ached. He finally conceded that we could take the dog. But only if our dogs accepted him.

Day 1

First thing in the morning, before he ever comes to my house, we go for a walk. Imagine a full-grown Labrador who has never seen anything beyond his own house and back yard. Cars! Bicycles! Pavement under my paws! What’s this thing around my neck? Is that another dog?? And all the smells! O.M.G.! Fortunately he tires easily because he has never gotten this much exercise before. I want him settled down before he meets all the canines at my house.

I spend almost the entire day in the yard with him, cycling the other pets in and out. He paces anxiously, not understanding why he is at our house and where his people have gone. Despite his size, the other dogs — even the puppies — let him know his place, and this is good. I do not need a 65-pound Lab beating up my elderly Whippet.

This 4-year-old has never worn a collar, been to the vet, or had his gnarly toenails trimmed. He doesn’t know any basic commands, and as I already discovered, does not know how to walk on a leash. After two weeks of living alone, he has a fierce case of separation anxiety and loses his mind a little every time I go into the house and leave him outside. But that is nothing compared to the awful howling and crying that goes on until nearly 2 a.m. as he spends his first night in a crate.

Day 2

His new name is Milo. The whole family wakes up bleary-eyed from sleep deprivation and I wonder if I have made a terrible mistake. But we go for a walk using a head collar, a tool I learned to love while raising the Guide Dog puppies, and he settles down and heels like a pro, so I’m encouraged. At home, he follows me around like an enormous shadow and Karma speaks sharply to him whenever she doesn’t like what he’s doing.

Karma making Fang Face. The blur in the foreground is Milo’s tail wagging.

The vet gives Milo a clean bill of health, a nail trim, and a couple of shots. He spends a few minutes at a time in the crate and still hates it but feels better if he can see us nearby. However, we are so desperate for sleep that we make a place for him on the floor in our room with the other two. It is crowded but blessedly silent all night, and I feel a little saner and more optimistic in the morning.

Day 3

Milo whimpers and stalls a little but gets through his morning walk without stopping to freak out every time a dog barks at him from inside a house. He spends 90 minutes in his crate while Mike and I are out and is not howling when I come home. He wants to be wherever I am but manages to play outside without me for about 15 minutes. He is an absolute star at walking on a leash, and this afternoon, he went into his crate voluntarily to take a nap. As I write this post, Karma and Milo are sleeping about six inches apart on the floor next to my desk.

It was a ridiculous idea. Nobody needs 3 dogs, especially when Dog #3 is big and doesn’t know much. The timing was terrible, we lost a whole night’s sleep that we’ll never get back, and the floors may never be clean again. Still, I think I was right about this one. He really is a very good boy.

Milo

Here’s What I Heard

It’s not that I have a hearing problem. It’s just that my family keeps trying to talk to me when I’m at the sink.

“Can’t hear you! Water’s running!” I say that a lot lately. I also have trouble concentrating on a conversation if the TV is on, although I’ve always been highly distractible so that’s not new. And sometimes I miss words if someone is turned away from me when she’s speaking, but that’s easily remedied by her turning around, which is really more polite anyway.

I was finally willing to consider that the problem might be my ears when I started hearing words that weren’t there. It’s a little like an unintentional game of Mad Libs. Like when Tessa told me that a troop of Door Scouts had volunteered at the zoo during her shift. Door Scouts? Oh, Girl Scouts.

Another day, we were walking Tessa’s tiny dogs when Astor went into a barking fit because a plastic bag blew by. He’s a little sensitive, that one.

Astor

“Usually he only goes crazy like that around other cans,” she said.

Tin cans? Garbage cans? What are we talking about here?

“Not cans, you silly woman. Canines,” she said. I blamed the guy with the leaf blower for making so much noise that I couldn’t hear properly. Besides, if she’d said dogs, like regular people do, there wouldn’t have been any confusion.

Then there was the time she was sitting in the back seat while I was driving, and she asked if we could stop at Walgreen’s on the way home.

“I need to pick up some penguins,” she said.

Okay, I knew that was wrong, if only because they don’t sell penguins at Walgreen’s. But it was too late to stop the picture in my head: little tuxedoed birds lined up in the refrigerated case next to the Diet Pepsi.

“Tampons, Mom, I said tampons!”

What I hear is so much funnier than what people are actually saying.

So I reported my family’s mumbling at my next medical check-up, and the doc sent me off for a hearing test. For one section, the tech asked me to repeat each word as I heard it. One was “iceberg.” Or was it “expert?” Oh well, if you say them fast enough, they sound almost alike.

I’m too young for this, right? Well, once upon a time, boys and girls, concert tickets used to cost ten bucks. In my teens and early 20s, I went to a lot of concerts and sat right up front next to the speakers. Sometimes my ears would still be ringing the next day, a sure sign that I’d gotten my money’s worth. Then there were the two years I worked at the Post Office with my headset on, trying to drown out the sound of the letter-sorting machine with even louder Whitney Houston and Huey Lewis. By the time the report came back that I have some mild to moderate hearing loss in the low end of the register, it wasn’t much of a surprise.

But it is still amusing. Mike was trying to take a compost bin apart last week, and when I saw him struggling with it, I asked if he needed some help.

“It’s not that hard,” he said. “It’s just these teats.” Huh. Now there’s a word you don’t hear much after you leave the farm.

“What did you say?” I asked.

“I said it’s tedious, that’s all,” he repeated. I guess that makes more sense, but it sure doesn’t make me laugh as hard.

The other night, I came home to find that Mike and Tessa had already gotten dinner started. We were celebrating her new job and Mike was heating up the grill. From a couple rooms away, Tessa called to me.

“Sage is marinating!”

Sage

“I hope not!” I yelled back. Because that would be really gross. And not the least bit funny.

Not Buying It

I was wandering the DFW airport recently, stuck in travel purgatory on a three-hour layover. I get odd cravings when I travel. On a long car trip, I start jonesing for McDonald’s chocolate shakes or a Hostess cherry pie. Air travel, on the other hand, makes me want to buy magazines —  women’s magazines. They’re like junk food for the mind, without the animal fat.

I must’ve spent half an hour trying to find one that looked like it might amuse me but left the store with nothing. That’s because when I scrutinized the covers of Real Simple, O, and disappointingly, More, which is aimed at women over 40, all the articles echoed the same theme: Your Life Sucks. Your makeup is outdated. Your man wants you to learn a few new tricks to drive him wild in bed. Your wardrobe needs a boost, your organizational skills are disgraceful, and sweet Jesus, what have you done with your hair? By the way, you’re fat. Hey, try this new cheesecake recipe!

That’s not even counting the advertising, also designed to poke at your insecurities. Age spots? Worry lines? Saggy chin? Muffin top or any other signs that you’ve been around past the age of 22? Never fear. You can buy back your youth in a jar, or if you’re a little farther gone, an injection. If the situation is really dire, there’s always the surgical option. Cosmetic surgery: it’s not just for movie stars anymore.

I’m 51 and utterly fatigued with the whole adolescent preoccupation with looking “hot,” especially in women my age.  It was annoying enough when we were adolescents, and now it just makes me want to slap somebody. At a point in our lives when we deserve some respect for our considerable talents and experience, we are still being inundated with the message that our value comes from how we look. That’s old news— but the urgent push to keep trying to look younger by any means necessary, including surgery, is a relatively recent development. It’s disheartening, really. After all the struggles of the women’s movement over the past 50 years, we still can’t let go of the notion that being sexually appealing is the only thing about a woman that ever truly matters. And as long as we keep buying that premise, they’ll keep selling it.

As I was getting ready to celebrate my 50th birthday, one of my friends asked if it scared me. Another friend had turned 50 the year before and just hated being that age, she said.

“Are you kidding? I can’t wait,” I said. “Fifty is the age when I expect to be taken seriously because I’ve lived long enough to know a few things. Car accidents scare me. Cancer scares me. But another birthday? Please.”

I was fortunate that the two women I admired most as a child were already over 50 when I was born. Both were beautiful, but not because they were obsessed with looking younger. In fact, their appearance had little to do with what made them so lovely in my eyes. Neither had been to college, yet they were two of the smartest people I knew. They had lived through struggles I could only imagine, and those experiences had both toughened them and given them compassion. They had learned a few things about living in the world, and they talked to me about what they knew. They had wrinkles and white hair, but they also had character and depth. You can’t get that stuff from a bottle. You have to work for it, and it takes decades.

I haven’t totally given up my travel junk food, but I seem to have lost my occasional craving for women’s magazines. You can work off a manufactured fruit pie with a little time on the treadmill, but it’s harder to shake bad ideas, especially the ones that “everybody” believes. Like the assumption  that we’re always failing at something, right down to the way we present ourselves to the world. Like the myth that sets the gold standard for beauty at age 35 and convinces us that we have a duty to fit it because we couldn’t possibly have anything else to offer. It’s a lie that diminishes all of us, and I don’t buy it. Maybe if we’d stop buying it, they’d stop selling it.

Another Anniversary

Dear Readers,

I almost forgot our anniversary again. If WordPress hadn’t sent me a little reminder, the date would’ve slipped by me without so much as a nod. Four years ago today, after some set-up coaching from my friend Dan, I wrote my first post to this blog. I spent all day writing that post and then found, for awhile, that I couldn’t stop. My mother had just died and there were too many moments from our 47 years together that I wanted to capture — including the last ones, difficult though they were.

Since then, I’ve written 195 posts that have received nearly 27,000 views and generated more than 900 comments. Those aren’t record-breaking stats, but if you had told me in 2009 that anything I’d written would be read 27,000 times, I couldn’t have imagined it.

Unlike a lot of blogs, this one never has had a consistent theme. I couldn’t write about Mom forever, so eventually, the posts shifted gears as I did. Now I blog about whatever is on my mind, from the death of one of my hospice patients to the state of my hair, so you get to run the gamut from the profound to the ridiculous. Kudos to you for being able to keep up.

Most of you, dear Readers, are North American but nearly every week, someone from a faraway land finds this blog. There was a run of readers from India and Japan for awhile. Last week, I had one from Bosnia and today, one from Saudi Arabia. And nearly every single day, someone new ends up here after Googling “where do peas come from.” Given that I wrote that post sort of tongue-in-cheek, its popularity — and what appears to be a global ignorance about the origin of peas — have both been a bit of a surprise.

You readers are a patient and tolerant bunch. I try to crank out a post at least once a week, which has been the overall average, but sometimes I may go a few weeks with nothing to say. Or maybe the best I can come up with doesn’t really resonate with you. Yet most of you stay, waiting out the drought right along with me. Knowing that you are expecting something makes me want to keep doing a better job of conveying my ideas and honing my writing skills. You have made me a better writer in the past four years, just by being there. For that, I am grateful.

So Happy Bloggiversary, dear Readers. I’ve been having a great time here these past four years. I hope you have, too.

~MY

The $5 Credenza

About 20 years ago, I found an oak rocking chair at a yard sale. The rockers were broken and the upholstery was shot, but it fit me perfectly, a feeling I don’t get from modern furniture, which tends to be sized for Big People. I paid the guy $20, thinking I’d gotten quite a deal. But by the time I’d gotten the rockers replaced and upholstery re-done, the $20 chair had become the $200 chair. I use it all the time so it was absolutely worth it, but it was also a lesson about the pitfalls of falling in love with what something might become.

Last spring, I wasn’t looking for a credenza and I wasn’t really interested in this one. All I did was open one of the drawers and the next thing I knew, the nice yard sale lady said, “You can have it for $5.” So because I had someone to help me haul it home and carry it inside — and $5 — I took it. Like a stray puppy or a bad boyfriend, it had little to offer except potential. Clearly I’m still a sucker for it.

 

Take one mid-century credenza of middling quality, add (at least) one previous owner with no refinishing skills, and look at what you get. The only thing to do with this mess was to prime it and paint over it.

Thanks to the interwebs, there’s plenty of help out there if you’re not sure how to do something. I found this blog, Mandee Made, and read a post where she repainted a piece similar to mine. Since the top of my credenza was such a train wreck, primer was a must, so I followed her recommendation and used Zinsser Water Based Primer which covers everything, including laminate. Then I applied one coat of tan latex that we had in the shed, planning for it to show through when I distressed the piece later.

Unnecessary coat of tan latex paint

I could’ve skipped the tan paint but didn’t figure that out until later. After two layers of black paint and a couple days for it to dry,

Painted the exterior in black

the credenza was ready to be distressed. (One might reasonably point out that the piece was already plenty distressed when I got it, but I was aiming for something a little more intentional.) I sanded around the edges of the drawers to see if I liked the tan showing through, and then did the whole credenza — only to find that I didn’t like the way it looked after all.

Oh well. There was still plenty of black paint left so I repainted the edges, gave it another day or two to sit, then wiped on a couple of coats of polyurethane. We had some red spray paint in the shed, so that’s what I used on the drawer pulls.

Cheating off Mandee‘s work again, I found some cool paper and covered the credenza doors with it using Mod Podge Hard Coat. I am probably the last person in the developed world to discover this stuff. Mod Podge is well-loved by Girl Scouts and those crazy people who make their own greeting cards. Essentially, it acts as a glue and topcoat all in one, so (with a little coaching from some YouTube videos) the paper is now permanently sealed onto the doors.

I let all the pieces sit again for several days. Although I live in the desert and our humidity is almost nonexistent, paint and other finishes still take awhile to dry thoroughly. It’s worth the wait because I have learned through unhappy experience how easy it is to eff up your own paint job by being impatient.

Drawers in: check. Metal caps back on the legs: check. Doors (after sanding the edges and putting a little soap on the tracks): check.

Ta-da!

From start to finish, this project took about two weeks, most of it spent sanding, sanding, sanding, and waiting for things to dry. All tallied, the cost of supplies ran about $40, plus the $5 I spent at the yard sale. The once-hideous credenza is now one of the most unique pieces of furniture in our house, and I’m a little in love with it. I guess that’s why potential is so seductive. Every once in awhile, it really is in there.

Photo Pileup

I can’t see into your house, but I know what’s packed away in your closets, basements, attics, and shelves. There are hundreds –or if you have kids, thousands — of photographs. They’re rubber-banded inside photo boxes and stuck into frames you’re not using anymore. Some are trapped in those sticky “magnetic” albums, while others never even made it out of the envelope from the developer. They frequently have no identifying names or dates on the backs, and let’s face it, most of them are not very good.

This glut is, I think, unique to 20th-century photographs. Cameras didn’t get into the hands of amateur photographers until the 1900s, and most of us in the 21st century use digital cameras, printing only a few of the shots we take. But in the 1900s, especially after World War II, we were determined to preserve our existence on film, no matter how poorly. And once you’d gone to the trouble of buying film, taking the pictures, dropping the roll off for developing, picking up the photos and paying for processing, by God, you were going to keep them. Every. Last. One.

After several decades of living, you have a pretty substantial heap of photos. At some point, your parents die and you inherit all their pictures. Then your spouse’s parents pass away, leaving all of theirs. Now you have A Situation, a photographic pileup of such enormity that it is overwhelming. What you don’t have is the first idea of where to start.

You know how I hate clutter, so I’ve developed a system for dealing with small bites of this elephant. Maybe some of these ideas will work for you, too.

First, you have to set your photos free. If yours are still in those “magnetic” albums that were popular from the 1970s – 90s, most of the sticky stuff has worn off and your photos are falling out anyway. Those albums are bad for your prints, so take them out. If the adhesive has, conversely, become even stickier over time, try bending the page backward and slipping a thin knife under the photo to loosen it. Do not pull the photo off without loosening it, or it may rip. If you’ve neatly arranged your photos in a photo box, your organizational system is precarious, doomed to failure the first time someone grabs a handful out of the section labeled “Mayer Reunion 2001″ and throws them randomly back into the section marked “Michelle’s baby photos.” Give up the photo boxes, I say.

Next comes my favorite part: throwing out the junkers. Most of us never learned how to take good pictures, so many of those taking up precious space in our closets and drawers are really, truly bad. In my family photos, faces are often speckled with tree shadows or there’s a lamp sticking out of the top of someone’s head; but there are plenty of other reasons to discard a picture. If you have six prints of the same basic shot, choose the best one and dump the rest. If a photo is blurry, discolored, or you can’t see somone’s features because of overexposure, you can’t fix it so you might as well toss it. Most of us do not look our best with our eyes closed, heads turned away from the camera, or while chewing. Try not to be overly sentimental about this part of the process. You’re not throwing out the person, only some unlovely moments that were accidentally captured on film. Let those go and keep the good ones.

Also, I try to remember who will end up with these pictures: our descendants. With that in mind, I only save photos that will mean something to our children, i.e., shots of people they actually know or are related to. Photos of the kids in my 5th grade class do not qualify. Ditto for pets from my childhood, trees and sunsets in general, and sundry livestock from our days on the farm. (Seriously, Dad, how many pictures of heifers could one family need?)

If you’ve weeded bravely, you’ve probably reduced your heap to about a third of what you started with. Now grab a handful of the keepers and check the backs for identifying info. While my children were growing up, I apparently thought that each moment of their lives was so significant that I’d remember it forever, along with the year. Sadly, this has not proven to be the case. Now I’m reduced to guesswork based on things like whether a child had lost baby teeth or if we still had carpeting when a photo was taken. I write the names of the subjects and the year it was taken (or a best guess) on the back of each picture, then put it in a “file” pile. Nothing goes into that pile without identifying info. Remember, your descendants won’t know your life as well as you do, so give them a little help now.

It will take awhile to i.d. all your keepers, so stash them where you can do a few while you’re waiting for the microwave to go off or during a commercial break. But what do you do when that pile gets too large?

I use hanging files in a dedicated file drawer. As I note the year on the back of a photo, say 1989, I make a hanging file for that year and stick the picture in it. Then when I come across another one from 1989, I just drop it in. So far, my folders span the period from 1942 – 2008, when we started keeping most of our photos on our computers. (That’s a whole other storage problem, isn’t it?)

Hanging files are a low-tech approach, but they’re an interim step, a way to organize the pictures until I figure out what to do with them next. Scan them? Turn them into a photo book? Who knows. The beauty of the hanging file system is that, no matter how many photos I pull out of it for whatever reason, it’s easy to put them back in the right place. Even if this is as far as I ever get in the organizing process, our kids will be able to make sense of this much smaller collection. They’ll also know that the pictures we saved for them were the ones we really cared about.

Funeral Shoes

Living in the west as we do, our wardrobes are pretty casual. Mostly jeans and t-shirts, and sometimes a shirt with buttons if we want to kick it up a notch. It’s a rare occasion that demands a suit or dress and grownup shoes. Well, not so rare lately. We’ve been called to another funeral.

When I was a kid and wanted to earn extra money, I’d dig through my parents’ closet for shoes that looked scuffed. Dad would pay me a quarter for every pair I shined up — or maybe he didn’t, but that’s the way I remember it. There’s a method to getting a good shine. You put the waxy polish on with a rag. (Holey underwear works well for this purpose.) By the time you finish wiping polish on the last shoe, the first ones have dried. Then you grab another raggedy pair of briefs and buff off the polish. Finally, you go over the shoe with a brush until the leather gleams. There’s something satisfying about taking a pair of shoes that look rough and making them beautiful again. Scuffed footwear says something to me, the same way a shirt with a hole or stain does. Shine says something different.

I polished two pairs of black shoes this morning, Mike’s and mine. His are all-purpose dress shoes, equally fit for weddings and more somber occasions. Mine, the pair I bought two days after my mother died, are reserved only for funerals. I eventually gave away the clothes I wore to Mom’s memorial service because I could never bring myself to put them on again, but I kept the shoes. They’re not cute, but they’re practical: low in the heel, so as not to torture the wearer, and soft on the inside because mourners need a little extra comfort. Also, these shoes can be polished.

But really, who cares about a detail like shined shoes? It’s a funeral. No one’s going to be looking at our feet. Maybe it’s just my own peculiar ritual, a way to create a bit of order in a difficult situation. We may feel awful, but at least our footwear is in good shape. Also, this is our last chance to honor the one whose life has ended. This is why we don’t say our last goodbyes in bermuda shorts and a Budweiser t-shirt. We take extra care with our attire as a final show of respect. We wear our best. We even try to act our best. We shine our shoes.