Rambling into the void

I took far too long writing a whole navel gaze about why I've been gone and what led me back, and how I found myself reading through my blog today.* You know the drill. I don't know how long I'll keep this up, and I have no expectations that anyone is reading this (but that is a bit of the appeal? It feels a little more like shouting into the void than Twitter does, these days). But I've missed writing. Let's see where this goes.

So: hi, guys! Since we left off, I turned 35, and bought a house for my birthday. (It just worked out that way.) We bought a 1950s bungalow that's walking distance from Chris's work, and now my life is so different from where we were at when I turned 30, that I barely recognise myself. (I think? I was leading into "I sometimes go for days without leaving the house and I bake a lot of bread," but that's exactly what my life was like at 30. It's just now, instead of having angst about failing at academia, I worry that I'm losing my identity into the domestic sphere, and mutter stuff about Betty Friedan and The Feminine Mystique.) (Okay, I guess the main difference is that Chris's commute is now a 5-minute walk instead of a 40-minute drive, and I have to get out of bed before he leaves for work now, because the early hours of the morning are Wild Party Time in preschooler land.) (Okay, and my life involves 500% more Small Person's Bodily Functions, but I'm trying to steer clear of that discussion here.)

Homeownership is exactly as scary as I thought it would be, during all our basement suite years: in the five months since we bought this place, we've spent roughly a kabillion dollars on it, especially on a furnace, a new stove, and an air conditioner (but the last one was technically optional), and when the snow melted and warm weather arrived, it turned out that our house was full of bees. (They had a way of getting in through the walls, and really, really love our house. Nine indoor bees in two days. Chris spray foamed every gap in the house, and now they stay outside and I stay inside.) And we got water in our basement, because it turns out that our sprinklers don't so much run as pour water against our foundation. And I hurt my arm attempting to be a gardener!

So, I think that catches you up. Rascally child, wacky house, and brain that's slowly de-fogging and starting to comprehend the surrounding world again. We'll see where this goes.

* A bloggy friend met up with my IRL friend, on my old university campus today! And then I got reminiscing about my bloggy friends, and then I got updating my blog roll, and then I realised I was blogging in my head while cleaning the kitchen...

Roused out of my silence by ants

I was trying to think up a post reflecting on how lovely it's been this past week, quieting my brain for a while. But then I saw them: ants again. My old nemeses. Well, I guess it's been a year since I last went insane with the cinnamon and got rid of them from our storage room.

So much for quieting my brain! At least they're not currently nesting in our living room carpet, or forming a solid line coming from our landlords' half of the basement. They're just coming under the front door, which is the easiest for us to deal with. But I did go a little crazy, spraying Fantastik all over the kitchen floor and outside the front door, in hopes that it killed their scent and a few of the ants.

We'll see how far my crazy goes this year. It's a good thing that my allergic-to-cinnamon sister isn't here right now.

(For now I'm hiding out in the office, where ants never come, and where I can't smell the cleaner that I sprayed everywhere.)