Help
Sign In
happiness
November 2009 
When do you most love coming home?
Posted on Dec 4th, 2008
by 
tinkonthebrink
tinkonthebrink
This is in Response to the Questions and Reflections for December 04, 2008:
We have this very run down little house with peeling paint and peeling linoleum on the floors and I love this little house so much. I would rather be home than anywhere else. If we owned this house I would fix some of the little problems, but we just rent. I still fix some of the little problems but not the ones like pulling the linoleum off and resurfacing the wood floors underneath. In the winter we heat the house with those little oil-filled portable radiators and it's surprisingly very energy efficient, although we deliberately don't keep the house super warm. Oh, and one of those radiant ceramic panels that mount on a wall - highly recommended if anyone is looking for a room heater, very very energy efficient. The house has a furnace which uses fuel oil but we don't use that. The floors are always cold though, and the basement is unfinished, dirt floor, and there is always a mold problem. But it's a house with eccentic charms, an old clawfoot bathtub in the funniest, tiniest bathroom, plants everywhere inside and out, cats and dogs and fish, buddhas and kwan yins and shivas and ganeshas keeping company with us all around, lots of books, lots of music, the most wonderful bed with a fluffy down comforter and always a couple of dogs in the bed, and often a couple of cats too, always some kind of food cooking or waiting in a kitchen that is the worst, most ineffiicient kitchen I've ever met, with not enough cabinets and two of those can barely be used because they open into the sides of the stove and refrigerator, this old metal farmhouse style sink, but oh my, I love this funny little house and the life we have in it. I love that Albert almost lives here (except he actually lives at the school where he teaches and just occassionally stops by here). I always always love coming home and being home and now I'm going to go and finish my NOVEMBER art cards (yes it is indeed december now).
Access: Public
i loved reading about your house with all of its eccentric charms. it makes us all want to come and visit, I'm sure! it makes me wonder if every house could be viewed w eyes of love and appreciation such as you've expressed here…. i love our house in the woods, but your blog has made me look around w fresh eyes. thank you!
A while ago a lovely boyfriend gifted me with the phrase “my pleasure” rather than “you're welcome” - so, my pleasure, I'm so glad my eyes for my house can give fresh eyes elsewhere for other houses. And you can all come and visit anytime as long as you're happy to camp out on the floor amongst our zoo - or in a tent in the yard. Actually, we have a tent that we can put up if we need a rustic guest room. So yes, please, that would be lovely. I'll cook.
Wow that sounds fun, you know I have a travel bug. The rustic tent guest room sounds fantastic. And food. Yes! My stomach/gall bladder has to get back in shape before the visit though, so we'll have to wait. And I should really try to figure out where you live. Oh it's lovely to dream!
she is a wonderful cook!
the art cards sound amazing! I hope they turn out well :-) I use to be an art teacher for kids in high school and I do not really have time to paint anymore BUT i do make my own cards and know the joy even that little gesture can bring!
So nice to get a mind's eye vision of your little abode! I am in gov'mt housing and it's pretty sterile as well as being small. When I fly somewhere, I always admire all the wasted space in the restrooms on the planes! Your description of all the critters and your bed reminds me of John Denver's song, Grandma's Feather Bed, too.
It was nine feet tall and six feet wide
soft as a downy chick
It was made from the feathers of forty eleven geese
took a whole bolt of cloth for the tick
It'd hold eight kids 'n' four hound dogs
and a piggy we stole from the shed
We didn't get much sleep but we had a lot of fun
on Grandma's feather bed
Oh my, George your apartment must be very tiny then! Airplane bathrooms are built for tiny miniature people who never need to turn around, not even when they're having sex on the plane. Our bathroom could hardly be smaller unless it was like an RV or a boat with the toilet and sink and shower all in one place - but it then mysteriously has a little kind of hallway inside the bathroom where there is absolutely nothing useful and not even enough room to turn around. It's very odd. But it has that great claw foot bathtub and my second favorite Kwan Yin is in there and a bunch of plants and a skarf from India pretending to be a curtain. So I've forgiven it for being a very odd design because it's such a nice little room.
And that does sound like our bed except it isn't quite so big, we just all cram in together. We hardly ever need to turn the heat on in there in the winter!
I like the cozy feeling of your home
I so get it. Used to be that the bigger the house the better, but then I emerged into a wiser being and realized all that space was a burden along with all the stuff in it.
Now I reside in a small 1 bd apt in a historic building with loud radiators that bang all night long but after teaching all day is so warm and inviting.
Than you for reminding me about the true essence of home.
I want to come over and visit you!!
I checked and it’s a 25 hour drive from here.
It’s 11 more hours from there to nyc.
farland & I are going to nyc in the spring. we were going to fly. I’m going to ask her if she wants to drive instead.
adam says, no way, he’s not letting me leave for that long, but he always gives in, almost, to whatever I want. I’m just persuasive. :-)
he says we should fly though and have a layover in asheville.
what do you think farland fish?? and jeannie and krissy and albert and the dogs and the fishies??
LETS DRIVE! and visit Jeannie and Krissy and Albert and Lyra and her doggie friends Yes!!! I don’t like to fly and yes what a great road trip that would be!
it really doesn’t take much longer to drive when you count the getting to DIA etc that way we can bring knives and other things with us and take lots of photos and learn a new language on the way.
Yay! And in the spring it will be warm enough for tents or certainly for floor sleeping (which would be very chilly right now on our refrigerated floors) and oh, is Gnomi coming too? Yay!
Jeannie, your house sounds so warm and sweet and real. my own house has its funkiness too though it’s quite big enough. I inherited it four years ago from my mom and it has a bit of curling linoleum and a need to work underneath the deck a bit where some boards came loose in a storm. and I need to paint the deck, which I plan to do in the spring. but I love it in much the same way you love yours. and I have Ganeshas too. they do something for a space, don’t they?
please come visit.
we will have so much fun!
it’s real pretty here in the mountains, i’m already making a list of all the places we can go……………
Alright, I’m going to try this but this comment box looks crazy so if the links don’t work, I’ll repost with the url’s.
Here is a nifty calculator which shows that flying is nearly never more ecologically sound than driving, even with just one person in the car.
And this one was an interesting question about whether, if all those people on the plane decided to drive instead of, in effect, plane-pooling by flying together, would it still be less resource efficent? And the answer is yes, it would be better if they all drove. Even with just one person per car.
It’s 2018k to drive from Denver to Asheville. I plugged it in and Dawn and Farland could make the same drive 3.4 times for the same carbon emissions and environmental impact as flying once. Even if they were driving a midsize car.
I didn’t know any of this until Dawn and Farland and Kathy brought up coming here, so thank you for being thought provoking. I wasn’t planning on flying anywhere anytime soon, but now I’m actively planning not to!
I hope this encourages you to make the trip by car and come visit!
The most interesting thing about that is knowing driving is bad and finding out that flying is that much worse. I am ready to drive.
cool………….we’ll be waiting!!!! spring? is that right?
We are hatching the plan which will include Cambridge and Diamondlil and will be first week in May. We were hatching the plan while we car pooled in my car from work and even though I was driving without my headlights by mistake wondering why I couldn’t see through the darkness it didn’t undaunt us from the trip.
Oh my. Okay, try to remember to turn on your headlights on your roadtrip. I’m so excited!
No way! A visit for me too! What a lucky dog I am – almost as lucky as Gnomi and Sticky and Lyra too! Or maybe I could haul patootie down to Asheville with my tent so I could meet Krissy and Tink as well. How many is too many Tink? And, since I am carless, do you know of any calculator-of-train-on-environment-impact? I’m afraid to plug my flight to Minnesota for Christmas into that web site …
No number is too many as long as all are flexible about their sleeping arrangements. Here is a cool article about comparisons between the different forms of travel - click to download the pdf file near the end too. Trains are the best. Can you take a train to Minnesota? That would be fun.
trains ARE fun. I do like amtrak though it’s been many years since I took a trip on amtrak. I dream of taking a european train trip with a sleep car and everything!
farland & I will bring no dogs with us because we just think dogs in nyc will be too much and Lil we are thinking maybe we can leave our car in boston or cambridge and take a train to nyc because we think a car in manhattan is just too much to manage too. and we thought maybe, you would want to have the car for the time that we are in nyc???
I will put together a tentative itinerary once I have spoken to the schedule maker at my workplace and email it.
I so excited!!
i can’t believe this might be real. i definitely have a visitor permit
so you could leave your car on the street outside my apartment, where i
could keep an eye on it for you.