I'm Not Afraid to Keep On Living

The plumber and the digger have left after tamping the dirt back down and pouring some new gravel where the car parks! The septic tanks have been removed and the separate rainwater drainage is in place!

The sewers from the tenant side do not empty into the tank under the garage anymore (that's still there though, but it shouldn't be able to give us any trouble unless we get like a month of flooding rains and a leak)!

It's all brown dirt and gray gravel again now, but here's a few pictures Wax took of the excavation earlier.


We have lost a few bushes and possibly some hostas, as well as a little flat cement pad that we didn't want, to the piles of dirt and digging. We will need to buy a few baby bushes (rhododendron maybe?) and a bunch of clover seed which hopefully might manage to outcompete the grass. And set the cement paver path back in place. All that has to be done during the autumn, before the frost, so... here's hoping. Also a city tree on the corner of the lot had a lot of its roots cut off and unfortunately a lot more on the other side last winter when the city dug up the street to fix the pipes. It's probably not gonna survive that, I guess.

I have been feeling full of anxiety and suspense when actually a lot of things are going well. This stupid open septic tank issue has been oppressing and terrifying us for a year. Monday and Tuesday are my last driving lessons and then I take the test (tons of anxiety) but my teacher and I agreed I've been doing pretty well. Wax and I have managed to cook together a bit more often, even.

On the plus side, plumbers are here digging up the yard to fix the drain to the sewer.

On the minus side, the plumber asked me if Wax was my mom. 😂😭But on the plus (?) side that was probably more embarrassing for him than for us? (I have gray in my hair! But apparently not visibly, at a glance.) (Wax also looks young for her age, but I guess her hair looks much grayer now.)

The tenant side drains will be cut off from tomorrow, so we have to clean the bathrooms tonight so they can use our bathrooms. And the giant pit that's being dug has eliminated the direct route from their door to ours, so they'll have to go the long way around the house to reach us. And we'll have to climb over the railings and jump down the side of the stairs to our door for a little while.

But obviously it's all worth it! Because ultimately it means working drains instead of open septic tanks with a pump in them.

Years ago Wax bought one of Finlayson's original Tom of Finland tote bags. She carried it a long time (12 years maybe?), until finally the handles wore so threadbare they were falling to pieces and there was a big and several small stains, so I confiscated it for treatment.

Washing it several times and soaking it in oxygen bleach only faded the main tea stain. But this week I finally got around to unpicking the stitches that attached the handles and sewing in new longer ones of cotton webbing (by hand because the sewing machine isn't working). I embroidered over a couple of small rust spots where there had been button pins and then sewed a zipper into the pocket. In the process, I accidentally put it down on top of a wet teabag, so it had to soak in cold water and be spot-treated with oxygen bleach, which removed the new spots. I then soaked it in some diluted lemon juice and the older tea stain faded to a faint yellowish.

See, I was going to embroider over it too, but it's much bigger than the other spots, about four inches long and two or three high. And the bag shrank a bunch when initially laundered. It's sturdy cotton canvas and it didn't occur to me to worry, but umm, it only shrank vertically, not horizontally, and so all the semi-obscene gay guys in the print became... stumpy. And Wax thinks that they will stretch out again over time when the bag is weighed down with cargo; a big embroidered patch would interfere with that.

And he came and spray painted on the ground! He says that the digger dude who was never returning his calls in the spring should be less busy right now. Idk, but I hope he's right.

We might not have to have the open septic tanks for another winter!!

I have been a mess for about a week now, partly just in anxiety about learning to drive and my driving lessons.

After the first few lessons I was having lots of trouble with the clutch and I was really worried about it (I still think it's unnecessarily complicated for regular cars, but... I've mostly got it now). And I can't just add extra easy repetitions to build more motor memory and make it automatic because I can't drive outside the driving school until I have my license. I had to add an extra three lessons (to the original 6) because I just didn't have it yet. I have had one of those now, and the teacher and I agreed I will probably be ready to take the driving test after just a little more practice. So we booked the driving test in two weeks, and my last two driving lessons the day of and the day before. Hopefully that will be enough! Failing is to be avoided: it costs 99 euros to take the test, but if you fail it, the second time costs like three hundred.

I had lessons three days in a row this week, and I absolutely should not drive without taking methylphenidate: taking adhd medication significantly reduces driving accidents for adhd sufferers. But while it makes it easier to concentrate, it also speeds up my heart and... kind of makes me hyperfocus and be in a hurry? Generally, it makes anxiety worse. I have real trouble slowing down and relaxing to the appropriate level for driving, but I can't take a tranquilizer for the anxiety so I just have to try to breathe deeply and stuff. Probably walking a couple miles or something first would be better, if I were in shape, and if I would be able to shower and go to the lesson right away (but it takes 50 minutes on the bus to get there).

I also contacted the licensed Bernina repair shop about the sewing machine that won't go, and he said he has a huge backlog right now and to try again in October-November. I delayed contacting him for a year and a half after the problem appeared, so this is comparatively minor and I can't be mad, but of course now I want it urgently because both pairs of my flannel pajama pants are falling beyond the reach of patching and mending.

One of the triplets finally told us what she wanted in a sweater and we ordered the yarn, but the other two are silent and our attempts to get them to give us their measurements have also failed. I suppose we'll have to propose a date when we will show up and ask if they can hand us their favorite sweatshirts to be measured then or not.