Being an adult is so wonderful and such a pain.
When I don't post a new entry for a while, Rick gives me a verbal nudge, as he did this morning.
I'm finally having a new roof put on the house. It is only about 9 months overdue at this point, but better late than never, right? I've needed one since the hurricane (Ivan) came through during my extended hiatus in Southwest Asia. I even saved some of the "extra" deployment funds to help pay for it. When I got home, I was just so happy to be on American turf (with grass!) with all the pleasures of home that hiring a roofing contractor didn't cross my mind. When it did, a friendly coworker suggested I get an insurance adjuster out to see if I could get my insurance to pay for it (did I already tell y'all about this?). I protested that the roof was near the end of it's life expectancy when I bought the place, anyway, but he insisted that they insured it as such, so it was at least worth a try. I called them and had a friendly man with a tape measure on my roof within two days, talking about how flimsy the shingles were. In a little over a week, I was holding a check from my insurance company for just under $6000. I sent it to the bank, then promptly got so involved with work and school that I forgot to take those crucial steps in getting estimates and hiring somebody to do the job already.
I hired a local roofing company about a week before we left for Belize. They said they should have someone there the following Monday--while we were gone. That would have been perfect, of course. The dog would be in the pound so they could go in the back yard, and we wouldn't have to live with people stomping, dropping packs of shingles, sawing, hammering and stapling. In a perfect world, it would have been finished before we got back.
It isn't a perfect world. We returned to an unchanged house. I figured they were running behind (roofers are at the whim of the weather, among other things), and didn't call. A little over a week ago, we came home to find two pallets of shingles, with rolls of insulation (or whatever the black padding is) and nails sitting on the front lawn and walk. I used this as an excuse to not mow the lawn. The roofers appeared and began making a tremendous racket and mess Wednesday morning. They say they should be done today. Meanwhile, we have to lock the dog in the house and live with close-proximity construction until they decide to leave around dusk.
In other news, I'm already bored with my "Jewish Literature of the Holocaust" class. I've read all the stories and plays already (I highly recommend Art Spiegelman's Maus books, by the way; they are amazing). I had enough of people reading symbolism and deeper meaning into stories and poems when I was an undergrad. People have a tendency to attempt to make things more profound than they are, it seems. Maybe I'm simple-minded, but I usually find the facts (or story, or idea being presented) profound enough.
I've been inexplicably low on energy since I returned from Belize, and my weight seemed to shoot up.* I felt fine there, eating some very tasty, fresh and nutritious foods (and the usual amount of tasty junk), and being very active. Upon my return home, however, I found myself incredibly lethargic. I managed to run five miles yesterday on a treadmill, but it was very, very slow. When I run outdoors, though, I end up alternating between walking and running the whole time, then absolutely drained of energy when I finish.
* All things are relative. I'm ten pounds higher than my normal weight, but until I noticed my clothes fitting tighter, I didn't weigh myself often. I don't know how fast I gained.
My diet hasn't changed in years, really, and neither have my exercise habits. About 18 months ago, I had an identical problem. I gained a bit of weight despite my running, and would get dizzy climbing a flight of stairs. I went to the clinic and had several blood tests run, and they didn't find anything wrong. They tested for low iron levels and thyroid problems, I'm quite sure. I ended up just reducing what I was running, making sure I got enough sleep, increasing my water intake, and taking ginseng and gotu kola supplements for a while*, and I eventually came out of it.
* I'm still not sure how useful such supplements are, if at all. Obviously, since I changed several things at once, any improvement can't reasonably be chalked up to the supplements. And for several months without these supplements, I have been fine. This suggests that they were, if anything, mere placebos.
In other news, I rented the movie The Phantom of the Opera this last weekend. I'd heard some of the music, of course, but didn't know the story. I've never seen the play performed (yet). In light of this, this is my review:
The movie is a visual feast. Like The Passion of the Christ, many of the scenes look like Renaissance paintings, they are so perfectly composed. The actual story is given as a flashback, and the initial scene in which the chandelier is raised again and the Opera House comes to light, returning before your eyes to the glory of its heyday (to the music of the title piece) is stunning. The actress who plays Christine Daae has a sweet voice, but not the sort of voice that would inspire people to fall in love with her as their new diva, as the story requires.
The Phantom has a couple of problems: first, he simply doesn't have the voice for the part. He doesn't have the range, the control or the strength. He tries to compensate for these shortcomings by acting the words with more power, but alas. The story requires that the Phantom have the voice of an angel (ahem...he is the Angel of Music, after all). The other problem he has is that he isn't ugly enough. The story requires his face inspire horror--not simply revulsion. (The original novel makes him so noticably disfigured that he can't cover it with a cool little half-mask.) The Phantom in the movie/musical is young and--in every respect other than his face--handsome and sexy. By the end of the movie, I found myself wondering why she left him for the viscount.
Maybe it was because the viscount was the only person in the movie who had a memorable voice. (Plus he had that classy turn-of-the-century aristocratic long-haired pony-tail thing going on...what's not to love?) But compared to the Phantom of the movie, he was shallow and boring.
The movie is worth seeing, but if you want to hear the music that does not ask you to suspend disbelief at the storyline, get your hands on a copy of the performance by Michael Crawford and Sarah Brighton. Listening to Crawford sing "Music of the Night" gives me chills.
So, because I become obsessed with things once I've discovered them, I've been reading the original (well...translated) book online, as it explains many of the things that are only hinted at in the musical. Wanna know the significance of something? Ask me. Or go read it yourself. Online library, no late fees.
Meanwhile, my lawn really needs mowing now, someone bought the lot next to me and I don't know what they plan to do with it (or when), my checkbook perpetually needs balancing, the laundry perpetually needs cleaning, I need to think of some big pot of something to cook over the weekend so I have ready-made lunches next week, the house needs cleaning something awful, and I'm so far behind on my correspondence that my friends think I don't love them.
In addition, tomorrow is Michelle's birthday, so I feel obliged to do something nice for her, so I figure I'll bake a cake and take her to dinner (at Magnolia Cottage, recently opened just down the street and owned/operated by a friend of mine and her husband; they've been 2.5 years in restoring the house in preparation for this). I'd get her a gift, but I never was any good at shopping for gifts.
I need to start writing papers for the lit class, find a good framer in town and get the painting from Belize stretched and framed (as well as a charcoal I picked up in Venice a few years ago), and someday--go through the house and get rid of the clutter that piles up from work and schoolwork for several months at a time.
Maybe I'm physically just fine, but utterly fatigued at the thought of all the things I need to do.
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