A Room of One's Own

Believe it or not, the tiny room pictured above is one of the more exciting developments from our time in Vermont. It's a studio, and it is all mine.

We had a bit of a scramble getting from the town we were living in to Montpelier. We had chosen a town in which to sublet in Vermont thinking that we wanted to either live there or in Burlington. As it turns out, we fell in love with Montpelier, and then, amazingly, I got a job there. Awesome, right? Except for the fact that it is really hard to find apartments here, especially pet-friendly ones, and our sublet was about to run out. We literally saw a place on Tuesday, signed a lease on Wednesday, and moved in on Friday right before our sublet expired on Saturday. We were so happy to have somewhere to live that we tried not to focus on the fact that the place we found was very, very small. 

And it is very, very small. It is a glorified studio apartment, though since it has two rooms and a bathroom, it was advertised as a one-bedroom. We are making it work, but it was very hard at first. It got easier when the Husband found himself studio space. It was actually his idea that I get studio space as well. My loom and yarn are over there, as well as sewing supplies. 

The theory is that I'm going to give the whole weaving thing an actual go, in a space where I won't have to fold up the loom or shove it in the corner every night. The theory is that I'll be a weaver, and maybe actually sell the things I weave, and maybe eventually even make a noticeable portion of my income from it. 

When Virginia Woolf talked about having a room of one's own, she was talking about bringing legitimacy to one's work. The flip side of legitimacy is a sense of responsibility and the fact that it's time to either do the thing you've been talking about or shut up about it. Frankly, it's daunting. We'll see whether in a few months I'm doing the thing or shutting up. I really hope it's the former.

It Happens

The husband and I have settled, finally, in the fine city of Montpelier. We are both gainfully employed. I am not, any longer, a librarian. I am working at a preschool as a Toddler Teacher. In practice, this means I am the assistant teacher under a very cool head teacher in a room full of children aged 12-18 months. 

There are things I like very much about my new career. There are things I miss very much about my old one. Overall, though, I think there is one thing that I can point to as the main difference between the two, and that thing is poop. 

Oh, there was poop at the library, but for me at least, it was mostly in the abstract. I conducted storytimes for many diapered children, and sometimes I'd smell the telltale stink of a poopy diaper, but it was never my problem. Libraries are renowned for providing public bathrooms to any and all, including the type of unsavory character who would spread their solid waste on the walls, but when it happened at my library, I was already home for the day. 

These days, I am pretty much the Poop Queen. At frequent intervals, either me or my co-teacher will say, "I smell poop," and then we will begin the strange ritual of diaper-poking and bottom-smelling until one of us finds the culprit. Often there is more than one culprit, in part because these children eat most of their meals at the same time and are thus on very similar schedules in all parts of their lives. 

All of this was brought home to me in the past week, as a minor stomach bug swept the classroom. As illnesses go, it was nothing major. The afflicted children remained in good spirits and kept their food down. They just had wicked cases of diarrhea. I talked in great detail to mothers and fathers about the contents of their children's diapers, both during and after each child struck ill. In one case, within minutes of meeting a child's aunt, I was talking about his bowel movements to her. 

This is definitely not what I imagined for myself originally, but I'm enjoying it very much. In all honesty, diaper changing is one of my favorite daily tasks, because it is usually nice one-on-one time with each child that is hard to get otherwise in a busy room. Still, though, as I stand and talk earnestly about the texture of a poop, sometimes I would like to hit pause and enjoy a nice long Beavis laugh. So here, in my private space, I have but one thing to say to you: "Poop. Uh huh huh huh."

Thank you. I needed that.

Waiting to land

When we were planning this great move of ours, I expected to feel settled once we arrived in Vermont. After leaving Illinois, we spent nearly a month in a transitory state, spending time in the homes of family and friends. I loved seeing the people, some of whom we now live far from and others who are so much closer now. But I also felt like we were circling and circling and never quite getting to land. I was ready to settle down, and I was so sure that would happen when we arrived in Vermont.

The thing is, though, we're subletting. We picked a Vermont town, the town we most enjoyed when we visited on vacation last year. After trying unsuccessfully to find a permanent place for us to live, we found temporary one. The place is furnished, so we put the majority of our stuff in storage for the summer.

As it turns out, this was lucky. We now know that when we say we don't want to live in a city, we mean we don't want to live in Chicago. "City" doesn't mean quite the same thing in a state where the entire population is less than a quarter of Chicago's.

This is a good thing to learn while finishing off a two-and-a-half month sublet rather than, say, in month 2 of a 12-month lease. We're focused on two cities now, Burlington and Montpelier. In one of those cities (I won't say which, out of a ridiculous desire to avoid jinxing myslf), I have two very strong job leads. I feel so very hopeful about what the rest of the year will bring.

Still, though, I also feel like the circling continues. Where will I be working? Not sure! What sitting will we live in next month? Wait and see! I am aching to settle in and start the process of making myself at home. It will happen soon, but it's getting hard to wait.

In which I interact with real townspeople

Recently while walking our dog Beckett through the village green*, I had the following conversation. I share to prove that even in Vermont, there are Those People.

*Actually it happened near the bus stop, after I had left the green. I, however, would like to pretend I exist solely on the village green for as long as I live in a village with a green.

Random Woman: Oh, that's a nice dog. Is it a chihuahua?

Me: No, he's a fox terrier.

RW: Oh, because he looks a lot like a chihuahua.

Me: Yeah, people say that sometimes. But he's a terrier.

RW: His head is shaped like a chihuahua's. And his neck.

Me: (NOTE: The remainder of my side of the conversation takes place in my head, while in person I smile and nod.) I'm not sure that I can be polite to you anymore.


RW: (As Beckett allows himself to be pet) I let dogs approach me and sniff and decide if they want to interact. That's how I show that I respect them.

Me: Perhaps another way to respect him would be to acknowledge that he's not a chihuahua.

RW: Yeah, sometimes you have to watch out with chihuahuas. Sometimes they just want to bite.

Me: Have you ever actually encountered a chihuahua, or do you just refer to every dog you meet as a chihuahua? Maybe you enrage the dogs by causing identity issues. Maybe they think that while being a chihuahua is certainly not shameful, it is also not what they are and they get mad! Maybe they are just trying to prevent their owners' heads from exploding!

RW: All right, thanks for letting me pet your dog. To someone nearby: Did you see that chihuahua?

Me: Pfff! (It turns out that when your head explodes it just makes a quiet little pfff.)

Huzzah!

So we did it. We officially moved out of Illinois and into Vermont. We took a deliberately roundabout path that brought us to friends in Wisconsin and in Baltimore. (Our suggestion for Maryland's motto, in case the good people of the Maryland marketing board read this, is "Maryland: much prettier than you think it will be.") Finally, though, we've landed in the Green Mountain State. After trying unsuccessfully to find permanent housing from Illinois, we decided to sublet a furnished place here. The thinking was that while it is scary to commit to a year in a place without seeing it, we can live pretty much anywhere for 3 months. The only drawback is that it's been hard to shake the sense that we're on a really long vacation. It's not so much that it's so nice (though we did luck out and get a pretty decent place), but more that living with and using someone else's stuff feels a lot like staying in an inn. Also becuase we're finally living in a place that has multiple appealing restaurants. Also because there is a lovely little waterfall a short walk from our building's front door. And also, it must be said, because we're both still unemployed and our days are open. I've got faith that the last one will work itself out. We made the decision to value where we are over what we're doing for work while there. Having the choice is an advantage of not having kids and of living modestly enough to have accrued savings while both working part-time. Where I am, I can look out the window and see a mountain in the distance, as well as a pub with 17 beers on tap. For the moment at least, the decision seems like a good one.

The Name of this Post is Secret

I sometimes use this space to talk about my hypothetical beautiful life, wherein I live all my dreams and still have time to rock. In that vein, I'm going to make a confession now. In my beautiful life, a portion of my income comes from an Etsy store where I sell items that I have woven or otherwise crafted from yarn or thread. Like most aspects of my beautiful life, the Etsy store is fully plausible but thus far exists only in my head.

The other day, the Husband upped the Etsy store ante by showing me a wooden pin he had crafted and saying "If you do all the paperwork, I'll contribute to the store." This is awesome, obviously. The motivation of having spousal involvement means it might actually happen. The flip side, though, is that now I really do have to come up with a store name.

I have long felt that the worst part of most endeavors is naming them. Papers (in the days when I had to write them), screen names, dogs, blogs, blog posts: all require names, ideally clever ones that provide insight into their owner/creator's character. It took me forever to come up with a blog name that I was okay with. When I was talking about ending the blog hiatus, the Husband pointed out that I should change its name. "Misplaced" Hoosier implies that I might want to find my way back to Indiana eventually, which is demonstrably not the case. This may be true, but aside from the practical element of not wanting the URL to change, I also don't want to have to think of something new. Maybe if I learn a super cool nickname for Vermonters, I'll use that to create a new blog name, but until that point, "Misplaced Hoosier" I remain. (Also, part of the point of the name was that no matter where you encounter us, there is something distinctly Midwestern about us Midwesterners, and something even more distinctive about those of us from the Great Lakes region, but I digress.)

This, then, is the major obstacle of the Etsy store. It really needs to have a good name, because I'd be selling stuff. Something memorable, maybe clever, but not cutesy. Not something yarn specific, because the Husband will probably make things from wood and found objects. I know that not everyone thinks this hard about these things. There are people in this world who name their children after Twilight characters, for heaven's sake. But, since there is no way I'm going to be the proprietor of the Renesmee Emporium, I'm going to have to put some thought into it. Got any ideas?

Elation, Terror, and a Tiny Drop of Moose

I'm spending the days leading up to the move oscillating between elation  and terror. The elation is usually easy to access. This, after all, is a move the Husband and I have been talking about in some form for years. At the beginning of our relationship, we'd say "Seattle" instead of "Vermont", but in either event, it's a big move away from the Midwest and toward mountains. And it's happening! For real!

The terror is sneaky, though, and it manifests in the oddest ways. Looking at the Spring Preview issue of Publisher's Weekly, I saw a book that looked good and went to the library catalog to see if it was on order. When I saw that it was coming out in May, there was the panic. In May, I may or may not live here. If there's anyone ahead of me on the request list, I may never read it. How can I put a book on hold when I don't even know where I'll be living? If I breathe deeply and focus on mountains and the existence of libraries in Vermont, I can usually get back to the elation.

Yesterday was a hard day though. For reasons to do with the condo (wait, have we talked about the condo? I try to avoid talking about it, because it makes me feel panicky on a normal day. Come over for drinks sometime and I'll tell you the story. Spoiler alert: it ends with a word that rhymes with "more closure", which is ironic, since that's exactly what it didn't bring. Also, if you come over for drinks, I'm probably still not going to want to talk about it.)

Anyway, back to the point. For reasons that are unpleasant to think about, our taxes aren't done yet, and I was thinking about that and feeling tense. Plus, I have a dentist appointment this week to fix a chipped onlay. (Never heard of an onlay? Welcome to my mouth, your visual dental dictionary.) Dentist appointments are painful and expensive and usually come in groups, so I was already feeling stressed out when our landlords dropped in.

I should explain about our landlords. They are people we were friends with before we moved into their house. They have moved to Chicago, but he is a professor who comes in town to teach once a week. The point being that they're cool and not landlord-y and that we see him a lot, but not the two of them together. The Husband had talked to him about the fact that we were moving but didn't know when, and he (the landlord) thought he knew of some people with similarly fuzzy plans who might be able to move in whenever we moved out.

Yesterday, though, they said that those plans had fallen through and that we were going to need to give them an end date. This is entirely reasonable and entirely expected. I told them what the Husband and I had agreed, which is that we don't have solid plans but that the goal is to be out by the end of May. If we're not ready by then and they do have a new tenant, then so be it. We'll figure something out. All of which is true, and all of which has been previously discussed by the Husband and me. But there was something about putting a date on it, especially on an already stressful day, that brought on the fear.

I suppose that a little fear is a small price to pay for a beautiful new life in Vermont, or at least a new life in beautiful Vermont. And I'm learning a sort of site-focused meditation technique in which I focus on the good things until my heart rate slows. You know what nearly always works? The fact that we're moving to a place where some of the highways have Moose Crossing signs. How bad can life be when you're less than an hour from the potential of seeing a moose?

Is This Thing On?

Why, hello. Is there anyone still out there? I've been wanting to come back to the blog for a while now - framing stories in my head and wanting to share life's small developments. After sitting down several times to write a re-entry post, I realized that the thing that was holding me back was the whole "summary of what's been going on" thing that seemed necessary after being gone for a year and a half.

In truth, a lot has been going on. Tons of stuff has happened since July 2010. But any time I start to write about it, it turns into a list that I find boring to write and that therefore will likely be boring to read. So I'm skipping all that. Some of it will surely be covered in future posts, and please feel free to ask questions, but really there's no point in doing this if it's going to be boring. The key thing to know is that we are once again on the path to moving. Not just to another dump in CollegeTown either. (Though, in the interest of full disclosure, I must state that the house we are renting now is quite nice. It's not the filing cabinet mentioned in my last post, though we did live there. Suffice it to say that it was an entertaining novelty for a while and then it wasn't.) No, we are on our way to Vermont.

The Husband and I have long joked about the three rings of heaven. The outer ring (Level 1, if you will) is Bloomington, IN. This is where we went to college and where we met. People who stay there tend to wax rather ecstatic. With good reason - it's a nice college town with great restaurants and a progressive political vibe, surrounded by beautiful hills. Yes, it's in southern Indiana, which is kind of a drawback, but it doesn't feel like southern Indiana. Anyway, I met my life's love there, so I have a soft spot.

The inner ring of heaven, Level 2, is Madison, WI. If people wax ecstatic about Bloomington, they downright gush about Madison. We've never been there, but have friends who recently moved to the general area. They say it's all true. The restaurants are filled with local food, the country is beautiful for miles around, and it's nowhere near southern Indiana. Basically, everything Bloomington can do, Madison can do better.

The center of the rings - the crown jewel of my very mixed metaphor - is Vermont. We had always said we'd like to end up there, but that was just based on the fact that it is the land of organic milk and backyard honey. We want to be crazy hippies, albeit well-groomed ones, and Vermont very hippie-friendly.

Then we visited last May and we knew we need to actualize the heretofore somewhat vague plan to get the hell out of Illinois and be the organic hobby farmers we were always meant to be. Having spent several years in the purgatory of Illinois, we earned the right to go straight to heaven's core. We decided on a 12- to 24-month time frame for a move, although I think both of us were afraid that we would lose steam and give in to inertia. Then, conveniently (ha!), the Husband's job ended more quickly than planned, and all of a sudden it looked like 12 months was actually realistic.

So here we are, getting ready to move yet again, though we don't know exactly where. I have told my boss that I will likely be leaving before the summer, though I haven't put in official notice. Leaving my job is the aspect of the move that I really regret, as it is by far the best job I've ever had. We are both now looking for good jobs in Vermont - the Husband has even applied for his teaching license there. If jobs don't manifest, then at a certain point we'll move and take what we can get. We have some savings to fall back on and our needs are fairly simple. Time will tell if we are totally brave and awesome or totally stupid and nuts.