Complex Numbers

Stuff and Nonsense

For the record, I'm selecting JAFBG prompts using a random number generator, for maximum chaos.

"30-Day Blogging Challenge ON HIATUS"  [13+]:
3. National Roof Over Your Head Day!
Tell us about the favorite room in your home.

"JAFBG"  [XGC]:
What do you absolutely NOT want for the holidays this year?

I don't have a favorite room in my home.

What I do have is a home. That is, a relatively modest house in a quiet neighborhood that got picked for me by my first wife and her erstwhile business partner. They fell out, we fell out, somehow I kept the house. I decided I liked the house and its location, and so here I've been, absent a few months' worth of travel, for a bit over 25 years.

The last time I refinanced the house, it was on a 15 year mortgage that I managed to pay off early, so it's mine. All mine. MUAHAHAHAHA. No bank, no neighborhood association, just perfectly reasonable city regulations about grass height, snow clearing, not hosting crack parties, and the like.

I don't even have names for all the rooms. I mean, there's the kitchen, the bathrooms, and the bedrooms, one of which is oddly placed downstairs off the utility room that houses the HVAC, water heater

Why do they call it a "hot water heater," anyway? Isn't that redundant? It doesn't heat hot water; that would be silly.

, laundry facilities, and a whole lot of stuff. My housemate lives in that bedroom. I mostly keep to the upstairs area.

Also downstairs is a big room that I suppose would be described as a "rec room," because right now it's a wreck. In earlier times, it's been a lounge, a home theater (I still haven't replaced the projector, or the water-damaged sheetrock to which it was once attached), my computer area, a meditation place, and a gaming space, but right now it's kind of everything and I don't use it much. The rec room is covered with stuff right now, mostly belonging to my housemate, including her two guinea pigs who are very cute but kind of a mess. Right off of that is the downstairs bathroom, and it also has a door to the patio. The patio has collected stuff, but only waterproof stuff because the deck above it is porous.

Upstairs is more bedrooms, one of which is mine; the other two are a guest bedroom and my office. All three are chock-full of stuff. There's a bathroom, a kitchen, and a space off the kitchen which I suspect was intended as a living room but now contains a really nice, sturdy dining table, which I mostly just use to sit my laptop on because the office is full of stuff. The bathroom, oddly, doesn't contain much stuff, except the cabinet could use some organizing.

The kitchen has a door that opens up onto the aforementioned deck, which is badly in need of replacement before it collapses, but I've contracted with a guy to do that. Supposedly he'll get to it next year. The replacement won't be porous, so the patio might actually be mostly dry when it rains. The deck has a bunch of stuff on it. The kitchen has a bunch of stuff in it. The dining room is lined with bookshelves containing stuff.

You try living in a place for a quarter of a century, with a changing cast of other characters, and not collect stuff. I don't know; maybe you could do it. I certainly can't. I've been taking some time every day to deal with the stuff, but it's a Sisyphean task. Hell, I don't even know how to dispose of a lot of the stuff.

So I should buy a bigger house, right?

Okay, no. Then I'd have to move all the stuff. Besides, like I said, I like it here; it's in stumbling distance of at least five drinking establishments, depending on what you consider stumbling distance.

And like I said, I don't have a favorite room. Obviously I spend a third of the day in my bedroom, but I don't remember most of that time. The rest of the time I spend sitting on my deck with the laptop if the weather doesn't suck too badly, and that's not a room with a roof over my head, just a patio umbrella. When it's raining too hard, snowing, windy, or cold, I'll sit at the dining room table.

But hey, I'm just glad to own my own home. Which leads me to the other prompt (you knew I had to get to it eventually). My knee-jerk response to "What do you absolutely NOT want for the holidays this year?" is of course Trump Mumps, but that's way too obvious. The actual answer is "anything" because... dammit...

I have enough stuff.

But, you know, there's always room on my new Kindle... and there is that distressingly empty spot in my liquor cabinet...