Generalized Awesomeness

I have the most awesome roomie ever. (And no, Firefly, that doesn't diminish your awesome-roomie-ness in the slightest, but after you read what Tim did for me as a Christmas present, you will understand my superlatives.)

I spent Christmas Eve at Mom's, as usual. That's been the family tradition; Christmas Eve dinner with Mom, the traditional Gospel reading *, and luminaria** placed out in front of the house. Mom went off to Midnight Mass, I took my heathen self to bed, and next morning we opened presents. Around lunchtime, I drove back here to pick up Tim, who was coming to dinner because Mom couldn't stand the thought of anyone being alone on Christmas. Of course, Tim, who is used to being alone on Christmas, found this outrageously awkward and intimidating, for which I can't say I blame him--back when he was "CR's friend", he was not so much looked upon with kindness by the family circle. Guilt by association, I guess; but now that he's "Gladys's roommate", that's a whole new situation, and requires a different approach. And Mom, who feels awkward just by nature, spent the intervening few days questioning me about what would and would not be appropriate for discussion. So the few days leading up to Christmas were spent calming everyone's nerves, and wondering how, exactly, I'd gotten into this.

Christmas dinner went fine, despite everyone's angst, and despite the meat thermometer, which apparently has issues with the concept of "medium" vs. "medium-well" as regards steaks. Since I was in charge of the steaks, the shame of overdone meat fell upon my shoulders, even though everyone claimed it was fine. Of course, if everyone would just eat their meat rare like me, we would have had no problems at all. But it wasn't nearly as awkward as all of us feared it would be.

We came home after dinner, Tim and I, and he went into his room and told me my gift was "upstairs". I wasn't sure if he was entirely serious--we spend a great deal of time abusing each other's credulity--so I figured if there was anything to find, I'd find it. I peered into my room--nothing unusual there. I went into the bathroom and discovered that the air-conditioner, previously in my bedroom window, had been removed for the season and placed on a sheet of cardboard to drain. I was thrilled--I had been meaning to do that for the longest time, but it's an irritating job and anyway I have nowhere to put it, as my closet is still in unusable condition. So I paged Tim on the cordless phone*** and said "Thank you!"

"For what?" he said.

"For taking out my air-conditioner," I told him. "That was really great!"

"Thanks," he said. A few minutes later, he paged me back. "That totally wasn't your Christmas present."

"Was it the fresh box of Christmas Q-Tips in the bathroom?" I asked.

"Well yeah, that too, but...Keep looking," he said.

By now I was totally perplexed, trying to figure out what, exactly, he was talking about..."Upstairs," he says, and I'm upstairs, and it's not anything obvious in my room except the air conditioner being moved, which he says isn't it, and there's nothing in the bathroom, and....no, the closet didn't miraculously get fixed, so it's not that, and there's nothing out of place in the hall closet, and the only other thing up here is....

Light bulb.

I opened the door of LJ's room.

It was no longer LJ's room. The floor had been vacuumed into a state of immaculateness--or at least, as immaculate as a carpet can be after two years of gratuitous abuse. The bed had been moved and, as much as possible, made; there was a comforter and pillows covering it, anyway. The little TV from the basement had been placed on the little stereo stand which we had moved from the living room when LJ removed his stereo from it; the dresser was beside the bed, with a lamp on it, and an alarm clock. It looked, in short, like a guest bedroom, instead of something you might access through a dark alleyway after being beckoned by a middle-aged bottle-blonde in a too-tight skirt and too much bright-red lipstick.****

In case he hadn't heard my yell of "Awesome!" I paged Tim and yelled it into the phone. He came upstairs and told me the story of the process (including a confirmation of my dark prediction of what would become of anyone who would attempt to vacuum that room*****.) "I wasn't sure, though," he said, "that it was such a good idea....I mean, I didn't know how you'd feel about me doing this. I didn't know if maybe you had been putting it off for a reason...like, an emotional reason..."

"No," I assured him, "I was putting it off because I knew it was going to be disgusting in here and I didn't feel up to the challenge."

"Well, I mean...I didn't have any money to get you anything, so I figured...Anyway, Merry Christmas," he said. I gave him a hug.

And then--the ultimate.

"Oh yeah," he said, as he descended the stairs. "I fixed the faucet in the downstairs bathroom, too."

The day I moved into this house, nearly three and a half years ago, I noticed that there were a lot of problems with it which hadn't been evident on inspection. One of the subtlest was in the first-floor bath; when I turned the hot-water knob, I got cold water, and vice versa. I had mentioned it to the seller's agent, and his response set the tone for the entire experience: "It's an old house--you can't expect it to be perfect." If someone had said this BEFORE the closing, I would not be living here today; unfortunately, by the time of that conversation, all the papers were signed and there was nothing to be done.

Throughout the time I've been here, that faucet has been symbolic of all the small aggravations here. I didn't want to mess with it myself, lest I cause something even WORSE to go wrong ******; during the tenures of all my various repair-people, there were always more-pressing things to do, and so the faucets stayed reversed...until Christmas, when Tim fixed them.

I went into the bathroom and turned the knobs. Sure enough--the hot-water knob produced hot water, the cold-water knob produced cold.

I'm not sure, but these two incidents of home repair may rank among the most awesome Christmas presents I've ever received.

However, the most awesome thing of all is this: the holiday season is, mercifully, almost over, and if all goes as I expect, people will start hiring again soon. I had an interview for a job this past Tuesday, which I almost certainly didn't get, and I have another one scheduled for this coming Thursday. The Thursday job is downtown, and has an added advantage: I applied for one job they'd posted, and after looking at my experience, they decided they'd rather interview me for a different, higher-level position. I'm really, REALLY hopeful on this one, but I'm not holding my breath just yet.

But something needs to happen soon; the financial situation is becoming fairly dire, and according to the folks at Unemployment, it will take about a month before they can hear my appeal. I filed it last week, but they have to schedule a hearing--which may, if I'm lucky, leave me in the entertaining position of having to take some time away from a NEW job so that I can get compensation for being fired from the OLD one. Life is just a ceaseless round of hilarity, you know? (An ideal outcome would be this: my back-dated unemployment would arrive at the same time as my income-tax refund, which I always get in February after e-filing. That would solve many, many problems all at once.)

Even with the money problems, I'd have to say things are going very well indeed...but I won't miss the money problems when they're gone!!
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*Performed by yours truly, no less; apparently this has been a family Christmas rite for, as Mom calculated this year, probably approaching 200 years now. Her parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents did it; after that she can't trace, but she's already threatened to haunt me if I break the chain after she dies. As I told her this Christmas when she repeated this threat, there's a pretty decent chance at this point that what she's condemning me to is a couple dozen Christmas Eves spent reading the Gospel to cats, but I don't think that unsettled her nearly as much as it should have.

**"Luminaria"--paper bags filled with a bed of sand and with tea-light candles placed inside. We did this when I was a kid, when my dad was alive, and we have quite a few stories about what happens when you put out candles in paper bags on a windy night, or in a blizzard, or any number of other conditions.

***Another contribution of Tim's; nestled among his belongings was a two-unit cordless-phone system. We discovered the paging system by accident, and spent a couple of childlike hours paging each other with every random thought, question, and belch that came into being. It's wonderful to be able to communicate without hollering down the stairs.

****I still want to borrow some sage incense from Debbi, so I can burn off all the evil in that room. Seriously--the number of men who cheated on their girlfriends in that room, and the number of evil plots that were hatched there, and the sheer weight of all the slimy thoughts, leaves a sense of palpable ugliness that no conventional cleaning products could remove.

*****I learned about this a few days after the last time LJ vacuumed that room, when I was thwarted in the attempt to clean a patch of crumbs off the living-room carpet. I went over the crumbs four or five times, and still they were there. I emptied the dust cup--still no suction. I pulled off the hose--nothing. I pulled off the hose at the other end, where it joined the vacuum itself, and spent a jolly hour--no exaggeration!--with a needle-nosed pliers, pulling out clots of impacted fluff, dust, cat-hair, and god-knows-what from the vacuum cleaner's innards. In the end, there were at least THREE dust-cups full of debris piled in the trash can by the time I could get the machine to work properly. LJ, of course, denied all wrongdoing.

******For example: as a result of a simple request to Morris the Handyman to move the upstairs bathroom sink, I ended up (two years later!) having spent over six thousand dollars --repairs to the joists below the bathroom, a new kitchen ceiling, and three grand worth of money lost to Bob the Plumber. I stopped making small requests after that.