I wish I could give you a link to my new flatware; I love it so, so much but can’t find it online, and it’s so difficult to get a good photo of it. It’s by Cambridge and claims to be the Celeste pattern, but I couldn’t find it on the Cambridge site. (I bought it at HomeGoods.) Here it is tucked lovingly into its own separate tray:

And here are is the set of six small spoons (I give them to the kids for things like yogurt, when a big spoon would tip over the container), in a heap with their small-spoon-and-spatula-and-chopsticks-and-whatnot siblings; they’re a different brand but look very similar except with more of a matte look:

Here’s the best I could find for shopping links:

• Cambridge Logan, which is the same colorful kind of flatware but a different shape
• Cambridge Beacon, also rainbow but even less similar in shape
• Cambridge Cortney, again also rainbow but different shape
• set that looks exactly like mine but is suspiciously unbranded and inexpensive (the 20-piece set I bought was $39.99)
• Berglander, which is a different brand and a lower price than mine, but looks similar
• Kadina, which I’m all but certain was the brand of my set of six small spoons
• another insufficiently-branded set that looks just like mine; I wonder if the Cambridge packaging on mine was fake?

Also, I am almost certainly going to be taking a chance and ordering these suspiciously unbranded but darling tiny little flower coffee spoons:

(image from Amazon.com)

I am taking a day off from my voluntarily restricted eating plan, and that combined with writing about the chocolates reminds me that it’s a good time for an infrequent-as-promised (I haaaaaaate constant diet talk, but I like periodic check-ins) diet update.

I have been on the keto eating plan (very very low carbohydrates, plenty of everything else) since July 2017. I have not increased exercise; it’s been an eating change only. Here are previous posts on the topic:

• Keto Grocery Shopping List (not just a shopping list, but also telling you about the diet for the first time, and talking about Diet Talk in general)
• What I Eat on the Keto Diet
• Cholesterol Report After a Year on the Keto Diet

I have never before stayed on a restricted food plan for this long. I lost about 60 pounds in about a year plus a month or two, and since then I’ve been maintaining. With experimentation, I have found that I can take one to two days off per week and still maintain my current weight.

It was odd to get to a point where I felt like I was done losing weight. That has never happened before with a diet: I always go off a diet before I’ve lost as much as I want to. I’ve never been in maintenance mode before. I’ve heard it can be way harder to maintain than to diet, because it’s still most of the work of dieting but without the motivating thrill/reward of seeing the numbers go down. I will say more about this in a minute.

It is also odd to realize that my chosen stopping-point would be a Nightmare Weight/Size for someone else—in fact, for many, MANY someone elses. It is impossible to escape the culture: we thoroughly receive the message that thinner is always better, and certainly if you CAN be thinner you SHOULD be thinner—and even if you CAN’T be thinner, you should STILL be thinner. People much, much thinner than I am are struggling hard to lose more weight. Much-thinner friends talk about how they hate their bodies and feel like they’re wearing a fat suit, and I can be sympathetic even knowing that at my current size (the smallest I’ve been in over a decade) I still outweigh the friends by fifty pounds or more. I know that weight gain/loss is relative (on the way up, my current weight appalled me, whereas now it contents me), and I know how it feels to get away from what feels like your own normal weight; and I know we tend to look more forgivingly/lovingly at other people’s bodies than at our own; and I know that when people talk about their own weight they’re rarely talking about anyone else’s. (I originally put “they’re not talking about anyone else’s,” but sadly I think we all know of people who drop hints about other people’s weight by talking about their own weight. It’s just that I am fortunate not to have any in my regular circle.)

I wasn’t sure, when I started out, how much weight I was trying to lose. For one thing, I had very little hope of accomplishing any stated goal: I’ve been on so many failed diets, it felt stupid to have hopes/goals. For another thing, I didn’t know how much I COULD lose, even if the diet did work. But what it came down to eventually was figuring out where did I feel RIGHT, and I wasn’t going to know that until I got there. And sure enough, there was a point where I just started to feel Right, and I gave it some time to see if I would get restless to lose more weight, but I didn’t, and so I decided to attempt to stay there.

I am just barely out of plus sizes. According to the BMI chart (may it rot in hell where it belongs), I am obese (may that word, too, rot in hell where it belongs). I feel cute, and most of the time I like the way I look now, and I don’t mind as much having my picture taken, and I have a much easier time buying clothes. It’s much, much easier to walk, and to cross my legs, and to get down on the floor and back up again, and to sit comfortably, and to climb stairs, and to do things like crawl into the back of the minivan to vacuum it. There has been a significant uptick in Male Attention, which is so irritating/infuriating I can hardly express how much it makes me want to start screaming and strangling, while at the same time it’s queasily gratifying in a way I hope you just immediately understand without me having to unpick it further, because I realize it’s gross and yet I feel like you will nod cringingly, knowing what I mean even as your hands form the strangling position and a scream rises in your throat.

Do you remember that 80%/20% thing, usually applied to grades, about how you can get 80% of the result with 20% effort, but getting the last 20% result will take the remaining 80% effort? (A professor once used this as, apparently, a way to motivate us to work much harder to get an A; my absolute take-away was that it was obviously way more sensible/efficient to get the B.) I feel as if I’ve applied that concept nicely to this diet, though I wouldn’t say I put in only 20% effort. But still: same KIND of thing. I did not want to get to the point where I was working hard all the time to lose another half-pound or whatever. I didn’t want to have to exercise hard for hours a day, or think about calories constantly, or be hungry all the time, or feel wrong for eating food. I wanted to be happy at a place that was easy to maintain, not stuck feeling like I’d stretched the slingshot as far as I could and would be rocketed back to my old weight if I relaxed at all. I didn’t want to have to put in constant, unrelenting effort to achieve/maintain small results.

I was worried that maintenance mode would be too hard: as I said above, I’d heard it was difficult to stay motivated without the reward of decreasing numbers. But I have found that the reward of increased treats is plenty for now. We’ll see how long that lasts, but right now I find “numbers staying within a certain range on the scale” plus “yay, one to two days of non-dieting per week!” is plenty motivating, and more pleasantly peaceful than when I was hoping for the numbers to go down. I like the feeling that it’s no big deal if I need to take a day off for a get-together or special occasion. I like the feeling of coasting instead of pedaling. I like the feeling of looking at the scale just to check, as opposed to hoping and/or feeling disappointed.

It also helps that I am now completely acclimated to the keto eating. When I started, everything felt so upside-down from what I was used to, and sometimes I would get stuck, feeling like there was NOTHING I could eat, NOTHING! and that this was IMPOSSIBLE! I vented about this to a friend who had been on keto longer than I had, and he told me he didn’t feel that way anymore: that he felt like keto was Just How He Eats Now. I found that news dismaying: I didn’t WANT it to be normal, I wanted it to be a weird fad diet that then I could go OFF of when I was done losing weight. But then more time passed, and now on my diet-following days my food feels normal/familiar. And then on my days off, I eat everything I want, and it’s like a holiday. Everything tastes so good, and there are so many choices! On my on-diet days, if things feel rough, I just think ahead to my next day off. And now that I’m maintaining, that day is never very far away, so I’m never telling myself “No,” I’m always telling myself “Yes, just wait a little longer.”

And I want to make sure you understand that a “day off” or “day of non-dieting” is not a day of Sensible Non-Keto Eating. Like, it’s not as if it’s five or six days of keto weirdness, and then one to two days of eating grilled chicken and fruits/vegetables and milk and a piece of whole-grain bread, maybe a half-cup of vanilla ice cream. No. The days off involve things like pizza, french fries, potato soup, bagels, doughnuts, ice cream, candy, fast food, snack-cakes. Whatever I pine for on the keto days, I eat on the non-keto days. Candy/chocolate used to be the most important thing to me, so it’s interesting to me that what I most want on days off are things like breads, rice, potatoes, and cakey things. I think it’s the texture as well as the flavor: keto doesn’t have much with the texture of bread/potatoes/cake. I also want grapes, grapefruit, and those little Dove Mini ice cream bars. My long-term goal is to have more days off but with less extreme party-food eating on those days, or maybe to be off the keto thing entirely and just be eating well with reasonable treats, but we’ll see if that ever happens. The current “all on or else all off” seems to work with my temperament better than moderation.

Anyway, that’s how it’s going. I realize this story could still end in me ditching the diet and gaining the weight back. That is true of a statistically enormously large percentage of diets. But FOR NOW, this diet is working better for me than any diet ever has, and also it feels sustainable for now.

Okay, that’s enough diet talk for awhile. (I mean, YOU can talk in the comments section, though I recommend re-reading this post first; it’s hard to talk about diets. But I mean that I will now wait a fairly long time before doing another post about diets/dieting.)

I have mentioned before that Tipsy Swistle is a cheery little chore-doing house elf. Another thing I have mentioned before (I should just cut-and-paste today’s post out of snippets from old posts, or make it a series of links to other posts) is that what I would really like for Valentine’s Day every year is a heart-shaped box of nice chocolates, and that for whatever reason that does not seem to be something Paul can/will do, and so over the years I have come up with a work-around to reduce resentment and increase happiness: we go out to dinner (but not ON Valentine’s Day, because of crowds) for our joint Valentine’s Day gift (with cocktails and dessert, so it’s fancy), and I buy myself the box of chocolates (often after Valentine’s Day, to get them at 50% off).

I’m not saying this is a great solution, or entirely free of hard feelings (is it really SO VERY DIFFICULT to go into a store and buy a heart-shaped box of chocolates once a year??) but it means there ARE chocolates in a heart-shaped box and there IS some sort of Valentine’s Day acknowledgement, which I DO want, and I realize many people DON’T want that, and that’s fine too and maybe one of those people should have married Paul and spent many happy years calling it a Hallmark holiday or whatever.

This year I wanted a box of See’s chocolates: the keto diet means I eat less candy than I used to, and so when I DO eat candy I like it to be Ultimate Candy. But I dithered with it in my cart. Even with the current shipping deal, shipping was still $5 on top of what was already some very expensive chocolate; and it cost another $6 extra to get the heart-shaped box, and is that REALLY worth it for something I will likely end up throwing away after keeping it for way too long because it seems as if I really ought to be able to find another use for such a pretty box? And probably I should just get the usual 50%-off box of non-See’s from Target.

Well. Tipsy Swistle did not think these were reasonable concerns and just went ahead and hit “Complete order” (after adding a box of the peanut brittle chocolate bars I love) and then cycled the laundry and cleaned out a pitcher and gave the kitchen floor a quick touch-up mopping. This morning I am very grateful for all of those things: the nearly-empty laundry baskets; the floor, which yesterday afternoon was making me crabby with its smudges; but especially for the order confirmation from See’s in my inbox.

The housecleaners have been here twice, once before we moved in and once after. Their next visit is approaching, and I am so filled with dread, and the dread has been building for days. I said to Paul that probably I should get used to ALWAYS feeling these days of building dread before every housecleaning visit, and he said sympathetically, “Yes, now that they’ve been here so many times, I’d say that’s a safe conclusion.”

Here is something that helps, a little: making two lists, one for things I want to do the night before, and one for things I want to do the morning of. I am trying not to go overboard with these lists, but there are some things I like to get out of the way so the cleaners don’t have to deal with them (e.g., taking some stuff we usually keep on the counter and tucking it into a cupboard), and there are some other things I like to do so that the cleaners don’t spend time doing them (e.g., I have everyone make their beds). Plus, I make the kids get everything out from under the beds/couch.

Here is something that does not help, and I wish I could stop: assuming the cleaners are thinking bad things about us. There is literally nothing I can do about what they may or may not be thinking, and also I can’t read minds, and also it’s not as if bad thoughts were physical things that emerge and do damage. I have got to stop looking at our house/lives through an “Imagined Negative Thoughts of a Housecleaner” cam. It serves no good purpose.

Here is another thing that helps, a little: remembering when I did cleaning work as part of my in-home eldercare job, and how I did NOT have the kinds of negative thoughts I keep worrying about our housecleaners having. I felt GLAD when I arrived at a house and there were obvious things that needed cleaning! It was SATISFYING to do the dishes, make the bed, wipe the counters, give the kitchen a quick lemony mopping. I was NOT thinking bad things about the people who lived in the house! When I folded the throw blanket, I was thinking “There, that looks nice and tidy, and it shows I have cleaned in here!” and not “This throw blanket should always be FOLDED, and it better STILL be folded the next time I’m here!” or “This person should have folded their OWN throw blanket rather than leaving it for me!” Not at all! Not at all!

Here is another thing that does not help, and I wish I could stop: thinking how different it is to clean for people who are not able to do it themselves, vs. people who are absolutely able to do it themselves but don’t feel like it. I don’t think I would have had the same glad/satisfied attitude if I’d been cleaning a large messy house for people who didn’t feel like cleaning it themselves—though maybe I would have. My mom had a job cleaning houses when she was a teenager, and she describes a similar glad/satisfied feeling. She says the worst house was the one that was spotlessly clean and shining already when she got there. She says that when she made the beds, it was because it was a quick task with a big visual impact, NOT because she was thinking “These people should have made their beds.”

Here is another thing that helps, a little: remembering that “so that they’ll do the housecleaning” is only ONE of the reasons we wanted to hire housecleaners; the OTHER reason was “so we’ll be motivated to keep the clutter at bay.” The dread is what motivates me to keep up with the clutter. It’s too bad it has to be dread rather than excitement, but we all have our own temperaments to contend with.

And also: do I feel better if I imagine the alternative? Like, if I pretend that every other week there was a day when it was up to ME to go around thoroughly cleaning every floor and bathroom, do I feel GOOD about that? happy, excited, eager to do some scrubbing? No. So would I prefer to dread doing the cleaning (and then also have to do the cleaning), or would I prefer to dread the day someone else comes to do it? Easy answer.

I made a mistake—or rather, did what was technically the right thing to do, and yet was still basically a mistake.

Our homeowner insurance on the old house came due, and it occurred to me that I should call them and tell them we didn’t have any STUFF in there anymore to insure: coverage for personal property is a big part of the policy, so I was imagining a nice little savings. Instead, the insurance company said they could no longer insure the old house, because it was (1) vacant and (2) not our primary dwelling, and that they don’t even offer such policies. I said wait, wait: we were going to be listing it for sale any day now, this was just a normal move, we weren’t planning to keep it vacant—and he said no, that didn’t matter. He was nice about it, but decisive.

He put me through to a partner company that does insure such properties. At this point I was still expecting a savings. I also thought that since it was a partner company, all the information on the old house would transfer. An hour later, after attempting to remember things like when did we replace the roof and what was the finished square footage, I had a new policy that cost 2.5 times what our old policy cost. TWO POINT FIVE TIMES. I was dismayed. I asked for clarification. She said it’s because vacant houses are actually the MOST expensive kind of property to insure, because no one is there to watch over them.

I ventured that I thought I had probably made a mistake by calling: that if our policy hadn’t coincidentally come due, I would never have known we were SUPPOSED to have a vacant-house policy, and we would have just sold the house and canceled the old regular policy without ever knowing. She was very nice but just as decisive as the other guy: she said she totally understood the feeling, but that actually if something had happened to the house while it was waiting to be sold, we would not have been covered under our old policy. That is: YES, we could have gambled on nothing happening, and that’s what most people do when they move (probably because many of them, like us, don’t even know they’re doing that), but that we would have been coasting on no actual homeowner insurance, while still paying for homeowner insurance and thinking we were covered.

Well. And we’ll get a prorated amount of this new expensive policy refunded to us when we do sell the house (less a non-refundable $250 portion). And now if it burns down, or if a potential buyer gets hurt while viewing the house, we’re covered. And it wasn’t much extra to add vandalism coverage, so now I can stop worrying about someone breaking in and spray-painting or whatever. But the odds of anything going wrong were so small, I wish I’d stayed ignorant and just paid the insurance bill.

I want to talk a little about how it was having Rob home for winter break, because it matched my friend Leigh’s experience having her college-age daughter home, and both of us felt a little grim at all the pictures we saw of other people’s college kids home and doing affectionate selfies with their moms or whatever. “Got my girl back in the nest! Love seeing her sweet face every morning!” and so on. Whereas Leigh and I were not seeing our kids’ faces until more like 3:30 in the afternoon, and the faces did not have particularly sweet expressions on them.

Leigh reported that her daughter was fairly reluctant to do family stuff or participate in household activities, and that she was back-talky and irritable and eye-rolly. Rob was only occasionally back-talky and irritable, but he was unenthusiastic, and almost the entire time he was home he radiated the impression of suppressing eye-rolls. He gave off the sense of not being real impressed with us as a family/household. As if he were making an effort to be as patient and tolerant and as good-natured as he could be, but that we were fairly inferior as families/households go, and he was finding a lot to silently (or sometimes not silently) criticize. (You can see how this could be all in my head: “gave off the sense,” “radiated the impression,” “silently criticize.” But I don’t think I’m wrong. I’ll ask him in a decade.) He disapproves of the way we handle the other kids. He disapproves of the amount of cleaning we do, or rather don’t do. He disapproves of our dishwasher’s effectiveness. He disapproves of how much stuff we have. (What’s it to him, if I might ask?) He was especially seeming-to-bite-his-tongue about Paul, and a couple of times made inappropriately rebuking remarks to Paul, or critical/complaining remarks to me about Paul. (I don’t know if he said similar things to Paul about me. I didn’t tell Paul that Rob said things about him, and Paul might similarly be sparing me.)

I remember reading (in a book about teenagers, when Rob was an earlier teenager going through a similar stage) that this kind of irritating/heartbreaking stuff is in fact considered crucially important if the child is going to be able to successfully separate from the parents and vice versa. Though (my mind answers back, apparently eager to cast off the full comfort of this assurance): there is a lot of variety in how kids go through this stage. Not everybody gets the disapproval and the suppressed eye-rolls—though of course many get far, far, far worse. I’m remembering our former neighbor who wrote a piece for the local paper to explain how despite being as good and careful a parent as she could be, and having a couple of children turn out very well, she had been bafflingly unable to control her teenaged daughter or even keep her in school or at home; that before this happened to her daughter/family, she’d thought such things indicated a serious parenting issue, and now she cringed to think of other people viewing her family this way.

I remember having my own mixed feelings about my family growing up—and I was widely considered to have a very good family and home life. I remember friends having very negative things to say about their families. Some of them had a lot of reasons to criticize; some didn’t, but still did. It was a common conversation topic in high school and then in college: What’s Wrong With My Parents.

Now my friends only occasionally talk about what’s wrong with their parents (still a fun topic, though); more often we talk about what’s wrong with our spouses/children. And so part of me is thinking this too shall pass etc., and that one day Rob will seem glad to be home and seem to want to spend time with us, instead of seeming like he’s deliberately avoiding us. But part of me is doing that thing where a parent can’t help but project the current stage all the way into the permanent future: What if she NEVER sleeps without me sitting in the room with her?? What if he NEVER stops needing a diaper at night?? What if she NEVER learns to eat more foods?? What if he NEVER learns to independently handle his schoolwork?? What if she ALWAYS goes mute when she’s upset?? What if he ALWAYS throws things when he loses his temper?? What if she ALWAYS dates terrible people?? What if he ALWAYS dislikes us and thinks we’re inferior parents running an inferior family/household?? I’m picturing him telling his future friends/spouse/kids all the ways he is avoiding being like us. And some people really never do come around to liking their families much or identifying with the way they live, and that has to be okay too.

But it was a little disheartening to feel the disapproval. And frankly kind of annoying. None of us are perfect parents, none of us run perfect households, all of us do some stuff the non-ideal way, all of us make regular mistakes. We all have limited resources to apply to the pursuit of The Highest and Best Way To Live—as well as having different ideas about what even IS The Highest and Best Way To Live. (And it is a LITTLE EARLY for him to think he has it figured out better than we do, considering he hasn’t even TRIED any of this stuff yet.) What we hope for, or at least what I hope for, is that if we do a reasonably decent human job of things, eventually the children will be adults who will understand the gist of it: that they will think, “Back then I felt my parents should have met these ideals or been better people in such-and-such a way, but now I see that everyone has their own ideals and their own strengths/weaknesses” and “My mom does things one way, and I do things a different way, but that doesn’t mean one way is RIGHT and the other is WRONG.” One hopes (I hope) that in the end, the grown children come to an understanding that everyone is just another imperfect person, including their parents, including themselves, including absolutely everyone they know—and so they will be easy on themselves, and on others, and ideally also on me.

We all (except Rob, who is back at college) went to see the movie Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. It was at my insistence, which was a bit of a surprise to Paul who generally finds me rather tepid about superhero or comic-book movies. I can only watch so many men using fantasy/glory scenarios to wrestle with their father issues while gaining emotional motivation from the endangerment/pain/death of women before I get a little weary of the theme.

Anyway, I saw many, many highly positive mentions of this movie online, including this one from @birbigs:

And I saw lots of other people saying similar things: that they’re not into superhero stuff or comic-book stuff but they nevertheless loved the movie. So, fine. And it won an award, so.

It would be best to see it without all the build-up: like, if I’d gone to see it reluctantly/resentfully because the kids wanted to see it, I would have been rather blown away. But the trouble is: without the build-up, I wouldn’t have gone to see it. Which means that while I don’t want to build it up too much for you, I do want to build it up enough to encourage you to see it—especially if, like me, you are not normally into superheros and comic books.

I can say I considered it worth it to see it in the theater: it is a visually fun movie, and it’s nice to see that LARGE. I found it a HEARTENING movie. There was enough humor. There were some good Men Showing Emotions moments. There was Lily Tomlin voicing Aunt May. Naturally there were Daddy Issues and violence, but it was not too much for me and I am pretty dicey about violence; it helped that it was all animated. I’m not sure there was even any blood, and in my memory it seems as if most violent acts were done out of view: for example, you “see” a bad guy crush a good guy, but you only see the arm going up and the fist going down, and the actual act is hidden by the bad guy’s back. But there are a couple of emotionally upsetting deaths. There’s no sex or nudity at all, just a tiny bit of mild friendly flirting.

Anyway I recommend it! Go see it! If you want to! And maybe even if you don’t particularly want to!

Months and months ago, almost a YEAR ago, I asked your advice about replacing my coffee-maker. Then I dithered around and did nothing, because my coffee-maker was still usable and so I wasn’t in the state of adrenaline/emergency that is apparently the only way I can motivate myself to take action / make decisions on things.

Then I dropped my coffee-maker’s carafe Friday night and it shattered everywhere, and wasn’t I glad to have collected advice in advance! I spent part of Friday night and part of Saturday morning re-reading all the comments, looking at coffee-makers, and adding and subtracting to my cart. I ended up ordering the Cuisinart DCC-3200 14-cup Programmable Coffee Maker. I like that it loads water/coffee basically the way I’m used to. I like that I can see through the carafe, even though that also means I can drop and shatter the carafe (but I’ve only done that once! once!). I like that there is a lot of talk about how hot it keeps the coffee.

I compared prices to see if I should just zip out that very day and buy the new one, but I still had my old 4-cup Mr. Coffee to use as an emergency back-up, so instead I ordered from Amazon; the new pot was supposed to arrive Monday. Monday late afternoon, the tracking was still saying it would arrive by 9:00 p.m.; at 5:01 p.m. I got an email saying the delivery was running late and would arrive Tuesday or Wednesday. It was the “or Wednesday” that got me, combined with the email suggestion that I could always track my package for the latest updates. Oh can I? Thanks, that helps!

I have Prime shipping, and I have allowed many, many, many, many guaranteed-delivery-date packages to arrive late without consequence because it didn’t really matter and for the most part I don’t need packages to arrive that quickly. I mostly wanted the FREE part of the shipping rather than the 2-day part. But just last week we were charged ONE HUNDRED NINETEEN U.S. DOLLARS for a year of Prime shipping, which is high enough that Paul and I discussed cancelling it and came very close to doing so, and that discussion was fresh in my mind.

And also I was finally fed up. I love Amazon, and I love shopping there. But I keep hearing how it can be considered dicey to shop at Amazon for a variety of reasons. Meanwhile the rates for Prime keep going up, and more and more of the items don’t even qualify for Prime shipping (or perplexingly, some of them say they qualify and yet the cheerful prediction for arrival is four days or eight days or whatever) (honest to god, do not explain this to me, I already know there are “reasons!” and my complaint is that those are not GOOD reasons and/or that the items should not then claim to qualify as Prime items). And now they’re using their own Uber/Lyft-like delivery system which means strangers drive unmarked cars into my driveway and startle me, and these new delivery people keep falsely marking the delivery “handed directly to a resident,” making it difficult to protest to Amazon when it wasn’t in fact delivered at all, or when it was left in the dirt under a dripping roof. Plus, I have concerns about the vetting and pay/benefits of such non-employees.

So with all of this, with all of these costs paid in money and in ethical compromise, it should at least, at LEAST be reasonable to expect them to compensate customers when they don’t keep the few promises they DO make. So I contacted Amazon and they gave me a $10 credit. Which is nice, and I am satisfied: that’s one month’s worth of Prime.

But from now on I will be paying attention. I will notice which items guarantee the delivery date, and I will watch to make sure they arrive by that date; if they don’t, I will contact Amazon. Before, I let it slide. I let it slide again and again because I didn’t care enough and I didn’t know what to do when I DID care enough. And because I and many other people let it slide like this, Amazon felt comfortable continuing to push it. But they pushed it too far and too many times, and it crossed a line that forced me to notice and care, and now I DO know what to do, and so I will be doing it. If they had kept it at the old level, they could have gotten away with it basically forever. But because they went too far, they tripped a switch and I will now be tracking the situation closely. It is a useful metaphor for our times.

Here is how I got the credit:

1. Scroll down to the bottom of an Amazon page and select “Contact Us.”

2. It will ask a series of questions, with little pull-down menus. I selected that it was about “An order I placed,” and then I had to say “Choose different order” to find the one I wanted, and I selected that order. Then I selected “Problem with an order.” Then I selected “Shipping or delivery issues.” Then I selected “Shipment is late.”

3. It gave me a little “Did you know?” thing about tracking my orders. THANKS YES I KNOW I CAN TRACK MY LATE ORDER TO OBSERVE IT BEING LATE. I scrolled down a little further to “Or, talk to someone.” I would have preferred an email option, but it only had phone or chat, so I selected chat. It opened a new window and started a chat.

4. I kept in mind that the person who has to answer these chats is 100% not personally responsible for the late delivery of my package. I said that I’d received an email that my item would be late, and that I was writing to ask if that particular item had qualified for the delivery guarantee (I could not figure out how to tell; it apparently tells you during the ordering process but not afterward). The customer service representative asked for two minutes to investigate. When she came back, she said it had been shipped on time and the delay was the deliverer’s fault; she did the cut-and-paste things that every Amazon customer service rep does about how this doesn’t usually happen, they haven’t met their own standards of excellence, they apologize. Then she offered the $10 credit, and I thanked her for her help. The end.

Interestingly, this morning when I took their suggestion to track my package, I could see that the tracking had been updated: yesterday afternoon it said it was “out for delivery,” but now that has been revised to tell me that yesterday afternoon it was in fact MANY STATES AWAY. At 7:00 in the evening, two hours after they’d told me it would be delayed, it arrived at another location two states away. At 5:00 this morning it finally arrived in my state. So this means it is even less helpful than I’d thought to watch a package being late, since I can’t even watch it being late: I first have to watch it neeeeearly arrive on time, and THEN see it be cast backward into another dimension where it was late all along.

Today I have to make myself go over to the old house and do some work. I dread these trips so much. It gives me an extremely unpleasant mix of feelings—like seeing an ex, when you’re not really done with the relationship. Or, less melodramatically: it’s sucky work at this point (picking through the stuff that piles up under furniture, collecting the last and totally miscellaneous/random possessions, cleaning up areas that are too dirty for me to want the cleaners to see them), and it feels like it’s going on forever. Definitely it would have been better to have listened to all the people advising us to treat it as a cross-country move so that everything happened on one day; but I was not able to manage that, so now we’re doing it this way, and this is going to be okay too. I assume.

And we’re so close to being done, even at our slow, slow pace! For awhile it seemed as if every trip revealed new depressing discoveries. My mom describes dealing with her parents’ house when her parents moved into a nursing home, and how it seemed as if she just kept opening more doors to more areas packed with more stuff, and that’s how it felt for awhile at my old house. But now it is more like emptying out that one last drawer, cleaning off that last shelf, throwing away those last scraps. So if I can just MAKE MYSELF deal with it, it will be DONE and we can move on to the stage where we get a real estate agent to advise us what we should do next.

Specifically, we’re not sure how much work we should put into it—or rather, pay to have other people put into it. What we’re thinking of doing is having the floors refinished and the walls painted and the whole place cleaned. But maybe the agent will say that if we’re not going to do anything to the 1959 kitchen (which we are not), we might as well save ourselves the time/effort/money and sell it to a flipper. Or maybe the agent will say that we would be surprised at how much we could add to the price if we also got the popcorn ceilings taken care of and the cabinets painted. And quite possibly the agent is going to explain what I’ve been hearing on the news, which is that the housing market is extremely affected by this government shut-down and at this point we might as well just hang out until that’s over, and too bad we didn’t list it back when we bought this house.

Oh! I almost forgot to tell you about something that has been RADICALLY HELPFUL for my mood and state of mind! This book:

(image from Amazon.com)

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, by Betty Smith. (Don’t read the foreword if you haven’t read the book: it’s full of spoilers.) Miss Grace mentioned it as a book she read over and over again as a child, and it sounded exactly like the kind of book I would have read over and over again as a child (Little House books; Five Little Peppers books; All of a Kind Family; Little Women), so I got it out of the library and I just love it. BUT ALSO: it is about a family living in poverty a hundred years ago, so there are a lot of scenes where, for example, the child is sent to buy six stale loaves of bread at two loaves for a nickel, and the mother makes that bread last all week for meals, and once a week they get a tiny bit of the gristly fatty reject meat from the butcher and that is such a treat. The children collect trash to trade for pennies, which they use to buy broken crackers and penny candy. The mother is trying so hard to save a few pennies every week because HER mother says the most important thing is to try to own a scrap of land you can pass down to your children—but every time the money in the can starts to build up to something, they have to use it for an emergency. They have to move several times, from one grim apartment to another grim apartment. The mother is struggling to see if she can achieve the huge accomplishment of letting the kids graduate from 8th grade before they’ll have to quit and go out to work.

I’ll tell you what: if you are stressing about how much it costs to heat a big old house, or whether the move from one house to another house was a good idea, it can snap things into perspective to read about this level of life struggle. Picturing that mother looking up incredulously from floor-scrubbing to observe how much wailing and fretting I am doing over THIS LIFE I HAVE is…perspective-resetting. I have been reading the book every day for a week or more, and I haven’t had a single panic about my own life. If I start to fret, I immediately think, “We are fine. We are FINE. Look how many pennies we have for candy!”

And yet it’s not a DEPRESSING book. I mean, it is, a little, in some ways. But as with the Little House / Five Little Peppers books, there is more of a feeling of triumph over adversity, and perseverance in the face of hardship. And the book is from a child’s perspective, so to her this is all normal and not depressing. And so often I am thinking things such as “Yay, this means a whole $1.50 more per week for them!!” instead of “Oh no, not another disaster!” Like, do you remember reading books where a child is agonizing over how to spend a nickel on candy, and it would make your heart race happily to read about the resulting little paper sacks of treats? It is THAT feeling, rather the “Only a nickel??” feeling. Combined with the “And we are so lucky!” feeling.