I am so fascinated in these breakdowns of socks or no socks and house temperature.  I have two more questions that have come out of the comment sections of those posts, and I’ll break them down into two separate posts.  So the first question is whether or not you make your bed.

We do not make our bed.  Pretty much ever.  Maybe if I’m doing the laundry early in the day and new sheets are going on the bed before 10 am.  But if I put on clean sheets in the afternoon or evening?  Never.  Our bed is always unmade.

The twins’ beds are always unmade.  Their rooms are neat.  Their rooms are clean.  Their rooms are vacuumed and dusted and organized.  But their beds are always unmade.

I was never a big bed-maker, and I don’t remember my parents enforcing a bed rule.  I feel a little guilty when I think about this because my mum probably came up to my room after I left for school and made my bed. (I’m sorry!)  But once I left for college, I made the conscious choice not to make my bed.  I wanted to always feel like it was waiting for me, beckoning me to climb under the blankets for a few minutes if I got a chance in the middle of the day.

And I do.  If I’m working out a difficult plotline in my head, trying to come up with a character’s motivations, I climb into bed and set a timer for 5 minutes.  I do my best thinking in that bed.  Don’t you always have 3000 thoughts as you’re trying to fall asleep?  Well, I find that if I get back in bed in the middle of the day, I get those same 3000 flooding my mind.  So I leave the bed unmade.  Because there is only so much time in the day, and I’m not going to spend my minutes making the bed a half dozen times.

Plus while I know some people love that moment of peeling back the blanket and climbing into bed, I have no strong feelings about that moment.  I don’t look at a made bed and think about how delicious it will feel atop smooth sheets.  I just like my sheets clean.  Once clean sheets are on the bed, the blanket can be a crumpled up mess.

We are also an anti bedroll or decorative pillow house.  Everything that goes on the bed gets used: pillows, blankets, and stuffed animals.  And that’s it.

So now you know how messy I am when it comes to my bed.

So do you make your bed every morning?  Or do you leave it unmade?

I have to tell you that the discussion on house temperature was very eye-opening.  While I don’t love being super hot, I would take it any day over being even a little bit cold.  I would never in a trillion years partake in a winter sport that kept me outside for longer than 5 minutes.  I won’t even go to ice hockey games and the rinks are heated.  If it were up to me, I’d keep the house near 74 in winter.  But it’s not up to me.  And I can’t seem to figure out how to change this newfangled thermostat.  So I’m stuck with 70 degrees.

Though a few of your answers brings up an interesting question: do you wear socks to bed?  Do you like socks?

Because I think the world is really divided into the sock-wearers and the sock-endurers.  I am a sock wearer.  I like to wear socks.  I wear them to bed.  I wear them in summer.  I like to buy pretty socks.  Fun socks.  I like to match my socks to my clothes.  If I’m not happy with a certain pair of socks, I will change said pair until I am happy and then can focus on my work.  I do not wear stockings if I can help it, but I do love a good pair of socks.

Sock-endurers wear socks because they have to wear socks, not because they want to wear socks.  They wear socks because it is cold and they need their feet covered if it is cold.  But if given their choice and a decent temperature, they would opt for no socks.

I even have a song about my socks that I wrote and sing any morning that I put on a pair that I particularly like, a sort of commercial-like jingle for my socks.  I’ve heard the kids humming it to themselves as they put on their socks.  Josh is the only person in the house who does not derive great pleasure from his socks.  He just wears them.  He does not partake in reveling in the joy of a good pair of socks wrapped around his feet.

My guess is that sock-wearers tend to like their homes warm and sock-endurers can handle colder temperatures inside.

So are you a sock-wearer or a sock-endurer?  And does that match with how you like your home temperature?

What temperature do you keep your home?  We keep ours around 70 in the winter.  I was promised that once we fixed the windows, I would feel an immediate change; that the 70 degrees on the thermostat would really be 70 degrees as opposed to beforehand with our cruddy windows.  I have not felt said change.  The house feels exactly as it did before.

I like the house very warm.  I once lived in an apartment in Wisconsin where we couldn’t control the heat.  We had these old metal radiators.  Regardless of whether we wanted them on or not, they clanged alive, filling the apartment with hot air.  We wore t-shirts in the middle of winter.  I hated that apartment when I lived in it — the floor was so bowed and uneven that you could put a marble down and it would roll around the room — but I miss the heat that I didn’t pay for, that came out strong and hot, as if it were mimicking the sun.

The problem also is that my home is my office, which means that I’m always cold.  I could put another sweater on, and I usually do, but that doesn’t change the fact that my fingers are cold.  The tips of my fingers are freezing right now.  I decided I would poll all of you to see where our house temperature falls with the general public.  Are we keeping it too cold?  Are we (I highly doubt this) on the high end of the house temperature spectrum?  Or are we somewhere in the middle; in which I have to ask: do you think your home is cold too?

What temperature do you keep your home?

So we started the first of the house renovations: replacing all of the windows and doors.  We’ve needed to do this for years but put it off because it’s a pain in the ass.  A smarter person would have waited until spring when the weather was a little warmer (since the temperature in the house is the same temperature outside).  But we are not smarter people.

The twins sobbed the morning before the window people arrived.  Sobbed.  Took photos of their cruddy old windows.  Kissed the panes of glass.  It took everything in me not to start shrieking, “do you kiss every piece of garbage before it goes in the bin?  YOUR WINDOWS ARE CRAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAP.”  As is, I did threaten to never tell them again before we make changes.  I told them that if they didn’t stop sobbing, I would go ahead and make all the decisions for the kitchen without them, and they’d come home and see an entirely different kitchen with no warning.  That stopped the tears and made me feel evil.

I spent the morning very anxious before the window people arrived.  I don’t do well with strangers in the house.  Plus, I work out of the house, and I still needed to work.  I had no idea how much I’d be able to get done.  I dropped off the kids at school and drove back to the house, pausing outside as I looked up at the windows, realizing it would be the last time our house looked like this.  And then I took out the phone to take a picture because I was suddenly feeling a bit weepy too for our cruddy windows.  Not weepy enough to kiss them, but weepy enough to snap an extra picture for the kids.

*******

And then the workmen were here and they were knocking out the windows.  Doing home renovations is a bit like surgery.  You dread the lead up, stressing about the time off from work and the interruption to your life.  And then the during is pretty awful as people are walking around your house, covering it in a fine layer of dust and making a shit-ton of noise.  And then there is the recovery; lying in bed and sniffing in the strong smell of caulk as you and the house recuperate.  And then there is the day when all is healed and you enjoy the new-found health of your space.

I’m not going to lie.  Replacing the windows sucked.  A word of advice if you are considering doing this: they remove all the windows at once and leave big gaping holes in your house for a few hours before they pop in all the new windows at once.  Which means that if you do this in spring or summer or fall, you end up with gnats or mosquitoes in your house.  If you do this in winter, you end up with a cold house but at least nothing flying around afterward.

Though we lucked out and the first day was warm-ish.  Warm for winter, though the skies opened up 15 minutes after they finished.  The second day was cold but sunny.  The third day… yes… there was a third day because these people seemed to want to drag the smallest job imaginable into the longest stretch of time, was fine as well.  So it was just very lucky that the weather was what it was, the biggest problem being the wind blowing bits of leaves and dirt into the house.

I went up on the first day to peek after they popped out the upstairs windows.  It was a very strange sight; these rectangular holes in the house.  If I had their job, I would always be worried that I’d accidentally fall through.  It happened to my friend’s child; he leaned on the screen when the window was open and tumbled down to the concrete below.  I tiptoed up to each hole to snap a photo, as if the hole had the ability to suck me out of it like a portal into another dimension.

The second day was a little less awe inspiring and more seriously-how-much-longer-do-you-guys-need?

And the third day was a stare-at-the-clock-and-wait-for-them-to-be-finished feeling.

*******

After they left on the first day, I went upstairs and opened the window.  Actually, this was after I checked the basement to make sure they didn’t let a mass murderer into the house while I wasn’t looking (you can never be too careful).  But after I did my check and before the storm began, I sat on the floor of our bedroom and opened the window.  It was difficult to open our windows before this point (and in some rooms, impossible).  While air molecules circulate and we’ve obviously opened the door millions of times, there was still this sense that the air in our room had been with us since we moved in.  It contained all of the moments that had gone into our life in this house, infertility and treatments and raising the twins and several novels and a play and hours of television and book reading and talks in the dark while we slide under the blankets.  We’ve eaten ice cream with these air molecules and made love with these air molecules and made major life decisions with these air molecules around us.

And now I’ve opened a window.

And I’ve let them out.

And I’ve brought new ones in.

And then the rain started to pour, so I closed the window and started to clean up the dirt and dust left from the first day.

I once asked a boy on a date.  He answered back that he could fit in dinner in a few weeks but he was busy with a class he was taking and volunteer work and paid work… and maybe dinner was too much time.  Maybe he could only squeeze me in for coffee.  I told him that he certainly sounded busy and maybe this wasn’t a good time to start something new.

I thought about that boy last week while I met a friend for coffee, my to-do list burning a hole in my back pocket.  It was a self-congratulatory thought.  I may have a long to-do list, but I still make the time to have coffee with friends and fold the clothes properly.  Good for you, Melissa.

I like being busy.  I like not only having my normal to-do list, but around holidays and travel and particularly busy times, I make a to-do list for my to-do list.  I take a piece of blank white paper and fold it into eighths.  Then I label each square with a date and pull tasks off the larger to-do list and slot them into dates on the blank sheet of paper with utterly ridiculous time constraints.

This is one of those times when I have a to-do list for my to-do list (which always makes Josh and I sing, “he’s got a wig for his wig, he’s got a brain for his heart, he’ll kick you apart, he’ll kick you apart!”).  I love carrying it in my pocket.  I love taking it out and remaking it so it’s neater whenever I have to move tasks around.  I like crossing things out after I do them.  I like going to bed knowing a lot of things were crossed out.

I like feeling overwhelmed by my to-do list.  I think I may be addicted to it.  And like most addictions, I seem to need more and more to get that stressed out high.  I used to be able to reach my breaking point if I had a meeting that was going to take up 8 hours of the day.  Now an 8 hour meeting barely phases me.  I need to tack on baking 117 cookies after said 8 hour meeting and 2 loads of laundry.  And even then, the stressed out high isn’t a given.  Sometimes I feel like I’m always chasing it and never reaching it anymore.  Sometimes I think that I need to get a non-house-trained puppy… that has the potential to get me my stressed out high.

I say that I want a neat Google Reader, except whenever I finally get the unread blog posts down to zero, I start getting antsy, hitting refresh until someone posts something.  I feel like a kid with a lemonade stand on an unbusy street, waiting for someone to walk past.  I feel better when there is a folder or two of unread posts, something to look forward to when I get a moment to sit down and read.  I say that I want a neat email box, except whenever I respond to my final outstanding message and archive it, I start checking email more frequently, impatiently waiting for the next one to come in to give me something to deal with.  I feel better when there are five unanswered emails waiting for a response.

I know a lot of people say this, but it’s actually true for me: I can only be productive when I have an insane deadline, one that does not seem do-able at all.  I need to have too much on my to-do list so that things get done because when my to-do list gets too low, I get so distracted and antsy that I get nothing accomplished.

I say that all I want is a vacation where all I do is relax and read.  It sounds so good from over here, with my long to-do list for my to-do list.  But I know that once I get wherever I’m going where I’m going to plop down and relax, I only feel anxious being non-productive.  In not moving anything forward.  I need to ease into the relaxing thing; take 3 days of so of the trip to feel my heart racing over the idea of wasted time (think of all the things on my to-do list I could do!) until I finally settle down and say, “wow, vacations are great.”  And then I only relax because I realize that if I’m away and nothing is getting accomplished, there will be a long to-do list to tackle when I get home.

Are you addicted to busyness or do you like a slower pace?