I'm so sore from cleaning today, and probably from a fairly intense ashtanga class last night. It sure feels good though. I always vacuum at least once a day, and wipe down the high chair after every meal, but today I scrubbed all the cupboard doors clean and wiped off all the hardware and scrubbed the floors and the walls and the light switches and the windows and the baseboards and wiped off all the appliances. I love the feel of a super-clean kitchen. The baby was having a fairly whiny day and she followed me around making pitiful sounds. She was just so pathetic, it was hard not to laugh at her. She has taken to pushing her high chair around the kitchen (we have laminate floors - ugh) like a walker. When she runs into an obstacle, she cries.

Our house was built in 1973. We bought it about a year and a half ago, and although it has plenty of, let's say, room for improvement, it was never so bad that it needed work before we moved in. However, there is oak everywhere. The baseboards, the cupboards, the floors. Everywhere. I hate oak. Oak is my nemesis. The plan is to make it look nice, increase it's value, live in it a few years and sell it at a profit. I'm confident in our ability to do this (we bought it cheap) and on one hand I can't wait to move forward with this. But on the other hand, I've kind of fallen in love with the place. The house was a rental in the years before we bought it, and in a lot of ways it shows, but underneath it's not hard to see that it was once a beloved place. It's most obvious in the care that was taken in landscaping the back yard. I have three lilac trees that bloom beautiful white in the spring, an apple tree and a mysterious oak tree that doesn't belong in this climate (we call it the ugly tree). The front yard boasts three very tall trees that I think are poplars and a lovely weeping birch. The front flower beds have been neglected, although pansies and roses pop up in the summer.

It's just a little house, but now I don't want to think about leaving it (though we have no certain plans to right now). So much has happened here. I didn't feel this way about my first car or my first condo, but I've planted such roots since then that my whole dynamic has changed. I loved my second condo, but I never felt quite the same way about it that I do about here. I've been out of the house a lot lately, and coming home to our little house gives me a lot of joy. The whole house is my sanctuary. I don't know that it's such a good thing to feel that way about a place you don't plan on settling. Moving has never been hard for me; I've always loved a change of scenery. But right now I'm loving what I have. Wait, why am I complaining about that?