Auf wiedersehen, 2022

Here we are at the end of another year and all I can say is that 2022 should have been a named storm.

We had our third and worst go-round with Covid. Moved Nana back to New Jersey. Built two-thirds of a house. Please don’t ask when we hope to be in it because the answer is last September.

We made trips to Mississippi, Tennessee, Colorado, Mississippi again, New Jersey, New Jersey again, Tennessee again, North Carolina (several). I’m pretty sure we’ve racked up frequent-driver points though I can’t find them on my license. Somebody should make this an actual thing and get me some gas credit.

Getting to our rough-in inspection took about four months longer than it should have because of the inconvenience of a day job and all the trips. Plus we like to make sure things are done well, so we do them wrong first, then take it all out and re-do it the right way. It’s been an adventure.

But we have plumbing and wiring and insulation and finished drywall and will have siding soon, and now we get to make it pretty, so at least the fun part is coming. It’s also the part in which I have to make a jillion decisions, which is my least-favorite thing on the planet so y’all please pray—for both of us. Every day brings a new change of mind, and, bless Ben’s heart, he is handling it extremely well.

I started this whole house-building thing knowing for-sure-without-a-doubt-no-kidding that I wanted a farmhouse-looking kitchen—you know, the typical white cabinets, butcher block countertops, big white sink, all the farm-y things. After all, it is an actual farmhouse, so I have a bona fide right to use that term and all the design choices that come with it.

What I’ve settled on is hickory cabinets and dark granite with a leathered finish and live edges, because why make one decision when you can sweat the details over ninety? I waffled over the sink being the only white thing in the kitchen and changed my mind to stainless steel, but I’ve changed it back again. I like my white sink so I will stand up to the kitchen design police if they show up. And then there was the whole refrigerator placement issue that turned into a major mental health almost-crisis. I wrote about that here. I promise I am not changing the kitchen again. And all the husbands said amen.

This process is like the book If You Give a Mouse a Cookie …, where every change leads to another change, which leads to another change, forever and ever on repeat. I might not recognize my own house when I get in it. All the decision making is forcing me out of my comfort zone which is not necessarily a bad thing since I need the practice. But it does take a toll.

While the house build has, by a huge margin, been the overwhelming event of the year, there have been a few other small things. Ben started a new job (still working from home—yay), I switched to a more usable writing platform that does not require a technological genius to operate, and Hank somehow became more spoiled and obnoxious than ever. He is exceeding our lowest expectations and we have no one to blame but ourselves.

Just kidding, but not. He’s still very cute. Yes that is a pinch collar on my tiny dog. I promise it is vet-approved.

Do you see the contempt in his eyes? Here he is being totally put-out that I made him stop and sit in the middle of a walk in the woods. I took twenty pictures of him not looking at the camera. He would look one way so I would move the phone in front of him and he would quick look the other way, and on and on into infinity. He is like a defiant toddler.

This is not what we anticipated when we bought a $500-per-pound lapdog, but here we are.

In case you didn’t know, Hank is a Biewer (pronounced like beaver) terrier. He weighs all of eight pounds before a haircut, which he currently needs. He is nothing at all like my last terrier, which was a super-chill Yorkie named Spanky, the perfect dog. That’s why I didn’t hesitate to get another terrier. Silly me.

Here he is trying to beguile you with his cuddliness. Don’t be fooled.

Hank is a high-energy yapper. He goes from sound asleep to five-alarm barking in a nanosecond. This behavior is commonly hidden under the label “protective.” He loves other dogs but when he’s on a leash, he is very reactive to anything coming toward him. One day last week I was walking him down the road in our neighborhood when a large hunting dog came trotting toward us. He was a big, happy-go-lucky guy just coming to meet a new friend. Hank let out his typical frantic yelping, which is really like dog-screaming, and the big hound jumped back with wide eyes, trying to figure out what just exploded out of this moppy little thing. He turned tail and ran away hasty-posty, as Tigger says.

I once asked our vet about Hank and all of his over-the-top-ness and he asked, “Do you know anything about terriers?” So I started explaining how we’d had a little terrier before who was very calm and quiet and he interrupted with, “Do you know anything about terriers?”

Apparently not. But Hank is ours so we keep him with all his oversized self-combustion. We wonder whether, at just four years old, it is too late to re-train him. We’ve put a plan in place, which, not surprisingly, begins with re-training ourselves.

Anyway, here is the distillation of our year into one line:

2022: Covid, driving, house building, and solving the problem of Hank.

May 2023 bring us a finished house and lower interest rates. Let it be so.