Damir being musical with a wine glass:

After almost 4 years of dating and over a year of looking for a home to buy together, Damir is moving into my smallish (but adequate) apartment. The housing market in Toronto is still crazy, with bidding wars on almost every downtown condo that comes on the market, and it seems stupid for him to be paying rent on an apartment when he is here half the time.

The big challenge is making room for his stuff, which means getting rid of some of my stuff, or at least putting it in storage for a while. We have a cheap storage locker thanks to a friend who lives in a large condo complex nearby with lockers for rent, and I’m packing up some of my things for the locker.

This morning, I was packing books: cookbooks and travel books. I love to both cook and travel, so this was a bit difficult, but when I looked at my cookbooks, I realized that I haven’t even opened many of them for more than a year, so certainly they can go into storage for several months until we have a bigger place. That begs the question, of course, why do I need to keep them at all? Is my cooking style changing so that I don’t use some of the older ones as much? Do I just look up recipes on the internet instead of using a cookbook? Or do I just cook what I know without referring to a recipe at all?

The travel books were also hard to separate myself from, but I tried to make an assessment of where I’m likely to be travelling over the next year (which is the longest that I can imagine it will take us to find a new place) and kept out mostly the European travel guides plus my collection of city maps from all over. Egypt, Australia, Mexico — all in the box.

Technical books will be next, and a glance at my bookshelf has me realize that a lot of these are going to be junked, like Duda & Hart’s Pattern Classification and Scene Analysis, a classic book that I used during my university years when I was developing image analysis algorithms, but is so far from what I do now that I know that I’ll never use it again. Just opening the cover and seeing Bayesian classification and linear discriminant functions takes me back more than 20 years… and makes me close the cover again, quick.

Once the books are done, I’ll be tackling the closet to make some room there — he claims that he has clothes to hang in the closet, although the only suit jacket that I’ve ever seen him wear is already here.

I can totally relate to Ces’ Drink At Work post today: although I don’t write comic strips, I do work at home and I understand the state of avoidance that leads to all sorts of other activities, ranging from dusting to watching reruns of CSI, and the total failure to attend to trivial things such as getting dressed. I’m having the opposite problem about eating, however: today for lunch, I whipped up grilled tilapia and sauteed snow peas in a whole wheat wrap. This is not my usual fare, but I managed to completely blow my schedule this week due to an urgent project deadline, a not-insignificant amount of work avoidance, and a network router that failed and managed to separate me from my beloved internet (also required for the work project) for almost an entire day. It was my plan to have three friends over for dinner tonight, after rashly promising to make them my famous crème brulée during our last outing, but I was forced to cancel so I have a fridge full of yummy stuff that was going to make dinner for four. Now, it’s making lunch and dinner for one, for a few days in a row.

I figure that by tomorrow, I’ll be tired of tilapia and will have to branch out to celeriac soup, braised leeks, and a salad of baby greens and avocado with a fresh lemon and olive oil viniagrette.

I love tulips this time of year. We’re still ranging between below-freezing temperatures and more moderate days, but I have the most beautiful bouquet of orange and yellow tulips on my table. On Queen West near where I live, there are several little markets that all carry tulips beginning in February and lasting until May or June. The going price seems to be $4 for a bunch of 5 blooms, and if you buy them tightly closed and keep them in a fairly cool room, then they’ll last for days.

I always buy tulips for myself, and I can’t recall anyone ever buying them for me, although I’m sure that that has happened. Men, if they deign to buy flowers, seem to want to make a grander gesture than a $4 clutch of tulips; I suppose that they want it to be remembered. So once a year, on Valentine’s Day, Damir gives me a dozen red roses. Don’t get me wrong, they’re gorgeous, and I love them. But if he took the $100 that he probably spent on the roses, he could buy me $4 tulips every week for half the year, or two bunches per week for the 13 weeks that I most need a taste of spring, from February to April.

There is, however, a satisfaction in buying flowers for myself. I might stroll out to the market, window-shopping along the way; or stop when I am rushing home from a meeting. I let my eyes drift across the array of colours (I only have eyes for tulips), then pluck one or two pleasing bunches from the pack. If the weather is bad, I inevitably remark to the shopkeeper that the flowers make it feel like spring (like they’ve never heard that before). At home, I carefully cut the stems and strip the lower leaves, then place them in a round glass vase (for one bunch) or a pottery water pitcher that I bought in Barbados (for two or more bunches).

As long as I look at the tulips, and not outside at the snow still on the ground, I can pretend that it’s spring.

I’m a terrible housekeeper. Maybe it’s because I was the youngest of four with a stay-at-home mom so never had to clean much except for my own room. Maybe I missed that day in home economics class. Maybe I got lazy by being married to a complete anal retentive who literally vacuumed around houseguests. Whatever the reasons, I don’t like to clean house, and I don’t do it as often as I should.

I should have a cleaner come in every week or two and clean my place. I used to, then the last time that I moved, my cleaner was too tightly associated with my crotchety old landlord and I thought a change was due. Then my metrosexual male friend teased me about having a cleaner even though I worked only part of the time, and mostly worked from home, as if this somehow meant that I should be using my free time to do something that I hate. Ever since then — two years ago now — some weird Protestant work ethic has been at work in my subconscious, based on that comment from my friend, and I still don’t have a cleaner. When I was away in October, a friend stayed at my apartment, and she had a cleaner come in the day before she left. Was this a hint? Do I care?

A funny thing happens every week now, however. Damir ususally stays over the weekend, then we’re both busy during the week so we don’t see each other again until Friday or Saturday. Mondays, after he leaves, I find myself cleaning the place. Not a thorough cleaning, but laundering bedding, towels and any clothes that he left behind; cleaning the bathrooms; making a swipe at the kitchen; and straightening the living room and the inevitable debris on the coffee table left over from a lazy Sunday of reading and watching TV. It’s not like I’m trying to eradicate traces of him, there’s still lots of that around; it’s more a matter of setting things back to my “single” state such that whatever I touch is the way that I left it.

I love being with him, but I also love my time alone. As long as I don’t spend too much of that time cleaning.