It was back in 2007 when I bought this house. At the time, I thought it was the right thing to do since I wasn’t sure how to justify throwing money away on rent each month when I could put it towards something I own. I figured I’d learn to do the yard stuff and that it might be fun fixing stuff up around the house. Unfortunately, I ended up hating both, and being a homeowner has just been making me more and more miserable each year. I’m already stressed out about other things to the point where it makes me literally sick, and the house just makes it all the worse because I feel shackled and enslaved to it. I loathe being a homeowner. I don’t like to do anything out in the yard, and never get to do any of the fun, planting stuff anyway because the time I do spend out there is dedicated to continuously battling weeds, or having my skin breaking out in hives from touching the grass.

I don’t want to fix up anything, nor do I want to be responsible for it when it inevitably breaks. It’s become such a heavy burden on me that I began to question whether the financial advantage (if there really is one) was really worth the pure and utter misery of owning a house.

Not to say there aren’t any advantages at all. I do like the relative quiet and the privacy, and, er…yep, that’s about it. I don’t think there’s really anything else.

Yes, it’s a small house by most people’s standards (around here) but it’s far too big for me. In the back of my mind, I’ve always had this nagging suspicion that buying a house was a mistake, that it would be too much for me to manage. I’d originally attributed those thoughts to possible buyer’s remorse that every home buyer supposedly goes through, but after 5 years, I don’t think that’s the case. I even resent having a second bathroom to clean when I’m really only using one. I like small, minimal places.

I’ve tried to like the house and enjoy being a homeowner, but I just don’t. I don’t like the feeling of being trapped by a house, by the fact that I can’t just pick up and move whenever and wherever I want at any time without dealing with the hassles of selling it.

So I’ve pretty much come to a decision.

I’m going to spend the next few days or weeks, however long it takes, to completely declutter everything to a bare minimum. I’m not much of a packrat at least, but the less I have to deal with, the better. If I don’t need it, use it, or love it (and I mean really *love* it), then out it goes. I am literally going to be brutal because I don’t want any “stuff” holding me back and chaining me down to this place…or any place for that matter. Then I’ll spend time fixing up whatever needs to be fixed and/or paying someone to do it depending on the difficulty and my non-skills in this area, and then…

And then if I’m still feeling the way I’m now feeling, and I have every expectation that I will still feel this way, I will put the house up for sale and move back into an apartment once it’s sold. For me, the American dream of homeownership is more like an American nightmare. I don’t want a house and “stuff” holding me back from whatever I may be called to do.

Special thanks to Colin-47 for the use of Chained under the Creative Commons license.

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1. The horror that was last week

Because of the box design, the kleenex box seemed daunting at first. The cube part was fairly easy, but figuring out the design wasn’t so easy. Once the drawing was complete, I figured the table would be a breeze in comparison. Unh uh uh, nope! The turned legs nearly drove me crazy trying to get them reasonably uniform to each other. Halfway through my first attempt, I trashed it and started completely over. The second attempt, posted here, turned out much, much better. Nevertheless, I hope to avoid turned legs for a while, at least until I stop having nightmares about them. Turned legs are so finicky.

The lounge chair wasn’t too bad, though the shading took a pretty long time since there was so much of it and the chair was black. I had to keep going over the same spots a lot with the pencil to get the cushion area really dark. I also had to make sure the dark areas didn’t run into each other too much lest the chair turn into a giant black blob instead of a chair. No one would have wanted the giant black blob. It would have slimed over all of the other drawings with potent viscous acid and destroyed them. Fun, perhaps, but I’m not letting my drawings get eaten by a giant black blob. I’m just not!

All and all, I’m pretty pleased how these came out and look forward to making yet more improvement.

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1. Sketchbook: Putting Perspective Into a Box
2. Sketchbook: All A Matter Of Perspective
3. Sketchbook: Quirky Chair

We spent the first part of the morning in a full review of what we’d learned over the course of the training, and then headed out to the drill site. The location was a moderately sized house and garage, and we were informed that there had been a gas explosion. We circled the buildings to initially assess damage, and discovered that the garage had major roof damage, what appeared to be a stray cable lying over part of the yard, a broken electrical box, and lots of broken windows. We also checked to see if the gas was turned off. (We also happened to notice some bullet holes in some glass panes that remained in the windows, likely left over from some other group’s previous training exercises. We didn’t have to worry about those for ours. )

A bloodied person came around the corner of the house screaming for help, and we divided up into various teams for a search and rescue operation. My partner and I had areas of the first floor. We didn’t realize flashlights were available, so once we were inside, we were slowly moving around the walls in the dark, calling out and searching for possible victims. We came across something that felt like a body, and it was so dark in there, I wasn’t sure if there was only one or two in that location as it was halfway buried under something. We “tagged” it and moved on.

A noise alerted us to someone beneath some debris in a dark corner. We found a woman who was hurt and panicked for her children. Since she was able to walk, we were able to get her outside to the area set up for medical triage. She kept trying to turn to get back inside the house, believing her children were still in there.

The people playing most of the victims were teenagers from one of the area schools who had organized a CERT team there. The fire chief’s little girl was also playing one of the victims and she was really cute walking around when it was over with fake blood running down her leg. She seemed to be having a great time! The “victims” all did a fantastic acting job to make the scenario as real as possible. One guy even had some metal rods stuck through one of his calves. They had all been “doctored” up pretty good.

We debriefed for a bit afterwards and discussed what we did well and where we could have improved, and then headed back to the fire house where we received our certificates. I just loved these CERT classes and am really going to miss them. However, there will be monthly meetings as well as other events and classes that I can attend to continue my training, so the ending of the class is really only an exciting beginning! I’ll end this post with a photo of my certificate:

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1. CERT Class: Disaster Medical Operations
2. CERT Class: Fire Safety Week
3. First Steps in CERT

If you’re wondering why I’ve left my perspective lines visible in my drawings instead of erasing them, it’s to make it easier for the person running the lessons to visualize what I’m doing. As I’m highly doubtful these particular boxes would reach the level of masterpiece 300 years from now, I’m not too worried about them, and besides, who knows that some group of future artistic lunatics wouldn’t end up being fascinated by drawings that have ruler-straight lines all over them. Maybe it would be a new art style labelled something like “grunge perspectivism” and my beginner scrawlings would be at the forefront of the movement.

Hrrm, well, moving back to today’s reality, I’m not quite done drawing boxes. I’m currently working on a still life of a Kleenex box with a pattern that’s proving to be a challenge. Once that challenge is overcome, I have a “boxy” table and a chair left in the queue. Afterwards, unless I end up having to redo something for the lesson once I turn in my boxes, I will move on to the next thing which I think may be spheres. I haven’t really been looking ahead much, so my memory is iffy on that one. I think I’ll go ahead and submit the boxes I’ve already drawing before getting too far into my current ones just to make sure that my perspective isn’t too murky to forge ahead.

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1. Sketchbook: All A Matter Of Perspective
2. Sketchbook: Out of Perspective
3. Sketchbook: Vault Boy Special Request

Next, I was to find four boxes of anything around the house and draw them with both accurate detail and perspective. I happened to have the box for my Nintendo 3DS handy, so I set it at an angle that required two vanishing points on the horizon line and went to work on it. Again, I freehanded the actual box. It didn’t take long, so soon I was already looking around to find another box and rested my eyes on a small trunk or chest that I had up on a shelf in the room. I place it on a nearby table and turned it in a direction that needed only one vanishing point.

As an aside, a vanishing point is a point on the horizon line to where all the sides or planes of an object point as they “vanish” into the horizon. I know I just drastically mangled that definition, but if you look at my drawing of the boxes above and below the horizon line, you can see where I’ve marked HL for horizon line, and VP for vanishing point and you’ll hopefully get the idea of what these are if you didn’t already know.

Back to the chest. The chest had very simple lines, so perspective wasn’t a problem for me at all, but drawing all of the little studs was kind of a pain. With the exception of the studs on the very top, they are numerically correct, if not completely uniform…oh, and possibly a bit lopsided too. I suppose that adds character, right?

More perspective drawings yet to come!

You might also like:

1. Sketchbook: Putting Perspective Into a Box
2. Sketchbook: Out of Perspective
3. Sketchbook: Vault Boy Special Request