Happy Anniversary, Chief: Why I Have A Perfect Husband

Chief: My husband Jeff and I are celebrating our
fourth wedding anniversary today.  

Today is my fourth wedding anniversary. Time flies.

I thought I'd use the occasion to write an open letter to my husband Jeff, who I call Chief. Here goes:

Dear Chief,   

Hard to believe we've been married four years already.  Time flies when I'm happy, I guess.

If I had to list all the reasons why I love you'd we'd be here all week. So I'm going to dispense with the list. You know I love you for a gazillion reasons, and we'll leave it at that.

In these past four years, we've settled into being a couple old married farts, but I'm sure you'd beg to differ with that description.

Actually, I pretty much do, too, since it certainly does nothing to capture the essense of our marriage.

The old fart remark is a reference to being comfortable. Happy in our routines. 

It's just that I'm so comfortable with you around. Even when neither of us is doing anything in particular. Just vegging in front of the TV. Having another dinner. Or when you're downstairs at your drafting table and I'm playing around on my laptop in my office.

All "boring" routine things that old farts do.

I feel safe. At home. In every sense of the word, whatever we're doing, whenever we're doing it.

Jeff ripping apart part of our deck this summer to retrieve the
wedding ring I dropped between the boards
Repairs were quick, by the way. 

Home is a refuge. And I don't mean just a house. 

Our home is a place where I still get a spasm of delight when I pull into the driveway and your Jeep is there. That means you're home. And I'm happy.

I even get a little pang of disappointment when I arrive home from work and I see you're not there. 

You're still at work, or grocery shopping, and you'll be home soon. But I still miss you and feel a little bit too alone when you're doing something routine like that.  

Oh, I can handle myself just fine when you're not home.  But I feel my heart lift when you're around. The other night I called it "the vapors" You just make my heart race with joy, is all.   

Another thing that makes me feel secure -  at home and comfortable -  is you have faith in me even when I don't have faith in myself.

I'm impatient.  I have ambitious plans for the gardens around our house and the plans are moving too slowly. Meanwhile, you create an enormous, beautiful outdoor deck so we can enjoy our home even more. You created it seemingly in an instant, while I plod along.

You constantly remind me my projects are a process, that you delight in seeing the slowly expanding flower beds, the incremental transformations in our yard. 

Jeff and his mom. He's as good a son as he is a husband! 

You always come to my rescue. Even little instances. 

Like when I dropped my wedding ring between the boards of the deck, and you ripped up some of the boards to retrieve it. My hero! And I'm not being facetious. You ARE my hero. 

I might not show it through my frustrations  but again and always, your words and support and love make me feel safe in my own chaotic head.

I keep bringing up the word "safe."  Love, when done right, is a safe place. It's a shield against all the hate and turbulence and weirdness of the world.  I think - I hope - we're doing love right. 

In the evening, when we're watching TV, you sit in your big armchair, and I'm usually on the couch with our crazy dogs Jackson and Tonks.

I don't think you notice that sometimes I go quiet and stare at you instead of the TV screen. Yeah, the antics on "America's Got Talent" are fun enough, but the real entertainment for me is you.

Not the fact that you're sitting there watching TV. No, the entertainment is the fact that you're there. Home, with me.  

So I watch you as you giggle at "The Big Bang Theory" or roll your eyes at the politicians Rachel Maddow is picking on.

And I feel so lucky, so over the moon in love with the guy in the armchair watching TV.

Because the guy in the armchair is the one who never makes me feel lonely, who always makes me feel safe, who has made me so happy to be alive.  The one I want to be with forever and ever. I don't want this to ever end.

Thanks, Chief, for always being there.

And Chief: Happy anniversary. We're celebrating our fourth. Let's go for 40!

Love, Matt

Of course I dedicate this song to Chief, too:

A (Sick) Day Gone To The Dogs

Tonks engages me in a staring contest out on our back deck today.  

I had to call in sick to work today.

A really nasty early season cold. Actually, I probably could have soldiered through the day except for my voice. The cold rendered it totally nonexistent.

Most people would rejoice at the news that I was finally silenced for at least a day. (SHADDUP Already!!!! is something I tend to hear a lot.)

But my job entails talking with customers and clients, pretty much constantly for eight hours on the phone. That wasn't going to work.

Tonks concedes she lost the staring contest.  

This afternoon, feeling a little down in the dumps for being sick on what looked like a gorgeous Vermont autumn day, my two dogs, Tonks and Jackson looked at each other, looked at me, and then ordered me outdoors into the sunshine on our back deck.

It was nice out there. And all I had to do is sit and relax. No exertion to make my stupid little illness worse.

To cheer me up, Tonks and Jackson struck a few poses. They really were voguing. It did cheer me up.

Luckily I had my iPhone with me to grab a few of the poses to cheer you up, too.  

Jackson trying to look cool and world-weary. 

Tonks laughs at a joke, but Jackson doesn't seem to get it.

Jackson thinks he's livin' the thug life here.  

Pappa Built Us A Brand New Deck, And It's Awesome

The unsafe old deck on our house, minutes before it came down.

During April and May, the trees around our house went from bare to leafed out.

That's not the only major transition around our St. Albans hacienda.

We got rid of our rickety, scary old back deck and replaced it with a new deck that I swear will land on the pages of House Beautiful any day now.

My husband, Jeff Modereger designed the new one. He does things right, so I knew his little scheme to build a big deck would at least be safe.

And big. Did I say big? Jeff does nothing small. Uh-uh.

Note: Nothing tracks the progress of the deck like photos. Click on any of the photos to make them bigger, so you can take a better look at the images.

Jeff is a theater scenic set designer, and he becomes extremely antsy in the rare moments he if doesn't have a project to do. So, during some down time, he designed this entire project. He works fast, too, so this came awfully quickly.

Old deck down, we await the new one.  

The decks, both the old and the new, were/are on the back of the house.

The property slopes downward behind our home, so the  back of the house sits on what amounts to the second floor, as opposed to the front of the house, which is essentially on the ground floor.

A door comes out of the basement beneath the deck.  

The design for the new deck extends across the entire back of the house, on the second floor. It wraps around both sides of the house. A second deck extends from the basement door, and out 40 feet toward the vegetable garden.

Starting to take shape.  

The only thing that went slowly was getting the St. Albans, Vermont town permits to build the deck. It wasn't the town's fault.

The town has regulations that any new construction in our zoning district must lie 40 feet from the property line.

Fine. The only question was whether the deck would fall less than 40 feet from Vermont highway department, which owns the road in front of our house.

We knew the deck wouldn't impinge on the setback requirements  but the state of Vermont had various maps that all wildly incorrectly positioned our property outside of where it was.

We either lived a half mile east of where we were, or west or our house was in the middle of relatively busy Vermont Route 36, which in reality is the road that sits 150 feet or so from the house.

It's a little scary that every government entity around me has a wildly different idea of where I own property, but oh well.

It took an act of Congress to prove that our property was not too close the road.

The point we could first stand our our new deck.  

But we got the permit, eventually.

The crew came to tear down the old deck and start installing the new one on a chilly April morning that threatened rain.

The old deck was unquestionably dangerous.  It was built with substandard material and with substandard construction methods, to say the least.

 We knew it was a little scary. It bounced when you walked on it. The frost made the middle of it rise, creating a nice little hill in the middle of the deck in February.

The old deck was on the second floor of the house, and I had worrying visions of it crashing down to the ground when we had a gathering out there.

Two chain smoking guys tore the old thing in minutes. I told the contractor I was a little alarmed that it came down that fast, was it that unsafe?

The lower deck begins to take shape.  

Well, yes. The supports for the deck only extended five inches into the ground. The supports themselves were only two by fours.

The old deck could have collapsed under the weight of just one person, never mind several. I'm surprised it didn't collapse when a bird landed on it. I shuddered.

I was heartened a couple days later the contractors started preparing the posts for the main deck supports.

The supports extended concrete more than two feet into the ground. They used six by six boards, and used sturdy brackets to fasten the vertical support beams to the concrete bases.

The new deck at completion. It's so big I can't get it
in one photo.  

This spring, the trees leafed out around our house abruplty, as we seemed to go directly from winter to spring.

The new deck took shape rapidly, in tandem with the blossoming trees. It started just as the tree buds were poised to flower, and finished when the leaves were fully out - less than three weeks.

As the deck was rapidly appearing, Jeff did have to do some last minute redesign.

The property slopes behind the house more than we thought, so the end of the lower deck was more than four feet above the ground when the contractors finished it.

Jeff had intended the lower deck to be deep within garden flowers and plants that will eventially surround the lower deck.  He didn't want the deck towering above the gardens.

Another view of the new deck.  

So, thanks to Jeff's changes, the lower deck now has steps that gradually lower it along with the slope of the property.

Here in Vermont, we're environmentally friendly, so recycling is big.

So,  Jeff took some of the debris left from the old deck, and pieces of wood left behind and built a great, sturdy potting bench. It's under the main deck, just off the basement door, next to the lower deck, closest to the house.

He also took more construction debris to build a cover over the recycling bins in front of the house, so things look more attractive there.

Some of the only debris we couldn't re-use was the approximately 1,987,532,221 cigarette butts the contractors left behind. I'm still picking them up. Anybody want LOTS of cigarette butts? We got 'e. Other than that, the contractors were very good, if just a bit messy.

Another problem: We have about two dozen or slightly more immense poplar trees that grew up over the years, mostly along the edges of the property. Most of these tall poplars died in the last couple of years. Some of these ghostly dead trees threatened to topple over on the brand new deck, or the shed where we store so many of our tools.

An awesome potting bench Jeff built out of leftover
construction debris.  

We had to hire a tree guy to cut them down. To save money we told them not to haul the debris away.

That left us with HUGE piles of wood to get rid of. I'm gradually piling the poplar tree debris on a corner of our property.

We did hire a guy who is built like a Big Brick House to take the heavy chunks of wood and stack them on the edge of the property for now. But I have been cleaning up the epic amounts of wood from the house.

Poplar wood is basically worthless, so I'm going to have a LOT of brush pile burns/bonfires come winter.

(I like to do brush burns when there's a little snow on the ground, so embers don't get away to cause a massive St. Albans forest fire. Forest fires are just so depressing.)

The only drawback to the deck, the trees that have been cut down and the gorgeous raised beds for the vegetable garden that Jeff is building is these projects created an ENORMOUS amount of work to do.

It's all the type of work I love to do, gardening, garden design, physical labor outside. So this will keep me happy and in relatively good physical shape for years to come.

Note to Jeff: We did all to ensure I got exercise daily to stay in OK shape, didn't you?

The biggest challenge is creating a design for the gardens around the lower deck.  I'll get out there soon with a sketch book and map out what kinds of plantings to place around the deck, what varieties to set in, what the overall look will be.

The goal is to make our property a Must Stop on any garden tours that swing by within three years. Good look with that, but I'll try.

Jeff, with Jackson (the black dog) and Tonks (whose color
blends in with the sawdust( with just a small part
of the dead trees we had to cut down.  

The deck has only been completed for a couple weeks. It's already creating great moments, great times.

This deck has room for our dogs, Jackson and Tonks, to watch me as I work outside. (Gates block stairs and entryways, so the dogs stay put on the deck.)

Beforehand, when I was inside, Jackson would be indoors, howling because he was alone and couldn't see what I was doing.

Now, both Jackson and Tonks come out, peer through the railings along the edge of the deck and watch.

I'll glance back at them, and it's always a wonderful, happy moment.

Jeff also likes to come out and visit. Or on mild early summer mornings, we'll take our coffee and breakfast in the fresh air out on the deck while the dogs play with their toys next to us.

The deck is already the best room in the house. Also the biggest.

We'll have parties and gatherings out there, especially now that we have a deck that won't collapse under the weight of our friends and family.

We're really not into killing those we love, so it's nice to have something safe.

Jeff also hit the recycling bins under a platform made
of construction debris.  

As I noted, there's still a lot of work to do.

 I'll give an update in about, I don't know, 1,000 years, when I complete the gardens around the deck.

And if anybody from House Beautiful or HGTV wants a look see for an article or television, show, leave a comment with this blog post and our people will talk with your people.

It Was Too Quiet On The Home Front

At last report, my husband Jeff was en route home from a week long business trip out of town. He'll be home later today.

Jeff and Jackson enjoy an autumn
day in Vermont last October.  

Thank GAWD!! The house has been too quiet. Worse, because of my work schedule, I had to put Jackson the Cocker Spaniel/Weather Dog in the kennel for a few days.

You'd think I'd enjoy the brief peace and quiet, but no way. Uh-uh.

When I was single, I thought it was perfect, the fact that I lived alone and didn't have to answer to anybody.

Jeff never demands to know where I am, he's easy to live with. But I do always want to check in with him when I'm going somewhere, because it's common courtesy.

And I need to coordinate schedules with him, so we don't get in each other's way.  In other words, I have to be at least minimally considerate.

This past week, I would come and go whenever and not tell anybody. Not that I was doing anything a little sketchy. Mostly, I was working. But still, I miss having to tell somebody I have to leave for work at such and such a time.

I work in a home office for a good part of my days. At home, I just barely get on a roll writing something, and it always seems just then Jackson bounces into the office needing to go outside, needing to play, needing to eat, needing for me to go to the window and help him bark at the birds flitting around out there.

This week, none of that. No Jackson wanting to play when I need to work (and I would rather be playing with him. That guy is a temptster no question)

I used to enjoy the silence, when I was single, of no other voices in the house. Now I totally miss the little noises Jeff makes. His chortle when he's laughing at a bad sitcom, or when he starts singing (quite well!) along to Josh Groban as he's working at his drafting table downstairs.

At night, he'll snore a little bit. It'll stir me awake, and I'll listen for a couple minutes before falling back asleep. His snore is strangely comforting.

This past week, no snoring.  And that made me stay awake at night, rather than get any extra sleep, because I missed the snore, missed Jeff.

Yeah, marriage changes you all right. It's a responsibility, being married. And it's a lesser, but still big and real responsibility, to have a dog.

No, I take that back.

The word is not responsibility, but love. Love is why we ache when our partner, even our dog is gone for a few days. It's why the ache is there when they're gone,  even when you know that your husband and the dog are perfectly safe and happy and will be home in a few days and everything will be back to normal.

That's my new normal.  The new normal that officially arrived on August 26, 2012, the day we got married. A new normal I didn't think I'd ever achieve. Or even want. And now I crave it more than anything.

Welcome home, Jeff and Jackson!   I missed you. I'm so glad you're back. Make some noise for me, OK?

Cameleon House

Jeff has been at it again.

My houae last week...

He says he needs projects over the summer, so when I come home in St. Albans, Vermont, I often find some major changes to the property.

A few days ago, I arrived to find the house was a different color and so was the strange gargoyle lamp post I have out front.

Much better, don't you think?

And now, with a much better shade of green and
a nice red and black lamp post.

Huge Home Improvement

The hated living room window in my home in St. Albans is gone and a beautiful new glass wall has taken it's place.  You can see the before and after photos in this post.

It's so nice to be able to actually look outside. And the removal of the old window revealed yet another example of how scary the previous own of this house was.

The old, ugly window in the living room of my
St. Albans, Vt. house.

The previous owner did everything wrong with this house. Pipes leaked, the electrical system he installed was a major fire waiting to happen and there were other issues to list. Some do it yourselfers should not do it themselves.

The old window's seals were broken. They were always foggy with condensation, and the woodwork was rotting. We had plenty of company in the house with carpenter ants skittering around. Carpenter ants aren't my friends.

Turns out the old window practically had no supports. No woodwork supported the roof over the window. So unbeknownst to me, I could have had a nice little roof cave in above the edge of the living room.

The new doors and windows in my living room, leading to
the back deck. FInish work needs to be completed.

That would have livened up a party, or a cold relaxing winter's night, huh?

The new windows make this modest box of a ranch house look like a palace. It consists of double sliding glass doors leading out to the back deck, with almost floor to ceiling windows on either side of the doors.

Credit Jeff for his design sensibilities for coming up with this concept. This time of year, especially, the wide view of the deck out the windows makes it look like I'm looking out into another, beautiful room in the house.

Finish work has to be done, of course. But I first saw the new windows and doors, I felt like one of those people on "Extreme Makeover: Home Edition" who have their scary falling-apart house torn down and replaced by something really cool.

Jeff oversaw the whole project, so huge kudos to him. I wonder where he got all his patience?

Darlusz and the Changed Home

"So many changes. I no keep up. It different,"said  Darlusz Zabagaiski, the Polish Frog said amid the construction material and shifted around furniture in the house.

Darlusz, for the unitiated, is the plastic/ceramic frog that serves as a household muse and conversation piece. He likes making an occasional guest appearance in this blog.

Darlusz compares our new kitchen floor, brown, top
left, to the ugly old lineleum floor.

"I know, isn't it great,?" I said, as I tripped over a box of flooring that was ready to be installed.

The St. Albans, Vermont house Darlusz, Jeff and I live in is in the throes of a major transformation, thanks to Jeff, who is both a design expert and somebody who can't stand life unless he has some nice big projects going on.

Because of Jeff's hard work, the front deck was replaced, a new floor appeared on the kitchen and living room. He installed carpeting in a bedroom, refinished the kitchen cupboards, painted the shed, and did plenty of other projects that are too much to count. All this happened just in the past month.

Oh, and Jeff is overseeing the replacement of the entire west wall of the living room, and it will become mostly glass, to capture the great view of the Champlain Valley.

Darlusz and I are exhausted just thinking about all this, and Jeff's the one doing all the work.

"Yez. it nice, but I confused. So much new stuff. Da boxes everywhere. Da floor, it new color. No used to dat. Da new baseboards, make da wall different and I bump into it. Why you take out the big window in the living room?  It plywood now. Look awful. Can't see da bugs fly by outside dat I can eat," Darlusz whined.

Darlusz inspects the old window we're removing from the
house. Sheetrock was removed to prepare for the work.

"Oh, relax, it will be done soon enough. That plywood is going to become a big glass wall, you can see all the bugs you want. But it will probably make you hungrier because the bugs will be outdoors.  And you have to admit the new floor and baseboards are gorgeous," I said.

"Yah, but I no good at change. Took me months to get good again when I move here from Poland two year ago," Darlusz said.

"You'll get used to it soon enough, and you will love it. I guarantee it. I already love it. And I sure don't miss that awful window in the living room. It was leaky, you couldn't see out it that well because of condensation, and worse, it was attracting carpenter ants," I said.

Darlusz hunts in vain for insects to eat on the great new floor
in our kitchen and living room.

"But I love doz carpenter ant. Day tasty," Darlusz said.

"You can only eat so many of those. And besides, you're gaining weight," I said. There will be plenty of bugs for you even without the carpenter ants. And if they're not enough, I'll even buy some for you."

"You do dat for me,?" Darlusz asked.

"Absolutely. As long as you help me move these empty flooring boxes out of the kitchen," I replied.

"You good man," Darlusz said.

"Thanks. But you should really thank Jeff. He's the one responsible for all these great home improvements," I said.

Progress at the House

Sometimes, when I'm discouraged because of a rain out, or a lack of time, or both, in getting things done, like I am this morning, it's worth it to see that I have made progress. As you can tell by the scene in front of my house in the two pictures in this post, I have more work to do, but I've definitely come along.

The first photo shows the scene last spring, when I was trying to build a wall. Next photo was taken recently, as I started to plant perennials and Jeff made major repairs to the deck. Much better.

Makes me want to go out there and do more work, if it would only stop raining. Next up: More plants, and we paint the house a darker green (note the samples on the wall of the house near the window on the right.

Darlusz the Frog Embraces Change

Darlusz, the Polish frog that lives with us in St. Albans, has been out of sight, almost out of mind lately.

There's so many black flies that hatched from the record spring rains we've had that he's been gone getting fat and happy munching on them.

But he emerged yesterday as home improvements reached another crescendo at our place, and Darlusz came out to inspect the changes.

Darlusz the frog inspects the great new deck Jeff
installed at my house.

"Dis new deck, is wspaniate," using the Polish word for wonderful. "But da rotten board on da old deck. It had lot of doz tasty bugs. Dis new cedar board, no bugs. What, you make me go hungry,?"

I swatted at the thick cloud of black flies around my head for effect. "Darlusz, um, I don't think there's a bug shortage. Besides, I haven't thrown out the old boards yet. They're stored over there, behind the house, next to the perennials I'm going to plant".



The deck in question is at the front of the house was a hazard. Jeff worked his butt off the past few days ripping out the old boards and putting in the cedar planks. Between that, the painting Jeff did on the shed, and all these other projects he's doing, I feel like the lucky recipient of a new house on "Extreme Makeover: Home Edition"

Darlusz the frog inspects perennials I'm planting near the new
deck. Wreckage of the old deck is in the background.

Darlusz interrupted those thoughts. "Deese plants day smell nice and day not even blooming much yet. What you do with those,?" he asked while sniffing around the collection of perennials I had purchased at Claussen's, a Colchester, Vermont plant nursery that's bursting at the seams with plants.


"Now that the deck is fixed and the stone wall is mostly built, it's time to plant some flower. Make the place look like a real house," I said.

"Day nize," Darlusz said. "See, you like color too, I see. You got da daffodils blooming all over da place. Now deeze. I like."

Darlusz searches for tasty insects to eat in the truckload
of rich topsoil I bought for the new perennials.

I looked at Darlusz sternly and said. "I'm glad you like them. I do, too. But be warned: A lot of these plants attract butterflies, honey bees and hummingbirds. You will NOT touch any of those insects and little birds That's part of the reason I'm planting these. I like to look at them, and I like to see what little bits of wildlife they atrract," I told the frog.

Darlusz helps guide where to plant perennials near the new deck.

"But I get hungry," Darlusz whine. "But OK, I stay away. I search elsewhere for da bugs," he said.

"Here, I'll help," I said waving a towel around my head to drive the approximately 1,378, 276,322 black flies swarming around my head toward Darlusz.

Darlusz took a deep, satisfying gulp of flies. "You goud man," he said, between burps.

Deck Demolition

Darlusz the frog supervisers my
deck railing demolition

"What you do, dat noise, da pieces of wood all over. You make da mess," Darlusz Zabagaiski told me as I stood there, axe in one hand, claw hammer in the next. "You look like you murder somebody. I hope you no hurt me."

As readers of my blog at www.mattalltrades.wordpress.com know, Darlusz is the big brown frog made of plastic and resin that lives here and comments on my comings and goings. He believes he is my muse. He's nosy, but I don't mind because in the summer he consumes some of the mosquitoes that plague the boggy woods around my house.

As he always does, Darlusz was watching me work. I was starting to demolish the ugly, rotting wooden railing around the deck near the front entrance of my house.

Darlusz tottered on top of the railing I was destroying, seeing how his balance is

"Careful, I don't want you falling and breaking another foot. You still haven't recovered from that fall at Thanksgiving," I said, pointing to his bandaged front foot.

Darlusz  was looking doubtful about my work, and I could tell he needed more explanations from me.

"This will look better eventually. The railing is in the way. I'll have a garden in front of it, and we'll build  some seats. We can sit out here in the summer and enjoy the flowers. You can be my bug control guy," I said.

Darlusz brightened at that. He's been missing the big juicy insects we get out there when it gets warm.

I cut the railing demolition short though. After I knocked down about a third of it, I decided I didn't want to wrestle through the remaining snowbanks to get the rest of it. The railing demolition will have to wait.

Darlusz and I both want spring to arrive.