A very large part of my old raft is taken up by My Blue Heaven, and that will of course have to be moved to the new raft once I build it. My Blue Heaven is the name I gave my condo after I bought it from my best friend and moved in the September of 2000...almost exactly 15 years ago as I type this. You may be getting the idea by now that this raft of mine is actually a very large thing, and you'd be correct. The new raft I build will also have to be very large, of course, though I will be scaling it down as much as I can--that is one of the very few plans I have already determined. It will have to contain My Blue Heaven for sure.
You probably already guessed that the condo is blue--it is mostly, but it's a very gray blue, truth be told. Also, in full disclosure, the name for my condo was inspired by the Steve Martin movie by that title. My reasons for naming it that, though, have nothing to do with any happenings in the movie...I just liked the name. I had never named a home before--probably because I had never owned a home before. In fact, up until I bought My Blue Heaven, I had never lived in the same home for more than three years even once since my birth. I was raised in a military family, and spent my entire life moving (that's a story we won't get into in this blog, as I'm not covering aspects of my life that happened before the building of my last raft). I didn't buy My Blue Heaven as an investment, or to make the often wise choice of owning rather than renting. No, I bought it simply because I didn't want to ever have to move again--seriously, that was the only reason. In most respects, I'd honestly much rather rent than own, but not having to move has been my top priority for many, many years. I digress. I seem to do that a lot.
Emptying everything from storage, and opening boxes that had been sealed for many years, was a great feeling of course after I moved in to My Blue Heaven. It was really during that time that Alaska genuinely became my home, though I had already lived here for several years. I had almost half of a decade here in this condo by myself (aside from my canine companion Sheba) before Weasel was born. It was very much a bachelor's pad for most of that time...action figures, rock posters, cinder block shelves, general lack of furniture...you can imagine the rest, I suppose. Where you'd expect to find food, you might find compact discs; where you'd expect to find a recliner, you might find a tool box; where you'd expect to find a bed, you might find a drafting table. And so on. I remember trying out plants a couple of times, but I could never seem to keep them alive. I have only plastic plants in My Blue Heaven to this day...and now you know why. They don't provide oxygen, but they also don't die. There might be a lesson in there for me somewhere, no? And I suppose I might as well toss these plant food spikes now, as I'm thinking about it.
My bedroom ended up becoming a sanctuary for me--which it remains to this day--though it has taken on many different looks over the years. I used to have newspaper routes when I first moved in to My Blue Heaven, so I was able to furnish my home with items people threw out in the trash. I used to have a short table that I covered with a red silken cloth, and it became an altar for me in my bedroom. I remember how we were supposed to tithe 10% of our possessions to God, so I actually measured off 10% of my bedroom floor space around the altar and designated it as holy--I would not set foot in that area except to pray. And I wouldn't even enter that space to pray until I had recited The Lord's Prayer sincerely, and was certain I was harboring no resentment toward anyone. That table and altar are long gone now, but their memory remains...as do dozens of holes in the wall where all different types of crosses were hung above it. I also have memories of a VCR I found in the trash, though the VCR itself is also long gone. Among the items pilfered from the curb, only the golden floor lamp and the alarm clock remain--to the best of my knowledge. In fact, that alarm clock sits next to my bed and rousts me for work in the most trustworthy of ways to this day.
The upstairs bathroom was repainted by H, while she was pregnant with Weasel...a submarine gray color I call it--and she added self-adhesive fish laminates, and a shower curtain with various tropical fish on it. The shower curtain remains, as well as most of the self-adhesive fish--some of them were picked at by Butterfly when she was little and ended up being removed.
There are also random stickers in many places throughout My Blue Heaven, all placed there by Butterfly at different stages of her life. And there are colored marker heiroglyphs from her in a few places as well...I believe I've managed to clean off most of her crayon markings from the walls. Weasel was never into defacing walls, for whatever reason--or anything else for that matter.
Overall, My Blue Heaven became much less bachelor-pad-like after Weasel and Butterfly were born, as you might imagine. Deciding how much to bachelor-ize the new raft will be a recurring thought for me, I think, throughout its planning.
You probably already guessed that the condo is blue--it is mostly, but it's a very gray blue, truth be told. Also, in full disclosure, the name for my condo was inspired by the Steve Martin movie by that title. My reasons for naming it that, though, have nothing to do with any happenings in the movie...I just liked the name. I had never named a home before--probably because I had never owned a home before. In fact, up until I bought My Blue Heaven, I had never lived in the same home for more than three years even once since my birth. I was raised in a military family, and spent my entire life moving (that's a story we won't get into in this blog, as I'm not covering aspects of my life that happened before the building of my last raft). I didn't buy My Blue Heaven as an investment, or to make the often wise choice of owning rather than renting. No, I bought it simply because I didn't want to ever have to move again--seriously, that was the only reason. In most respects, I'd honestly much rather rent than own, but not having to move has been my top priority for many, many years. I digress. I seem to do that a lot.
Emptying everything from storage, and opening boxes that had been sealed for many years, was a great feeling of course after I moved in to My Blue Heaven. It was really during that time that Alaska genuinely became my home, though I had already lived here for several years. I had almost half of a decade here in this condo by myself (aside from my canine companion Sheba) before Weasel was born. It was very much a bachelor's pad for most of that time...action figures, rock posters, cinder block shelves, general lack of furniture...you can imagine the rest, I suppose. Where you'd expect to find food, you might find compact discs; where you'd expect to find a recliner, you might find a tool box; where you'd expect to find a bed, you might find a drafting table. And so on. I remember trying out plants a couple of times, but I could never seem to keep them alive. I have only plastic plants in My Blue Heaven to this day...and now you know why. They don't provide oxygen, but they also don't die. There might be a lesson in there for me somewhere, no? And I suppose I might as well toss these plant food spikes now, as I'm thinking about it.
My bedroom ended up becoming a sanctuary for me--which it remains to this day--though it has taken on many different looks over the years. I used to have newspaper routes when I first moved in to My Blue Heaven, so I was able to furnish my home with items people threw out in the trash. I used to have a short table that I covered with a red silken cloth, and it became an altar for me in my bedroom. I remember how we were supposed to tithe 10% of our possessions to God, so I actually measured off 10% of my bedroom floor space around the altar and designated it as holy--I would not set foot in that area except to pray. And I wouldn't even enter that space to pray until I had recited The Lord's Prayer sincerely, and was certain I was harboring no resentment toward anyone. That table and altar are long gone now, but their memory remains...as do dozens of holes in the wall where all different types of crosses were hung above it. I also have memories of a VCR I found in the trash, though the VCR itself is also long gone. Among the items pilfered from the curb, only the golden floor lamp and the alarm clock remain--to the best of my knowledge. In fact, that alarm clock sits next to my bed and rousts me for work in the most trustworthy of ways to this day.
The upstairs bathroom was repainted by H, while she was pregnant with Weasel...a submarine gray color I call it--and she added self-adhesive fish laminates, and a shower curtain with various tropical fish on it. The shower curtain remains, as well as most of the self-adhesive fish--some of them were picked at by Butterfly when she was little and ended up being removed.
There are also random stickers in many places throughout My Blue Heaven, all placed there by Butterfly at different stages of her life. And there are colored marker heiroglyphs from her in a few places as well...I believe I've managed to clean off most of her crayon markings from the walls. Weasel was never into defacing walls, for whatever reason--or anything else for that matter.
Overall, My Blue Heaven became much less bachelor-pad-like after Weasel and Butterfly were born, as you might imagine. Deciding how much to bachelor-ize the new raft will be a recurring thought for me, I think, throughout its planning.
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