LA Week 7: Femme Rome Wasn’t Built in a Day

Week seven was pretty sweet. Our weekaversary in our LA home is on Saturday, and that Saturday we put up all of our hard work on the house and went to a pool party! It’s definitely too cold for summertime style pool parties out here. But when your friends heat their saltwater pool to 95 degrees you drop everything and show up with flowers, red vines and a beverage.

Here are some things I didn’t know about pools until recently. The unheated pool temperature will be an average of the daytime and nighttime temp. So even if temps soar into the 80s, if they’re dropping to 50s at night (which is possible here, and lately we’ve been more early 70s and sometimes 40s at night) that means the pool is way too cold to swim in during the day at about the 60s. Brrr. Heating a pool is mad expensive if you do it all the time, so most folks do it on special occasions. My grandmother has a pool and even though she’s been in her house in Rancho Mirage (by Palm Springs) for 15 years I’ve literally been in the pool twice.

Got to hang with my friend Taylor Black last week!

So back to the pool party. How lucky I feel to have gotten to hang so much with Barb since we moved to LA! She’s buying a house here and keeps visiting from Fresno, about 5 hours North in Central CA. Barb has been staying with Tristan and Colten, and Anne and Susanna were in town and so were some other friends I didn’t know from NY. So it became a party, my very favorite kind where I know 50% of the people in attendance.

Barb, Susanna and Anne drinking prosecco from the Red Vines I brought. Red Vines are the licorice of my youth and I don’t like Twizzlers. They’re decidedly West Coast.

I know most people perceive me as an extrovert and totally socially confident but there’s a reason I love to throw parties and have something to do! I love people and I love talking but I was an only child and get super socially awkward and nervous in un-facilitated interactions. So when I have a “job” I feel better. Pro-tip: I’ve found volunteering at parties a great way to take my anxiety down a notch and an easier way to meet new people. Once I know more than 30% of the people at a party it is way easier for me. All interactions become kind of facilitated because you already know and are comfortable with people!

We had been working hard on our attic the previous two days so getting to soak in a 95 degree pool was perfect. It was like taking a luxurious bath with a bunch of awesome people.

I dropped Dara off at the airport that night to go to NYC on business again. She’ll be going once a month for the foreseeable future because one of her biggest clients is out there. It’s interesting having moved with a partner. I’ve never had that experience. I’m usually Captain Solo, Queen Independent and can do quite well on my own. In Brooklyn, when we would spend time apart at our different houses (this house in LA is the first time we’ve ever lived together for real) I was great. All those years I spent single I really cultivated a way of being with myself and being fully present and excited in my life.

Sometimes if we were apart I would stay up super late just… fucking around? Just like watching bullshit TV or reading or doing tarot cards. (Even now, sometimes I stay up later than Dara because I just like to do those things solo.) I was so good at being independent that it would actually be hard for me when we hung out again to let down my guard and do that couple comfort mesh thing that happens.

This fatkini is from Modcloth and I love it. Also, when you’re in a 95 degree salt water pool and you get out steam comes off your body. Also also I was stung by a bee and Colten gave me excellent poolside nursing care and it was itchy and hurt for days after but was totally worth it for the magic of that pool party.

It was interesting when I dropped her off and was alone again because I didn’t experience the joy of independence again. Just like her first trip to NYC I was left alone feeling my feelings. It was hard and lonely without her and it was because I have all this discomfort with new things happening. Having a partner comes with benefits and drawbacks. A huge benefit is a support system that makes you feel good and hopefully mitigates discomfort. An all the time social safety net. I’ve never really noticed needing that before (Queen Independent) but noticing that I felt it missing made me feel vulnerable and it was hard.

I think that’s a warning sign to me that my self care game is off. I mean, I already knew that, but if I am with someone and not feeling my feelings that means I’m not setting aside enough time to work through stuff while we’re together. I know I could be journaling more, setting aside more time for reflection and going to more Al-Anon meetings. In NYC I had a great therapist and that was an hour each week I had to ]let off my steam pipe of feelings, plus I did Al-Anon weekly and so many other things to work through my feelings.

To my credit I’ve been meditating and now that my kitchen is at 90% capacity I am cooking nutritious food. And having only been in the house seven weeks that’s good.

I painted a lot of intentions into the attic. Casual woo.

Setting up a sanctuary is hard work. My friend Morgan said on instagram “Femme Rome wasn’t built in a day” and she is totally right. You might remember Morgan as the gorgeous Femme who baked gourmet cupcakes for Rebel Cupcake when I was hosting it in Brooklyn.

Photo by Kelsey Dickey for Rebel Cupcake.

It’s a nice thing to remind yourself when you are frustrated with things not going at the pace you would like them to go. Having this deadline of getting the house together is actually not as nice as I said in my last post. It’s actually creating a lot of stress and time pressure.

My mom was visiting my Grandmother in Palm Springs that weekend of Dara leaving town. Because Dara’s flight was right in the middle of the visit I couldn’t make it work to go out there (I also thought my mom was leaving on Sunday, not Monday as it turned out). I had plans with my Aunt Shari to watch the finale of Downton Abbey Sunday night. I knew I wanted to watch with Aunt Shari because she loved the show so much she deeply spoilered it for me even after I said I was really behind on this season because of our travels. Mom surprised me by asking if she could join me and Aunt Shari in spite of the six hour round trip it would take to go do that.

So I went with the choice of fostering intimacy over perfectionism and asked mom if she and Grandmother wanted to come see the house in it’s totally not “mom clean” or finished state on their way to my Aunt’s house. (I am 50 minutes to Aunt Shari’s and 2 hours to Grandmother’s.) Later that night our impromptu hat party for the Downton finale (with a special cameo from two of my cousins) was a fabulous memory!

I haven’t 100% come out to all of my family about my blog but I’m getting there. They know I’ve been in the New Yorker and stuff like that but I don’t think any of them read it except my mom.

I spent the better part of Wednesday last week working on buying packaging for my Reiki tea pre-sale. It started with physically measuring out 20 servings of two types of tea (the herbal blends take up more room than the tea blends) and then using a tape measure to see what kind of capacity I need.

Buying tins and packaging is not as straightforward as one would believe and I’m definitely not at “scale” yet for cheaper prices. I need to be buying about 300 tins per order to get even a small discount. But the tins were important to me and my vision (they are truly the very best way to store tea for longevity). I also bought all the herbs and tea I needed to get the blends going. They just arrived, I’m really excited to get my hands herby!

B-School has been going slowly. I’m glad they give you a pretty generous time module for it (it is go at your own pace). Just like in my AP classes in high school with their over the summer homework and reading lists you need to do before school starts, B-School had a whole pre-course module for follow-through success AND an e-book for “Starting the Right Business.” The book itself has lots of homework so I’m doing all this very necessary guided research (it’s a pretty brilliant method, but I wish it had just a touch more guidance and samples) to identify who I admire who does something similar to what I do and what and how they did it. So if you know of a tea company, woo modality company or other small product based company you like let me know in the comments because I’m deeply researching what makes them successful!

Thursday and Friday of last week I really buckled down and finished the painting upstairs. We had Dari and Jen come over again on Saturday and they helped so much with the final touches in the attic. Installing my closet rods and shelving while Dara mopped the hundred year old dust a shop vac, many many sweeps didn’t get, and I used my staple gun and 80 yards of gold glitter tulle to fill in the gaps in the wood so stuff doesn’t fly into an unreachable space.

I definitely had the place okay enough to have someone stay for tea. But we still have a lot to do in order to get things together to host Dara’s mom overnight tomorrow night and meet our artificial deadline of having the place in order enough to host Seder. The hustle is real in these parts right now.

“Optimism expresses itself in the persistence and resilience of living things.” I found that quote once more while unpacking and it is a good one I am pondering. Even though my self care game is kind of a flat tire right now, even though I’m stressed and I know stress is an optional emotion, I know that I can get back to feeling serenity and joy. And I know the power of six months means that in six months, this period of trying to get stuff together for the house will be just a memory.