Operation Pink Herring

Exodus

I used to think blogging was really hard when there was nothing much going on. Just the same old same old, nothing much to report.

Turns out it's even harder, at least for me, when there's lots of stuff to talk about.

So!

This lady turned one! There was cake.

And then she turned 13, 14, 15, and 16 months old. Lordy, I guess it's been a wee bit longer than I thought.

She walks, she runs, she dances. She puts shoes and diapers on her stuffed animals and buckles them into her carseat. I remember saying when she was nine months old that I just could not imagine a kid being any more fun. Guess what? It gets more fun. She kills me.

The one thing she doesn't do is talk. Not a single word, not ever. I'm not really worried because she signs, and signing babies are just the cutest. Especially when you ask them "more what?" hoping they'll elaborate on the ubiquitous demand for MORE MORE MORE and they stop, think for a second and then sign "more... PLEASE."

The second and third things she doesn't do is give up bottles or pacifiers. But I'm ignoring that for now because: 1) teeth. OMFG THE TEETH. They never stop with the being assholes! This child has never shown interest in a single toy designed for teething babies, but she will chew on keys, cigarette butts she finds on the sidewalk, and her personal favorite: styrofoam packing peanuts. So! When you see her with a pacifier in her maw in 75% of the pictures I post on Facebook, just realize that it is better than seeing a picture of her with four cigarette butts poking out of her mouth NOT THAT THAT HAS EVER HAPPENED. Except yes it has. 2) she is already sleeping like crap, which should be downright illegal after months of fantastic nights of 12+ hours of sleep and predictable naps, which lull parents into a false sense of security and causes them to lose all the powers of functioning in the world on very little sleep that they develop during the newborn months. I realize that complaining about her waking up 2-3 times during the night between the hours of 6:30pm and 6am sounds absolutely laughable to people still on the waking-up-every-ninety-minutes schedule. But the other day I was trying to veg on the couch during her (too-short) nap, and I went to the search function on Netflix and typed in "netflix". And was then surprised when no results were displayed. Goddamnit Netflix, FIGURE OUT WHAT I MEAN. I had absolutely no recollection of what show I was trying to find. That's what a few weeks of waking up several times a night and starting the day at 5:15am will do to me nowadays. So I'm not even THINKING about taking away bottles or pacifiers until we're all good and settled in our new house.

Oh, did I mention that we're moving? To Salt Lake City? Um, yes. That is happening. 

Joel drove away from our house in Baltimore on December 28th. Sad, surreal, strange. Thank goodness my brother was staying with us at the time, helping us paint and pack, when Joel left or I would have lost it. Instead I lost it when my brother drove away later in the day. And then I survived fifteen days of solo parenting with no car. In the middle of winter.

 

It wasn't pretty. Hannah learned to fend for herself while I dozed on the couch (STOP WAKING UP AT 5:15AM) or packed boxes. I learned not to care about messes, because OMG. The mess created by solo parenting + not enough sleep + too small house + no car + winter + can't go outside + boxes everywhere + has anyone seen the vacuum + OH, JUST HELP YOURSELF TO A SNACK SURE THING GREAT JOB NO NEED FOR A BOWL.

Hannah and I stayed behind in Baltimore for a few weeks to finish packing and getting the house ready for sale. Movers arrived last Monday, and when they finished loading the truck we all bundled into my mom's car and retired to our country home (aka my mom's house) in New Jersey. 

Goodbye, Baltimore. It was good knowing you.

 

 

23 weeks

Well, here I am. I survived the weekend. Looking back, I am really not sure what I was so panicked about, but you know how that is. Or maybe you don't because you're not an anxiety-prone person who works themselves into a lather at the thought of not having a full weekend day to zone out on the couch. Lucky you.

Things went pretty well overall, if anyone cares. I survived the entire 18 hours of yoga training and my teaching portion went really well. No prize dropped from the ceiling as a reward when I walked out the door on Sunday at 4pm, but I'm sure that was just an oversight and a big box of chocolate covered something is on its way. The flea market was a pretty good success, despite the fucking RAIN that would not stop raining down from the rain-filled sky the entire day. And my friend and her boyfriend ended up not coming to town and staying with us. Which was probably best. For their own safety. I spent a good hour and a half cleaning up and putting shit away last night after work and the place STILL looks like a post-yard sale disaster. I had to leave the back door open all last night just to vent out the nasty smell that has somehow invaded the house. Henry the Cat chose to lounge on the deck next to the compost bin rather than in the house, if that tells you anything. I'm going to stop talking about this now.

****************

Now that it's glaringly obvious that I am quite pregnant, a lot of my fellow teacher trainees have been politely asking if I knew I was pregnant when I enrolled in this training. The answer is kind of complicated. When I registered and paid my non-refundable deposit in November, I was not pregnant. Shortly afterwards I got my PCOS diagnosis and we started to very seriously think about trying to get pregnant sooner rather than later. I obviously realized that with the training running from February-September, there was a possibility that I would (hopefully) have to complete some portion of it while pregnant. I looked at it as betting on both sides: if we were able to get pregnant, hooray!  And if we couldn't get pregnant, well... at least I'd be able to complete the training! Which, by the way, I'd been meaning to do for years, but there was always something in the way. I was working full time and going to grad school and didn't have time. I was travelling too much for work. I was planning a wedding. I just felt like if I put it off another year it was just never going to happen. So we plowed ahead on both tracks.

And then by the beginning of January, we realized that hooray and holy shit, I was pregnant. For real. With a baby. I emailed the studio owner who runs the training to see if I was even able to still do the training, which is pretty intense, while pregnant. She said it was totally up to me. I wouldn't be the first person to do go through some of the training pregnant (although I've since found out that I will be something like the third, and that I will be the first to do the ENTIRE thing pregnant), but they would refund my deposit if I wanted to drop out at that point. The thing was, I needed to decide right away so they could fill my space before the training started in February. If I started and then couldn't make it through, I'd be getting zero refund. This thing is pretty expensive. She did graciously offer that if I had to drop out, I could make up what I missed in a future year's training at no charge... but we really, REALLY hope to not live in Baltimore at that point. So I'm not considering that as an option.

Obviously, I decided to go ahead with it. At that time, way back in January, the pregnancy seemed so tenuous and incredible that it felt like I'd be tempting fate to make any sort of life alterations around it. And now here I am, halfway done with the pregnancy and halfway done with the training. So far, so good!  The training ends on September 11th. I am due on September 13th. The closer we get, the more ridiculous it seems that I thought cutting it so close was a feasable option.  But really, I didn't have much of a choice.Hopefully the baby stays in until its due date. Hey, my mom had all three of her children on her exact due date!  It could happen. And we're allowed to miss one day of the training, which I am obviously saving for that last day in case the baby is two days early. Maybe I'll be the first person to go into labor during this thing. At least I'll be surrounded by a pretty competent bunch, which includes two nurses and a gaggle of doulas and midwives. I'm trying not to worry about it, and to just take it one week at a time. Right now I can still do both. If I reach a point where I can't any more, I'll figure something out.

*********************

You may have noticed that I'm still calling it "the baby". Not "him" or "her". That's because we're not finding out the sex. As an impatient person who doesn't really like surprises, trust me, I know. But Joel really, really wants it to be a surprise on the day of the birth and he's a pretty good guy so he gets his way on this. I'm actually very OK with it. What's another 20 weeks of not knowing in the grand scheme of life?  Sorry to disappoint those of you who've asked, though. You'll know when we know!

 

I have absolutely no feeling one way or the other. I had one dream that the doctor accidentally let it slip that it was a girl. So maybe it's a girl. Then again, I have about five girl names that I really like and no boy names that I'm absolutely in love with, so it's probably a boy. Place your bets!

Maybe if I write it all down it won't seem so overwhelming

I am not sure how everything that needs to get done in the next four days is going to happen.

I started a yoga teacher training in February, did I tell you guys that? I meant to tell you about it in NOVEMBER, when I signed up, but then I got distracted. And then I got pregnant. And as you may have noticed, that sort of took over my life and my blog. The teacher training has been great so far, but it is extremely time consuming. One weekend a month, from February to September, we have training all weekend. And I mean ALL WEEKEND. 7:30-10:30pm on Fridays, 12:30-8:30pm on Saturdays, and 9am-4pm on Sundays. It's fantastic, but it's exhausting. Rest assured, we're not actually doing yoga that entire time (I'd drop dead) (although we nearly did yoga the entire time the first weekend, and I nearly did drop dead), but it's still 18 hours of paying attention and taking notes and, now, practice teaching.

On top of that, we also need to go to 90-minute yoga classes three times a week. I thought this would be the hardest thing, but I actually love this. It does cut into my TV time, but I've come to love knowing that Tuesday and Thursday nights I have to go to yoga. There is no hemming and hawing over how I really should go to the gym, but I don't feel like it, but I REALLY should, but I REALLY REALLY just want to go home after work. No more worrying about it. I just have to go. And unsurprisingly, I feel pretty great from doing that much yoga. But still... it's more hours cut out of the week. And on weekends when we have the training, I have to squeeze in all three classes during the work week and that is kind of tough. While also trying to cram in the required reading that I always procrastinate doing.

Anyway, we have a training weekend coming up tomorrow. It's my group's turn to teach an hour-long yoga class and I am really nervous. And on top of that, we all have to have ANOTHER individual 30-minute class prepared, and I am also nervous about that.

And on top of THAT, we are participating in the neighborhood flea market on Saturday. When I haven't been at yoga this week, I've been helping Joel go through the entire house from closet to basement, deciding what to sell and what to keep. Hint: everything is a sell. Apparently a baby is going to live here in four months (FOUR MONTHS) and currently the only space we have to put said baby's crib (which we don't actually own, because the thought of researching and buying baby gear at the moment is enough to make me faint from exhaustion) is next to Henry's litterbox in the room we affectionately call the Poop Room. Because, you know, it's where the cat poops. And unfortunately, that's also what it smells like.

So I have to go to yoga tonight. I'll get home around 7:30. Then we'll start (and finish) pricing stuff for the flea market and cleaning off all the stuff that was stored in the spiderwebby basement. Then I'll HOPEFULLY go immediately to sleep, since I haven't slept the past two nights. Then on Friday, I'll finish out what has been an insane week at work, go immediately to to the yoga studio to practice one last time with my group, and stay there for training until 10:30pm. On Saturday we'll wake up around 6am, set up for the flea market, and then I'll race back to yoga training at noon, teach our class (OMG), and stay there until 8:30pm.

Oh yeah, and did I mention that my friend and her boyfriend are staying with us on Saturday night? So at some point, our disaster zone of a house is going to have to get cleaned. I'm putting Henry in charge of that.

All this to say, I cannot wait for it to be 4pm on Sunday. I can't even decide what I want to do starting at 4:01. Go directly to sleep? Surgically attach myself to the couch and watch 12 straight hours of TV? Compulsively pull every single weed out of the garden?

Sometimes when I'm feeling really overwhelmed it helps me to just list out everything I need to do, and then I realize it's not really that much. It didn't so much work this time so I'm just going with my backup strategy, which is to count down the hours until everything is over and then go into autopilot mode. First, survive the work day. Then survive Prenatal Yoga. Eat something, do the flea market stuff, sleep (please, god, let me fall asleep tonight). Repeat with variations on Friday and Saturday. On Sunday all I have to do is survive the training, no teaching anything. And then at 4pm I can go home and return to my life.

Seventy-eight hours to go.

A lesson on dog walking from a non-dog owner

So, you've got a dog! Good for you. I like dogs. Dogs are great. Here are some quick instructions on how to care for your dog in the city.

1. Feed your dog. Dogs like food. 

2. Walk your dog. Dogs eat food, and then they need to poop.

2(a). Pick up your dog's poop.  I know, it's poop, it's gross. But if picking up poop is too gross for you, you should not have gotten a dog. Too late now! PICK IT UP. Use a bag.

2(b). Tie the bag up. This keeps the poop from getting out. If you need a diagram on how bags work, one can be provided for a small fee. 

2(c). Take the bag home with you and throw it in the trash. What's that? You don't want to carry the bag all the way home because it's full of poop and it's gross?  Again, too late. You should have thought of that before you got a dog.

2(d). Here's an idea!  If it's trash day, why don't you just deposit your bag full of your dog's shit in the first trash can you see on the sidewalk?  I mean, it's YOUR dog and YOUR dog's shit, but I'm sure that the owner of the trash can won't mind storing it for a week!

2(e). That was sarcasm.  If you don't want to carry your dog's shit home with you and store it until the next available trash pickup, imagine how much the owner of the trash can does not want to have that same shit rot in their trash can for a week. 

2(f). Yes, dumbass, that's what it means when all those empty garbage cans are lined up on the street: the trash collectors have already come by. The next pickup is in seven (7) days.

2(g). The owner of that trash can especially does not want to store your dog's shit for a week if you've neglected to follow instruction 2(b) regarding bag closure.

3. If you find yourself unable to follow the instructions above, watch your step. An angry neighbor might just leave a litterbox full of cat piss on your stoop.

Time to get the old hearing checked

You may remember the minor freakout in which I was convinced our entire household was going to die in our sleep due to a gas leak in the oven.  I can call it a minor freakout now because it all turned out fine.  The problem was with the oven, not the gas line, and it was quickly fixed for a couple hundred bucks.  No big deal!  God, why am I always so dramatic?  I guess I've seen too many of those BGE commercials.  Wires down, red alert, don't go near, you'll get hurt!  Yeah, I totally know all the words.  Safety first, my friends.

The fix to this problem, unsurprisingly, involved having a guy come over to fix our oven.  Unfortunately, I hate having repairmen come to the house.  HATE IT.  It is so awkward. 

The worst was the exterminator that we've had to have come over several times to deal with the massive ant invasions we suffer here in the heart of the concrete jungle.  He was gross to begin with, all grunty and sweaty (I am quite forgiving of sweatiness, but this guy was above and beyond any normal limits of perspiration).  But even worse, he would always ask me about the baby.  Did I need to go feed the baby?  Should he be extra quiet in case the baby was sleeping?  It would have all been very considerate of him, if, you know, I HAD A BABY.   Which I do not.  Never have.  I got the vague idea that he was trying to hit on me a few times, like he was waiting for me to exclaim that I didn't have a baby because I was single and lonely and wanted to go out on a date with him. It was fucking creepy.  If I had had a baby, I would have kept it far away from him.

But even the ones that don't repeatedly inquire about my non-existent offspring are awkward.  I never know what exactly you're supposed to do while they're fixing your alarm system or replacing that leaky pipe in the kitchen.  Do you hang around in case they have questions?  Just go back upstairs to watch TV and wait for them to call you when they're done?  Are you supposed to clean your house before they come over?  Are you supposed to tip them?  Offer them coffee?  GAH.  What do you say when they tell you "your house is pretty," as the guy who cleaned our dryer vent did?  (I said "thank you" and then spent the rest of the day wondering if he was being sarcastic. On that particular day I'd decided that no, you don't have to clean the house for repairmen.)

Anyway, the oven repairman came, fixed the broken heating element in the oven, and left.  I stayed upstairs while he was working because I was in the middle of a Pretty Little Liars episode, but fear not -- Madison the Cat kept an eye on his every move.  I'm sure he appreciated being micromanaged by a snaggletoothed cat. 

Before he left, I asked him to take a look at one of the stovetop burners.  I never thought it was a problem before, but flames sort shoot out from under the burner when it's on, and after a near-death experience with the oven I wanted to get it checked out.  He said it needed to be replaced, but he didn't carry the parts with him.  They'd have to come back, and in the meantime we shouldn't use that burner.

I was really hoping that it would be a different guy for the second appointment, for the same reason that I never go back to the same hair stylist: I hate making small talk with semi-strangers.  No such luck.  Same guy.  Same cat demanding to supervise his work, same messy house.  This time I opted to just stay downstairs, reading a magazine in the next room while he worked, feeling ridiculously awkward. 

After about ten minutes, I heard him say "Ma'am?", and BOY, good thing I wasn't upstairs, I told myself.

"Yes?"

"Do you by any chance have a bathroom?"

"Of course," I told him, "it's right upstairs and to the left." And to myself, I thought, dear Jesus, please let the toilet be flushed.

"Upstairs?",  he asked.

"Yup, upstairs and to the left.  You really can't miss it."  When was the last time that toilet was used?  Oh god, are my bras still hang-drying on the back of the door in there? 

"Upstairs, and to the... left."  He gave me a strange look and resumed fiddling with the burner. 

Well, I told myself, I guess he didn't have to go too badly.

A little while later, he put his tools down.

"So, it's upstairs and to the left?"

"Yup," I confirmed.

He slowly went up the stairs.  Then I heard him start to come back down.  There had been no toilet flush.  Crap, I thought, was it THAT bad in there? 

He appears at the bottom of the steps holding our purple Dyson vacuum.

And then I died. 

And when the locksmith came over last week to put a new deadbolt on our alley gate, Joel handled the entire transaction while I hid upstairs in my pajamas.  Amen.

Robbery in progress

“Someone tried to break into our house,” Joel announced as I walked through the door on Monday night. I hadn't thought much of the cop car I'd seen parked in the middle of the block as I came in. There's a decent police presence here, and they often stop their cars to talk with people or write tickets and such. This guy, however, had been talking to everyone on our block after being alerted to a string of alley break-ins that afternoon.

Most rowhouses in Baltimore, including ours, share an alley with their neighbor. The alley runs between the two houses, allowing residents to take things like garbage cans out to the street without having to drag them through the house. Unless you’re us, and your side of the alley is blocked by an adorable scooter, which you have to keep behind the security of a locked alley gate so it doesn’t get stolen. Again. Our neighbor uses her side of the alley as a garbage-storage-site-slash-dog-run for her yappy mutt. Anyway, the situation looks like this:

(Note: totally not our house.)

At some point on Monday afternoon, a gang of miscreant adolescents had tried their best to break the lock on our alley gate using a couple of screwdrivers, a bottle of bike lube, and chunk of broken cement. How do I know all this? Well, they left their set of junior locksmith tools in my potted plant. Plus, a woman across the street watched the entire fiasco and described it to our neighbor when she got home from work, and our neighbor in turn told us. Unfortunately, this woman across the street neglected to do anything about the scene she witnessed – like, say, call the police and report a burglary in progress – but on the plus side our poor little lock held, although it was badly mangled and will need to be replaced. The people a few houses down weren’t so lucky, and the little thugs got into their alley and stole two bikes.

We assume they were after our scooter, which you may remember was already stolen once before. We got that scooter back, by the way, did I ever tell you that? The police recovered it a few days after it was taken, during an unrelated raid. (People are always incredulous that I've never watched The Wire, but why do I need to watch a TV show about crime in Baltimore? We're living the dream!) After a three-day fight with the city lot that houses stolen vehicles and several hundred dollars in ridiculous fees, we dragged it back home in Joel’s old pickup truck. It’s not usable because the thieves destroyed both the ignition and the gas tank when they stole it, but it’s home, resting dejectedly under a tarp on our back patio. We replaced it with a nearly identical scooter from Craigslist, which we keep in the alley, out of sight and behind a locked iron gate.

Our neighbor was quite upset, as were we. We pushed the scooter farther up the alley and closed our secondary gate, which separates our half of the alley from the neighbor’s, so that it’s no longer visible at all from the street. We haven’t ridden the poor thing in over a year because it’s such a pain in the ass to wiggle it out of that alley, which is barely wide enough to accommodate a trash can, let alone a miniature motor vehicle. Now we’ll certainly never use it, since we’d have to haul it to the side just to get that secondary gate open. We should just sell it, but that would be admitting defeat. I almost want to challenge these thugs to a scooter theft olympics; see if you can get it over the secondary 5-foot gate, wiggle it down the ridiculously narrow alley, get the massive Kryptonite lock off the front tire, and then contend with the long-dead battery. It’s also possibly out of gas.  Ready? GO. 

**********

Last night I was vacuuming the first floor around 10:45 (shut up, my mom is coming to visit this weekend), and Joel pulled aside the curtain and looked out the front window. “Someone’s in the alley!” he said, and raced out the door.

I started FREAKING OUT, justifiably, I think. I dropped the vacuum, grabbed the phone and called 911 – all while trying to look out the window and see if my husband was being stabbed to death outside our house. Dramatic, maybe, but there have been a rash of assaults, muggings, and all other sorts of misdeeds in our neighborhood lately.

I had the following conversation with the woman who answered the phone:

911 operator: “Hello?”

Me: “Someone’s trying to break into my alley! I’m at [my address]!”

911 operator: “Your alley?”

Me: “Yes. Someone is trying to break into my HOUSE. They are in my alley. SEND THE POLICE.”

911 Operator: “OK, we’ll send a unit.” [CLICK]

I have a few problems with this conversation:

• What ever happened to answering the phone with “911, what is your emergency?”
• Could you please hold the backtalk and just send the fucking police? I realize that this whole alley-between-houses thing can be confusing to people who don’t live in this city, HOWEVER, you’d think a 911 operator would be somewhat familiar with the city they serve, or at very least have the courtesy dispatch police first and ask questions later. And sure, maybe I wasn’t being crystal-clear, but I think that’s acceptable when you are in the midst of being burglarized.
• So that whole “Don’t hang up, ma’am, help is on the way?” line is just a TV gimmick? CLICK, gotta go, have fun with that burglary in progress you’ve got going on isn't quite as reassuring.

Just as the 911 operator was hanging up on me, Joel came back in (without any stab wounds). It turned out that the hooligans hadn’t actually gotten into the alley, they were just messing with the lock again (fine, but he said IN THE ALLEY, Ms. 911 Operator. Bite me.). The police did arrive 11 minutes after I’d called 911 (yeah, I timed it), took a description from Joel and headed off in the direction the thugs had fled to resume their patrol. We went to bed, I moved to the couch at 2am and finally fell asleep around 3:30. It was a very restful evening, as you can imagine. Around 2am I had the brilliant idea to use one the U-locks we have for our bikes as a failsafe in case the bandits came back and finally managed to crack the lock on the gate, but I was far too scared to go outside.

I clipped the bike lock onto the gate before I left for work this morning. Yippee-kay-ay-ay, motherfuckers. I am so very ready to get out of this city.

And the oven is fixed too

The dark ages have come to a close.  Our internet and phone service were restored yesterday afternoon.

Normally I wouldn't have been as rage-y about the lack of Internet, because after all, I spend all day at work on a computer. I can get the basic email-checking, bill-paying and web-surfing during the day, yes, but we've been trying to plan some sort of anniversary trip thing, since by some sort of time turner witchy magic we have been married for almost a year. In this age of coupon codes and roaming gnomes, it is not possible to plan a vacation without the internet. Well, it's not possible to plan a discount, last-minute vacation without the internet, and if you know us at all, you know that we're very much the last-minute, discount vacation types.

We didn't want to be literally last-minute, though, so we tried our very best to soldier on without home internet. First, we went to the close-by Starbucks on Wednesday last week, having read that they had just transitioned to free internet. We each bought the cheapest thing we could consume (a small iced coffee for Joel and an orange soda fizzy thing in a bottle for me) and then sat down for some interneting. Five minutes later, we found out that the whole free internet at Starbucks thing was true, starting July 1. At this point it was 8:30pm on June 30th. So! We packed up our computer, I screwed the bottlecap back on to my orange fizzy drink and we biked over to Barnes and Noble in the sweltering, record-breaking, I-just-took-a-shower-goddammit heat. At Barnes and Noble we were able to successfully able to connect to the internet for an entire twenty minutes before they closed. It was just enough time for me to finish my $3 orange drink thing from Starbucks.

There were several different variations on this scenario over the following days. We went to Joel's office on a Saturday, except we were unable to figure out the network key, so I sat and watched Joel do computer stuff for a few hours and THAT ended in good moods for everyone. Joel spent an hour in the coffee shop across the street from my yoga studio unsuccessfully trying to connect to their broken network. On the Fourth of July we returned to our trusty Barnes and Noble, where the free internet was no longer working because of "interference" and all the cafe tables were taken up by tourists (my personal favorites were an elderly Asian couple who were intently paging through a picture book called Baby Animals). Let me tell you, after this whole ordeal Panera Bread has won my undying affection. Four hours of uninterrupted internet access. It could only have been better if we were, say, IN OUR OWN HOUSE.

But, anyway! We have an anniversary trip booked and I got a really good cup of french onion soup out of the deal.

I was a little bit ruffled by this entire situation, in case you couldn't tell, but I think that the family member most traumatized by this outage was the Tivo. You see, we have the Tivo hooked up to our wireless network so that it can have high-speed conversations with the internet about all of the wonderful programming options out there for citizens with basic cable. When it can't talk to the internet for some reason (say, when we didn't have our own internet for several years), it uses the phone line to talk to the hamsters at Tivo central. When the internet AND the phone line are down, the Tivo gets a little bit crazy. It threw increasingly frantic messages up every time we turned it on, telling us that program information was running low! Please to connect to internets for talk with hamster friends! I CAN HAS INTERNETS RIGHT AWAY PLZ! Finally, we turned on the program guide on Tuesday and saw a blank, open space stretching from 7pm on Wednesday onward. Forget December 2012, armageddon was coming on July 7 as far as our poor Tivo was concerned. And he was afraid.

We had a scheduled appointment with Verizon yesterday, made weeks ago, but I had little hope would get anything accomplished. Someone had already come out the week before and been shocked that the pole with all the phone and internet wires was not in our backyard (note: we have no actual yard), but in the alley of a house up the block on another street. This also shocked Verizon when they came out to install our internet several years ago and every other times they have come out for service. Every time they are completely flabbergasted that there is no way to access this stupid pole from our house, which is kind of annoying because, 1. this is not the first time we've been over this, and 2. we are not the only city dwellers in this situation, guys. But the dude last week said he'd contact the owners of the house that does have access, and that he'd call Joel the very next day to work something out. He never called, obviously. I tried pleading with the Verizon customer support representative on Twitter, and that accomplished about as much as you'd expect. But someone in the technology world must have heard our Tivo's distress call, and somehow everything just got fixed yesterday at about 3pm, four hours shy of the Tivo apocalypse. And then there was a brownout around 9pm and we the internet was broken again for a while, but we're not going to talk about that because I don't want to cry.

So things are fixed and everyone is happy. YAY. Except the Tivo, who can't get it through his antennaed skull that we narrowly escaped the pit of despair and everything is OK now. He is still giving us frantic PLEASE CAN I HAS INTERNETS messages after we finish a program. And when we turn the TV on. And at the bottom of the Tivo screen. Obviously he has suffered serious psychological damage from the near-miss and is going to need lots of therapy. Which is why I'll be demanding at least two months of free phone and internet, just for starters, when I call up and yell at Verizon later. Yelling at people is my new thing. I yelled at a gang of thug-wannabes in the movies this weekend -- they were being seriously, disruptively loud and we are serious about The Last Airbender around here -- and then I demanded my money back from the theater after the movie was over. I am half proud of myself and half nervous that I'm turning into the older lady at my office who calls up to yell at her credit card company at least once a week, but either way I have two free movie passes. Hello, Edward Cullen.

The Dark Ages

Last night I set the oven to preheat and went upstairs to take a shower (my second of the day, thanks to East Cost humidity) while Joel finished washing off our bikes out on the back deck.  When I came back downstairs I heard the oven beep and assumed the pizza was ready.  But, no.  The oven was just done preheating.  It had taken nearly 40 minutes for it to heat up to 400 degrees. 

I put the pizza in and went about the business of inspecting the tile floor for any stray ants when I smelled gas.  I opened the oven and REALLY smelled gas.  And then I did nothing for a few minutes.  I don't know if this is a universal thing, but my first instinct when presented with really bad homeowner stuff is to pretend it's not happening.  Water coming out of the wall?  Nah, I must be hallucinating.  Bird chirping coming from the chimney?  Must be the neighbor's TV. Carpet all wet in the litterbox room?  Must be cat pee.  That, my friends, is when you know things are bad, cat pee is the best case scenario.

I eventually came to my senses and turned the oven off. We cooked the pizza on the grill (can't believe THAT worked), ate it, and then were suddenly overcome with the urge to go to Home Depot and buy that carbon monoxide detector I've been meaning to purchase and install for, oh, three years or so.  I realize that carbon monoxide and natural gas are not at all the same thing.  I just wanted to do something to responsible to counteract the WE'RE GOING TO DIE IN A FIRE panic feeling building up in my gut.  Unfortunately, Home Depot had been closed for an hour.  Instead we put batteries in the smoke detectors.

I insisted that we sleep with the windows open, just to because of the .001% chance that there was still a teeny invisible leak, slowly filling our house with poisonous gas in order to suffocate us in our sleep. People survived before there was air conditioning, I told Joel as he grumbled something about it being ninety nine degrees outside and our bedroom being on the third floor.  Yes, he replied, but they didn't live in asphalt-covered people-filled cities teeming with machines.  And a lot of them probably died of heat stroke.   

Well, I'm happy to report that we died neither of heat stroke nor gas poisoning last night.  We're both alive and the oven will hopefully be repaired tomorrow.  And I'll go buy that carbon monoxide detector... later. 

In addition to the broken oven, our landline phone stopped working at some point in the past few weeks. We didn't notice for awhile, although the lack of telemarketer calls should have been a hint.  The only reason we have that phone line is because it connects our alarm system to the monitoring company.  The same alarm system that alerts the fire department if, say, there is a gas leak in the house. 

We noticed the absence of a dial tone when our internet mysteriously stopped working last week.  We've been using my phone's browser as our home internet since Thursday.

If the Tivo breaks I'm checking into a hotel.  Under an assumed name, just to be safe.

Citizen's arrest

If I had to pick the one thing I hate most about city living, it would be the parking situation.  Hands down.   Why, internet, what's that?  You'd like to hear all about the latest development in the ongoing parking saga?  SO GLAD YOU ASKED. 

Parking, it sucks.  Parking on my particular block sucks even more because we have two handicapped residents, and both have designated handicapped parking spaces outside of their houses.  That's fine and dandy, except for 1) their spaces are big enough for a yacht, 2) one of the spaces is arranged so that there is space for about 3/4 of a car between the end of the space and the "no stopping" sign at the end of the block, and when the meter maid is in a grumpy mood she gives out tickets to anyone parked in this 3/4 space.  This could have been avoided if they had moved the space up two feet when the city marked it off, and 3) one of the handicapped dudes is a total asshole who refuses to park in his designated space.

But! Back in the fall we reached a happy turning point in the parking saga:  our street (and several others in the neighborhood) was converted to angle-in parking.  There was a heated debate over this proposed change, with the nay-sayers claiming that angle-in parking would ruin the "historic look" of the neighborhood.  (To that I said, tell me if you care about the "historic look" of the neighborhood when you've been cruising around for 45 minutes looking for a parking space.  And how is changing the direction of parking ruining the historic look, anyway?  I mean, we're still talking about parking CARS, trade in your sedan for a horse-drawn carriage and then talk to me about the "historic feel" of the neighborhood)  In the end, practicality won out and I came home one day in October to find that I suddenly lived on a one-way street with freshly painted angle-in spaces.  This was a glorious day.  Sure, it's a little annoying to live on a one-way street. Now we have to go around an extra block to get to the house and it's harder to double-park while unloading groceries, but WHATEVER.  This has really helped, parking is a bit easier to find.  O, happy day!

Except for one little thing: The handicapped spaces.  When the city came to re-paint the angled lines, they failed to move the signposts marking off the boat-sized handicapped spots.  So, now the signposts spanned two spots each, from the middle of one spot to the middle of another.  Which spot was the actual handicapped spot was anyone's guess for Handicapped Space #1.  For Handicapped Space #2, they'd thought to mark off the actual handicapped space with hash marks.  Unfortunately, the dubiously marked Space #1 is the space belonging to the asshole neighbor.  I've seen him call the two truck twice so far on people parked in one of the dubious spaces, EVEN THOUGH THE OTHER DUBIOUS SPACE WAS OPEN FOR HIM.   I'd resolved to call the city and demand that they come over and move the signs or paint a handicapped symbol on one of the spaces or arrest him for being a total asshole or something, but Inever got around to it.   Instead I just made sure to never park in either of those spaces and grumbled about this asshattery to myself. 

And then yesterday, when Joel and I came home, Mr. Old Man, the kindly owner of Handicapped Space #2, called us over to let us know that the parking cop had been by and tried to give Joel a ticket for parking in the space NEXT TO his marked handicapped spot.  We were incredulous.  How can we get a ticket for parking next to  the handicapped space?   Well, the parking cop told Mr. Old Man that the hash marks on his handicapped space did not actually designate a handicapped parking spot.  No, they meant "No parking whatsoever in this space".  The cop explained that this was so that a wheelchair van would have space to unload.  Mr. Old Man explained that he didn't have a wheelchair, nor a wheelchair van, so he'd be happy to just park in that space.  The cop told him he couldn't; he needed to park next to it.  On either side.  That's right, the spaces on BOTH SIDES of the hash-marked space belong to Mr. Old Man and his ONE car.   The old handicapped signpost is in the middle of one of these spaces, but any rational person would assume that the sign was outdated (since it is) and negated by the markings on the actual new space.  There is absolutely no signage of any kind indicating that the spot on the other side is off-limits.  That's the spot Joel was parked in.  That's the spot we almost got a ticket in. 

So, five of our glorious angle-in spots are now off-limits for two handicapped vehicles. I cannot even put my rage over this into words.  I want to call city hall and demand they fix the signs.  I want to report Asshole Neighbor to the cops for calling the tow truck on innocent people when one of his two half-spaces was perfectly available for him.  I want to report the entire situation to the Sun's Watchdog (we're not the only ones with ridiculous signage, check this beauty out.)  I want to cry about the entire situation on my blawwwwg.

We also got a call from BGE last night.  They'd like to come out and service our meter because apparently it's "not reading correctly".  I am pretty sure that's BGE code for "we're going to try to charge you more money".  They offer appointment for this mandatory service that I did not request during convenient 8-hour windows.  Weekdays only.   

My god, I hate this city. 

Happy fucking holidays

Even though I ponied up the extra cash for brand-name, officially sanctioned outdoor Christmas lights last year, we still had a problem with half the lights on the strand we hung on the window box going out periodically.   So I wasn't really surprised when half the strand went out again this year, but I was sad that the remedy I discovered last winter -- lifting the cover on the outdoor outlet and letting it slam down on the strand's plug -- no longer seemed to be working.   We mounted a more careful investigation and found that one of the bulbs was missing.

Huh, no big deal.  Some replacements came with the box.

Then I noticed there was more than one bulb missing.

More than two.

More than three.

Six of our bulbs are missing off of one strand of lights.  I put those lights up myself, and I am positive all the bulbs were in place at the time.  So, either the six bulbs entered into a suicide pact and jumped to their deaths on the cold, hard sidewalk, or.... someone fucking stole our Christmas lights.

Dear Christmas thief: you are officially on my shit list, along with the neighbor who refuses to make use of his designated, reserved parking space and the person who stole my tulips.

Monday mishmash

We met with two DJs and two photographers on Sunday, which I consider a rousing success just because 1. We made it to each location, 2. we weren't even late once, and 3. all the people we were supposed to meet with showed up.   I think that my recent experiences trying to find someone to fix our leaky roof have significantly lowered my expectations.  (Potential roofer #4 is supposed to be coming over tomorrow between noon and 4pm.  If he shows up and is not a total loon, I'll be more than satisfied.)

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I'm so glad we were able to cram all those appointments into one day, because I'd much rather spend one whole day doing wedding stuff than have to organize four weekends around different meetings.  But man, I was so exhausted on Sunday afternoon between appointments #3 and #4 that I fell asleep for an hour on the couch with my coat on and my earrings in.  The coat thing is not so strange, but I NEVER sleep with earrings in.  I was really wiped out. 

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So wiped out, in fact, that when I ran to the bathroom before we left for meeting #4, I forgot to re-buckle my belt.  I realized it was hanging, disheveled and loose, from my pants just before we walked into the Panera Bread to meet a photographer.   Joel hadn't noticed, but the cops sitting in the Dunkin Donuts next door might have.

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A war of passive-aggression has erupted over the changing of the two water cooler bottles in my office.  Normally I'm all for gender equality and pulling your own weight, but dudes.   Those 5-gallon Deer Park bottles are really heavy and the cooler apparatus is taller than my waist, and every time I try to change the bottle I end up either spilling water all over the nearby copier (not good) or getting my finger jammed between the cooler and the open bottle.  So I've just been  making sure I fill my bottle up before I leave the house in the morning and trying to pace myself to make it last through the day.  Those plastic Deer Park jugs are probably full of BPA, anyway.  

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Despite my scroogish tendencies, I have to admit that I love the way our house looks with its modest holiday decorations.  Instead of getting price-gouged again at the chop-your-own place, we got a perfectly lovely tree from the Home Depot this year.   And for less than the $75 we spent on that 2-foot Douglas fir, we got a 5-foot tree, a proper tree stand (instead of the potting container we used last year), and two wreaths for the outside of the house. 

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I ordered myself a new camera lens from Amazon a few weeks ago, and I've been kicking myself on a daily basis since then for not ordering a protective filter at the same time... especially since I've been using the new lens despite the recent rain and snow.  The first filter I ordered was the wrong size (my own fault) and the second one, which was the correct size, refused to cooperate with my lens cap.  Frustrated, I finally took the whole mess in to Ritz Camera on Sunday.  They not only let me in (even though I walked in just as they were closing) and listened to my stupid problem, but they also showed me why I didn't actually need a skylight filter and sold me a proper UV protective filter, instead.   Hopefully that had more to do with their high standards for customer service than the fact that my belt was hanging off my pants at the time.

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I mailed out my Christmas cards yesterday.  I'd like a prize, please.

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My Christmas cards this year feature a picture of Max on them.  Wearing his Santa suit.  I couldn't help myself.  I should be ashamed, I know.  But I'm not.

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I celebrated the 50-degree weather today by earing my new-ish corduroy skirt with a cute pair tights that I've had for at least a year, but have never worn before.  I'm sad that Mission: Put Together is over because the office is empty and there's no one here to appreciate my fashion efforts.  But I guess it's just as well, because I forgot to bring the camera, anyway.  Just so you know, the tights are brown argyle and they're adorable. 

This Really Old House

Over the past few weeks, I have become somewhat obsessed with completing some of the home improvement projects that have been hanging around on our to-do list since, oh... we bought our house?   Which was in 2003?  I am not really sure what triggered this particular compulsion in my brain, but it has been activated and there is no going back.  Last week I had a plumber come over and fix our kitchen sink, which leaked occasionally under some unknown set of circumstances.  I never could get it to leak on purpose, and trust me, I tried.  I turned the water on super hot, ran the garbage disposal, tried the dishwasher on various different cycles, did all of these things at the same time while wearing a blindfold and hopping on one foot -- NOTHING.  And yet the pan I put under the pipe would have water in it from time to time.  Not every day, not every week, but sometimes.  If there's anything I hate, it's a pipe that doesn't even have the decency to leak consistently. 

Anyway, the pipe is hereby fixed.   I still have a pan under there, just in case.  Obviously this pipe cannot be trusted.  But I feel better, it's fixed, box checked.  NEXT!

We have finally purchased a new window for the broken bit of glass over our door that's been serving as a convenient escape route for all of our heat for the past five winters; now Joel just needs to install it.   Joel has also fixed the broken weatherstripping around our front door and scraped off all the chipped paint around the doorframe so we can re-coat it with paint that is actually intended for outdoor use.  Sigh.  Have I ever mentioned how much I hate the assholes who rehabbed our house?  HATEHATEHATE.  I am trying not to project this hatred onto the house itself, but oh, it is hard.

Tomorrow I have a dude coming over to clean and tune up our furnace and clean out all the air vents and most importantly, the dryer vent.  When Mr. Dude came over to take a look and give me an estimate earlier this week, he seemed very concerned that our dryer is packed on top of the washing machine in a closet that has about an inch of clearance on each side.  When I informed him there was no possible way that the dryer can be pulled out from the wall because it doesn't fit through the door frame and there's no way in hell I'm taking that door frame off again, he seemed to think this was going to cause some problems.  Have I mentioned that sometimes I really hate our stupid 107-year-old house?  And the rehabbers who made a laundry closet that's too small to fit any machines manufactured on this planet?

Next on the list is to find a good roofer to come over and determine if it's our roof or the neighbor's roof that is leaking water into the litterbox room when it rains.  Because, yes, water, it is leaking into our house.  I discovered this when I was vacuuming out the poo-room and the vacuum brush was suddenly leaving wet marks across the uber-dusty surfaces of the plastic storage containers we keep in there.  My first reaction was to round up Henry and Max into separate interrogation rooms and then force one of them to flip on the other and tell me who had managed to piss on the rug underneath a pile of junk, because that takes considerable skill.  But upon a complicated forensic investigation, my nose and I determined that it wasn't cat piss soaking the rug, it was rain water.  So, yeah.  Anyone know a good roofer? 

Last but not least, we had a handyman come over to see about replacing three of our windows.  Two of them are permanently fogged up inside, which has been the case since we moved in, but suddenly it has become absolutely intolerable.  Joel need to call the manufacturer to try to get us some replacements for free, and that better happen soon because those windows and their foggy trickery are driving me insane. We also need to buy a new window for the poo-room because the one that's in there... well, it's the wrong size.  The propped-up drywall that's holding it in place was serving quite well until a few weeks ago, when a heavy sideways rain storm resulted in a huge bubble of water behind the paint.  DEAR PEOPLE WHO REHABBED OUR HOUSE:  ROT IN HELL.  So, yeah.  Windows.  Need to buy some.

And when the handyman/window installer is here again, I'm going to get him to re-seal both of our bathtubs too, because all of a sudden the DIY job we did a few years ago after the great Water Leaking Out of Tub and Through Wall Incident (HELL. THE REHABBERS ARE GOING TO HELL.) is now driving me crazy as well.  It is working, but it looks crappy and it must be fixed.  Soon.

All of these minor-ish (with the exception of the water leaking in, that's a real problem) repairs are suddenly driving me nuts and I am not really sure what my problem is.  Joel is out of town for a race this weekend, and last night I found myself moving all of the furniture in the front room (which is heavier than I remembered) so I could roll up the carpet in search of the source of the mysterious cat piss odor.  The phantom cat odor has been surfacing at irregular intervals for years, but last night just seemed like the right time to move all the couches (by myself) and roll up the rug (by myself), wash the floor underneath and carefully inspect for signs of cat piss (none found) and then move all of the furniture back (by myself). 

The really strange thing about all this is that these minxy fogged-up windows and a less-than-professional (but fully functional) tub sealing job are really weighing me down, while the fact that we haven't had a bed frame since we sold our old bed (in JUNE) doesn't bother me a bit.  And until we have a new bed frame, the new mattress and boxspring (which are not really that new anymore) are just resting unattractively on the floor.  I am OK with this.  And because the mattress is sitting on the floor, the storage containers full of clothes that used to go under the bed are stacked up in the hallway, serving as a cat condo for Henry.... also, fine with me.   I have a stack of picture frames next to the nightstand, still waiting to be hung and a drawer full of fall clothes begging to be organized and donated to Goodwill. 

But all of that seems unimportant when there are dusty air vents and magically foggy windows to be dealt with. 

Venue searching, new beds and assorted other goodness

Although we've still not set a date yet (SO STOP ASKING EVERY DAY, FRONT DESK LADY, SHEESH!), my thoughts have been preoccupied lately with all things wedding.   Every morning when I look in the mirror, I contemplate whether my hair has grown any longer, whether I should get a trim this week or push it off a little longer, whether I should go for a casual, flowy down-do for The Big Day or perhaps a simple, low bun instead?   I wonder whether I should look for a makeup artist and risk having a panic attack when she tries to put foundation on my face, or if I should just go to the Clinique counter a few weeks before, stock up on some new mascara and lip gloss and call it a day.  Ooh, maybe I should ask Sister-Wife Jenny to do my wedding makeup!  She's good at makeup, and she won't try to sneakily put foundation on me.  That's a great idea!

And this is all before I've finished brushing my teeth in the morning.

I've also been suffering a compulsion to buy things, especially things that are on sale, "for the wedding".  Like that three-strand pearl necklace I saw in the Macy's One Day Sale circular, marked down from $400 to $99: I was thiscloseto buying it.   What if I never see such a great deal again?   What if I can't find this exact necklace next month?  And wouldn't it be nice to have another thing checked off the list, one less item to worry about down the line?   I tell you, I almost had myself talked into that necklace.  And the matching earrings.  And a pair of shoes I saw on Piperlime.  All these things, for a wedding whose date has not even been set yet.  Is this what "nesting" is like?  Because I think maybe I should have bought that necklace.  Damnit.

Although we still haven't set a date, we have been making excellent progress in Operation Wedding.  Over the past few weekends, Joel and I have visited no less than eleven potential weddings venues.  I have almost finished entering these all into an exel spreadsheet that tracks the date we visited, their prices on everything from ceremony fee to chivari chair rentals, the cost difference between Saturday and Sunday, and everything in between.  So far, we have four real contenders.  And a dozen more places to look at.  (What can I say, I like to be thorough!)   While time consuming, I'm really quite enjoying the great venue search.  I didn't think that driving around all around Maryland every Saturday would be enjoyable at all. In fact, I kind of thought it was going to suck.   But it doesn't suck!  It's actually been a fun way to spend time together.  The set appointments force us out of bed at a reasonable hour, and with coffee in hand, we set of to conquer another corner of the state.  Driving through the beautiful scenery in Western Maryland on Saturday was downright idyllic.   I can't wait to see which place we end up going with.

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After spending Saturday looking at four different venues, the only task I wanted to get accomplished on Sunday was getting the new bed upstairs, by hook or by crook.  Joel and I managed to get the boxspring upstairs by ourselves on Thursday, which involved some tricky engineering and a bit of walking on our neighbor's roof, but I had this sinking feeling that the extra-thick, extra-foamy mattress was just not going to make it up the stairs.  I'm a worrier, that's what I do -- and let me tell you, I was worrying plenty when three kids from Joel's team arrived on Sunday to help move it.  Luckily, we needed neither hooks nor crooks, and it only took the four of them less than 20 minutes to get the entire job done.  One of them actually said "That's it?", when I showed them the mattress.  "Dude, when people say they need help moving furniture, they usually mean, like, the whole house," he explained.  God, I love the college mentality. 

You know what else I love?  Our new mattress.

And as you can see, I'm not the only one enjoying all the magical little Swiss masseurs.   Madison plopped himself in the middle of it within minutes after it was set down, and I thought he was going to die a happy cat right then and there. 

I've slept very well both nights so far, and I haven't even been doing what Joel calls my Alligator Death Roll during the night -- turning over and over until I have managed to wrap all the sheets and blankets around myself.  I consider that a very auspicious start.  With all the money I'll be saving on Tylenol PM and coffee, this mattress is practically going to pay for itself... after about 35 years.   But you know what, you can't put a price on a good night's rest.  That's what Madison says, at least.

Thanks to the wonder of Craigslist, our old bed was sold and gone by Sunday evening.  During the 48 hours it was listed, twelve people responded to my ad.  When I informed interested parties that it had already been promised to a buyer, two people tried to offer me more than the asking price, and another wanted to come over right then to whisk the bed away first.  I turned them both down, of course, but I still made out with $40 for a 5+-year-old mattress and a slightly warped wooden frame (which was fully disclaimed in the ad).  The best part is, I only paid $20 for the set five years ago.  I think I've stumbled upon my life's calling: stalking craigslist (already do that), snapping up underpriced items, and selling them for a profit.  All I need is a partner who has someplace to store all my finds.  Any applicants?

Max was the only one sad to see the old mattress go.  I came downstairs on Sunday afternoon, after we'd carefully laid it across the couch, to find him sleeping right in the middle of it.  When the buyer came to pick it up, I swear I saw Max shed a single tear.  I promised him that the mattress went a good home, where it would receive lots of attention and plenty of Fancy Feast, but he still wouldn't speak to me the rest of the evening.

 

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An adorable duck couple was hanging around on our block yesterday.  I saw the male sitting on the sidewalk in the morning when I left for work, and I thought he must have been sick.  I mean, ducks don't hang out on city sidewalks, right?  There are plenty of ducks in the harbor and plenty more in the nearby park, but I've never seen any just wandering around the 'hood.  I thought this poor dude would surely fall victim to the stray cats that prowl our block, but when I arrived home that night he'd been joined by his wife and they were marching around together, quietly quacking to themselves.  I found it so adorable that I grabbed the camera and took a few pictures of them.  I wasn't the only one interested in them; the orange cat that lives a few houses down looked like he would have killed to be able to jump through that screen. 

>

I assume that the Mr. and Mrs. Duck were visiting because one of the crazy ladies on our block (the owner of Orange Cat) likes to feed the pigeons, and our sidewalk is constantly littered with birdseed (and pigeon crap, but we won't get into that).  I didn't see them this morning, so I'm telling myself that they were just out on a daytrip and they've now safely returned to the park or the harbor or wherever they came from.  They were NOT hit by a car or eaten by a stray cat, so don't you even THINK that.  No, I can't keep them as pets, and, yes, that makes me sad. 

WANT

I feel like I say this all the time, but I really need to win the lottery.   Lately, I have been making a mental list of all the things I WANWANTWANT, and the reality is that we just can’t afford all of them.  Or maybe even any of them. 

We’ve been toying with the idea of putting in some new cabinetry in the kitchen for a while, and it just seems like this would be a perfect time to do it.  Next summer, if all goes to plan, we’ll be in full wedding-planning-OMG mode, and I’m thinking that probably won’t be the best time to be taking on any major home improvement projects.  Also, if the current plants don’t change, next summer will be the first time Joel’s family sees our house.  So, naturally, I want it to look ass-kickingly awesome.   Plus, new cabinetry will certainly help our resale value.  Our kitchen isn’t tiny, but it’s not big either, and it could really (REALLY) use some extra storage space.  Currently, we are using a white Ikea bookshelf that belonged to my freshman year roommate to house our cereals and other boxed goods, and that poor bookshelf is approximately 468 years old in Ikea-years.   Also?  It’s ugly.  So, if we’re using the logic that the new cabinets will increase the resale value, why shouldn’t we just go ahead and install them now, so that we can enjoy them for a bit first?  Right?  Yeah, that’s what I think, too. 

I am also dreaming that this new cabinetry will free up enough floor space for a small (very small) kitchen table.  Like this one, perhaps?

Why, hello lover.

And while we’re on the topic of home improvements, I also want to put up crown molding throughout the house.  The imperfect paint jobs (which I did myself, but it’s really the house’s fault for being so damn old and historic and UNEVEN) are driving me crazy, and I think some nice, simple molding would go a long way in improving the house’s overall appearance.  Again, why should we race around trying to raise the resale value when we’re ready to sell, when instead we could have it installed now and enjoy it for a few years?

While we’re at it, we also need to have our front door frame (which is an energy conservation nightmare) replaced, get the upstairs tub re-grouted, and find someone to fix the kitchen window that is constantly fogged up inside.

I’m also dreaming about getting a new bed (no pun intended).  Our current bed is another item of Swedish design (not that there’s anything wrong with that!  I loves you, Ikea!), and it makes me want to cry.  We purchased the mattress secondhand five years ago, which means that it’s served at least a seven-year tour of duty.  While that may be completely reasonable for some mattresses, this one has GOT to go.  I wake up every morning feeling like I’ve been run over by a truck, sore and stiff all over.  I’ve been considering just buying a nice pillowtop thingie, but really, this mattress is a piece of junk. An uncomfortable, kinda small piece of junk

Instead, I’d like this one.

And you know what else I want?  A scooter.

I have truly come to hate driving in the city (PARKING PARKING ARGH *SMACKS HEAD AGAINST BRICK WALL*), and I just think I cute little scooter would be a great, fuel-efficient way to get around.  I can just picture myself zipping to the Farmer’s Market on Saturday morning, or riding it to work on mega-hot days, or making an evening run to the grocery store without having to go through the soul-killing experience of searching for a quasi-legal parking spot when I returned.  I’d just park my scooter right in our very own alley!  As soon as our new neighbor figures out that our shared alley does not equal her own private dog run and stops propping a hunk of plywood in front of the gate, I guess.  Details, details.

Also, I want a new camera.  A nice, expensive one.  Mmm, I can almost taste all those deliciously blurry backgrounds. 

The sad reality is that (in case I haven’t mentioned this enough lately) we’re trying to save for a wedding, and as it turns out, weddings are expensive.  Even cheap weddings are expensive.  I think my scooter and my fancy camera and my cute little kitchen table will just have to wait, unless Santa is looking for something to keep him busy during the summer months.  We’ve got a chimney and everything, St. Nick!   And I will even put out cookies!

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In completely unrelated news, we watched the Tivo-ed MTV movie awards last night and I almost died laughing during the Ben Stiller/Robert Downey Jr/Jack Black viral video skit.  If you missed it, do yourself a favor and watch it here. 

The secret to living a happy and productive life, let me tell you it.

My normal weekend routine includes sleeping until at 10 or 11am, putzing around the house, watching some TV, eating breakfast, eating lunch, organizing, cleaning, possibly changing out of my pajamas to go to yoga, maybe taking a shower, maybe doing some laundry, and eating some more.   

Now, I love this routine.  I get all antsy whenever we have actual plans that keep me from getting in my cleaning/organizing/sleeping/watching TV in pajamas time.  I need my time at home to keep me sane.    But all too often, I find myself feeling depressed on Saturday nights because the weekend is suddenly half over and I've accomplished nothing.  In theory, I strongly believe that rest and relaxation are noble and valid activities for a Saturday.  In practice, OMG NOTHING GOT CROSSED OFF MY TO-DO LISTWAAAAAAAAH I SUCK.

Well, friends: after twenty-seven years on this planet, I have solved my perpetual conundrum.  I have discovered how someone who is NOT A MORNING PERSON can still get the most out of a weekend day, without sacrificing sleep! 

The secret is... go to sleep at 9:30pm on Saturday night.  That's right, you heard me!  Just go to bed at 9:30pm, and you'll be able to wake up feeling refreshed from a hefty eleven hour rest, make yourself a nice breakfast of waffles and Morningstar Farms Sausage Patties (I am convinced that these patties are not at all vegetarian.  They are way too delicious to be made out of soybeans and vegetables), and freshly brewed coffee -- which you made yourself -- and still leave the house by 9am!   I even managed to put in a load of laundry before I headed out to the Farmer's Market!  And it was still before 9am!  I think this deserves at least seven more exclamation points!!!!!!! (!!!)

PS: !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

After hitting up the Farmer's Market to support my local agronomists (The Omnivore's Dilemma is guilting me into becoming a better person), I also

• Went to Target
• Stopped by Ann Taylor Loft
• Went to Safeway
• Cleaned up the entire back patio, including sweeping, planting flowers, and dragging the hose out of the basement to water the new flowers
• Took down the Christmas lights from the front windowbox, watered the plants, weeded our sidewalk planter box
• Vacuumed the entire house

That, right there, is about two month's worth of stuff.  And I got it all done before Joel came home from his race at 7pm.  Seriously, if I had known this was all it takes to feel so productive, I would have adopted a six-year-old's bedtime ages ago! 

(OK, not really.  I am still a night owl at heart, and I really didn't intend to fall asleep at 9:30.  It just kind of happened.)

In other news: This weekend Joel was informed that he won a Bigtime Coaching Award That I Probably Shouldn't Name On My Personal Internet Site, Now That I Think About It.   So, howza bout a round  of applause for mah man?

In other news (part two): I am absolutely loving everyone's submissions and comments on Mission: Put Together.  Keep em' coming!  You guys are almost making Business Casual fun.  Almost.   

12 steps

I went home to check on Max (and Madison, who was still locked in the bathroom while Max remained intoxicated) during my lunch break today.  I'm proud to report that rehab/detox seems to be working -- it's not been an easy road, but I think that this big guy is almost back to normal.  He's still a little wobbly, and he's still battling to keep his eyes open, but I think he's going to make it through this.   

A day in rehab from Pink Herring on Vimeo.

I also tried to get a video of Henry wall-jumping while I had the camera out, but he refused to do it on film.  He was too busy doing God-knows-what in the bathtub.  He hangs out in there all the time.  I don't even want to know why anymore.  It's number 489 on the list of Strange Things Henry Does.   I cannot figure out how to rotate the video, so just tilt your head (or your computer screen) to the left if that sort of thing bothers you as much as it bothers me. 

(Please pardon the mess)

(Also, please ignore the many, many colors on the wall.  Decisions: who can make them?)

THE WALL: DONE

They say that an author never really finishes a novel, they just reach a point where they give up.

Well, that's the point I'm at with The Wall.  I give up.  It's done.

There is still quite a bit that I could do, if I had unlimited time and patience.  I could scrub the grout better, I could chisel away at the parts that we got sloppy on while we were applying the grout.  I could use the industrial sized bottle of grout sealant and then gently buff each tile to a shiny finish.

I could.  But I'm not going to. 

I am afraid that if I let my compulsive perfectionist tendencies take over, I'll end up hating this project.  I don't want to hate it.  It's certainly become a labor of love, but I am really happy with how it turned out.  It's not perfect, but hey.  We're not going to live in this house forever.  There's no point in killing myself (any more than I already have) over a project that I'm eventually going to have to leave behind.

It is good enough.   

Right?

I think that I had the foresight to take a "before" picture, but at that time we didn't have a digital camera (that gives you an idea of how long I've been working on this thing), so this picture will have to do.  It's actually the back side of our wall, which faces our neighbor's house.   I felt very sneaky tip-toeing around in her side of the alley snapping pictures, but the internet needs documentation. 

BEFORE:

Nice view, huh?  Want the number of my real estate agent so you can buy a rowhouse in Baltimore?

And, AFTER:

 

Unfortunately our alley is still the same size (that would be NARROW, just like our house, in case you were wondering), so it's impossible to get a decent picture of the whole thing. 

Don't worry!  That just means that instead of one picture, you get lots.

Here's a shot from the other side:

And a few close ups from the middle section:

I am happy with this section because you can actually tell what I was trying to make (it's a school of red fish swimming through some seaweed, just in case I'm the only one who can, in fact, tell.)

Um, this section got a little... jumbled.  But I still like it because it is colorful.  It was supposed to be a coral formation (yellow, pink and blue) with a crab peeking out and another school of fish (made from a plate featuring chili peppers) swimming by.

This also came out a bit jumbled for my liking, but hey: at least those glass marbles from Ikea went to good use.  Even if they do look like fish eggs (that was NOT my intention).

And remembering the whole point of this project, this is now the view from Kitchen Window #1 (left):

and this is the view from Kitchen Window #2 (right):

Both are arguably better than staring at a cinderblock wall, so I'm considering this Mission: Accomplished.

All in all, it took:

• Approximately 150 hours over three years (not including time spent scouring Goodwill, garage sales and The Loading Dock for supplies)
• About $500 for supplies
• At least 5 full boxes of tiles and more than 50 plates, bowls and mugs
• Three mirrors
• One 50-lb bag of mortar
• Three 25-lb bags of sanded grout
• One hammer (for breaking tiles)
• One pair of safety goggles
• A Sam's Club box of scouring pads (for scrubbing grout)
• A crapload of patience

I will be forever grateful that places like Goodwill and The Loading Dock exist, because without low-cost places to obtain dishes and tiles there is no way I could have afforded to do this.  Dude, do you know how much tiles cost?  It's ridiculous. 

I am also very, very grateful that I can officially say that this is DONE.  I did really, honestly enjoy working on it, but towards the end (meaning, this entire year) it became a burden, always in the back of my mind.  Every weekend I felt guilty for not working on it (or not working on it enough).  Whenever I looked into our alley and saw the boxes of broken and yet-to-be broken tiles stacked high I'd have a mini-panic attack about how this was never going to be finished.   I was sure that I'd only complete it minutes before we moved out of our house for greener pastures, and I wouldn't even have a minute to enjoy it in all its completed glory.

And now I can do just that.  Amen.

And if anyone needs an assortment of broken tiles and plates, organized by color (of course)... I've got a basement full.  I couldn't bring myself to throw the leftovers away.  What if I decide to cement slab on the second floor deck?  Or the front steps?  Or the entire side of the house?  I might need those tiles.

Then again, if I do decide to do any of those things, please sit  me down and make me read this post.

Weekend recap, posted on a Monday! Imagine that.

This weekend was lovely.  I did a million errands, vacuumed the whole house, crossed things off my to-do list left and right.  When I woke up on Saturday morning to get to my 9am hair appointment, the air was crisp and cool and by god, it felt like fall.  It felt wonderful.

After my appointment, I picked up our new video camera at Fedex (more on that later), picked up my truffle brown shoes at David's Bridal, went to Walmart for an oil change, got reject by Walmart because my car has an oil leak (they were not swayed my my "I know it has an oil leak, what does that have to do with changing the oil?" logic), took my car to the MVA for its biannual emissions inspection, ignored the signs that said not to have your emissions inspected if your car is leaking oil BECAUSE YOU WILL FAIL, passed the emissions inspection while simultaneously leaking oil, and made it home in time for some lunch before we headed out to peruse the annual neighborhood flea market in the park. 

I am not kidding at all when I say that these are my favorite kinds of weekends.

Only one thing threatened to spoil my weekend of productivity: IKEA.  Evil, evil Ikea.   

I have some issues with Ikea, mostly relating to their penchant for selling me lovely items for my home at a reasonable price, making me fall in love with said items, and then immediately discontinuing them.  For instance, we bought some delightful magazine holders that saved my relationship with Joel.  Joel enjoys saving every back issue of each of the four magazines he subscribes to, just in case he might ever desire to go back and look something up in the May 2003 issue of Men's Journal.  I, on the other hand, become extremely agitated when things look messy.  It's a disease, it's a neurosis, it's whatever you want to call it.  Clutter makes me nervous.  We used to have a conversation daily that went something like this:

Me: Are you done reading this four-month old copy of Rowing News? 

Joel: No, I haven't finished reading it.

Me: Well, when are you going to read it?  It's four months old.

Joel: I don't know.

Me: I'm throwing it out.

Joel: No, I want to keep it.

Me: WHY?  YOU'RE NEVER GOING TO READ IT! OMG!

Then we went to Ikea and found these adorably sheik magazine holders that completely solved the problem.  Joel got to keep his magazines, I got to sort them by date and file them away.  The colorful spines actually look nice on our bookcase!  Joy to the world.  In fact, I loved them so much that I went back to buy more.

Can you guess what happens next?  Ikea stopped making them, of course!  The ones we bought were very similar to this:

Except the ones we got are a different sheen of black, and are designed to have the spines of the magazines facing out, while the new versions are designed to have the back of the file facing out.  Ugly cheap Ikea-fasteners are on the other side.

This probably sounds like the most insignificant gripe you've ever heard.   I'm sure I could buy the different sheen of black and have the fasteners facing out and no one would notice.  BUT I WOULD KNOW.   And it would drive me insane.

Many moons ago, Joel and I re-did our living room, complete with a new bookcase/entertainment system, the design of which we agonized over for weeks.  The final plan we devised to maximize storage space and minimize cost consisted of three bookcases, a TV stand, and two bridging shelves to tie it all together.  When we went to Ikea to buy all the supplies, the bridging shelves were out of stock, so we decided to come back for those another day.

We were so naive.   

When I wrote about this back in May, I was frustrated but hopeful.  I called Ikea faithfully every Friday to check if those damn shelves were back in stock, and every Friday they told me they were still out of stock, with no ship date listed, but don't worry!  They're not discontinued.  In fact, we have some in birch that you can pick up right now, if you'd like.  Then I'd explain that birch shelves don't help me because our entire system is dark brown, and they'd tell me to call back in a week or two.  Which I did.  For months. 

Finally, when the 2008 catalog came, there were new! shelving! options!  In dark brown!  In the exact length we needed!  Screw the old shelves, in with the new.  Even though the new shelves cost $50 each, while the ones we originally wanted were only $14.99.

So we got the shelves home.  We tried to hang them, and HOLY HELL they were heavy.  One of us had to stand underneath like Hercules, holding up the shelf (at the right height) (and level), while the other stood on a stool to try to screw it into the wall.

Guess what!  The shelves are actually an inch longer than the specs said they were.  No problem, Joel will just move one of the bookcases over an inch! 

Guess what!  The studs in the wall don't line up with the pre-drilled holes.  No problem, we'll (and by we, I mean Joel) drill new holes. 

Guess what! The screws that came with the shelves are not long enough.  No problem, we'll go to the Home Depot for new screws.

In the meantime, the shelves can just sit in the living room.  And serve as a cat condo.

I declared that come hell or high water, those shelves were getting attached to the walls this weekend.  There was much angst, much cursing of all things Swedish, and my arms are SORE.  But the bottom line is: Joel is my hero, the shelves are up, and WE WIN.  TAKE THAT, IKEA.

Mish-mash and other fun stuff

Oh my.  We are leaving tomorrow.  I still need to:

• Pack
• Find my rain jacket (check)
• Go pick up my rain jacket from the yoga studio, where I apparently left it last week (oops)
• Pick up the dry cleaning, so I can pack my new dress
• Um, start packing.  Starting with my new dress.
• Go through my "shoe store" and decide what to bring home to pack
• Run the dishwasher
• Do the laundry
• Pack
• Clean the house (because I am really compulsive about cleaning before I go on trips)
• Give the cats Frontline
• Cut the cats' claws
• Try not to freak out about leaving the cats alone for nine days
• Congratulate myself on getting my petsitter note down to one page (single spaced, Times New Roman, font size twelve)
• Pay all my bills
• Balance my checkbook
• Take out cash
• Figure out how we're getting to the airport
• Oh, and I should probably pack at some point

I'm starting to get the pre-trip jitters.  I always do this.  The next step is to forget my sunglasses and/or the camera in the car when we get to the airport.  Then I'll relax.  It's a science, being this neurotic.

***********************************************************

Hey, remember the big hair controversy?   Well, I decided to dye it... my natural color.  I half chickened out/was half talked out of going black or darker than my natural shade.  I am a low maintenance gal, and I really did not want to get myself roped into a hair color that required regular maintenance to not look completely awful.  The last time I got my hair highlighted was -- are you ready for this? -- November, 2006.  Say hello to my leetle roots:

(Even Madison, who considers saliva to be sufficient as shampoo, cannot bear to be associated with someone so unfashionable.)

I figured anything too drastic would be a mistake, as I don't plan on becoming less lazy any time soon.  Also, I was really terrified that it would look awful and then I'd have to pay someone to professionally fix it, which is just not cool.   Oh, and my hairdresser told me that I "couldn't" go darker in the summer because "everyone goes lighter in the summer".  I don't really care what everyone else does, but whatever.  I'd pretty much already made up my mind.   So, viola!  I got my whole head dyed my natural color so that the fact that I haven't updated my highlights in a good 10 months would no longer be overtly obvious to everyone in the world.

So, that's that.  I now have dyed hair!  Hooray. 

On to more important things: how do you like the color we picked for the bathroom?  Personally, I think it is lovely.  But I may still be high on the paint fumes. 

While I'm tying up loose ends, I'm sure you'll be thrilled to learn that I finally finished The Wall last weekend.  I'll give you a few moments to let that sink in.  It honestly hasn't hit me yet.  Maybe it will once I figure out what to do with the millions of leftover tiles and plates I have sitting in our alley. 

Here's a picture from May:

And here is one from (almost) the same angle, taken July 22nd. 

I still have to grout and seal the entire thing, which I expect will take another full weekend, and photo document the finished product. 

And with that, I must be off to make lists that I will not look at while packing, because that is just how I roll, folks.   I'll have a computer with me on our trip, but that's only so that we can watch movies on the plane.  I don't know what the internet situation will be in the hotel, so, um, like, don't expect any posts for awhile, mmmkay?   

Have a good weekend/week/weekend... and don't have any fun without  me.

Return from the Fake Vacation

I was going to announce that "I'm back!", but I didn't really go anywhere, so I guess "I'm (still) here!" would be slightly more appropriate... Um, hi!  How've you been?  Apparently ya'll have been busy, since there are currently 75 unread items in my Google Reader and I'm 10 days behind on the sage advice of Dear Abby.  But that's all good!  Once the OMG thank goodness you're back I have ten important things I need you to do right this very second rush dies down, I look forward to reading each and every one of those posts.

I was unplugged for large majority of last week.  I'm not sure if I've mentioned this, but Joel and I live in the stone age.   No, we didn't get rid of the Tivo.  But we still have dial up internet.  I know, I know!  Trust me, I know.  No one has dial up internet anymore.  Except us.  We got by for a long time by "borrowing" our neighbor's wireless high speed, but then they wised up and put a password on their  network.  Fortunately, they didn't wise up too much, because the password was identical to their network name, and we continued to surf the internet for free for a while longer... and then, the password changed, and I've not been able to crack it.  So, now we're all Netscape, all the time, baby.  And it sucks.

I don't know if you've noticed, but Teh Internets cost a lot of money!  Plus, I spend all day in front of a computer, so I really don't need to go home and sit in front of a different computer.  Honesty, that's the real reason I have never pushed for an internet upgrade.  I don't WANT to spend all my time at home on the computer.  Having dial-up is like not keeping any cookies in the house -- it removes the temptation.  It frees up my time at home for more enriching things, like making smooching noises while buffing the Tivo with a silk handkerchief.

So anyway, that's my lame excuse for my internet absence this past week.  I was totally PLANNING to post pictures of my progress on The Wall, to maybe even write a post or two, to check in on my work email and keep up with all my personal emails.  That lasted through Saturday afternoon, when the aforementioned Evil Meeting, which was incredibly boring but at least had a wireless high speed connection, ended.  I was honestly so exhausted from the hard physical labor (I'm not kidding) of working on the wall that I didn't even have the energy to upload pictures from the camera, let alone type letters and make words.

Honestly, it was wonderful to unplug for the week.  I did have a nagging feeling that the world outside my little rowhouse could be ending and I wouldn't even be able to read the blog posts recapping the catastrophe in a concise and witty manner, but I told that feeling shut up and get back to work.  Ain't no breaks for gals on the chain gang.   And I did feel like I was on a chain gang at several points during the week, because I forced myself to keep my sights on the real reason for this "vacation": finishing the behemoth home improvement/art/hard physical labor project that I started on a whim three summers ago.

And I almost finished.  Almost.

This is not to imply that I failed, there was no way that I could have realistically finished the whole thing in one week, but I did get a TON of work done, and if it doesn't rain, I may just finish it this weekend! 

Don't worry, I already have some ideas about my next project.  Because that's how I roll.

Here are a few pictures that are already outdated because I haven't uploaded anything from the camera since Tuesday.  And also, I foolishly tried to post these at home and it took an hour (AN HOUR!) to post these three pictures, and after that I just gave up.  Um, enjoy!  I'll hopefully post more this week after I catch up on the piles of work that people keep throwing at me.

If you say you can't tell what that is, I'll cut you.  Uh, I mean, that's fine! It was supposed to be "abstract", OK?  (Fine, it's a school of fish made from a chili peppers plate, some multicolored coral, and a crab peeking out on the right)

This was my attempt at a signature embedded in the wall, which didn't' turn out quite as well as our address did in another section (which I won't be posting pictures of for obvious reasons).  But hey, it's there.  See, in yellow?  It says "JRS 2007".

Here is a little crab family.  I was really, really afraid that these crabs would look like crap, but I took the plunge because I needed some extra sea creatures, and this is Maryland, after all, so it's kind of a l law that crabs have to be all over EVERYTHING.  I am pretty pleased with how they came out.

And, that's that.  It's kind of amazing to look at that picture and realize it's from only a few days ago, because now that entire portion of the wall is covered. Not a cinderblock in sight.  And after all, that was the whole point of this little endeavor. 

Now if you'll pardon me, I have to make up for all the coffee I didn't get a chance to drink last week.

This is love

Joel had the task of re-assembling our bathroom this weekend while I was off watching an obscene number of movies with Jenny.  After we both scrubbed it (and holy mother in heaven, that is a whole post on it's own -- please remind me to clean my bathroom more than once every four years from now on), Joel set about re-attaching our Ikea cabinets to the walls, putting all the shelves back in, hanging the mirror, screwing in the ceiling vent -- oh, wait!  He didn't have to screw that in, since the geniuses who rehabbed our house decided to just PAINT IT ON THERE INSTEAD OF USING THE ACTUAL SCREWS -- and most importantly, putting the toilet tank back on.  The bathroom looks so shiny and fresh and green and pretty that I almost don't want to use it; I want it to stay this clean and neat forever.   Except I don't want to have to go downstairs every time I have to pee in the middle of the night, so scratch that.  I took pictures so we can remember what it was like for that 30 seconds before my electric toothbrush spattered Sensodyne speckles all over the mirror and Henry dragged all the dental floss out of the garbage and artfully arranged it on the floor, and that will just have to do.

When I came in from working on My wall for a few hours last night (and we're not talking about The Wall again until after my Fake Vacation week, because I am so very behind schedule and it's stressing me out to think about), I asked how everything went.  Did he need my help with anything?  Is the toilet working again??  Joel told me that everything was finished; the only thing he hadn't done was to replace everything in the cabinets.  "I left that for you because I thought you'd want to organize it," he said.

That's love, people.  In the simplest things, you see how well someone knows you.

Yet another weekend time warp

It's Monday again, and here I am again, wondering how the weekend is already over. AGAIN.

Does this ever end?  Ever?  God, retirement is so far away.  There are just so many things I want to do, and having to go to a job 5 days a week is killing my mojo.  I am trying to plot ways I can make it to the dry cleaner and the chiropractor this week, without sacrificing too many trips to the gym.  I don't think I can do it, and that just seems so... sad.

This weekend was (almost) a total bust as far as painting/wall-working is concerned.  I just couldn't bring myself to get out the painting gear on Friday night (I mean, I had a raging party to go to and then some clubs to hit, so of course I didn't have time to do something like painting my hallways on a Friday night!).  On Saturday I went to watch the IRA in Camden, NJ.  Sadly, Joel and I were probably the most Irish people at the whole event, and Joel proved this by getting a massive sunburn even though we were in the shade all day.  I had to teach him how to exfoliate just so he could try to fade the reverse-raccoon mask left by his sunglasses before his business trip this week.  Like a true Irishman, his sunburn is almost gone, and by next week he'll be back to pale.  I, on the other hand, have truly turned into an old person, such that I put sunscreen all over my body before we even got in the car at 9am.

The race was fun, it was mega-hot out and we were both a sweaty mess by the end, despite the fact that all I did was sit in a lawn chair and read the latest issue of Glamour (that's how you "watch a race," for those of your amateurs out there).  Then we got to drive the two hours home in my non-air conditioned, black vehicle.  Luckily I had some spare napkins in my glove compartment that I used to wipe the pooled sweat off my neck and face and then stuff in my bra to keep the Boob Sweat under control on the ride home.  Classy!  I remember now why I dream of getting a new car every summer.  Guess it's time to bring back The Sweat Towel, which is just that -- a towel I keep in my car to wipe off sweat.  I can't imagine why I haven't been voted Miss Mid-Atlantic yet.

Anyway, all that sun and magazine-reading and driving was very tiring, and I couldn't bring myself to paint when we got home on Saturday night either.  I felt like I was going to pass out a few times when I stood up off the couch. Hmmm, I wonder if going out in the sun all day and subsisting in iced coffee drinks might be sort of not good for you? 

And then it rained all day on Sunday, so I couldn't work on my wall at all.  We did paint one coat of primer on hallway #2.  We had to stop at one section of the wall, which is about 15 feet high and just happens to be over a turn in the stairs, so there is no way to position a ladder under it, which in turn makes it pretty much impossible to paint.   Any suggestions from the engineers/problem solvers out there?  Henry only jumped into the paint pan one time, so at least there's that.

I want a do-over.  I think that Monday should be the official rain-date for Sunday.  Let's start a petition. I don't know how I'm supposed to get anything done when there is water falling from the damned sky all day.  Honestly.

Coffee Genie

Has this ever happened to you?

You're sitting at your desk, wondering how on earth it's not even noon yet and thinking to yourself "Man, I wish I had some coffee right now. That would be awesome. But I really don't feel like walking all the way to the elevator and going up to the coffee shop to get some.  Woe is me!"

And then you remember that an hour ago you already did all the taxing work of getting out of your chair and dragging your mug all the way up to the third floor and all they way back down to your office, but then you were immediately distracted by the phone and you never even took a sip of your delicious hazelnut coffee with skim and splenda.  So it's still sitting there, ready for you to gulp it down!

It's like having a magic genie grant your wish.  And thankfully, it's still hot, thanks to my overpriced insulated Starbucks mug.  Bliss.

*****************************************************************************

I don't have such big plans for this weekend, since it's only a regular-sized weekend, not a fantastic super-sized holiday weekend.  I'm planning to go up to watch the IRA on Saturday with Joel -- that's Intercollegiate Rowing Association, not Irish Republican Army, by the way, although THAT would sure be interesting, wouldn't it?  Hopefully we'll make it home in time for me to go to discount yoga at 6pm.  We also need to go to the bakery because we're out of hot dog rolls.  Exciting times!

Also, continuing the home improvement frenzy, I plan to spend Sunday working on My Wall and painting Hallway #2.  Joel and I went to a home salvage/recycling warehouse last night to pick up some more supplies, and I am now the proud owner of $86 worth of discounted, off-color, broken, or otherwise unwanted tiles.  Now if only my mom can manage to haggle those blue tiles she saw sitting on the back of a truck last weekend, I might actually finish this thing this century.

Full speed ahead

Saying that the weekend went by so fast sounds kind of trite, but there you have it.  I can't believe it's Tuesday already.

The weekend was a great success by my standards.  We painted the downstairs hallway, removed all the tape, re-hung the pictures, and screwed the outlet covers back on.   In fact, we were done with the actual painting on Sunday!  A whole day early.  And only one cat earned himself a dunk in the kitchen sink  by jumping through the paint pan during his overzealous pursuit of a certain insurance mascot.  Mission: Accomplished.

I also put in many, many hours on my wall.  I've moved from a feeling of sinking dread to genuine excitement about this little pet project of mine.  Before I mixed up my mortar on Saturday, I stood and just looked at all the empty space for a good ten minutes, contemplating my severe error in judgment when I estimated how long it would take to slap some ole' tiles and plates on to cover up that ugly cinderblock. 

I was on the verge of tears.  I love this project, but I would love it a lot more if the wall were 10 feet shorter.  I wondered how much it would devalue our house if I just left it unfinished.  Maybe we could market it as a built-in creative outlet?  I could leave behind my collection of plates from Goodwill and the mortar and everything, and Joel and I could just move away and forget all about that one time I got in waaay over my head with an art project.

Then I snapped back to reality and got organized.  I took an inventory of the pieces I already had broken, the plates I had waiting for me to bash them with a hammer (I do love that part, there is something about the sound of breaking ceramic that makes me inexplicably happy), and re-sorted everything by category (solid color, patterns, bright colors, etc).  And then I just dove in.

Do you like my coral reef?  Can you tell that it's supposed to be coral?  If you say it looks like a whale I'll cut you.

A lonely octopus, swimming through the empty oblivion area.  His other two legs are behind him, OK?  God, I'm working in 2-D here and you expect my sea creatures to be anatomically correct? 

This explains why my back hurts so much today.  Terrible working conditions!  I want my union rep! And also, my drink appears to be empty, please get me another STAT!

I got a lot done, but there is still sooo much to go.  The good news is that I am now on a steamrolling express of motivation.  I'm having fun with it, and I want to keep going while my momentum is still strong.  We're going to look for some more tiles at a salvage place on Thursday, and then this weekend will be filled with more working on the wall and -- here's a shocker -- more painting!  Hey, does anyone know how you're supposed to paint walls in a room where the ceilings are 12-feet tall?

Somewhere in the long weekend, we also managed to go to yoga, do the laundry, see Pirates of the Caribbean 3 (more on that below), and make a trip to Ikea/Petco/PepBoys (Ikea still does not have any Jarpen shelves, bastards).  I had insomnia, helped along by a cat who likes to play fetch when mommy is in bed trying to SLEEP, and I read half of The Nanny Diaries while I was up until 4am each night. 

If getting painting and work on My Wall done were the highlights of the weekend, Pirates and The Nanny Diaries were the low-lights.   If you liked the first two Pirates movies, I highly recommend that you rent them and watch them over again, back to back, because it would be a lot cheaper than spending nine bucks to go to the theater and see the exact same thing.  I have not been so bored in a movie theater since... ever.  The "final battle scene" was over an hour long.  AN HOUR.  One scene.  And I stopped paying attention to the "plot" after the fifth double-cross, because I just couldn't keep track of who was on whose side any more.  Apparently I was the only one who thought the movie sucked, since the audience applauded at the end.  They clapped.  I was blown away.  More blown away than usual, since clapping at the end of a movie makes absolutely no sense to me

I am just as bored with The Nanny Diaries so far.  My friend lent it to me, so I feel like I have to at least make an effort to read it so that I can pretend I liked it and know the characters' names when I return it to her, but HOLY HELL.  It's soooo bad.  I hope I'm not insulting any of the billion people who apparently have bought and loved this book.  Maybe it gets better?  Maybe they'll stop referring to people by nicknames like Harvard Hottie ("HH" for short) and maybe the main character's name will stop being Nanny ("Nan" for short).  Maybe Nan will wake up and just quit this dignity-killing job, and maybe she won't fall in love with HH in the end and live happily ever after.  And maybe authors will stop insinuating that moms who have nannies are a waste of life.  Maybe Nanny's picture-perfect relationship with her entire family will have a few kinks, and maybe something will actually happen.  Maybe that's why this book was a NYT bestseller.  Please tell me that's why. 

Anyway, that was my weekend.  How was yours?

In a much better mood, thanks to the Day of Memorials

I was planning to write a happier, non-grumpy post today.  I was just waiting until I thought of something to actually write about.  But now I just got the get out of jail early call, so there's just no time.  Will some boring weekend plans do?   Aw, you're the best, internet.

I have BIG plans for this weekend.  Huge.  I'm thinking of waking up at -- wait for it -- 9am tomorrow just so I can get started.  If I come back to work on Tuesday and have to admit that nothing got done... well, let's just say that Ebay doesn't sell shirts that depict how I will feel about that.

I want to finish painting two of the hallways and do a significant amount of work on my mosaic wall.  Doesn't sound like that much, does it?  But let's consider this: I've been working on that wall for two full years and have only finished about 1/3 of it.  We've been working on painting the house for 15 months and have only finished 4 rooms.  We also don't have any paint, so a trip to Home Depot will be required.  On Memorial Day weekend, the biggest home improvement weekend of the year.  Well, at least I'll be in good company, since the rest of the country is also going to be taking advantage of the warm (hopefully!) weather and the extra day off do to all those things they've been putting off for months. 

I am ready to be a drill sergeant. I am beyond motivated. I am so sick of living in a house that feels unfinished, and I am afraid that at the rate things are going, we'll finish all the improvements we've planned on the day we move out.  I just don't want to do that.  I want to enjoy the fruits of our labor for awhile before relinquishing them to someone else; someone who might very well think my wall is heinous and our choice of green for the living room looks like ass.   And I just want to be done.  It feels like we have been working on both of these projects for so long, and there is just no end in sight.

PS -- we have no plans to actually move any time soon. 

PPS -- I'm not actually delusional enough to think that either of these projects will get finished this weekend, but at least some progress can be made.

PPPS -- I fully realize that the minute we finish this stuff, I'll come up with something else to start.  I'm just crazy like that.

PPPPS -- Happy freaking Memorial Day!  What are ya'll doing?

PPPPPS -- Boy, howdy!  I can't stop saying it in my head.  Alynda promised to say it three times in conversation yesterday.  I bet Isabel's urban cowboy friends say it all the time.

Ingenuity

I have a bunch of plants.  I like plants.  I think they are pretty and nice and they make everything look so much better.  The problem is, they are alive.  Which means they can die.

Example 1: I used to have a nice African violent that my mom gave me.  She told me not to take it to work until it got warmer out.  I didn't listen, and it's still in my office, half-dead.  It's trying to hang on, but I'm thinking of just throwing it out.  It's sad to look at. 

 

Example 2: I used to have a different office plant, but then I went on vacation for two weeks last year, and it died from lack of sunlight and water.  Oops. 

Example 3: A few months ago, I bought this pretty plant at Home Depot.  It looked kind of like an orchid, but promised to be low maintenance.  I didn't get a chance to find out if that was true, because Max ate it.

I could go on, but you get the idea. For some reason I don't have the natural ability to make plants thrive.  But I'll be damned if that keeps me from trying.

The two plants I've had the longest are a potted hibiscus ("Hibiscus") a potted ficus tree ("Tree").  Tree came with the house when we bought it.  He used to have a twin, but he didn't make it.  RIP, ficus #2.  Hibiscus we bought the first summer in our house, because I love hibiscus (hibiscuses?  hibisci?).  They remind me of Hawaii, which I love.  But the problem with Hawaiian plants?  They can't last the winter in Maryland (at least they can't in a pot -- maybe it would be a different story if it was planted in the ground, but I don't actually have any ground to plant it in). So, ever fall when it starts to get cold outside, Tree and Hibiscus come inside... which is sort of a problem, because we don't have any space for them.

Tree gets moved around every winter.  Sometimes I "trim" him (aka, I cut off some branches with kitchen scissors) so it can fit into a smaller corner.  Sometimes all his leaves fall off when I do that, but they always grow back.  Madison likes to climb in Tree like he's a freaking leopard in the jungle, and shake his artfully twisted trunk to make the leaves fall off.  Max breaks off its branches and hoards them in his favorite sleeping spots.  Why do I let this go on?  Well, first of all, I can't really stop them.  And second of all, I don't really like Tree.  He takes up space I don't have, and frankly, I'm a bit miffed that the people who sold us our house planted him in the tiny planter boxes outside without considering where he was going to go in the winter.   But after all these years, I have started to admire Tree's resilience.  Well played, Tree.  You can stay.  For now.

But I feel differently about Hibiscus, because we paid good money for her.  So each winter, I bring her in and let her live in the kitchen, because that is the only space that gets enough light for her very delicate temperance.  She's quite a nuisance to work around.  It's also very annoying that Madison enjoys sleeping in her pot, thus getting dirt and leaves stuck in his fluffy fur, which he then tracks all over the house.  But we paid $40 for Hibiscus, and she's going to make it worth my while by blooming every damned summer.

Hmmm, the last two paragraphs have suddenly made me realize that perhaps plants don't do well under my care because of my attitude?  Tough for them.

Anyway, a few weeks ago it got all warm out for the weekend, and I decided it was time to move Tree and Hibiscus outside for the summer.  Joel thought this was a bad idea, because it might get cold again.  Pish posh, I said.  They can handle it.  It's march.  They need to toughen up.  Then the temperature dropped into the 20s for a week, and now they're both looking pretty dead. 

Good riddance, Tree.  I'll still water you in case you make a comeback, but I'm not going to cry at your funeral. 

Hibiscus, on the other hand, will die over my dead body.  I moved her to the sunniest spot on the deck and gave her some water with carefully proportioned MiracleGro.  And then I set about removing the plug from the bottom of her pot so that she could drain properly.

Except the plug was stuck.  Really, really really really really stuck.   And Joel was not there to use his manly strength to muscle it off, so I decided to Think Like A Guy and bust out some tools on his ass.

First I got out some Wd-40 and tried to grease the plug up.  Mission: Failed.   Then I got out a saw, and tried to saw it off.  Mission: Accomplished... except the plug was still in the pot.  I had just managed to saw off the lip that you're supposed to use to pull it out.  Um... oops.

But then a lightbulb went off in my head.  I went back inside and got a big screwdriver and a mallet.  I then drove the remaining portion of the plug up into the pot.   

How do you like that, Hibiscus?  Drain away.  YOU WILL NOT DIE ON ME.

See, all those McGyver reruns really are good for something.   

Daylight savings weekend recap

I'm embarrassed to say this, since I usually count down to Daylight Savings Day for at least a month.  Last year, I had a chart with the sunset times and days left until DSD on it starting from January.  This year, I was uber-excited that DSD was coming a few weeks early.  So very excited, that I completely forgot about it.  On Sunday morning, my mother and I were busy painting my kitchen, patting ourselves on the back for being so closed to finished by 10am.  (Or maybe that was just me -- patting myself for being out of bed by 10am on a Sunday).  And then we found out that it was actually 11am.

Oops. 

Happy Belated Daylight Savings Day!  My favorite non-holiday holiday of the year!  Even though I forgot about it.

My mom and my brother and my brother's girlfriend came to visit this weekend.  We had fun, but more importantly, my mom helped me paint the kitchen.  We now have another room down, and I am one step closer to Finishing What I Started and having the whole house painted.  It's a slatey-blue color.  I'll post a picture as soon as Joel comes back from the Georgia with the camera.  I'm baching in all week this week, while Joel is away on Crew Spring Break 2007 -- Rowers Gone Wild.  So far I have had Chinese once and pizza once.  I plan to have each at least one more time before he comes back, and to watch as much Law and Order as is humanly possible.

Back to the painting -- every time I finish painting a room, I am amazed by how much nicer it looks with pretty colored walls, instead of boring white walls with ugly stains and scuffs on them.  And then, I get obsessed with making the room "perfect".  In the bathroom, this involved going over the edge between the ceiling and the wall about 30 times to get the edges straight (Mission: Failed).  In the living room, I started compulsively dusting and re-arranging books on the shelves.  And last night, after I my mom left, I found myself moving the furniture back into place, scrubbing all the baseboards and trim, and washing the top of the refrigerator.  You would not believe how dusty it gets up there!  Or maybe you would, and you just don't care because you are a normal person.  But you can see your reflection in the tile behind the fridge now, for whatever that's worth (I'll tell you what it's worth: 20 minutes of my life).

So, I am pleased to report that my kitchen now looks better than it ever has.  However, I don't want to cook anything or even walk on the floor, out of fear of messing it up.  I worked too hard to let anyone in that room.  Nope, from now on, we'll just have to live without a kitchen.  We can admire it from the hallway.

This was the first time we've had people stay over in a long while, and I found myself in this weird limbo between trying to offer real-person hospitality and still living sort of like a college student.  I mean, it seemed like a good idea to get rid of the only kitchen/dining table we had at the time, since Joel and I only eat on the coffee table... but it's sort of awkward when guests have to eat their cereal on the couch.  I think it's normal to eat leftover pizza for breakfast... but should I have, like, gone to the grocery store beforehand?   Made dinner?  Something?

Luckily my family knows well enough to bring what they can't live without along with them.   And I did offer them my last PopTart, and I shared my Chinese leftovers.  I just wish sometimes that I had a guest room, or something.  I suppose it didn't help that the kitchen was a total mess because of the painting.  Some day, some how, I will have a fully furnished guest room.  And a place to park cars.  And a closet.

Some day.

And in crazy cat lady news, because I know you're all dying to know, Henry is now officially ball-less and is doing fine.  I've started letting him out of his confinement to get socialized with Max and Madison, and it seemed to be going oh-so-well yesterday... until he started a fight and got clobbered by Max.  Baby steps.  The good news is that pissy Madison is scared crapless of Henry and hides in his cat-house at the mere thought of him.   Which I think is funny.  Because I am mean.

In conclusion, I'd like to leave you with a little piece of original artwork that I call "WHY ARE YOU WATCHING ME SLEEP, YOU PSYCHO".  As you may have noticed, last week I learned how to use Paint.  I know, welcome to 1984.  Well, it's new to me.  And it's fun.  So I decided to draw a picture of how I woke up this morning to find Max approximately 3 inches from my face, purring like a chainsaw and staring directly into my eyes.  He officially owes me a cup of coffee for that one.  I'm putting it on his tab.

I should have been an artist.

Ikea ate the internets

My list for last weekend was one of my most ambitious yet.  I usually try not to make my to-do lists too crazy, because then I just feel bad when I only manage to get 2 things out of 78 done.  But oh, this weekend I was feeling motivated.  Beyond motivated.  This was one of two free weekends I'll have this month, so I was all gung-ho.  I am very much looking forward to all of my weekend plans for the rest of the month (except the one work trip, I'm not looking forward to that at all), but going to Richmond for your friend's birthday party and having your family down for the weekend doesn't leave much time for obsessive cleaning, does it?  So this was my list for this weekend:

• Finish laundry
• Clean house (this was then broken down room by room, so that I could have the satisfaction of crossing more things off the list)
• Do taxes
• Tape and prime kitchen for painting
• Go to yoga on Saturday
• Go running on Sunday
• Go to Ikea (return boxes, buy diff. size boxes, buy shelves for office and living room and more magazine holders)
• Go to mall to use free certificates from Victoria's Secret
• Go to grocery store
• Pick up dry cleaning
• Buy flowers from Home Depot and re-plant pots in window box
• Go to mall to use free certificates from Victoria's Secret

(I get those certificates from Victoria's Secret all the time -- am I the only one?  They send me a card in the mail for a free pair of undies, no purchase necessary.  I guess they figure people will be drawn to all the pretty things and end up buying something... well, not me.  I take my free stuff and run.  And I can't pass up free stuff.  I just CAN'T.  Which is why getting free stuff makes my To-Do list)

I am pretty sure there was more stuff on there too, that I can't even remember now.  That's how far it was from getting done.  Ikea ate everything on that list and still had room for dessert.

We went to Ikea with very specific things in mind, which is important when you go to the Swedish Superstore.  If you don't have a plan, you WILL get sucked in the vortex, and you WILL lose hours of your life (and possibly the contents of your wallet, too).  We've been known to wander into to Ikea "just to look around" and to emerge hours later, confused, hungry and tired, carrying a bag full of decorative bamboo shoots and three different picture frames.

The plan for this trip was to return two boxes that we bought for our new bookcase without checking to make sure that they actually FIT in said bookcase, to pick up two smaller versions of the same box, some additional magazine holders for Joel's extensive back-issue collections, the shelves they were out of last time for our new living room, and some shelves I decided I wanted for our home "office" (aka storage room/cat litterbox room).  That's it.  Nothing else.  A quick trip.  In and out.

Except they were out (AGAIN) of the shelves for the living room, the only thing we really, really needed.  We planned our entertainment system intending to have these shelves, except Ikea apparently stopped making them in the black-brown color.  They might (might) get the black-brown versions back in stock in the next 4-6 weeks.  They also might not.   So much for finishing that room off.

They also did not have the shelves I wanted for the office, nor did they have ANY shelves that would fit that space. 

They were also out of the magazine holders.  All out.  Not even a display one to steal.

Oh, and they were also out of the smaller boxes in black.  They did have them in white.  No thanks.  I don't like white boxes.

So, accomplishing 0 of the 5 goals for this trip had me a little... peeved.  I might have said something about this being a giant conspiratorial plot by the Swedes to make you want, nay NEED, their stupid "Jarpen" shelves and then refuse to sell them to you, thus sucking you into their evil grasp, enabling them to take over the world, one consumer at a time.  I was pissed.  But not too pissed to pick up a few cute picture frames on my way out.  While I went to stand on line and pay for my frames, Joel wandered over to the As-Is section. 

And he just happened to find half of a couch that we have been wanting for months, but unable to find for a reasonable price on craiglist there.  It was 30% off.  I took a look at it, sat on it, and then refused to get off it, so no one could buy it while we were thinking about it.

Then we noticed a sign that said "All couches 50% off today only".  That's in addition to the 30% discount.  So it was 80% off.   So we bought it.  Even though it was on the chaise, and we didn't have the half-loveseat to go with it.  No problem, we figured.  We did have the regular loveseat, so we figured we could just push them together and it would look sort of weird until Joel could find the matching half-loveseat on Craigslist.  Good idea, right?

And then the problem arose of how to get this chaise home, since we drove my Jetta.  We decided to go home and get Joel's truck after a cursory inspection of my trunk, which reminded us that it is just a poor, simple Jetta, for the love of God, it's not capable of this sort of thing.

So we went home to get the truck.  And on the way, I convinced myself that we should just buy the matching loveseat at full price because we were getting such a good deal on the chaise that it would still be a good deal.  Then I convinced Joel of the same.  So we arrived back at Ikea, bought ourselves a loveseat, picked up our chaise, and went home with them firmly bungeed in the back of the truck.

We got them into the house with minimal problems (minimal = we only  had to take the front door off the hinges) and then decided that while we were on a roll, we might as well just move the existing loveseat upstairs to its new home.  It was about 10pm at this point.  I wasn't kidding when I said I was motivated to get stuff done this weekend.

We tried to get that damn thing up the stairs for about an hour, until I was ready to cry and just put the damned thing out on the street with a "FREE PLEASE TAKE" sign on it.  Joel vetoed that idea.  After all, here we were, just one staircase away from having a set of fully matching furniture.  Finally we left the couch, vertically on its side, in our kitchen and went to bed.

The next morning, after we tried a few more times to get it up the stairs, Joel got the idea that we should hoist the couch over the back balcony, since the stairs thing just was not happening.  We've moved things upstairs this way before.  Things like a boxpring.  When we had my dad and brother helping.  I honestly could not imagine how we, just Joel and myself, were going to lift a pretty heavy loveseat over our heads and over the balcony railing.   But I agreed to try because I couldn't think of anything else, and I was really, really sick of trying to push that thing up the stairs.   And somehow, with only a ladder, two towels, and the strategic use of my body weight, we got that thing up there.  I took the picture from yesterday because I wanted to remember forever how ingenious my boyfriend is (and how strong I am) (and how much I hate living in a rowhouse sometimes).  There were a few moments that were a wee bit scary, like when the loveseat was rotated so that only one edge was on the balcony and I had to lay across it to keep it from falling while Joel ran upstairs.  And the part where we actually had to look at all the crap in the gutters.  Ew.

But in about 40 minutes, that couch was moved from our kitchen to the upstairs living room, where Henry is now sleeping on it every chance he gets.  And the new couches are downstairs, where Max and Madison are sleeping on them every chance they get. 

(The giant ottoman in the bottom/middle of the picture is going upstairs.  I swear, it's not really a sea of brown leather).

I ended the weekend by putting our old couch from upstairs, a chair, and a cabinet-thing (all Ikea, of course) on Craigslist to make some room for the new stuff... and since then I have been fielding more responses than I can handle.  35 people alone want the cabinet-thingy.   People using words like "love" and "have to have" and offering more than the asking price and wanting to pick it up IMMEDIATELY.  Is there something I'm not seeing about this cabinet? 

 

Really, is there something so special about this?  Shoot, maybe I shouldn't have sold it.

On the other hand, I'm now $20 richer.  And that $20 will be paying for Henry's neuter surgery, which I'd like to remind everyone is TOMORROW!  Yippee!!  (Henry is less excited, I think).

Lastly, I would just like the internets to know that I have changed my opinion about what my least favorite part of our house is.  It used to be parking.  It is now this:

I don't care if that banister is original from 1901.  The next time we need to move something, I'm sawing the damned thing off.  With a nail file, if I have to.

Ikea Ate My Weekend

The newest trend in the ghetto practice of putting a couch out on the porch -- a couch on the balcony!  Classy!

But enough about me, what did you do this weekend?