bloomers

as it turns out, buying a house and then moving into it and then unpacking all your stuff and then organizing all your stuff and then deciding what new stuff you need to buy and then choosing that new stuff and then getting it delivered/set up/put together is all a pretty time consuming affair.

i have really wanted to be organized from the start this time, so i've spent a lot of time decided exactly where things should go and then putting them there. which isn't to say there aren't some things just tossed into closets to be dealt with later (like when we move out in 38 years), but i've been trying.

and it's coming along. really nicely, actually. maybe some day soon i'll show you?

one thing that we just didn't have the time or energy to tackle this year was the yard. besides the basic maintenance (AWD mowing the lawn, me purchasing and then killing some hanging plants), we haven't done much. but, as it happened, it didn't matter. because we have the most gorgeous hydrangea bushes in the front that bloomed gloriously even in the face of drought and neglect. i added a few impatiens to the window boxes and, voila! we look like we know what we're doing in the garden department.

plus, i can snip flowers from my very own bushes and enjoy them inside, too.

and that, my friends, is bliss.

everything but the kitchen cabinets

there i was, taking a plate out of the kitchen cabinet the other day, when i realized that something looked a little funny.

had there always been that gap at the top?

and was it just me or was the cabinet sort of leaning forward a little bit?

sure enough, upon further investigation i discovered that the whole cabinet had come disconnected from the wall, and it was hanging precariously, with all my dishes inside, just waiting to come crashing down entirely.

so out the dishes came, to live on my countertop for a few days. there's nothing like all your plates stacked on the countertop to make you realize you probably have too many.

when the repair guy showed up yesterday he said, "well, god's green earth, you don't see that very often."

seemed like a bad sign, but it looks like he did the trick with wood glue and a drill and something called a brad. i am a little wary of putting all my breakables back in there but, nothing ventured, nothing gained, right?

the whole thing reminded me of this house where some college friends of mine lived, a classic college rental dump. we had a party there one time and when our friend frank went to open a cabinet, the door just came off right in his hand. his response:

"everything in here is a little... antique."

couldn't have said it better myself.

well, nuts

when describing a scene of total chaos and disorganization, my co-worker smack always says, "this is squirrel city!" which basically means to say that whatever is going on is so out of control it is as if squirrels are running the show.

(at this point it is sort of fun to close your eyes and imagine what a city run by squirrels would look like. little squirrel mayor at the podium giving a press conference? check. little teenage squirrels wearing baggy pants and working at the mall? check. super stressed out businessman squirrels running around in ties. check and check.)

well, i am somewhat sad to report that EH and i have squirrel city in our attic. literally. as in, there is a nest of squirrels living up there.

it came to our attention late last week when i came home from work and saw the back-end of a squirrel hanging out of a hole in the front of our house, just under the eave. and then all of a sudden i heard a terrible screeching noise and a bunch of clawing and i realized that squirrel was having a fight (turf war? nut deal gone bad?) with something that was clearly living up there. up there being our attic, directly above my bedroom ceiling.

long story short, we called some people, who confirmed there is a squirrel nest in our attic. they're coming on monday to set some traps (yuck) and get the squirrels out of there so they can patch up the hole.

on the one hand, it is sort of fun to imagine a fully functioning squirrel city right above our heads. (i wonder if they have a newspaper?) on the other hand, i am totally terrified that one of them is going to somehow come crashing through the ceiling and right onto my face while i am taking a nap or catching up on celebrity gossip. so i guess getting rid of them is the right thing to do.

and so, to dull the pain of destroying squirrel city, i have decided to go to denver for the long weekend. (just kidding about the first part of that sentence, but true story about the second.) i am planning on eating a lot of my mom's cooking, watching movies on my parents' new and apparently enormous television and sleeping in, squirrel- and fear-free.

a happy president's day to you, my babies! i hope you live it up.

blow this house down

i will confess i've been a little jealous of all the dramatic winter weather that has been happening pretty much everywhere but here. (well, maybe here and madagascar.) our winter weather has definitely been over-promising and under-delivering (except for the one time it canceled my flight), which is a tragedy because bad winter weather here means you can work from home for a day or sometimes a week, and that is the exact opposite of a tragedy. it is a miracle. and my one true love.

the best we've done is a big wind storm. but it wasn't a total loss, because this particular wind storm did have a dramatic result. hurrah! EH and i heard this awful banging noise outside all night long. it definitely sounded like something was hitting repeatedly against the side of our house but we could not figure out what it was. until we went out the next morning and saw this.

turns out what was hitting repeatedly against the side of our house was the side of our house. go figure.

so, dramatic weather-related incident? sure. but something you can take a day (week) off work for? not even close.

winter weather, you still owe me.

light up my life

as you may or may not recall, EH and i have had a long-running dining room light dilemma.

because, as you may or may not recall, we suspended a bunch of paper globes from the ceiling to a) cover a truly atrocious light fixture and b) distract from our truly atrocious ceiling tiles, the only unfortunate outcome of this project being that one of the paper lanterns rested directly on the light bulbs that were left bare by the removal of the aforementioned truly atrocious light fixture. and turns out paper on top of a lightbulb is a hazardous combination. we polled all of our house guests for possible solutions, with the grand prize for the best solution being the chance to implement that solution for us, but oddly enough no one was really jumping at the chance to rewire our entire dining room, so we decided to take matters into our own hands.

the solution, we decided, was the remove the original lightbulbs all together, pretend as if the trappings of the aforementioned atrocious light fixture did not exist, and go with corded bulbs instead. the bulb could hang in the center of the globe, safely away from the flammable paper, and we could put the aforementioned atrocious ceiling tiles to good use by running the light bulb cords through the tiles, safely out of sight, and then discreetly down the wall to the outlet.

so, to review. the plan was: hang bulbs in the center of three of the globes. string the cords inside the ceiling, out of sight and out of mind. run the cords down the corner wall to the outlet. bask in glorious, artificial light.

{pause. i just sat here for five minutes playing through in my head that scene from mixed nuts when they are trying to decide what to do with stanley tenenbaum's body and felix proposes a two-step plan and phillip freaks out and says, "well, that's not really a plan, felix. a plan has to have more than two steps. a plan has to go, 'first we do this, and then we do this, and then we do this.'" i love that scene.}

this turned out to be easier planned than done. not because of any flaw in the plan, necessarily, but mostly because our arms are not 15 feet long and we could only shove the cord through the ceiling so far and then we would have to sort of guess how far the cord had made it and take down a bunch of tiles until we found it and then push it from there and rinse and repeat until the cord made it all the way to the corner. you might be interested to know that the space between the tiles are and the actual ceiling is big enough to fit my whole head. i know this from experience.

in the meantime, every time we popped out a tile, a steady stream of shards of sheetrock and other building materials would come raining down on our heads, dining room table and carpet. some of it also fell right down my shirt, a little surprise i discovered when i changed into my pajamas later that night. the fact that a dead bird or something even more disgusting didn't also fall out is proof that god lives and loves us.

it took us almost two hours. but, the happy ending of the story is that we did it! all by ourselves! and now, not only do we have cool paper globes hanging from our dining room ceiling, we also have lights in our dining room and our house will not burn down when we turn them on.

win, win, win.

you can jump but you can't survive

there are some really charming quirks about our new house (hello, extra room for shoes and hand bags), and there are some less-than-charming quirks as well (hello, no outlets in the bathroom). the worst of these is our forced cohabitation with camel crickets.



this particularly pernicious pest tricks you into thinking it's a spider and then, as soon as you make a move to squash it, jumps away like a cricket. which probably explains why they are also referred to as spider crickets. we prefer to call them sprickets. cute, right?

unfortunately, sprickets themselves are not cute at all. they are kind of freaky. and they are super-duper hard to kill because their antennae give them the super-power of speedy escape.

this isn't such a problem when sprickets just stay in the basement where they belong. but lately our spricket stowaways have been getting bold. the other day we found one in the living room. then one in the dining room. then one in the kitchen. and then i found one on my bed. and that was the last, gross straw.

so, let it be known. i have declared war on sprickets.

conventional anti-spricket weaponry includes sticky traps, the downside being the statistical unlikelihood that these otherwise uncooperative bugs will actually land on the sticky trap before they make it up to my room.

so i am employing uncoventional tactics as well, guerilla warfare if you will. namely, i have discovered a flaw in the evolutionary development of sprickets and i am shamelessly exploiting it. do you want to know my secret? for the betterment of humankind, here you go.

the antennae that allow sprickets to so quickly jump away from murderous stomps can also work against them. just back a spricket into a corner antennae-first and he can't feel you coming. and, BAM! bye-bye, spricket.

and hello pure satisfaction.

i am considering keeping a rambo-style body-count tally. for now, all sprickets should consider themselves on notice. i am coming to get you.

this old house

yesterday was day five of life at the new homestead, and we finally got the gas connected.

for reasons i cannot discuss in too much detail without risking a homicidal rage, the gas people came on the day i requested and then decided there were too many people around and left without doing anything, and so off our gas went.

naturally.

we suffered through cold showers for one day before decamping to MJ's for a few mornings. and i have to say, if you are forced to shower at someone else's house, MJ's is not a bad place to do it because she'll play the ukele while you get ready.

just saying.

project numero dos has been ridding the house of new paint and carpet smell, mingled with the vague scent of smokers-as-previous-tenants. not great, but a vinegar/ammonia/baking soda concoction sprayed on the ceilings and into the vents seems to be doing the trick quite nicely. a few vanilla bean candles and i think we'll be in good shape.

also on the list of new house projects: assembling my massive wardrobe, which emily and i tackled last night and did a pretty good job of on our own until the top had to be inserted into the sides, at which point emily was nearly decapitated twice and we were forced to admit some level of defeat. luckily, jed was just around the corner and up for a nighttime furniture assembly extravaganza, so he came to our rescue and helped us finish the rest.

i even got my first piece of mail at the new house, courtesy of jaron's aunt kathy and the impending delivery of my big-girl mattress (any minute now!) will cap off the first week. so i would say we are off to a good start.

i mean, our kitchen is still entirely in boxes and we've been eating cereal out of plastic cups for a week, but what is that they say? don't sweat the small stuff? all right. i won't.