Sunday
Originally uploaded by kostia.
I finished painting the Mulling Spice wall. Yay. I put together the
new shoe rack, which is very nice. This is the bed I liked at Ikea
yesterday.

I took one of the doors off the under-sink cabinet in the basement and put Jasper’s litterbox in there. It’s out of the way, the litter-catching rug fits exactly down in front of it, and there’s room on the other side for the Litter Locker and scoop. Jasper adapted with no problem. I’m very pleased. Much better than having it take up a third of the floor space in one of the bathrooms.

I hung the curtain rods and drapes in my bedroom. The new drapes (which I also hemmed) and the old drapes are not quite the same color, but it’s hard to tell. It makes all the difference in the world with the light in the morning, so that’s great. I went to a great deal of trouble with measuring and using the level and tapping in anchors, and I still didn’t get the rods quite as far out from the trim as I meant to, but the height is good and they look okay. I really need a headboard now, though.

I think I’d like to put a vinyl wall decal between the windows, above the headboard when I get a headboard, but I haven’t decided of what. There’s not much on blik that I like, but there are a lot to choose from on etsy.

I bought a cheapie over-door hanging shoe organizer at Five Below and hung it over a tension rod in my small closet, where it’ll be nicely out of the way.

We started a housewarming registry on the Target website, because why not, and today we went to Target and I scanned a bunch of stuff to add to it. Mostly stuff we actually need, or will need.

While we were there I bought a lampshade for the lamp I got at the thrift store last weekend (handily, it turns out to be a Target lamp, so I was able to compare the shades with an identical one). That’ll be my reading light next to my new big comfy blue chair in the bedroom.

I also got a curtain rod and a pale green balloon shade to make the window in the office look nicer. I think the pale green will complement the lavender nicely.

I pulled the nails out of the makeshift shelf that was in my closet and put it up as a proper shelf, screwed to the brackets and everything. This enables me to unpack the last of my clothes, sweaters and sweatshirts and such.

Tonight I had dinner at the Olive Garden with Deborah and her mom, to celebrate her finishing her thesis. She starts her fourth-year externship (a paying job in her field!) tomorrow. Go Deborah!

Jasper has been acting weird about water lately; he was always picky about drinking out of his fountain if it wasn’t perfectly clean, and he’s always been obsessed with drinking from a faucet, but there are more faucets here than there were at my apartment, and now he’ll rarely even consent to drink from a bowl. When he sees me go into a bathroom he sprints to catch up, and the sink downstairs is a pedestal so he often falls off the edge.

So I did a little research and found a different cat fountain, one that actually has a falling stream of water like a faucet instead of a “ramp” of water like the fountain I had. It came today, and we set it up, and I really hope he takes to it. I’m starting to worry that he’s thirsty all the time, and that just can’t be fun for him. Plus this fountain came with (and I am not making this up) hydroponic cat-grass seeds in a plastic pod that latches to the side of the fountain so a little snack will grow there for him as well. We’ll see how much of a mess that creates.

On Monday a nice man named Brian came and installed FiOS, so I now have internet (of my own! with my own router doing what I like! and the Slingbox works!) and television (yay! television!) and a phone (it’s rung twice so far, and it’s just weird when it rings; I haven’t had a telephone in years).

Brian looked a lot like Balthazar Getty. I’m just saying.

We’ve been watching a lot of the Olympics, especially volleyball, track, and gymnastics, and all Max’s shows (Handy Manny, Mickey Mouse Clubhouse, etc.) are available on-demand, so that’s cool.

I mowed and even edged the front lawn today. It looks nicer than we thought it would.

The house was cleaned on Monday, and a ton of trash went out on Tuesday.

There’s a dude on TV now (men’s high bar finals) named Epke. I think EPKE is a good name. It sounds like an end table at Ikea.

Ooooo, Epke fell down. Darn. That would’ve been an insane score. He did crazy stuff.

Let’s see. I got a library card the other day. It’s a nice library, and it’s very close. I paid fifty cents in the book-sale section for, um, the audiobook of the novelization of the movie of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which was so hilariously stupid that I couldn’t pass it up.

I unpacked more stuff into the basement closets, including all my winter clothes and the duffel bags they rode in on. And I put the empty electronics boxes and Christmas tree into the attic, which freed up a lot of space.

David and Lisa brought over the stripey chair for Lin’s room and the big-ass blue chair and ottoman for my room (they seem much bigger here than they were at their house) and the cabinet with drawers that Lin’s going to use as a dresser for Max.

The 50“ Samsung plasma TV I saw for redacted at Sears a few weeks ago, and was sorely tempted by, is now redacted plus seven hundred dollars, so I’m bummed about that. I should’ve bought it when it was on sale. I think that’s what I want, as I’m no longer sold on LCD being a must-have, and 50” plasmas are comparable in price to 42“ LCDs. I need at least a 46” to have the same size 4:3 picture as I do now. The math for 16:9 vs. 4:3 is very misleading.

But I made Brian give me an HD-DVR (not the standard-def non-DVR box he walked in with), so I gotta get the new TV soon. He even left me an HDMI cable, which I don’t think he had to do. He also took away about four miles of coax we ripped out of the giant switch that was attached to the old dish.

I can’t wait to get my hands on a fall TV preview (and, honestly, for the Olympics to end) so I can program all my serieses in.

We ate at a fancy French restaurant last weekend. I had some really wonderful sturgeon caviar and some stuffed veal—my first veal in years and years—that made me wonder what the big deal about veal is.

I hung the moon-and-stars shelf and touch lights in the playroom, and another useful shelf in the downstairs bathroom.

I fixed the leaking faucet; turns out I was wrong about where it was leaking, so I did not in fact need the big wrench. It was a bad seal between the top rubber gasket and the bottom of the sink, due to the misalignment, so I fixed it with plumber’s putty. I don’t know if that was right or not, but it worked like a charm, so I don’t care.

Jasper sleeps on his high Ikea Lack shelf in the living room every day. It pleases me that he’s taken to it, since I put it up specifically for him.

And Bonnie Hunt, who I love, has a new TV show coming. So things are good.

And not just in swimming at the Olympics.

Let’s say you bought a house recently, and that the records for the least pleasant things you’d had to do to it so far involved cleaning and painting and plumbing.

That record would have been shattered today.

Because today you had to get a dead bunny rabbit out of the backyard.

* * *

In other news, I “fixed” (let’s just say it’s better than it was) the threshold at the top of the basement stairs where the wood floor ends.

And since I was down there with the shovel and my work gloves anyway, I threw away a few shovelfuls of the morass of crap at the bottom of the deck stairs.

I freed all the satellite dish cables from the windows on the back of the house and dropped them all down under the deck for easy removal. The dish is coming down as soon as I can get outside with a wrench I do have at a non-buggy, non-blistering time of day.

I rearranged all the crap on the deck, and it looks nicer now. Helps that I threw out a big wet painting dropcloth that’d been there for weeks.

I hung up my bulletin board in my office.

Small next steps include moving boxes up to the attic (I was all worried when I started running out of space in the basement closets—but I have an attic for that!), replacing two of the doors on one of the basement closets, hanging a shelf thing in the basement bathroom, and installing blinds and curtain rods in various bedrooms.

And, of course, unpacking books and clothes, but that’s neither here nor there.

Also, the new faucet drain is leaking, but at least I know where it’s leaking. It’s a matter of having the right wrench to fix it. I do not (yet) have the right wrench.

P.S. The Grill on Grill Action tattoos came today.

Welcome back to Elaine’s Blog About Nothing At All Except The Goddamn House.

I got and hung up a windowsill-mounted cat seat in the office window. Jasper has yet to discover its existence.

I hung my cable-mounted glass shelf and filled it with Eeyores. They complement the lavender paint in the office nicely.

I installed the glow-in-the-dark Harry Potter light switch plate in the playroom.

I replaced the broken tilt latches on the living room windows. I really need new windows.

The list of things that are still missing (packed? where? who knows?) is shrinking, but there are still things on it I’d really like to have, like my battery tester.

Still no internet/TV/phone. Got a rescheduled appointment for the eighteenth. That’s two whole weeks away. Sigh.

Meanwhile, all day yesterday we couldn’t get on the neighbors’ wireless either, so it was really hard to work. Eventually I got the phone working as a modem (and it stayed connected for over six hours, a new record), but until then I was emailing files using my phone’s email client and an SD card. Big fun.

Yesterday I installed blinds in one of the bedrooms. Did you know blinds only cost five bucks? I was really surprised. Anyway, I measured wrong, installed one bracket sideways, stripped four screws … I was in tears. Then I decided to drill pilot holes, and it was Really Easy. So now I know how to put up blinds.

Lin and Max slept last night in said bedroom for the first time. Yay.

I also finished installing the faucet (flexible Qwik Trap fitting for the win), and it works, so that’s awesome.

And I put up a double towel rod and a toilet paper holder in that bathroom too. It’s actually a usable bathroom now!

We put wallplates on the outlets and switches in my room and Lin’s. Such a small thing makes such a nice difference.

On Monday the cleaning ladies came, and the house was veryveryclean for a day. Not so much now, but it’s nice to know I don’t have to worry about tiresome non-everyday things like getting cat hair off the sofa, or cleaning mirrors, or dusting, or changing the sheets on my bed, as they’ll be back in two weeks to do it again. Also I have no plans to vacuum ever.