Why oh why did I decide it would be fun to paint big harlequin-pattern diamonds on the walls of the baby’s room? A pattern that would require lots of precise measuring, pencil lines, and precise taping? A scheme that required math, rulers, swearing, and several erasers?

Even though it was time-consuming and frustrating to get right, and even though I cut way back on the number of diamonds in the pattern and made them kinda, well, BIG… I am proud of the results.

Plus, there’s a few “fun errors” that Aquaman will some day be old enough to discover. “Mom, Dad, why is that corner of the room dark yellow when it’s supposed to be light yellow?”

I am quite pleased with our choice of crib, so far. It’s a Babi Italia Pinehurst Lifestyle Crib, which means it transforms into a toddler bed and then a fullsize regular bed when he’s old enough. The wood is a beautiful color, thick, and smooth, and all the bolts and cams are made of super-thick brass. Most importantly: an 8-months-pregnant woman put it together by herself in less than 30 minutes (not because her husband wasn’t there, but because she wanted to see how easy it was).

The animals and letters embroidery is one of my favorite things, ever. Mom made it for me when I was a baby; I remember it hanging in my room when I was little. And now it’s going to hang in MY baby’s room!

I haven’t felt much like posting lately. I’ve been sick and just not in the mood to write. I’m still not in the mood to write but it’s been almost a week so I’m going to try to think of some things that won’t bore you, my two readers, to tears.

I’m working from home this week, because our building at work is undergoing renovations. They’ve ripped out the ceilings, some walls, a bunch of doors, and have turned off the air conditioning. Oh, did I mention that they didn’t find new places for everyone in the building to work during the duration? No, people are expected to show up, sit at their desks, suffer through the sweltering heat and humidity, breathe in dust and asbestos and mold and god only knows what else that’s floating around in the air, and tolerate the incessant drilling and hammering noises. It’s only because my boss is freaking awesome that I’m allowed to work at home while all this is going on.

I wish we could have cats at work. It would decrease the stress level. They are SO CUTE when they are trying to get your attention. Neko has been all over me, all day long.  She’s either lounging on my desk, or trying to drape her formidable bulk across my mousing hand, or purring and licking my fingers, or trying various other things to get me to pay attention to her. I might set up a cat-cam tomorrow.

“Ha! I wrap myself around your teacup and leave you no room to mouse! PET ME!”

The other thing that happened last week – the building flooded AGAIN. We had a rainstorm Thursday night and it was heavy enough to flood our floor for the FOURTH time in the three years we’ve been there. Just like last time, they did not bother to take up the carpets or dry them out adequately. I am sure the mold is growing like crazy. It smelled pretty bad when I went in on Monday afternoon.

I can’t understand why the higher-ups are continuously and consistently willing to let their people work in a building that by all rights should not be occupied during heavy construction periods (including during the asbestos abatement from last December, when they insisted that the air quality was just fine but refused to show us air test results), or why they seem perfectly happy to let mold grow underneath our feet and enter our lungs when it repeatedly floods.

It just seems to me like there should be a lawsuit mentioned. I have half a mind to pry up some carpet tiles and take some photographs of what’s certainly growing underneath.

Anyway.

I was sick enough over the weekend that I couldn’t go down to Austin with Kathryn, to visit Debbie and tour the wildflowers of Central Texas. I’m bummed about that; I was looking forward to a girls’ weekend! Food, drinks, giggles, M&Ms, staying up till at least 11 p.m…. god I’m old. I hope that we can reschedule for a little later this spring.

We have termites. EW! TERMITES! We paid a painful amount of money for the pest control people to come out and shoot poison into the ground around our house and drill through our foundation to shoot poison underneath the house too. I absolutely hate poisoning the ground but don’t know what else to do to get rid of those little fuckers. I don’t think they managed to do too much damage though. I’m just glad we caught them before they SWARMED. Yes, that is as bad as it sounds. Once they poke out through your walls, it’s only a matter of time before they decide it’s time to look for a new place to nest, and they come shooting out the little holes they’ve made in your walls, one after another after another, and fly around until they find a suitable structure to eat. INSIDE YOUR HOUSE. We scotch-taped over their little holes in the walls so they couldn’t get out, forcing them back underground where the poison is (hopefully). However, this afternoon we noticed a bunch of them swarming around in our front yard. No idea where that batch came from; maybe from someone else’s yard, or the creek behind us. Anyway, apparently today was swarm day so I’m really glad we caught our infestation in time. EW!

Doc did some very cute husbandly stuff over the past few days - today he sprayed that termite swarm in the front yard, and also got rid of a wasp nest that was being built by our garage door. Damn paper wasps. Over the weekend he also fixed my shower; one of the springy washers in the faucet finally disintegrated and the shower wouldn’t stop spraying. He turned off the water to the house, after scooping about a cubic yard of yucky stuff out of the water main access hole in our sidewalk, and went to Home Depot and – surprisingly – found the right replacement bit for the faucet. I say “surprisingly” because nothing in our house is standard size, or made by companies that still exist. We really need to replace the whole faucet though, and for that we have to go down to Teter’s on Gaston to get the right kind. Apparently it’s the only place in town that stocks this old nonexistant brand anymore.

So I celebrated Earth Day by not only telecommuting (which saved about 1/4 gallon of gas and 14 miles on the Prius), but also by being a responsible tree caregiver and having our trees trimmed. The price wasn’t as bad as I was expecting, and they look great. Our backyard looks much roomier and a bit sunnier now that the 30-foot tall Bradford Pear has been “lifted and thinned,” as they call it, and our ginormous Land of the Lost Buford Hollies growing in the courtyard are still about 15 feet tall, but much thinner and lighter now. We were afraid they might bend and crack under their own weight. I’d post a photo, but without a “before” shot it really won’t look like much to you.

Homeownership is expensive.

-New fence.
-Paint fence and repaint deck.
-Dirt, plants, equipment rental, blood sweat and tears for landscaping.
-Termite treatment.
-New alarm system components.
-Tree trimming.
-Air conditioner maintenance.
-Refinancing.

People always say that owning your own home is the best investment you can make! But with the way homes leach money out of you, it’s hard to see the advantages sometimes. I guess I have to believe it since I’m WAY too invested right now to change my mind!

Honestly, I don’t know how people do it sometimes… afford everything they want or need. Oh wait, yes, I do; it’s called credit cards. In our family, thankfully, we don’t carry credit balances as a rule. Is that un-American?? Probably so. We don’t buy what we can’t pay for. I don’t count the house in that equation, because if I scrimped and saved long enough to buy a house outright, I’d be moving in by the time I reach retirement age.

Speaking of houses, I want to live in an Earthship! Or, at the very least, an earth-sheltered home. These beautiful structures have now supplanted my dream of living in an underground house.

And wow, how amazing are these places?! So environmentally friendly, built largely of recycled materials like tires and aluminum cans, sturdy, fireproof, bugproof, requires little to no climate control, generates solar energy, recycles used water, catches rainwater… and more. Check out the photos of The Phoenix near Taos. The bathroom leaves me speechless! You can actually stay in some of these Earthships overnight, like a B&B I guess. I’d love to do that next time I’m in New Mexico.

I think you need a good bit of land to build one of these, and probably decent soil as well. In otherwords, no matter how much lottery money I win, we can’t really tear down our house and build an Earthship on our tiny clay-soil lot.

A girl can dream, though.

We got a new fence yesterday! Due to the nature of our backyard layout (fences joined to neighbors’ on either side, and a deck that goes all the way to the fence on 2 sides), it was a little on the pricey side, but we needed it badly. Our old fence was falling apart, and I do mean that literally. Doc said that the construction crew didn’t need any tools to remove the old fence; they just pulled it out with their bare hands.

We chose not to have latticework across the top again, as it was an added expense. I’m fine with that; I didn’t really care for it in the first place, although Doc liked it quite a bit. You can get an idea of what it looked like here.

I plan to take out those stumpy shrubs, put in a gravelled path with sandstone flagstones, and plant monkey grass and caladiums here. It will be much nicer than the mud pit that it now is. The lovely shade tree above it tends to drop huge quantities of leaves here in the fall, so raking it out is an ongoing chore, and one that I have neglected for years, until now.

The weird little box shed is gone! It was a real waste of space and hard to use, so I’m glad we had it taken out. I think it was originally the spot for a previous owner’s jacuzzi, and a subsesquent owner had a little covering built over the hole, to use for storage. Click here for a photo of what it used to look like.

The new fence is nice and straight. Not only was the old fence wavy in a kind of seasick way as well as rotten all the way through, it had previously been repaired with silicon caulk. Yes, that’s right, a previous owner had “glued” pieces of wood back on with silicon caulk.

We put in a gate between our backyard and courtyard, for security and visual appeal. I love this gate!

We got a lot of rain today. It rained pretty hard and pretty steadily for most of the day. Northwest Highway flooded where it crosses White Rock Creek, as it always does when we get more than a couple hours of precipitation.

It took me almost an hour to get home because they closed the road and diverted everyone. I pulled over and got a couple of photos. Notice the DART bus tipped over about halfway down the road.

In other news, our next-door neighbor was robbed today in broad daylight. They kicked in her front door. Luckily she was not home. The criminals got away with some cash and jewelry. This is the first instance since we’ve lived here of crime on our street, at least according to the crime reports in the neighborhood newsletter. Doc and I are taking measures to beef up our own security — although I think we’re doing fairly well in that area already. It’s unsettling that it happened while Doc was home today. That part really worries me. What if they’d chosen our house instead and busted in on him? What if they had a gun?

(By the way, this does not make me want to go out and get a gun for the protection of my family, in case you were wondering if I was about to get all NRA on you.)

Here is a photo of our newly blue bathroom! Click here to go to Flickr and see the others.

This weekend we finished a mini-remodel of our master bathroom. I absolutely love the way it turned out. I’ll post photos this evening, once I take some halfway decent ones with Doc’s fancy camera… my little snappy-happy doesn’t do so well in low light conditions.

I love the color on the walls (”Ocean View”), and although it was initially tough to get the hang of the corner-antiqueing treatment, it looks fantastic. We bought a new mirror to replace the hideous 1980s giant sheet mirror taking up the whole wall, new bath mats and toilet seat covers, and new cabinet pulls and switchplates, again replacing hideous 1980s hardware. We’re having trouble finding a towel rack and TP holder that we like that won’t cost us a week’s pay.

The thing about painting that I detest and that makes me swear every time that NEXT time I’m going to hire someone to do it for me, is the taping, masking, and painting of trim.

Last time this room was painted, someone really did a half-assed job. Instead of removing the brownish-pink wallpaper with little blue and green hash marks on it, they simply sprayed texturizer on the walls and then a thin coat of paint. Every time we touch the walls with wet hands (which happens fairly frequently, this being a bathroom and all), the paint tends to rub off. Also, nobody bothered to mask off the baseboards, and they were textured the same as the walls. This is bad for baseboards, because they tend to collect a lot of dust and dirt which then gets trapped in the little textury crevices.

But we’ve fixed all that. It’s all nice and fresh now. The room feels cool and relaxing. Our next step: framing some art for the walls. And finding a towel rack!

I’ve been thinking a lot in recent years about off-the-grid living. I think it would be really hard, and really interesting, and I’d probably eventually return to The Grid but have the knowledge to make a lot of changes and seriously reduce my “footprint.”

I just read about a family living in an apartment in New York City who are entirely off the grid. No electricity in the apartment, no carbon-consuming personal or public transport, no commercial cleaning products,  no shampoo, no packaging on any products purchased, no toilet paper.

That’s right, no toilet paper.

I could give up (and have given up) a lot of  things, but toilet paper is not one of them. Of all the modern conveniences we enjoy in 21st century America, this is right up at the top of my list. I recycle absolutely everything that’s possible to recycle, I don’t run the water when brushing my teeth, I don’t use disposable feminine hygiene products, I only run full loads in the dishwasher and clothes washer, I compost my food scraps, I don’t put chemicals on my yard, I drive a hybrid car, I open the windows instead of using the air conditioner when it’s cool enough (hard to do in Texas, but I try). 

So I’m not giving up toilet paper. Call me extravagant and wasteful if you will, but I think that the karma I gain from the abovementioned lifestyle practices is more than enough to make up for it.

One thing that I am interested in doing is substituting environmentally harmless substances for the cleaning products I currently buy. We have 409 spray, bathroom cleaner, Windex, carpet foam, etc, and I would like to start using home-crafted formulas using ingredients like lemon juice, vinegar, baking soda, borax, and bleach (although I’m not sure about bleach… must do more research).

Ideally I’d love to live in an underground house made largely of natural and recycled materials (cool in summer, warm in winter, without an air conditioner) with a huge vegetable garden, sunlight reflecting tubes, an outdoor shower, giant arrays of solar panels, and use a stationary bike to help charge up batteries.

My parents sold the house I grew up in and moved several years ago. My mom was heartbroken — this was the house she’d raised her children in. I was sad to see my parents leave, of course, but I’d said goodbye to the house long before that. Seeing it turned over to another family wasn’t an overly emotional event for me at the time.

However… it has been brought to my attention that this house is once again on the market, and through the magic of the Internets (a.k.a. a series of tubes), I found the realty company’s photos.

Now, I fully realize it’s not my house anymore, I haven’t lived there since 1990 (well, and that brief period in 1994 after college). And I fully realize that all homeowners do things to houses to suit their own tastes, to make them uniquely theirs.

But this is just making me sad. Look what they’ve done! The Disturbingly Ornate Antique Jampacked Christmas Fairy threw up all over the house!! And aren’t you supposed to, you know, put away most of your decor and things, and go kind of minimalist, if you’re trying to sell your house? I guess these people never heard that little tidbit of advice.

Oh yes… this one was MY room. Now it’s junky floral — and it is a pretty damn small room for all the crap that’s apparently in it. Under that yellow paint are layers of pink (the original, when I was very small), light blue, black with Jackson Pollock white drops (when my parents went out of town for a week; boy did I get in trouble for that), and also paintings that both I and my youngest brother painted directly on the walls.

My parents’ bedroom. Boy, that bed almost doesn’t fit, does it? And what’s with the “JUS CUZ” on the wall? That’s just weird.

The living room. I’m not sure if they could fit any more furniture in here. And what’s going on in that back corner? Are those bows?

I’m not certain, but I think that this used to be my dad’s study.

And I think this was our lovely covered patio room - big windows, tile floor, very light outdoorsy feel. Ha!

Standing in the kitchen, looking at the breakfast area.

And standing in the breakfast area, looking into the kitchen. Are those easter eggs hanging from the ceiling? Or is it fruit? And they obviously don’t do any actual cooking — there’s an Oriental rug in the kitchen! That makes me really sad — this is the kitchen where my mom taught me everything I know about cooking. This was a kitchen filled with love and knowledge and a lot of spilled flour. Now it’s just decorative.

I managed to pull off one of those rare energy-filled productive sprees this past weekend, consisting of paring down and trimming away the old, and encouraging growth of the new. I guess I have spring on the brain.

NEW GROWTH
I bought a bunch of seeds and planted our garden (some directly in the container pots, some in what passes for “ground” here, and some in a seedling starter tray). With luck, we’ll have tomatoes, onions, French heirloom green beans, heirloom Chinese Giant bell peppers (I love that name!), zucchini squash, pickling cucumbers, jalapeno peppers, blue star morning glories, sweet pea vines, and coleus. I’ve been reading “Under the Tuscan Sun” by Frances Mayes (I haven’t seen the movie but apparently the book is very different) and I think that part of the reason that I’m in a gardening mood is her beautifully simple, poetic language about fresh food.

I think that I may have overextended my reach with this garden. I have four long “windowbox” style containers, and three of them are full of beans, squash, and cukes. My starter tray has everything else in it… but I only have one container left to put seedlings in once they’re ready! I have a feeling I’m going to have to invest in more containers in a few weeks. Also, the instructions on the seed packets direct you to plant the seeds pretty far apart. I’m not sure exactly how this is going to turn out, because I bunched the seeds up in the pots. I guess that if any of them do take off, I can thin them out once they’re established.

I put the morning glories in the red containers that the giant rosemary used to be in (those finally got transplanted to their nice ceramic pots), and set those on the bench by the fence in hopes that they’ll trail up the fence and along the top. I raked a lot of the leaves from the only patch of ground we have in our backyard — underneath the neighbor’s Bradford Pear tree — and attempted to dig a shallow furrow along the deck railing for my sweet pea vine seeds, but the ground is mostly clay and rocks, so I ended up tossing the seeds on the ground and covering them with a thin layer of compost, and hoping for the best.

I noticed that the poison ivy plants behind our back fence have started to sprout again. The city came through and mowed the whole area a few months back, but it seems that they didn’t actually do anything to eradicate the plants themselves. I guess we’ll have to do something ourselves. Again. This time I’ll wear full body protective armor.

Some day I would love to have a house with a backyard big enough for me to have a real garden, where I can grow directly in the ground.

TRIMMING THE OLD
I cleaned out the attic, despite the oppressive heat and lack of circulation up there. I really wish that we had a finished attic, but that is not in the cards for us with this house. We do want to add more flooring, though, so that we can have a larger area to store things in. The way it’s configured now, we have pull-down stairs in the ceiling outside of our master bathroom, and the only way you can actually step into the attic is by hoisting yourself up and over an air conditioning pipe that runs to the bedroom. We want to re-route the pipe to run along the other side of the attic entrance, the side that only has a tiny storage area under the eave. Why the contractor just didn’t do it that way in the first place remains a mystery.

Anyway, the cleaning out part. I have been in a mood to throw stuff away lately. We have way too much unneccesary crap. Much to Doc’s relief, I have been restraining myself from tossing out everything we own, but the urge is strong. Mom will arrive in a few weeks in her new truck with a load of items from her house, and we’ll hold a garage sale. I’ve started piling up our own stuff in the garage as well. I now have three paper-boxes of books to sell to Half-Price Books (I’m getting rid of books! Can you believe it?!), and some old dishes and pots and pans and various other old unused things to start tagging. I have a “to sell” box on the bar counter to which I’m gradually adding things from around the house.

When I finished going through all the attic boxes and sorting what to keep and what to get rid of, I was covered in dust and my arms and legs itched like mad. I’m sure that I am now full of tiny fiberglass insulation punctures. I hope that’s not hazardous to my health. Maybe I should have worn a breathing mask.

After two days of 90-degree gardening and going up and down the attic steps a million times, most of the muscles in my body hurt. I think that tonight I’ll have some therapeutic yoga and a nice long herbal soak in the bath.

THINGS THAT REMAIN TO BE DONE

• We need to get some plywood for additional attic flooring. Prometheus is now our transport car for things like this, but it’s going to look pretty strange with plywood tied to the roof.
• We also need to sweep out that attic. It’s crazy dusty in there. Also I’d like to install a fluorescent light to replace the standard bare swinging bulb.
• And of course, reroute the air duct.
• More vegetable containers!
• Kill that poison ivy before it attacks me again.
• Clean and restain deck
• Get new fence
• OK, now this is getting expensive. I’d better quit while I’m ahead, otherwise I’m going to include hardwood flooring and a kitchen remodel on this list.

We spent about 6 hours last night moving refrigerators across the city and back in a Uhaul truck.

And when I say “we,” I mean “mostly Doc.” He really worked hard. Those fuckers are monstrously heavy and kind of scary to manhandle.

We acquired a new refrigerator (new to us, anyway) which we had to pick up from South Dallas, and then we transported our old fridge to Rich’s house on the complete other side of town. It took MUCH MUCH longer to move them than I anticipated. Plus, the fun part is that our door is too small to fit a fridge through. So we had to take the handles and doors off the old fridge to get it out of our house, and the new one to get it in.

And come to find out, the new one has some problems — a water leak between the bottom of the door and the water dispenser, and the frame in the middle where the side by side doors meet is getting way too hot… too hot to touch. It burned my arm and left a red mark.

I spent about 2 hours this morning cleaning out our lovely new fridge. It was pretty clean to begin with but I carefully washed all the shelves and wiped down the entire insides. Then we got the doors back on, plugged it in, and immediately noticed the little hot-frame problem and a little later noticed the water leak problem.

I woke up with a killer headache that was not improved by the scent of the cleaning products I was using (natural, but still they give off fumes). And then the fact that after the ordeal of refrigerator moving and the hours I spent meticulously cleaning it, the damn thing wasn’t even working right… ARGH. I got reeeeeally grouchy. We called some repair people, scheduled them for Thursday morning, and then I decided that I wanted to just get out of the house and turn off my brain, so we went to the mall for a while and just wandered around.

Jim said he felt awful because he and Bill had no idea there was anything wrong with it; it just didn’t fit in their new apartment kitchen. It’s only 4 years old. He said it had always been really hot right in the middle but they didn’t know that meant there was anything wrong. So, I don’t blame him for it or anything; I know he would never have knowingly sold me a broken refrigerator. It’s just circumstances.

Anyway, even if we have a medium sized repair bill, I think it will still be a bargain, especially for a stainless side-by-side fridge with ice and water in the door.

I had a small shock today. While picking up a co-worker from the Love Field, I decided to swing by Doc’s and my old house in the neighborhood just to the east of the airport. Just for nostalgia purposes, you know, to see if anything’s changed.

Boy, did it.