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A while ago, I lamented our horrific attempts at home improvement, including dying phlox, a shelf that forgot how to assemble itself, and “unbreakable” switch plate covers that somehow did not fit the light switches. I have since uncovered the truth about all 3 things.
1) The phlox was deluged on a fairly regular basis by dog urine owing to lazy dog owners who shoo the creature out front for his last pee, rather than leash him and take him down to the curb to kill the neighbors’ grass. He enjoys the phlox.
2) The shelf had fit together perfectly before. Then we made each board thicker with two coats of primer/paint. It no longer fit so nicely. Our closet-builder friend recommended that we take the tedious step of sanding when the boards’ “swelling” (my first hope was bloating due to the shelf having its period) didn’t go down. We sanded. We grunted. We dealt soft blows with a hammer on a piece of scrap wood so we didn’t split any more boards. The shelf is up. It’s full of books and gorgeous.
3) The fucking switch plates. When our kitchen was designed/remodeled in 1465, switch plates were a standard size. When we went to Home Depot and bought brand-new unbreakable vinyl ones in 2009, they were also a standard size. A bigger standard size — one designed to cover more wall, more mistakes from the painter, more half-assed switch box assemblies. Thus, the sconce which was not too close to the switch in 1465, is now too close to the switch. Mr. Apron took some scary-looking wire-cutters to the plate. And now it “fits”.
The latest saga again involves — you guessed it — switch plates. Because we’re gluttons for punishment. We like to fail at our home improvement attempts, no matter how small.
The walls in downstairs painted, we decded to replace the ugly granny switch plates with new ones. Mr. Apron, being the bridge-brained beau that he is, fixated on some ceramic switch plates at Anthropologie we’d seen a while back. On our next trip there, we scanned the hardware section to no avail. Disappointed, we traipsed back to the sale section, where I played among the racks, and he scoured the tables of tchotchkes, including books about fashion, French pick-up sticks, hair pins, scarves, and dishtowels. Guess what he found? Two double switch plates, in the exact design he’d wanted. And. On. Sale.
Huzzah! Took them home only to realize our electrical system had not been updated since the house was built, and our light switches did not fit in the slots. We don’t have the hundred year old push button switches, nor the modern “decor” rocker switches, nor the boring, usual switches. What we have looks like the ordinary switch, but is just slightly thicker. Enough so that it won’t fit through the rectangular slot of our snazzy new Anthro plates.
The electrician came about something more pressing (I think “fire hazard” was a word the home inspector used), and I begged Mr. Apron to ask him to replace our switches, as trivial as it probably might sound to an electrician.
He did it yesterday.
Take two. I came home, and, craving some pride in accomplishment, immediately went looking for the switch plates. Only they were nowhere to be found. Now I’m not the cleanest person in the world, and I’m not so organized (except at work, where the other SLP and I just organized the office supply closet, and it’s freakin’ awesome), but Mr. Apron’s style of cleaning leaves me, ummm, frustrated sometimes. He cleans out his car by taking a black plastic trash bag, filling it with junk, and stashing it in the trunk of the car, or our garage. Are you surprised I thought my grandma’s quilt had been the victim of an unmarked trashbag and pitched in a feverish cleaning spree? House cleaning is also challenging. Much as I try to bite my tongue and not say, “Where did you put the..?” I am often wondering the same thing.
So, after tearing the house apart yesterday, from top to bottom, looking every place we could have logically stashed the switch plates, Mr. Apron finally uncovered them. In the kitchen. In a bag. Stashed in the dog food cupboard. Because company was coming 2 weeks ago, and he needed to hide our clutter.
Take three: installation. I located 4 cast off screws from the former switch plate and dropped them into the new plate. They fell right through. That’s right, folks; the heads were too small because artsy fartsy Anthropologie switch plates have non-standard sized holes. Off to the hardware store.
ACE hardware was inexplicable closed at 5:25pm Monday. True Value is not really a hardware store any more because they used to be 3 different variety stores, and now they’re condensed into one store that simultaneously carries everything and nothing. Not a loose screw to be found — just packets of useless hardware we couldn’t try out on our switch plate.
Sears hardware did not want to sell us anything. Though they had a nice hardware aisle with tons of metal thingies, there was not a soul to help us. Two ladies staffed the register, and no one else was to be found. After failing to find a screw with the same circumference and a larger head on our own, we meandered through the deseted aisles, perusing gas ranges, air conditioners, caulk, and small children mouthing hardware bits. Finally, I spied an employee.
“Quick! There’s one! Get him!” I whispered to Mr. Apron.
Johnny Hardware had about as much luck as we did on our own finding our Perfect Screw. I took frequent breaks to disappear from the insanity as he kept opening drawer after drawer. Finally, there was a breakthrough. Johnny Hardware suggested using our existing screws (or ones with a slightly longer shank) with washers to keep their little heads from falling through the holes.
By the time we finished with Mr. Hardware and tried to check out, we’d discovered both check-out bitches had disappeared, leaving a growing line of confonded would-be customers. I swear, the store doesn’t want to sell us things.
We finally returned home around 7pm with 8 screws and 8 washers, and a motion detector flood light kit for our next hopeful project. Installation pretty much sucked because the plates are extra thick and — have I mentioned? — non standard. I could see Mr. Apron’s fist curl as we kept dropping screws under the radiator and struggling for some decent light to see by. Finally, they were in. And beautiful. They really do match the colors of the room.
But our success is not without reservation. The one by the door is such a tight fit that it now requires Arnold Schwarzenegger to flip the switch. One day we’ll take it off and sand it down. For now, we’ll suffer, suffer in success or a job that took entirely too much of our collective energy and money.
Mr. Apron and I accomplished two fantastical feats this weekend. Yes, we assembled the shelves, and completely emptied 18 boxes of books. A half dozen more have been relegated to the basement, as neither of us care to think about grad school notes right now, but the shelves are up! And they look great. We’ve established a little reading nook in the living room. After all that hard work yesterday, we’re still married, so we thought we’d tackle something else…
Gardening is not our strong suit, but the previous owners left us with some stumps from greenery formerly known as hedges. I had heard that stump removal was impossible to do, and prohibitively expensive to get someone else to do. Nevertheless, Mr. Apron posted this blog today. Since he’s such an excellent writer, and since many of you have come my way from his blog, I thought I’d send you back today. No need to redundantly write about our efforts.
I tell you this much. In the words of my beloved husband:
“Something very positive was done today, and it wasn’t just the beautification of our little patch of the world. Today’s hard work proved to my wife that we are, on occasion, capable of achievements that may seem daunting, if not next to impossible.”
Maybe the light-switch cover evaded us. Maybe the shelves challenged us to a do-over. And maybe the poison ivy will be our nemisis for years to come. But we can do some things together, even hard things.
Today, we tackle The Shelf again. Last time’s effort was a spectacular and abyssmal Fail. Mr. Apron split the end grain of the wood trying to hammer a shelf into its slot on the vertical pieces. The wood was swollen or water-logged or PMSing and seemed to have grown since the last assembly. But this time, armed with wait time (it’s been a while since we painted the shelves) and sand paper, we shall redeem ourselves.
Why are these shelves so important? They’re holding up everything, and I don’t just mean that literally. Sure, seven foot tall by five foot wide shelving holds the bulk of our reading materials, but there’s more to this story. The books I speak of are currently housed in 40-odd boxes in our spare room. Which we cannot use as a spare room because it’s full of liquor boxes of books. We’d love to get the painters to come in and paint our bedroom (with its new closet!!!) as well as the office. While they were great downstairs at moving and covering our “valuables” (thrift-store, curbside, and Ikea furniture), I doubt they’d love to begin the office in its current state. My boxes and piles of craft stuff are everywhere, balancing precariously on a dresser here, a filing cabinet there, shoved under my crafting desk and threatening to overtake my sewing machine. The final destination of all this crap is a bevy of shelves we’ll install on a free wall in the office above my crafting zone. It’ll be awesome. But, we have to strip (or pay someone to strip) the wall paper, and then paint (or pay someone to paint) before we start screwing in the shelf standards. So it’s a Catch-22. Can’t paint until we clear out the shit. Can’t store the shit till we paint.
As a temporary solution, we thought we could move much of the crap into the spare room so the painters can attack the office, but remember what’s in the spare room? Ah, yes, the boxes of books. This one shelving unit is preventing us from a) having overnight guests (not that we have those kinds of friends anyway…), b) painting the office or our bedroom, c) becoming exponentially more organized, and thus crafting more, and d) having a baby (which we will install in the aforementioned spare room).
The takeaway lesson here, the gestalt, the final message: we cannot procreate until we successfully assemble this shelving unit. Got it? There’s a lot riding on those shelves. Wish us (and our future offspring) luck.
Mr. Apron is upset at me for getting so down on our home improvement attempts, but I keep seeing failure.
1) We dropped $80 at a garden center to buy some plantings to make the bare flower beds look a little prettier. The phlox have since died a pitiful death of dog urine because we let Finley take his final pee right on top of them. But in good news, the 3 tomato plants are yielding about 3-5 grape tomatoes a day, which Mr. Apron is enjoying as a little snack. Grade: B. And now we have poison ivy. Trying to irradicate it has taken out a nice chunk of our front pachysandra. Adjusted grade: B-
2) We dropped $50 in painting supplies at Home Depot to finish a set of bookshelves my father built for me in my first apartment. He gave us unpainted wood mixed with boards leftover from another project, and we decided to paint them to match our new wall paint, so they’d look built-in, or at least as though they belonged. We slaved away for 2 weekends in the stuffy humid garage, priming — squeezing every last drop of primer out of that can — and painting. The color looked great. The boards first stuck to the plastic drop cloths. Then, in an impulse to assemble them when they were dry to the touch, we discovered they no longer fit together. Either they’d swelled (swollen?) too much in the humidity, or the paint was still wet and the boards had absorbed water from it, or they were menstruating and bloated. They just wouldn’t go together. Mr. Apron took a hammer to them, to try to shove them together. Since we did not have a rubber mallet, he cushioned the blows with a dishtowel. And split the end-grain of the board. Later, our closet-maker, Bob, tells us to cushion the board with a scrap piece of wood. Never, he cautioned, hit the end of the board by itself. Oops. The half-assed assembly job is still sitting in the living room, like some great orange albatross. Grade: C-
3) Switch-plate covers. Simple, right? Unscrew the old, put on the new. We didn’t have old ones in the kitchen. Somewhere in between unwallpaper and panting the room, they disappeared. I guess they were probably junk, anyway, being wallpapered to match the walls. So we bought new ones. The kitchen light-switch/outlet is right near a little wall sconce that plugs into that outlet. Its mounting bracket is so near, in fact, that it interferes with the screwing in of the new switch plate. We decided to cut it, and discovered we’d purchased “unbreakable nylon”. Kitchen scissors can’t even begin to try. We can’t even install a $.44 switchplate. Grade: D.
I know we’ll have success with some things, like the tomatoes. And we’ll find pride in home ownership and in fixing things ourselves, eventually. I know I shouldn’t be so down on us, especially when it makes Mr. Apron sad. It just feels like we’re thwarted everywhere we turn, in each new project, no matter how paltry or simple; no matter ho many times we’ve assembled those shelves in the past years (3?), or how stupid it is that our kitchen was designed in 1980 so the switchplate doesn’t fit the sconce 3 inches away.
I think I”ll give myself a break from brain surgery blogging for today. Too much intensity might threaten my readership and burn me out on writing about it. So today you get a peek into our weekend of home ownership duties.
Saturday Bob came over to build our closet. He stayed pretty much all day till 5:30, with a brief break so he could run to a funeral. He’s not quite done yet, but what we have now definitely is emerging as closet-like. There’s 7 ft of railing where previously there was none. There’s framing and some drywall and I even hung up 2 garments to make sure they’d fit in there. We didn’t go “standard” depth because of issues of where to fit my gezunta Ikea dresser and making sure we had enough room between the closet corner and the bed to pass without turning sideways. I got a little scared when I saw that the railing wasn’t centered depth-wise, and had to make sure a hanger would fit in there. Thankfully, it does. Bob will come back and finish all that stuff he knows how to do. Then I can finish my Nova documentary, “A Closet is Born”.
This morning, having procured our ritual Sunday morning bagel sandwich breakfasts, we put on long sleeves, pants, socks, shitty shoes, and rubber gloves and proceeded to attack the poison ivy in the front yard. Our neighbor saw us, gasped, came running out and asked, “Do you know that’s…?” “Poison Ivy. Yes, we know. That’s why we’re dressed like this,” we said as we held up our gloved hands. She ran into her house and came back out with some scary looking pesticide spray she had from last year when she used it on our yard. Our previous owner, Mildred, was 95, or somewhereabouts, so I’m guessing our neighbor did much of the home maintenance for her. Hence, she attacked the poison ivy for Mildred, chemically.
I had hoped to be green, and use the chemical-free gloved-hands answer I’d found on the internet, but I’d also hoped Mr. Apron and I would be able to clip our hedges with the manual clippers. While that was a rousing success the first time, the freaking hedges were sporting new radical sprouts within two weeks, causing Mr. Apron to give a sigh of relief and comment he would be borrowing his father’s electric clippers from now on. I try to do the right thing by our planet, but it doesn’t always work out that way. And today, we looked at each other, then looked back at our neighbor, and told her we’d be happy to try her spray. As we came back from the dog walk this evening, Mr. Apron happily pointed our some already wilting ivy. I couldn’t help but put on a menacing glare and challenge the plant to “Die, motherfucker”. I hope it does.
We had dinner on the front porch, making inane comments about how the street’s cars are parked different tonight. The Pilot that was parked at the corner all week long has moved to the 2nd spot from the corner, but that Passat wagon is still parked backwards because the owners are douche-bags. Finley sat calmly, tied to the railing until our back-alley neighbor came along, walking her Corgi-mix. He started to go bat-shit, and I couldn’t imagine why. He usually barks a little at passing canines, asserting his dominance over our small piece of turf, but this time he was lunging and growling. Mr. Apron took him inside to cool off. He whined pitifully from behind the door as we casually sipped our Cokes and swatted mosquitos. Then we saw Mother.
Mother is a light-colored calico cat who lives in the back alley. I think her real name is Miss Grey, but she’s been nicknamed Mother because she, uh, mothered the latest brood of feral cats recently. The neighbors whose yards she frequents got a pool together to have her fixed, so she’ll be Mother no more. She hangs around those neighbors houses, I assume, because they feed her. Her favorite activity, besides playing in the overgrowth of our next-door neighbor’s back yard, is walking Megan, the Corgi-mix. When our neighbor gets Megan ready for her walk, Mother gets ready, too. If you watch at just the right time, you’ll see Megan emerge from the side door, and Mother will come trotting along. She follows at enough of a distance to say, “I’m a cat. I don’t get taken on walks. I’m an independent creature. I shit wherever I please.” Yet she’s always close enough to be the caboose of the train. Today she lingered on our neighbor’s lawn after Megan had passed by, and Finley spotted her through the hedge. We called to her after we’d shut the dog up, but she remained still, aloof in her feline ways. “Is this the way you call a cat?” Mr. Apron asked, clucking his tongue and making kissy noises towards the hedge.
“Yes,” I said, “but there’s a secret of callling cats.”
“Yeah? What’s that?” he inquired.
“They don’t come when you call them.”
Mr. Apron has already written Closet, part un, in which we tried to bite the bullet and pay some fancy franchised closet organizer company to make the maximum use out of our existing closets. See, in 1929, they only had 3 dresses, or 2 suits, and 3 pairs of shoes. If they happened to be clothes horses, and owned 6 dresses plus a fur coat and 7 blouses, they they probably bought an armoir. We, however, are modern folk. I also have a fear of large pieces of furniture, specifically entertainment centers and armoires. We like our closets built in, to hold our 17 spring skirts, 17 summer skirts, and 17 fall/winter skirts. My man, at least, has nearly 50 dress shirts, including button-collar oxfords and his dressier spead or point collars (and two eyelet collars), as well as some short sleeve dress shirts, many circa 1950-1970. He owns one pair of jeans, from an ex-girlfriend whose lasting compliment was, “You’ll look handsome when you get some clothes that fit you”. She made him shell out $68 for a pair of Structure jeans, which he has never worn, but keeps as a reminder of stupid choices he’s made. He has pants, slacks, “trousers”, instead, in three tiers of fashion. Tier I are the nicest pants. They may have creases, pleats, and cuffs. They’re suitable for all but the most formal affairs. Tier II are the more casual pants: Dockers, knakis, vintage polyester trousers, linen pants I introduced him to on our honeymoon to Bali, and Tier I pants which may have met unfortunately with a too-hot iron or an overzealous dryer. Tier III consists of paint pants, moving pants, gardening pants, and set-construction pants. They usually started life as Tier II’s. All of these, you understand, must be hung up. And then we get to the ties. Mr. Apron used to shell out $50 or more for new brand name, designer label ties. Ralph Lauren, Tommy Hil, Calvin Klein. When we met, he had about 30 or so ties, almost all of which fit on a rotating tie rack. Then I introduced him to TJ Maxx, Marshall’s and the thrift stores, where he discovered he could get 4 or more ties for $50! So the collection has, needless to say, grown quite a bit, and no longer fits even on the custom serpentine tie rack I made for him. And while Mr. Apron has many tastes (British comedy, the 3 Stooges, Gilbert & Sullivan, Herbie the Love Bug, Banjo, Finley, me), my mother continues on her endless quest to buy him more and more and more clothing. She considers it her personal mission to find each and every odd-sized piece of clothing and buy it, to prevent any other man Mr. Apron’s dimensions from buying clothing that fits. See, he wears a 15″ collar, with 34/35 sleeves. I learned about these things. That means he has a skinny minny neck with go go gadget arms. Hard to find. And in trousers, he wears a 30/32, which, again, means he has no waist, and legs that stretch to China. He’s not overall so grotesquely proportioned; there are many men taller and some men skinnier than he. It’s just that his combination makes buying clothing challenging. But not so challenging that my mother didn’t help us fill two suitcases and many several boxes with his oceans of clothing.
I am guiltier than he. It was I, afterall, who introduced him to discount shopping, encouraging his acquisition, supporting him to buy short-sleeve shirts when he had nothing but his plaid jersey knit polos from 10th grade to wear in the summer. So it is my fault. And, being a woman, I have a worse clothing obsession. It’s difficult when you’re known for your unusual style, and you find yourself wearing the same half-dozen shirts through the late winter because everything else is in boxes. When shoes go through a 3 pair rotation because I’ve run out of shoe racks and I still have two boxes of shoes unpacked. My poor darlings. I miss them so.
So these closet people came, see? And the first one tried to convert our future nursery ito a 7′x11′ closet (to keep us from procreating?), as well as try to sell us on closet systems built into every other wall in the house except in our bedroom. And then when she told us her systems ran from $1,000 to $10,000, we had written her off while she sketched measurements into her folio. The second guy was on his way out at 5:15 after a 5:00pm appointment. He fired us, stating simply, that he could spend our money, or we could. He had no solutions for us, but at least was honest about it. He told us to hire a handy man to “throw up some drywall and a closet rod.”
And so we did. Well, we’re trying to. The first guy we called gave us a estimate of $1600. We cried all over again, resigning ourselves to curtaining off some garment racks from Bed, Bath, & Beijing. Then we went looking for another guy. We asked Mr. Apron’s parents. “General contractor? What’s that?” You know, a handyman. The guy who fixed your medicine cabinet and shower door. “Oh. No. He asked us not to call him again.” Dead end. We asked our grown-up friends who live locally to give us a referral. And it was then we found out that a friend we already know is a handyman. Which we didn’t know, because Mr. Apron doesn’t do LinkedIn with him; he just does Gilbert & Sullivan with him. He’s semi-retired, we think, so he has lots of time, we hope. All I know is, he showed up on Sunday afternoon with 5 two-by-fours, immediately started, umm, pacing off, our closet space, sawing boards over our carpet with his “ginsu” knife, and screwing boards into the floor. He quit when his screwdriver’s battery gave out, and we had to leave. But I think we hired him? I mean, I guess we did hire him. He’s giving us the “thespian rate”, which will amount to about $500. It’s a freaking bargain.
One mystery he solved was the crackling bulging piece of wall in our bedroom. He said it was caused by the bathroom mirror. Yes, you read that right. When the previous owners installed a superwide three-way bathroom mirror with a built-in medicine chest, they had to saw through a stud, and remove it. Meaning that the other side of that wall (our bedroom wall) is not anchored to anything at all. They didn’t even do a half-ass job of securing it above and below the cabinet. But our friend said it wasn’t anything structural, it wasn’t in danger of crumbling, and that it would be hidden in the new-to-be closet. That it was just a bulge; and that’s okay. Quoth he, rubbing his stomach: “I have a bulge, too.”
Mr. Apron and I have been homeowners since February 18th, when we handed over large amounts of money in exchange for keys and responsibility. I heard someone joke that when you become a homeowner, you should take $1,000 in $1 bills and staple them to your house, just to get used to spending money on it. Let me tell you what has required out attention in these short 3 months.
PECO, the gas company, has twice been out to investigate gas odors. The first time was a legitimate gas leak from the dryer line. I smelled it when I got home, but figured a) the dog wasn’t dead (heretofore my gauge for home odor strength), and b) I didn’t have a headache from being inside, so I waited for Mr. Apron to get home. $500 latre,we feel safer. The second time was a false alarm. Again, I smelled an odor, and waited for Mr. Apron to come home since the dog was still alive. PECO guy came, and told us it was just the paint fumes (so much for low-VOC paint) from our new downstairs paint job interacting with the burner in the basement when we activated the flame by turning on the hot water. All these things about gas-heated homes we are learning.
The bathroom sink is slow. Clogged perpetually. Has been since we moved in. Inspector theorized it’d be “no big deal”. Well, after Mr.Apron and his father tried unsuccessfully with plungers, “The Bomb” (some product in a can), and regualar Liquid Plumber, Mr. Apron stuck a coat hanger down the pipes, and busted a hole in the J-bend. Cost: $79, with a lesson not to stick anything else down there. Plumber said the problem is most likely at the level of the sewer pipe, and that it would require ripping up the tile floor to fix when we’re ready. Guess what? We still dealing with a slow drain. And an intact floor.
The oven, circa 1980, suddenly decided, during a double-batch of chocolate cupcakes, to forget how to maintain 300 degrees F, and instead, keep heating until the smoke alarm went off. After I tossed 24 charred rocks in the garbage and ran out for more ingredients, I then babysat the oven, turning it off periodically to simulate the pilot light turning on and off in a normally functioning gas oven that knows how to maintain a temperature. We are now looking at new ovens, and making do with our upper oven (this is old, folks), which works fine, but is quite small and can’t fit a full-size cookie sheet inside. Cost: projected to be $500-$700.
And today, Mr. Apron was spending far too much time online looking at ebaymotors, so I send him/us out to buy hedgeclippers (cost: $18.95 + tax) and deal with a growing nuisance in the front yard. It seems like only yesterday they were sweet little shoots promising spring was just around the corner, and now they’re threatening to attack neighbors innocently walking past. Mr. Apron’s father has electric hedgeclippers, and kept warning us not to do it ourselves, not to exert ourselves, that he’d come over, that they’d do it together. Well, he hasn’t come yet, and I wanted to prove we were manually strong and could save the environment while strengthening our upper arms and shoulders, so we clipped. It was fun. Satisfying, in some way, appealing to our sense of order. While Mr. Apron clipped, I cleaned up after him (insert sexist husband-wife joke here), and vis-a-vis (insert reverse sexist wife-husband joke here). While I was waiting for him to make some more refuse, I stepped into the “yard” of pachysandra, intent on pulling some weeds, and I found poison ivy. Joy of all joys. And I’m wearing shorts and flip-flops. So this now requires action, either of a pesticidal variety, or of a manual weed-pulling variety, complete with toxic waste substance isolation gear. I can’t wait. We can go buy Round-Up and paint it on the leaves, so it won’t harm the pachysandra which saves us from that other fun chore — mowing the lawn — or we can don rubber gloves, long pants, and long sleeves and pull out the poison ivy all summer long, hoping to make a dent. I swear, my legs are itching already. The mind-body connection is a powerful one, eh?
What’s next, house? Bring it on! Water damage? Another gas scare? Crumbling retaining wall out back? Basement stairs falling down? Oh, wait! I forgot my latest blunder. I put the garage door opener in my pocket one day when we wrre running back and forth to the garage to install our china in our new china cabinet, and Friday night, as we were lamely celebrating the weekend, I washed it. In the washing machine. We now can’t get into the garage. Awesome. I am so cool.
1). It’s too soon to be hot. April 26 and 88 degrees do not mix. I am not ready yet. We can’t just jump from pleasant spring days in the 60s to summer humidity overnight. I’m not ready! I don’t remember how to be sweaty and disgusting by 9am. I’m not used to carrying my refrigerated water bottle around like a binky. I haven’t cut my hair away from my neck. We don’t even know how to use the air conditioners in this house.
2) A working oven is important. When I met Mr. Apron, he had not, in the time he’d been living in his bachelor studio apartment, used the oven. Stovetop? Yes, for omelets. Foreman grill? Yes, for burgers. Microwave? Yes, for Salisbury “steak” “dinners”. But oven? No. I brought with me, on my first trip to stay with him (shh, don’t tell the unconceived children!), a tub of homemade cookie dough, and showed him how to work his oven in the service of hot fresh cookies. The next trip, I brought him an oven light.
Today, our 30 year old HotPoint double- oven ruined a double batch of cupcakes, necessitating a trip to the store for more ingredients because I had baking needs. My coworkers and friends are expecting baked goods this week. The oven, supposed to be set at 350, suddenly shot up towards 500, setting off the smoke alarm and turning 24 cupcakes into charred lumps of coal. Maybe that’s why the batch of meringues last week inverted and burned? So I sat next to the oven, through the next 3 batches (40 total cupcakes in my fridge…come on over), obsessively checking the oven temperature (so glad we have a thermometer), letting precious heat out of the oven and into the 80 degree April kitchen every five minutes as I peeked at the thermometer. But they turned out edible. Sigh. Guess this means a trip to Worst Buy. As Mr. Apron reminded me, we discussed this potentiality back in November, when we first looked at the house and cringed at the appliances. He was wary, and I was optimistic. “If they die, we’ll just replace them as they go!” I cheerfully replied. Now, of course, I just want the fool thing to give me more cupcakes and stop taking my money.
Spoiler alert: If you have not seen “Earth”, I revel some “plot” points.
3) The predators never get sympathy. Well, almost never. We saw the Disney Nature film “Earth” last night, amid the loudest house of children and adults I”ve ever witnesses. From the curly-haired girl bouncing (but quietly) on her seat for 90 minutes to the grown man shouting out, “That’s some fish!” when the shark snapped up a seal (sea lion?), to the mother hailing the mother elephant for pushing her calf onwards towards water, “Go mama!” Yes, really. I wouldn’t mind the “Oohs” and “Ahhs” when the cute animals babies first poke their heads out of caves, tree trunks, or pouches. I even may have uttered a few myself. It was a beautifully shot movie, full of extreme close ups on the big screen. And James Earl Jones’ narration led the audience to develop sympathies for the baby elephant as he blindly walks into a tree, the gazelle as he tries to escape a cheetah, and the ducklings as they fall with grace from a tree. Why are we always sympathetic to the prey? to the herbivores? Why did no one cheer the cheetah on as he ran for his lunch? Why did no one applaud the lions when they at last scored an elephant? We cringed, we recoiled, we looked away. Only when in the final scenes of the movie, we realize the fate of the stranded, starving, and wounded polar bear, do we feel sorry for him. We feel guilty about global warming and ice caps melting perhaps, or we feel sorry that his family is so far away, or we feel as if his plight in the unfriendly climate is hopeless. We finally sympathize with the predator.
4. Dog should get PE tubes. When children have chronic or recurring ear infections, they often get tubes to let the fluid drain. By the time the tubes fall out, their ear canals are better able to drain fluid by themselves, and they’ve outgrown this pesky problem. Our poor dog has seemingly unending ear infections. We recognize the signs and symptoms: he incessantly fwaps his head back and forth to try to alleviate the irritation, and his ear smells like a rotting squirrel carcass doused with vinegar. However, we cannot simply call in a refill on his ear medicine because we’re obliged to go down to the vet for a full wallet-cleaning. They have to confirm our observations, run labs and cultures, tell us he’s overweight, has a heart murmur, and needs his teeth cleaned, and charge us another $150 before releasing another small tube of ointment and instructing us to do exactly the same thing we would have done if we had the ointment in the first place.
5. Buying a house is the watershed moment for people to start nagging us about making babies. Doesn’t matter how old we are (27 and 28), how long we’ve been married (2.5 years), how employed we are (affirmative), or how much space we have (not enough, ever). My mother’ housewarming gift came with an enclosure that hoped we’d fill our new home with the scents of baking cookies, and, maybe someday, baby powder. Didn’t waste any time, that one. Others have started asking, hinting, insinuating. So much so that I’m using new terminology on the House Tour. My old highschool friend came to see the house last night. We showed her the upstairs, introducing the master bedroom, the office/crafting room, and, as I’ve now taken to calling the smallest bedroom, “The Elephant in the Room”.
6. Shelves can be assembled while wearing a long skirt and flip-flops, using a dying power screwdriver in about an hour, so long as they’re in the relative cool of the basement and one doesn’t mind tripping over said skirt and dropping assorted and sundry items on one’s toes.
7. Sunday night always feels like a precursor to Monday. And that’s always sad.
