heresluck, posts by tag: house - LiveJournal (original) (raw)

heresluck, posts by tag: house - LiveJournal

| | | | I am h.l's lack of fannish content Things have been non-optimal around here for a while, hence my lack of fannish (or any) content. I am behind on TV because of a combination of generalized work stress and a couple of specific work-related deadlines that left me feeling sort of unequipped to do much of anything mentally taxing, including write anything outside of work or process long-form narrative, for, uh, several months. My house is being more of a money pit than usual; some long-standing minor problems have rather suddenly entered the MUST DEAL WITH NOW category, so I'm looking at new roof and new windows in short order. We're due for a horrific heat wave starting tomorrow, so this morning I dragged the window a/c unit out and got it set up in the bedroom... and then when I took out the filter to clean it, it disintegrated in my hands. Fantastic.On the plus side, I have the money to get a new a/c unit without panicking about it, and I have the credit to get a loan for the house repairs. I have friends who've been supporting me through my work trials. The cats are a constant delight, aside from the occasional hairball or early morning serenade. (The kittens' latest game: stealing green beans from the kitchen, prancing off to the dining room with them, and then SLAYING THEM, which involves a great deal of tossing them in the air, catching them, and shaking them to break their necks.) I am sloooowly catching up on TV. I managed to finish a vid for VVC Premieres. I survived a visit to my parents. I have thus fair refrained from assaulting, verbally or otherwise, any of my colleagues (or my boss) despite severe provocations. I've been reading some interesting nonfiction. The garden is doing pretty well. I picked several pounds of cherries from a friend's tree a few days ago and now have roasted cherry sauce and brandied cherry sauce in the freezer, ready to top home-made ice cream later this week.And VVC is approaching, which will be a welcome respite from my current daily grind; I'll get to spend time with people I love and don't see nearly often enough and, assuming the tomatoes continue on schedule, share some of my garden with them. I look forward to a few days spent focusing on things that are not my job, eating some good food, and hanging out with friends.Originally posted at Dreamwidth || Read comment count unavailable comments on DreamwidthTags: house, personal, work work work | | | -------------------------------------------------------------- | --------------------------------------------------------------- | --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | -------------------------------------------------------------- | | | | | | |

| | | | adventures in home ownership We had a fairly serious hailstorm a couple of weeks ago -- softball-sized rather than our usual ping-pong-ball sized hail, thank you climate change -- which broke some storm windows and did a bit of other damage.The insurance adjustor came out this morning, inspected everything for several hours (apparently I have a tricky roof), and now I am sitting here with a check for nearly $4,000 because my house needs some fairly serious work done. o.OOf course this is the worst possible time of year; I am so not ready for the new semester to start, you don't even know. Fortunately none of it is pressing damage -- my roof isn't going to start leaking next week or anything -- but it does need to be repaired, which means I need to start figuring out how these repairs will and should mesh with, say, the new windows I've been contemplating.Also, hey, I went to VividCon! But that is really a post of its own.Originally posted at Dreamwidth || Read comment count unavailable comments on DreamwidthTags: house | | | -------------------------------------------------------------- | --------------------------------------------------------------- | --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | -------------------------------------------------------------- | | | | | | |

			CSA box: bell peppers and green beans! (bonus track: kitchen update) Bell peppers! And they're purple! I really could not be more pleased.Also: more fennel, more broccoli, more bok choi, more summer squash (zephyr and zucchini this week), more red kale, more cippolini onions, walla walla onions, an adorable little red cabbage, some absolutely gorgeous green beans, and a big bunch of genovese basil.Of course, I still have a good deal of the last two weeks' produce left; the chaos of moving and the frustration of an unusable kitchen have combined to ensure that if I can't eat it raw and with my fingers I haven't been eating it. Thank goodness renenet's coming to visit; I can make her help me eat all this stuff. Hell, maybe I can give some of it away. I definitely need to make a lot of weird pizzas, stat.Next week: cucumbers, which means tabouli. Yum.In more general kitchen news:Yesterday I primed the rest of the kitchen (walls, ceiling, remaining cabinets) and painted the trim; this morning I painted the ceiling and walls. So the kitchen is now officially more done than not. I still have to peel, sand, prime and paint all the cabinet doors and drawers, and paint the pantry, but at least I can now start unpacking the dozens of boxes of kitchen stuff, which is a mercy.Also yesterday, the new refrigerator was delivered. I now have a freezer-on-the-bottom refrigerator, which, as katallison knows, is the way all refrigerators should be. It is quite a nice appliance, and very reassuring: the refrigerator is stuffed full of vegetables and milk and cran-raspberry juice, and the freezer contains nine pounds of paneer, two loaves of my favorite bread, and quite a lot of unsweetened flaked coconut (for when it's cool enough to make granola again). I find this state of affairs unutterably soothing.Tags: csa, house

			letting go of objects I am a packrat, as anyone who has ever been in any of my dwellings can attest. I accumulate a lot of stuff, and I also tend to accumulate the packaging the stuff came in — a tendency I've justified by saying "I could move any time! I don't know where I'll be in five years!" which is, of course, a slightly more specific version of the rallying cry of packrats everywhere: "I might need it!" My file cabinet is overstuffed, my closets are full of boxes... and of course I'm never so conscious of the problem as when I'm in the middle of a move, because my god, why do I have all this crap? I mean, I know why I have the books and the CDs and the winter coat and boots, but the rest of this stuff? What was I thinking?I have been trying to break the packrat habit for a while now, with limited (though not negligible) success. In the wake of this move, I am re-committing myself to it, and I've already made some progress.To wit:This morning, I arranged to sell my old table and chairs to a new faculty member. Also, I put out on the curb an old dresser that my parents gave me several years ago, an old cat-scratched chair that my parents gave me more recently, and a thrift-store bookcase that I got for about ten dollars some years back. (All disappeared within fifteen minutes.)Later in the morning, I went through all the boxes still at the rental and bundled them up to take to the recycling center. Because old habits die hard, I saved two: the ones for my TV and my computer case (with corresponding styrofoam inserts). But the rest? Going away. And I plan to do the same thing with the vast majority of the boxes I have yet to unpack. I thought about keeping some of them, because they're Still Perfectly Good, but you know what? I'm earning an adult's salary now. If, god forbid, I ever move again, I'll just buy moving boxes. I need these boxes to go away — not just because I have better uses for my storage space, but because getting rid of these boxes is part of my emotional commitment to being here: I refuse to live as if I am on the brink of leaving. I can't know whether I'm really going to be here for the rest of my life, but I'm going to behave as if I am, because that's the kind of settled I want to be.And because I am settling here, I'm also giving myself permission to unpack slowly: to go through every box and assess its contents; to donate or throw out anything I no longer I want or use; to find a place for everything rather than simply shoving it in the back of the closet to deal with later. This is later. This is it.It's not as if I'm ever going to live a spartan existence; I like having a lot of stuff, because I tend to think symbolically, and so any object has the potential to accumulate a lot of personal significance for me. But a lot of this stuff isn't important anymore (or never was); and yet because I am in the habit of keeping for keeping's sake, it can be hard for me to distinguish what I really want from what I don't. (Note that I didn't say need; need factors into this equation hardly at all, which is perhaps the very definition of being part of the professional/upper-middle class.) So I want to be a lot more thoughtful from now on about exactly what stuff I allow into my life, and a lot more thorough about weeding out the stuff I no longer care about.Tags: house

			sigh of relief I'm moved.Well, not completely. I'm posting from the rental, where I am sitting (and the cats are sprawling) on the floor, with a few odds-and-ends boxes scattered hither and yon. So there are still a few things to haul over to the new place, and then the rental needs to be cleaned, and then of course there's the vast and currently unfathomable work of finishing the kitchen (don't even ask) and getting everything unpacked and properly set up.But hey, at least the toilet's been delivered (though not yet installed), and all the heavy stuff is moved, and, you know, now that the packing-and-hauling trauma is over, I'm feeling less ambivalent about this move than about any move since leaving for college. Which is exactly as it should be, but frankly I was so panicky until a couple of hours ago that I just couldn't feel it.And now I can.In theory, my new internet service starts tomorrow, which... well, I'm not holding my breath, but I'm cautiously optimistic. So I could be spending much more time online (hiding from the kitchen and the boxes...) in the very near future. Heh.Thanks to all who sent happy thoughts and good wishes -- they seem to have worked. I'm very grateful.Tags: house, moving

			house: progress katallison is my own personal Hero of the Revolution.She drove out yesterday and we spent most of the day scraping and peeling red paint off kitchen cabinets. (Should you ever need to strip latex paint off an oil paint base, the secret is to sponge down the latex paint, cover it with — I am not making this up — duct tape, leave it for 15-20 minutes, during which time you can be taping more paint, and then rip it up, at which point it'll take most of the paint with it.) Then we went out for beer (well, root beer, in my case) and burgers. Then we went back to the house, where we stayed until well past 11pm, sanding down the cabinets and spot priming with Kilz (my new slogan for which is Magic In A Can).This morning we went to the diner and had ginormous breakfasts (and Kat seemed pleased with the coffee, which was a great relief to me as I don't drink it and couldn't vouch for it), primed all the cabinets, went to the hardware store to buy paint — possibly the last paint I will buy, since the kitchen's the last room I'm working on. By the time we got back and got organized, the primer was dry (seriously, people: Magic In A Can), and Kat painted the insides of the cabinets green while I painted the outsides white, and by the time we were done the kitchen already looked 500% better — and it's only one-third done. So she's gone home on a note of success and accomplishment, and seriously, without her help I would be curled up on my bed and whimpering, and the cabinets wouldn't even be primed yet.Once I hit "post" on this entry, I'm heading back over to get the rest of the red paint off the doorframes and baseboards, and (with luck) get those primed and the ceiling painted this evening, because if I can get those things done I could paint the rest of the woodwork tomorrow morning and the walls tomorrow afternoon and then the kitchen would pretty much be ready for Tuesday's move (well, except the cabinet doors and drawers, but at this point those don't even count).And I'm trying not to freak out about the packing thing. As long as the furniture and the bulk of the boxes get moved on Tuesday, I've got the rest of the week to sort out odds and ends. So: this is me, not panicking.ETA: Kat has posted her perspective on the weekend.Tags: house

			graph paper house v. 4.0 This chat transcript is from Wednesday night of last week and for reasons that don't need exploring at this juncture I'm just getting around to posting it now. dualbunny can pretend that her TiVo lost it until today. Or, um, something.( I logged into chat late that night to be greeted with...Collapse )So then Wednesday night of this week, renenet and I were on the phone talking about the above conversation:renenet: Are you going to post it?here's luck: I could. Although there's the laziness factor to consider.renenet: Maybe I should post it; if you post it you'll just get a bunch of people saying "oh, I do that too, with the graph paper!" like Lum did.here's luck: I love how you want to forestall my getting any empathy or affirmation. It's 'cause you're hateful.renenet: You were hateful first! #1 Hateful! You do not need to be encouraged! You need to be taken down a peg or twelve, constantly! This is why you have me! ...possibly the only reason, actually. [pause] So are you going to post or what?here's luck: Sure. Fine. Whatever. Not tonight, though.renenet: What? You're not going to post it?here's luck: Not tonight. I'm tired.renenet: You are awful ALL THE TIME.Standard disclaimer applies.Tags: chat, favorites!, house

			in complete darkness I lose balance The past two and a half weeks have been a blur of getting other people to work on the house — updating the wiring and plumbing, refinishing floors, painting the exterior — and of working on it myself: stripping old shellac off the window woodwork; re-staining the woodwork and adding a couple coats of spar varnish; buying and installing new light fixtures and cabinet hardware; washing walls and spackling holes and plastering cracks and caulking windows and sanding everything in sight and priming where necessary in preparation for painting, the first round of which begins tomorrow afternoon.All of this activity has been exciting (my house! mine!) right up to the point at which it becomes exhausting and overwhelming. But I'm on a deadline and a budget, so exhaustion and overwhelm don't necessarily mean I get to take a break; I've been over at the house until about 8:30 most nights, and then more often than not I go back over for a few hours after feeding myself and the cats and get back to the rental again between 11:00 and midnight, riding my bike through the dark streets, everything quiet until one of the night trains comes through.Tonight was another session of dirty work, sticky and mosquito-bitten in the late twilight — this close to solstice it lasts until after ten o'clock — and on into the dark, until finally, frustrated at having so much left to do, I left tools and rags and canisters scattered on the bedroom floor, emptied buckets and rinsed the sponge and washed my hands, careful of the blister on my left index finger, and went out the back door to find that the outdoor bulb's burned out, leaving me to pick my way down the still-unfamiliar steps in the starry dark, waning moon not yet risen.I kicked up the stand and turned my bicycle, and there over my house was the big dipper, bright and clear, tipped on end as if it had hung itself neatly from a peg over my bedroom ceiling.Okay, I thought. _I've got a house, I've got friends to help me paint it, I've got this town and this sky and more good fortune than I could ever deserve. I'll sort this all out in the morning._In the morning. When I get back to the house that is — I know it — going to be home.Tags: house, nonfiction