Girl Detective

This morning I saw an alarming thing: the door to our laundry chute on the ground floor had popped open. The chute starts in the basement. I have more than one story’s worth of laundry!

Because life with ongoing post-partum depression that isn’t responding to treatment isn’t hard enough. Ha! My current bugaboo is things that break. Because not only were they a waste of time and effort, but they either need to be thrown away, or sent back to the manufacturer so that someone can be held accountable for the shoddy work. I should probably just throw these away, but they represent so much money, so much hope for a product that would work, that I can’t quite bear to just toss them.

Evenflo Top of Stair baby gate. Arrived broken from Target.com. Returned.

Summer Top of Stair baby gate. Purchased at Target. Broke within days of installation. Worse, the pieces that broke off were about exactly the size of baby windpipe–shoddy construction AND a choking hazard! Thanks, Target! Thanks, Summer! Returned, but I don’t think I’ve finished spilling bile on this one yet.

Kitchenart adjust a cup measuring set. Inner plunger broke apart. Why is it multiple pieces? Why not just one? Never found a use for the spoons.

Oxo cheese slicer #1. G. Grod threw away before I could rescue it from the trash.

Oxo cheese slicer #2, which I was excited to see came with a replacement wire. Guess what? It wasn’t the wire that broke. Grr.

Kitchenaid cheese slicer. Huge and unwieldy, and still couldn’t slice off the rind of my Dante 6-month sheep’s cheese.

Nike watch. Every time I pushed the upper right button, I also hit the lower left. Bad design, then the strap separated and couldn’t even be contained with duct tape.

Seiko watch. Can’t stay working. A battery works for a few weeks, then caput. I loved this watch.

I’m sure there are more broken items littering our home, waiting to be sent to their maker with a vitriolic letter from me. I’ve got to get these out of here. They’re wrecking the feng shui, and I’m going to get an ulcer from all this internal bile. More links to come when I finish complaining about these shoddy products online.

What Do They Put in There?

Stonyfield yogurt
crack for the younger set, in
cup, bottle or quart.

Spring

Sunshine gives, and takes
You banish suicide skies
Yet highlight all the dust.

I know, from experience and professional training, that unrealistic and vague goals are destined to fail. In defiance of this, I have decided 2007 will be the year I get my sh1t together.

Deluded? Probably. For purposes of this delusion, I define my sh1t as: disorganized finances; blowing and drifting piles of paper; teetering piles of magazines; unopened boxes from the last x? moves; bookshelves crammed with unread books purchased long ago; random stashes of junk throughout the house (why, yes, I do think I should keep these seven keychains, because I never know when I might need this exact one.)

I have to stop there. I’m just depressing myself.

In preparation for this unrealistic and amorphous goal, I’ve done a little acronyming. The 2007 goal is hereby named CMP. Take your pick what it stands for: Crap Management/Minimizing Program, or Clear the Crap, Manage the Money and Purge the Paper.

See, all those years spent in corporate America weren’t for nought. Now if only I could get a budget for snacks and authorization to conscript a team:

Drake, Guppy, it’s time to clean house. Put your toys away! Pick up those crayons! Get that train out of your mouth! If you do, we’ll have a post-mortem meeting with Cheddar Bunnies, Veggie Booty, and juice.

I’m writing in our basement, where the temp hovers in the mid-fifties. I have on a coat, scarf, warm socks, slippers. I put on gloves when the cold impairs my typing; I take them off when their bulk does same. Why type in the cold basement? The light is bright, even augmented by a few windows. There are fewer distractions. And it is two floors down from the napping boys, so I am less likely to wake them if I move around.

Sadly, Drake is having one of his ever-more common non-napping days, and baby Guppy did not get the memo that afternoon naps should last over an hour. Since I believe strongly in 2-hour naps, we’re having some conflict. It would seem I’m cold down here for nothing.

The past several years I’ve skipped New Year’s Resolutions. Instead, I’ve jotted down a few wishes for change in my journal, then forget about them. Lo and behold, when I check back at the end of the year, they’re usually under way.

Goal setting was a big part of my last job. I learned that vague goals are almost certain to fail, and that whenever possible it helps to have a quantifiable or concrete goal.

This year, though, I feel the urge to steel my resolve. What’s more, I intend to do it vaguely. In short, this is the year I want to get organized and clear out the junk.

I still have boxes of paper from each of the last three moves. I have two more piles, one for each child. I have magazines that are years old. Over the years, I’ve done a decent job at cleaning out wardrobe, books, comics and CDs. The paper, though, continues to accumulate.

I have some specific strategies to accomplish the great paper purge. I’ve called to cancel one catalog. Each time I receive one, I’ll call to cancel. I will re-register my name on the junk-mail removal list. I’ll try to let magazine subscriptions lapse. I won’t sign up for more. I will only buy magazines when I travel, or on special occasions. I will not borrow them from doctors’ offices anymore. I’m going to try to get all recurring bills and statements sent electronically.

I’m still going to have book, movie and writing goals. Those are important to me, and setting goals reminds me to prioritize them. But this year I’m setting an extra one of reducing the garbage in, after increasing the garbage out. It’s like a paper diet. I just hope this isn’t hubris.

Did you know if you kill a centipede, and some of the legs fall off from the body, they keep wriggling for a LONG time? This is especially creepy if there’s more than one pile of them. Drake was with me, so I had to be all “brave mommy killing the bug” but I was shuddering inside.

In the wake of turning off comments, yet still having to field spam and edit individual old posts that are attracting said spam, I wonder: to what level of hell would Dante consign the people who create and refine spam? I have no doubt they’d have plenty of company, what with junk-mail creators and telephone solicitors. I might want to reserve a special hell, though, for door-to-door solicitors. I put up a sign, and still the exempt groups brazenly come knocking. Perhaps I should change my sign from “No Solicitors” to “Just Go Away”.

People might get the wrong idea.

Then again, maybe they wouldn’t.

I strive to post five times a week, but this week I am feeling thwarted, though perhaps by my own hand. Yesterday we had a friend of Drake’s over for a playdate, while I attempted to do six loads of laundry, mop the kitchen floor, make some progress reading Jane Eyre, and resurrect–and more importantly, de-crustify–the high chair now that Guppy is on the verge of so-called solid foods. Unsurprisingly, I was unable to read or write online, especially since Guppy’s idea of when to wake from his nap differed greatly from mine.

One of the intake questions at the hospital where I gave birth was, “Are you under any stress at home, such as a remodeling project?”

Well, um, yeah, we had to admit. The day before I went into labor we’d had an electrician install a heater in our basement bathroom and expand our electric box, the day after labor we had a new washer and dryer delivered, and prior to the baby’s due date we’d hoped to have our old sink removed and a new one plus a dishwasher installed. Alas, Guppy had other plans, which put the sink plans on hold until yesterday.

The last of our out-of-town family visitors left on Sunday. Sink demolition began the day after. While we continue to put off starting whatever life will be as a family of four, we are very much looking forward to having a dishwasher.

#7 in my book challenge for the year was Bungalow Kitchens, since we’re on the verge of updating ours. After flipping through the book, I thought the photos were lovely but didn’t think I’d get much out of the book. The photos had a lot of period reproductions of older kitchens with vintage appliances. We plan to update our kitchen, not make it look like it’s original. Yet we don’t want to plonk a modern-looking kitchen in the midst of our 1917-looking house. Reading the book cover to cover, though, was well worth my time. I learned a lot about bungalows in general, and about design choices in particular. Specifically helpful was the organization of the book by detail, e.g. counters, and the inclusion of information on how to obsessively restore, countered by compromises for modern kitchens. It was also helpful to learn that if we take a restorative tack in our kitchen re-do, then there are lots of things we can rule out, e.g. recessed lighting, thereby limiting the vast number of choices we’d have to make if we were building a kitchen from scratch or renovating a kitchen in a more modern house.

#5 in my book challenge for this year is a practical read: The Not-So-Big House by Sarah Susanka. Not only does our family live in a NSB house, but with a second child on the way, a new sink in our immediate future, and a restored/renovated kitchen in our possible future, I thought it would be good to gather ideas. This is a beautiful book with lovely photography. It’s coffee-table size, though, makes for awkward reading in bed. It’s written much in the manner of a self-help book. Susanka introduces different concepts about how to live more authentically in smaller places, then reinforces her points both in the text and the photos. Unlike many self-help books, though, many of the ideas continue to resonate. One is that of an “away” room in the house–a place for quiet reading that is apart from the general traffic flow and noise of everyday life. Another is her suggestion that rooms be multi-functional. She gently denigrates the modern house staple of a formal dining room that is hardly ever used because of its singular function. Instead, she advocates the creation of a dining space that can be informal or formal depending on light and decor, or a dining space that does double duty in other ways. (Case in point: I am typing this entry on my laptop as I sit at our dining room table, which is also where our little family eats every night. Breakfast and lunch usually take place in the kitchen.) She also has an interesting suggestion for planning house changes when you have kids–ask them. Very often, they’ll have opinions, and you might save time and hassle by finding out what kind of space your kids want for their room or play space, instead of making something they will dislike and not use.

I heard about a $25 energy audit from a friend, then read it recommended in the Star Tribune. $25 is for a standard audit, and the energy company in Minneapolis will send an auditor to your home to go through your house and evaluate your heating use and potential ways to save money. They will also tell you how efficient or not certain fixes are. For example, replacing our boiler (original to our 1917 house) would take 15 to 20 years to pay for itself, thus it’s not a priority. Yet turning down the thermostat even one degree at night is an easy way to save money. The audit takes about an hour and a half, and the auditor (an independent contractor, not a direct employee of the energy company) leaves a detailed report and a goody bag of energy saving devices such as weather strip, clear caulk, plastic window covering, foam sealant and a low-flow shower head. (The latter item is all well and good for people who have an average amount of hair. I have rather a lot when I’m not pregnant and for the next few months even more; I’d never get out of the shower if I didn’t have decent water pressure for rinsing.) There’s about an eight-week wait for an audit because it’s a good deal and there’s high demand, but if you live in the Twin Cities, I found it very worthwhile, even though it made my already lengthy to-do list has grown even longer.

You start by shopping for new appliances. You end up calling an electrician to re-wire your house.

We shopped yesterday for a new washer/dryer. Simple, right? Look at Consumer Reports, visit recommended stores, choose, buy, wait for delivery.

BUT we have a gas dryer. And a gas dryer costs $50 more than an electric one. Plus, the city of Minneapolis is very strict about who can fiddle with gas lines, so stores will deliver but not connect in the city. Instead, we’d have to pay to have the current dryer disconnected, then have the new dryer delivered and the old one taken away, then pay again for someone to come and connect the dryer to code.

What a pain, we thought. Let’s just get electric. Until we looked at our electric box and realized a few things. We are at maximum capacity, and a ridiculous number of things seems to be on one breaker. So I’ve called an electrician about getting an upgrade.

That still leaves the question of gas versus electric dryer. As the energy guy noted today during the audit of our house, it doesn’t make financial or common sense to use fossil fuel to generate electricity to run an appliance that can be run on straight fossil fuel without the conversion. So–get electric and avoid the $50 cost plus the costs of de- and re-install? Or go with the “practical” choice? Also, can we get this done by the time Drake’s little brother arrives? Stay tuned. It’s an adventure.

The cold snuck up on me this year. I live in Minnesota, so you might think cold wouldn’t be surprising. Yet in the seven and a half years I’ve lived here, I haven’t found Minnesota to be the daunting tundra that so many believe it to be. Yeah, it gets a little colder for a little longer in winter, and it’s a little less hot in summer, but the climate is not much different from the other two places I lived the longest, Philadelphia and central Ohio, the latter of which had a MUCH worse winter last year than we did here. In fact, last year Minnesota had a very late first snowfall. So when the weather people began predicting snow this week, I thought, I’ll believe it when I see it. Sure enough, on Tuesday it was wet and cold, but the temp stayed in the mid-thirties F. and never dropped to freezing. Wednesday, though, was something else.

The change in weather wouldn’t have been a problem, except that I was unprepared for the last minute preparations to clear out our yard; today is the last collection day for yard waste by our trash service. My husband G. Grod, as is his habit, left all the leaves till last weekend. Unfortunately, he was only able to clean up the front yard, not the back and sides. Tuesday I went outside in the snizzle with Drake, who was miraculously open to playing in the yard while I hauled ten bundles of hydrangea stalks out to the trash, and raked the back yard. I put off bagging the leaves, though, and they sat out that night. The bad news is they got covered with a thin layer of ice and snow. The good news is that it formed a protective coating so my leaf piles didn’t blow away in the gales of wind.

By yesterday, it was below freezing (hovering just below 20 F during the day, with a wind chill of about 1. Yes, one.) and there was both snow and ice. I began my morning like a responsible home owner, by shovelling and sweeping my steps and walks. I followed this with a scattering of salt for the ice. Drake was not nearly so amenable to staying put while I did this as he’d been the day before (funny, how being fenced in can make watching him SO much easier), though, so imagine a pregnant woman running half a block down icy sidewalks after her toddler, several times, as punctuation to the shoveling/salting. Good times.

During Drake’s nap, I attended to my frozen leaf piles, and filled six bags by hand. I then turned my zeal on the hostas, and cut them back using a small hand clipper, which I don’t recommend. (Last year, G. Grod tried the weed whacker and it didn’t work, so if anyone has a recommended method/tool for cutting down hostas, I’d love to know for next year.) The hostas took up two more bags, and I decided to be done. Everything else will have to wait for a spring clean up.

Last year when we bought this house, the inspector told us we should have our chimney tuckpointed within a year. Tuckpointing, I learned, is replacing the mortar between the bricks of a chimney so it doesn’t collapse. Now it’s a year later, winter is coming, and I find there’s good reason I’ve put off this particular piece of maintenance.

First, it’s hard to find someone to do it. We have a two-story house with a high-pitched roof and three peaks, so it won’t be easy getting up there. I’ve asked four people. One said it was too high and he couldn’t do it. Another gave me an estimate of $1200 to $1400. A third waited two weeks to call me at 7:25 in the morning to tell me he was too busy. And the fourth I’m still waiting on an estimate from.

So it’s likely to be expensive, there’s not a lot of choice in who can do it, and finally, it’s not something we’re going to notice or appreciate if we do, only suffer for if we don’t. I shouldn’t complain. I was the one who wanted to buy the old house, as my husband G. Grod often reminds me. But it’s still aggravating.

Did anyone else besides me in the Twin Cities have J. Geils’ song running through their head last night? In one of those rare instances, the weather people were not being alarmist, and it was indeed a severe thunderstorm. Power was out for 8 hours, we got water on both front and back porches and our attic window broke, but nothing was serious. Drake was not at all scared. He was thrilled when we let him hold the big Maglite flashlight. He’d turn it on and off. When off, he’d look out the window at the lightning, then cry, “Flashing! Flashing!” Then we read him books by flashlight and put him to bed early, with nary a peep. He slept till almost 8 this morning. What a guy.

If you, like me, are lucky enough not to have any lasting property damage, then you may still be worried about the television you missed, notably the season premiere of Lost. I called KSTP, and they will be replaying Lost on Saturday October 8 from 7 to 8 locally. Also, Lost was to be followed by the series premier of Invasion. According to Tivo, ABC is scheduled to nationally re-run the pilot and the second episode of Invasion on Saturday October 1 starting at 7 p.m.

Drake turned two over the weekend, and we invited a few of his friends and their parents to our house to celebrate. The parents had a good time, the kids played well together, and Drake was still wound up the next day from all the fun. We ordered pizza and I made three kinds of cupcakes: yellow with chocolate ganache frosting, dark chocolate with cream-cheese frosting, and carrot with vanilla-bean cream-cheese frosting. For party favors, we went shopping at our favorite used bookstore and got a selection of Drake’s favorite picture books, by Kevin Henkes, Russell Hoban, and James Marshall, mostly. I was very stressed getting the house in order beforehand, but I love the aftermath of a party–everything is tidy and presentable.

Tomorrow is Drake’s second birthday, and we’re have a few friends of his over. I’ve been doing a little bit of cleaning every day. I tried to put off the kitchen floor as long as I could, but yesterday it reached a point of maximum disgustingness; I had to act. First, I scrubbed it by hand with a Dobie sponge using 2 teaspoons of Doctor Bronner’s Sal Suds to 5 gallons of hot water. Then I went over it with a mop and 1 1/2 cups of white vinegar to 5 gallons of cool water. I did every nook I could reach. That floor was as clean as it has been since we moved in. Yet it still looks dirty. The ancient, originally white tile looks grey and is stained. The corners have gunk in them that I could not scrub up. Like most other things in our kitchen (oven, sink, lack of dishwasher) I don’t love it, but replacing things piecemeal doesn’t make sense, because when (if? whimper) we do overhaul the whole, it would be a shame to have to re-do things. So for now, I do my best with what we’ve got. And I dream of a future kitchen, with a floor that doesn’t show dirt, even when it’s dirty.

Who on earth would be ringing our doorbell at 8:05 a.m. on a Sunday, we wondered. Yet no one was there. It occurred to my husband G. Grod that he had just turned on our laptop. The doorbell, which is radio controlled, rang several more times during the day, always in conjunction with some activity on the laptop. We have removed the batteries from the doorbell until we have a better solution. Better to disable the doorbell than the laptop, methinks.