Some Truly Random Topics
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Some Truly Random Topics

It is a gorgeous fall day. I am meeting two friends this morning for a walk and am too excited to come up with a “real” post idea, so here are some random questions you didn’t ask that I am going to answer. (Some of them I found online.) Please answer them yourself should you feel moved to do so.

If a song played every time you entered a room, which song would you choose? The first song that comes to mind is Suzie Q by Creedence Clearwater Revival. What a classic. Still slaps. But probably I would prefer Susanne by Weezer. Both because I do not go by Suzie Q, and because I adore Weezer. The only problem with the Weezer song is that the first time I heard it was while watching Mallrats, and Susanne is an orangutan.

What’s your most useless skill?  Knot untangling. Despite being impatient about nearly everything, I have a high tolerance for picking away at an impossible knot. A tangled necklace chain, a snarled cat toy, a quadruple knotted shoelace: I am pretty confident I can return it to its original state.

What’s in your mental (or online, or actual) shopping cart at the moment?

“Thank you very much Miss Lippy!”

What movie quote/s is/are constantly at the tip of your tongue?

  • “A Schooner is a sailboat, stupidhead.”
  • “O’Doyle rules!” (And pretty much every other quote from Billy Madison.)
  • “A watch doesn’t go with this outfit, Daddy!”

What is the worst thing you’ve ever worn? When I was a youth, I took a dance class that culminated in an annual recital. We wore sequined costumes and performed elaborate routines to pop songs, mainly, for unknown reasons, those by Michael Jackson. The worst thing I’ve ever worn was one of those costumes. It was a full-piece onesie made of fire engine red Spandex. My mullet-adjacent haircut did not help matters.

From whom are your 5 most recent (non-spam) missed calls?

  • The house painter.
  • The house painting company.
  • The roofing company.
  • The roofing company.
  • The mom of one of Carla’s friends.

 

Now it’s your turn:

  • If a song played every time you entered a room, which song would you choose?
  • What’s your most useless skill?
  • What’s in your mental (or online, or actual) shopping cart at the moment?
  • What movie quote/s is/are constantly at the tip of your tongue?
  • What is the worst thing you’ve ever worn?
  • From whom are your 5 most recent (non-spam) missed calls?
Five for Friday
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Five for Friday

Right out of the gate I am going to admit that I have been An Utter Failure at participating in Elisabeth’s walking challenge. I have gone for… three walks so far this month. And I have no excuse! The weather has been peak fall perfection, I have had pockets of time during which I could EASILY slip in a 10-15 minute walk, I am in good health and all my limbs are operational.

Well. Today is a new day. I have an opportunity to change my ways.

ROOF REPAIR WEARINESS

Our roof has undergone a total replacement this week. The contractor originally thought it would take two days; it took four. I worried that the constant but irregular thumps and bangs and slams would stress out the cat, so I spent most of the week in the house with him, so we could endure the constant irregular thumps and bangs and slams together.

In addition to the noise, I felt the same kind of on-edge-iness I always feel when people are working in or on my home. Yes, the roofing team was outside, but also they were RIGHT THERE. It was weird to eat lunch at the kitchen table because they were right outside. It was weird to go for a walk because I had to thread my way under and around their scaffolding and materials. It was weird to leave to take Carla to school or for an appointment because it was weird to leave behind a passel of strangers.

I never know how to deal with people working on my house. (I am soothed to know I’m not the only one who feels this way.) I said hello and thanked them for being there. On the second day (what I thought was the LAST day), I brought the crew donuts. But then I felt weird about not bringing them treats on the subsequent days. Was I supposed to be outside, observing them? Asking for reports and updates?

The guy who was overseeing everything – which is a different guy from the foreperson, because he had to call the foreperson a couple of times – didn’t really seem to be overseeing anything. I didn’t see him, for instance. And he assured me that something had been done that clearly had not, and had to call the foreperson to ascertain that I was right. The big storm that caused all the damage to our house caused widespread damage. I know that the roofing people are overwhelmed and have hundreds of clients just like me. I know they are being pulled in multiple directions at once. I still feel a little like no one was steering the ship.

Even though the roofing team tried to keep things tidy, there was trash everywhere. EVERYWHERE. Scraps of roof tiles in the shrubbery. A plastic water bottle on the pool cover. Shreds of plastic flung all over the lawn. Flowers trampled beneath ladder legs and canvas tarps.

By the end of each day, my head felt full and I was snappy and impatient with my family. Unfortunately, this is not the end of the work. The vinyl siding will be replaced next, and then the wooden parts of our house will be painted, and I have no idea how anyone survives any sort of renovation, especially if it requires having people INSIDE YOUR HOUSE. This is all to say, I am pretty sure the entire process stressed me out more than it did the cat.

Anyway: it is blissfully quiet this morning, and we have a new roof, for which I am very grateful.

THE POOL STILL HAS A LEAK

This is the Champagnest of problems, and yet it is rapidly becoming a massive pain in my ass. I have contacted the leak people; they said they could come out. They never give me a specific day when they will come out. They want the pool clean, full, and 85 degrees when they show up. I am spending unknown quantities of money and resources keeping the pool full and heated. With the roof repair, they couldn’t have done the work had they wanted to. Not that they called me back after saying, yes, they could repair the leak this week! My regular pool maintenance guy keeps warning me how important it is to address the leak before winter, lest the water freeze and cause much more damage. It does not appear that there is an alternative leak company for me to use.

I rescued this frog from the pool, even though he may have not needed rescuing. He has, presumably, nothing to do with the leak.

GARAGE DOORS

This is not about how we also are replacing our garage doors, it is about the doors to our kitchen storage garages! In response to my recent post, Carolyn asked, “Does it have a door that goes up and down like a standard garage door?” Yes, kind of! The doors come out and then up. Here is the front of the garage I recently tidied (don’t worry, Lenny is not inside).

And here is the front of our other garage, this one an appliance garage.

I do love how these garages allow me to use what amounts to regular counter space – convenient, counter height, no need to lift or carry – without resorting to the counter clutter I resist with all my heart.

I did TRY to take these photos in a way that looked normal, but I am incapable of photographing anything straight-on.

ANOTHER KIND OF CLEANING PROJECT

I drink Earl Grey tea every morning in the cool months. (I drink iced chai in the summers.) While I have many, many mugs, I typically opt for one of three enormous mugs my husband and child got me for Christmas back in 2018. Over the years, the ceramic has become deeply discolored by the tea.


The stain doesn’t bother me too much, but I left my empty mug next to the sink last weekend and my husband was aghast at the state of the mug. He informed me that he had used one of the tablets he uses to clean his stainless steel coffee mug on my mug, which I thought was probably not going to work on the ceramic. Sweet of him to try, though.

BUT IT DID WORK.

No idea what these weird shadows are. That’s what I get for taking photos in the early morning hours.

CAT NAPPING

My cat is an excellent napper. That is all.

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Satisfying Project: Device Garage

Our kitchen has a lot of pleasing features, but right up near the top are the two appliance garages. One of them holds our toaster, air fryer, and seldom-used Ninja Creami. The other has been serving as a junk repository for the past three years.

Until now.

I’d originally designated “clean the appliance garage” as a chore Carla could take on to make extra money. However, Carla lacks both the time and the motivation to tackle such a task, and it continued to irritate me on a daily basis. So I tackled it.

I started by getting rid of: random boxes no longer holding their original contents, old school papers, old receipts, expired coupons, broken crayons, and an empty tape roll.

Then I relocated: an old laptop, several cords with no discernible purpose, recipes, sparkly ribbon, the handle to the ice roller I use for my feet, and a mini humidifier I no longer use.

It took an hour, maybe two.

And now look at the garage!!!

It still holds an assortment of useful things: rubber bands, permanent markers, a variety of tapes, a box cutter, notepads, tape measures, the remaining pair of scissors from what I swear was originally a three pack, coupons, a giant bottle of Purell with which my husband and I refill our smaller car bottles of Purell, spiral cat toys, our Bug Guy.

It also still retains some echoes of its previous contents, storing what I might call “valuable junk”: business cards I will possibly only review the next time I tidy this cupboard, a box FULL of pencils, a baggie full of the things that one sometimes finds and cannot identify, a timer I use maybe three times a year, and some wooden dividers that belong to our flatware drawer but have no place in the current configuration of said drawer.

The purpose of this particular appliance garage, beyond providing room and board to the aforementioned household detritus, is to serve as a home for my child’s laptop, iPad, and Switch. Aside from Very Specific Exceptions, I do not allow her to use those devices in her room, and I expect them to live in the garage when they are not expressly in use.

Right now, they sit in a little heap. This works just fine, but I kind of want them to have their own storage space. Partly because I like things to Look Organized, and partly because I have a vague unfounded worry that it isn’t good for their longevity, to sit on top of one another all the time.

If you search for “device storage,” you will find things like this. And this is FINE. But I want something that orients the devices horizontally rather than vertically. Why? Nobody knows. I just do.

Such a thing is surprisingly difficult to find. It dawned on me that I don’t need something specific for devices; we already have a way to plug each device in, and there are only three of them, so I can’t imagine the cords getting terribly tangled. I realized that what I was envisioning was really one of those filing stands that people put on their desks to sort ingoing and outgoing mail.

Less difficult to find, but surprisingly expensive.

This one is okay, but it seems overly expensive for what it is. I also sort of worry that it might tip forward with the weight of the laptop?

This one is cheap, but it’s also quite boring, and its sturdiness is questionable. I suppose a device shelf that lives inside a cupboard doesn’t have to be nice looking.

In terms of utilitarian sturdiness, this one gets high marks, but it is definitely too expensive for what it is.

I like this one, and I don’t think it would tip over at all. But it’s a little bulky for something that will live inside a cupboard.

Suffice it to say, I have not purchased any sort of device holder. YET.

Sometimes I charge Lenny’s robot ball (which is technically part of this toy) in the garage, which gives him extra justification for checking things out.

Some questions for you:

  • Do you have a storage garage in your house? If so, what does it store?
  • Where do you/your family members keep devices when they aren’t in use?
  • How long until this tidy space devolves into squalor once more?