life with cat

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?
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Mountain Time

I have just returned from the loveliest two-week trip: a drive through the Canadian Rockies with my husband, bracketed on either end by precious time with my parents in their mountain home. I feel a little jet-lagged, water-logged, flooded with the joy of a truly pleasurable vacation.

Let’s not bury the lede: I got to meet Nicole, in person. She is, unsurprisingly, gorgeous and warm and generous and kind. She and her husband showed us the most delightful time. We drank really good wine. We ate a dinner of quinoa, roasted veggies, and lentils that I am still thinking about, plus a kale salad with the best Caesar dressing, followed by a luscious lemony cake topped by homegrown raspberries. I got to meet REX, and give him pets and tell him to his face that he is the softest, handsomest boy. I got to chat with Nicole’s son, who is one of the most charming, attentive, interesting young people I’ve had the pleasure of meeting, and he allowed me to hug him even though I am apparently of the age where I refer to twenty-somethings as “young people.” I got to ogle Nicole’s garden, and admire her prolific zucchini plants (she gave me three monstrous zucchini to take home; they were delicious). I did not take nearly enough pictures, or spend nearly enough time with Nicole. Our husbands are, obviously, fantastic, and I think next time we will allow them space to do their own thing so Nicole and I can cover all the extremely important topics we didn’t get to during our much-too-short time together.

An extremely distinguished gentleman.

Driving through British Columbia and Alberta with my husband was magical. Spending time together, just the two of us: It feels both simplistic and true to say that I enjoy his company. We travel well together. He’s a thoughtful and careful planner, and I like to think I’m an agreeable and supportive companion.

We listened to a podcast recommended by Engie, DNFed one audiobook and got a good chunk of the way through another. We giggled over Canada’s road signage (it seemed to us that things like “no services 110 km” would be more helpful before we’d passed the last town for 110 km) and wished that all US highways would follow Canada’s lead with the number of passing lanes they include. We stared in awe at the landscape and pulled over many, many times to try to capture the jaw-dropping beauty of the mountains and turquoise lakes with our phones. We ate tons of delicious food (my favorite, next to Nicole’s home cooking, was a meal of birria tacos in Banff) and did lots of sightseeing.

We visited multiple local bookstores, and my husband encouraged me to buy some souvenirs. (I also bought a really excellent book for a friend and had the author sign it.)

We encountered a lot of wildfire smoke. Sometimes it obscured almost everything.

Sometimes it leant an ethereal magic to our views.

Sometimes it disappeared at just the right moment for us to experience the pristine splendor of the landscape.

We didn’t see any wildlife at all, beyond a few birds and mammals that we can see in our own backyard, thank you very much.

Speaking of wildlife, we did admire our cat, via the cat cam. He spent a lot of time sitting glumly on the counter, waiting for someone (me?) to come tell him to get off. He also spent one morning exploring my mother-in-law’s set up for making hot fudge. He went so far as to get in the pot, which is horrifying and hilarious in equal measure. (Don’t worry: we did let her know that her hot fudge vessel had been contaminated before she started cooking.) I love that he looks directly at the cat cam. He knows (I fully believe) that he’s doing something we would not approve of, and he knows that we know what he’s doing, and he wants us to know that he knows we know, and he’s doing it anyway.

We had a wonderful time together, and loved the parts of Canada we saw. I hope someday soon we can explore other provinces… and perhaps visit Allison and Elisabeth in their corners of their stunning country.

Even though it’s a place I visit regularly (although nowhere near often enough), my parents’ mountain home is no less stunning or special.

Spending time with my parents feels both mundane and precious. We do things we’ve been doing for decades – walk the same mile-long forest loop, brave the black cold of the same lake, sit on the deck listening to hundred-year-old aspen gossip in the breeze – while knowing there will be a last time for each of these experiences.

Being among the mountains makes me feel small and insignificant and acutely aware of the vastness of time and the ephemeral nature of our lives.

I’m an introspective kind of gal, as you are well aware, and I spent a lot of this trip thinking about time. The mountains wrap me in a paradoxical kind of time warp, where I feel both the speed of time passing by and a simultaneous timelessness.

My parents are aging, I cannot deny that. In fact, several of our conversations this trip centered around estate planning, on things my husband and I need to know when their mountain home becomes ours. My daughter is now a teenager, nearly my height, about to begin eighth grade. My husband and I are solidly, undeniably middle-aged.

And yet: everything is the same as it’s always been.  

Even though the individual aspen that make up the skyline around my parents’ house have been around for a mere century, their underground root systems are thousands of years old. The peaks I admire as my dad guides our thirty-year-old boat around the lake were thrust into being fifty million years ago. Glaciers and water and tectonic shifts have sculpted the mountains and valleys into their current form over the intervening millennia. It is astonishing to me that I can admire the artistry of forces so enormous I can hardly conceptualize them, that I am alive for this eyeblink of a moment, that I can choose to spend my time with the people I love most while surrounded by such extraordinary beauty.

I am bobbing, breathless, in the same lake I’ve been swimming in since I was a little girl, the same lake my father visited as a boy, and his father before him. My daughter, shrieking, leaping into the bracing deep beside me, simultaneously thirteen and five and two and ages I have yet to experience. Around us, a crenellation of stately serene peaks that have stood sentry over each of us in turn, in a valley that was once itself a massive inland sea.