new house

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Saturday Superlatives

Once again, I am awarding superlatives for the week.

Biggest Success: My husband and I designed and ordered our holiday cards!!!! Holiday cards are my favorite thing about December, but I am rarely thinking too much about them this early. This year, cards feel extra urgent because we just moved. And I have not had it together enough to send out change-of-address cards, so the plan is to send out holiday greetings that also alert people to our new address. We did not take any new photos. My husband took complete ownership of this year’s card, and found photos and card options for us to choose from, put the card to together, found a coupon code, wrote the copy on the back, and placed the order. I had some input, but it was really his thing from start to finish. Is it exactly what I would have made? No. But it’s good enough and it was extremely pleasant to have him take over a task that is usually my purview, and which I usually have to beg and wheedle and prod him to focus on. We (he) ordered our cards Sunday and they arrived Thursday! Some very well-organized people on my recipient list send out their cards immediately after Thanksgiving, so we have to get these babies in the mail! My plan is to get them out the week of Thanksgiving. I already mailed two, including one to the person whose card arrives earliest every year. 

Most Delicious Thing I Made: My parents came over for dinner one night, so I experimented on them. I made cider braised pot roast with crispy sage butter potatoes and, of course, my favorite fall salad. First of all, this meal is SUPER EASY and yet it tastes like it took hours to prepare. I mean, it does take hours, but the oven is doing the work, not you. I was a little worried that it would be too sweet, but it wasn’t, it was meaty and perfect. The onions turn into jam and the potatoes – while I could have crisped them up a bit more – were delicious. I don’t even LIKE sage, and I loved the potatoes. I highly recommend this as a tasty, super easy, prep-in-advance dinner to prepare for company. Also, my husband RAVED about it. He is always very nice about the food I make, but I can’t remember him being so enthusiastic as he was about this dish.  

Most Panic-Inducing Realization: At some point this week I realized that Thanksgiving is TWO WEEKS AWAY. Family will be arriving at my house in eleven days. This is… too soon. We still have boxes EVERYWHERE. There is no lightbulb in the guest room lamp. I have not yet located the guest towels. My daughter’s bathroom (which she will be sharing with my niece and sister-in-law) has no towel rack. We have A TON OF WORK to do in the next eleven days, and that doesn’t even include all the normal Thanksgiving prep! At least Past Me had the foresight to order a turkey. Whole Foods offered a pre-brined version this year, which removes an onerous step from my prep list. 

Best and Most Comforting Decision: I made another batch of pumpkin bread. I was a little worried that the first batch was good through the magic of Beginner’s Luck, but no. It is just delicious, delicious bread. 

Longest-Time-Coming Completion of a Task: I would have counted this as my biggest accomplishment of the week, but I’m not because the whole thing is so dumb. I have been trying to end my relationship with a financial institution for TWO YEARS, and, in fact, thought that I had finally done so last winter. So imagine my surprise when I got a statement recently that listed assets the financial institution supposedly was still managing (no) and charged us a $30 maintenance fee (ARGH). But! I think we have finally finally cut ties with this institution. Unfortunately we are not getting our maintenance fee back, but it is money well spent if I never have to talk to the plan administrator (who never administrated ANYTHING) ever again.

Current Most Perplexing Home Maintenance Issue: While the new house is flush with perplexing things (why does the laundry room smoke alarm, which is wired into the house’s electrical system, chirp constantly and why is there no way to turn it off?), my husband and I have encountered a new one this week. We are trying to hang things like artwork and the aforementioned towel bar, but twice now our efforts have been thwarted. My husband will begin to drill into a wall, and will hit something. He thinks it is somehow our ductwork, because it sounds and feels like flexible metal. HOW did the previous owners hang things? There was a towel bar in my daughter’s bathroom, for instance; the painters removed it to paint, and then when they reinstalled it, found that the screws were stripped. So we asked them to simply remove it, patch the wall, and then we would install a new towel bar. (To make this boring story even more boring and also longer, the existing towel bar was very small, and there is no linen closet near my daughter’s room, so we wanted a double towel bar on which to hang multiple towels.) So there WAS a towel bar there, and my husband is trying to install the new towel bar in virtually the same place… how did they make it work?! So weird. 

Any superlatives you need to award this week?

I am kinda sorta attempting to complete NaBloPoMo, with the full expectation that life will make it impossible any day now. If you want to follow along, or join the fun, check out San’s blog here. 

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Five for Friday

It’s Friday! We are chugging right along through November. Here are five things I’m thinking about today. 

  1. Falling Back: Changing the clocks has messed me up. I hate it so much. I mean, I guess I don’t mind driving to school in the daylight again. But give it a few weeks and we’ll be back to driving in the darkness. In the meantime, I am going to bed at a NEW normal time and waking up at the OLD normal time, which means I am getting less sleep than I was before. Plus I am still waking up each morning at three or four, full of existential dread. GOOD TIMES. My poor kid is so far on the exact same page. Why could she not have inherited her father’s ability to sleep anytime, anywhere? We are both wandering around, exhausted and cranky. She keeps draping herself over furniture and moaning about how tiiiiiiirrrrred she is. I cannot stop yawning. People keep talking about how maybe this will be the last year of Daylight Savings Time! And I keep thinking, yeah, sure, whatever. But I also think it’s kind of amazing that we all collectively (except Arizona and Hawaii, I think?) agreed to just move everything back or forth an hour twice a year. That’s BONKERS. I feel like there’s no agreement on ANYTHING AT ALL, and yet we all do this???? No thank you. I would like to abstain. 
  2. Flu Shot: I finally got my flu shot. I was at the pharmacy and thought to ask if they administer flu shots; this is a newish-to-me pharmacy, and I’d always gotten my flu shot at Walgreens. We no longer live within walking distance of a Walgreens, so I’ve been putting off the flu shot until I had a reason to be near one. Anyway, I realize this is a very long and circuitous way to the point that yes, the current pharmacy DOES offer flu shots. The pharmacist came around the counter which was the first difference between it and Walgreens; there, you wait until the pharmacist calls you back, and you go into a little room with a door. This pharmacist was a cheery woman who seemed impossibly young. She was much friendlier than the old pharmacist, whose entire body seemed weighted down with regret and drudgery. And then she gave me the shot right there in the middle of the pharmacy! There was another client, sitting behind me, while I stood at the checkout counter. It was a tiny bit alarming. She was very sweet, but then asked me what I did for work. I told her I work from home and she gasped and said, “Well why are you even getting a flu shot?!” That threw me, I’ll admit. My answer in the moment was that I have a young child, but also… shouldn’t everyone get a flu shot? You can get the flu at the grocery store. She then chatted with me for a few minutes about having kids (she has a baby). It was a very pleasant interaction but also kind of weird. 
  3. Flannel Time: We have reached the flannel sheets portion of the year. I don’t normally love flannel sheets, because I sleep hot. But our regular sheets are feeling a little chilly lately. I’m a little apprehensive though because our house heats very unevenly. The house will get colder and colder until you’re shivering even under the covers – I have been wearing sweatpants and a sweatshirt to bed, when I much prefer a T-shirt – and then the furnace will decide it’s time to take action and it will WHOOSH to life and churn out an intense fog of heat so that you’re kicking off the covers and stripping off layers – and then it will turn off, exhausted by its efforts, and the cycle begins again. Will flannel sheets be pleasant or unbearable? Time will tell.
  4. Forwarding: We continue to receive mail for the previous owners. It’s not quite at the level it was – at first, we got boxes and season tickets to sports games and multiple cases of wine in addition to catalogs and letters and paychecks and things. But we still get some mail. We have been here since September 1. Is it time to start writing “return to sender” on the mail we receive? Obviously the nice thing to do is to keep holding the mail for the previous owners, and texting them occasionally, and asking them what they’d like us to do with it. (They always come to pick it up, and have ignored my suggestion that we could drop it at their new house.) I keep thinking about how mortified I was to learn, from the people who bought our old house, that they’d been receiving mail for us. My husband had been so diligent about setting up mail forwarding and systematically going through all of our bills and regular mailings to make sure our address was changed. And yet some things slipped past the gate. I also keep thinking about how, at our old house, we continued to get mail for the previous owners even though we’d lived there for twelve years. Not a lot of mail, but one or two pieces a year even at the end. Is mail forwarding really that tough? Are we all really that unclear about ALL the places that have our address?
  5. Fear of Friendliness: I saw one of our new neighbors outside and said hello and asked if she worked from home. When she said she was home most days, I said I was too and would she want to get a coffee sometime? She said sure. But now that I’ve made the overture, I don’t know what to do! Do I… have her over for coffee? I don’t actually know how to make coffee (although my husband could probably teach me). And if she comes for coffee, do I need to offer food as well? What do people eat? Do I live on this planet because I don’t feel like it. Do I suggest going for a walk? What if we have nothing to talk about? What’s a normal thing for people to do when they are trying to get to know other people? While I really, truly would love to get to know my new neighbors, I am kind of berating myself for suggesting anything. I know it wasn’t, like, set in stone or anything, and we could probably just never follow up. But… I want to follow up. Even if I also vehemently do NOT want to follow up. 

That’s it for today, Internet. What are you thinking about on this fall Friday?

I am kinda sorta attempting to complete NaBloPoMo, with the full expectation that life will make it impossible any day now. If you want to follow along, or join the fun, check out San’s blog here. 

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Weigh In Wednesday: Order in the Office

This is probably a better topic for the book blog, but since a) this is the first day of November, and if I am going to set myself up for the best chance of completing NaBloPoMo (which I am still on the fence about! day by day, folks!) (go check out San’s blog to see who is participating this year) I should probably post on this, the first day of the Mo for which I would be BloPoing, and b) this is both a Book Topic and a General Life Topic, as it concerns the state of my home, and c) I have already been neglecting the book blog for so very long, why not continue in the same vein, I am going to discuss it here, instead.

(You: Get to the point.) (And also use shorter sentences going forward.)

We just moved in to a new house. Me, my husband, my daughter, and our eight million books. 

In the old house, we had five bookcases, plus one in Carla’s room, plus three half-size bookcases. We organize our books into rough categories and then alphabetize the books in each category by author. 

Sob! My old office. The third bookcase is behind the door to the right.

Carla’s books are easy; they will live in her room. 

My new office, while demonstrably larger than my old office, still only holds three bookcases. (This is one of the perplexing non-problem “problems” of the new house; we have much more space but far less wall space.) Probably we could squeeze another one in there… or maybe even two additional narrow, glass-fronted bookshelves. 

We have a big, empty wall between the piano room and the living room, and the plan is to install some additional bookshelves there, as well. Maybe something like this.

We have moved the other three existing bookcases – two are black and one is brown – into the basement. Our nonfiction collection will largely live there. My office shelves and the wall unit and maybe the built-in shelves in the living room will hold our fiction collection and all my poetry books. I would also like my writing books (the non-fiction that won’t live in the basement) to live in my office. 

Some non fiction.

I have a small “tree” bookshelf in my bedroom that holds Books I (Think I) Want to Read Imminently. 

Strangely grainy photo of my old bedroom, with the tree bookshelf in action.

So we’ve figured out our rough categories and where each category will live… now all we have to do is alphabetize them and put them on the shelves. (Well, except that some of the shelves don’t yet exist.)

Except we’ve run into a quandary. 

We’ve squeezed all three of my bookshelves together into one unit. Should we treat each shelf as a separate bookcase, and alphabetize that way, so that Bookcase 1 might have authors A-C, and Bookcase 2 might have authors D-F and Bookcase 3 might have authors G-K? 

Or do we alphabetize across all three, as though they are one giant bookcase? 

This is a very fun problem to contemplate. Except that I already started shelving the books according to option 1, and am loathe to redo the work. 

Why is the lamp in the middle of the room? No idea whatsoever. Also, if you have any suggestions for new light fixtures I AM ALL EARS.

What would you do? And how do you organize the books in your house? 

Also, apropos of nothing (except that it is tangentially topical), do you think I need this customizable vase shaped like a book? I really think I need it. Maybe you need it too.

I am kinda sorta attempting to complete NaBloPoMo, with the full expectation that life will make it impossible any day now. If you want to follow along, or join, check out San’s blog here.