finishing touches

Little bits and pieces of the house are starting to really look finished, like normal people live here who don't rip down walls and have dumpsters in the driveway for months on end.

Don's parents have been breathlessly awaiting the chance to give us The Plant, which has been residing in their dining room for several years. The Plant originally belonged to Don's older brother, who is in the Navy and away from home for long periods of time. After one such stint, he came home to see that The Plant had gotten rather dusty. Being a logical sort of fellow, he did what he did with most things that got dusty in his home: he vacuumed it. It didn't work out so well. Eventually he asked my mother-in-law if she could resuscitate it, and the somewhat worse for wear plant relocated to my in-laws' house.

When Don and I moved in together, into a small apartment with a friend of ours, we took The Plant. Don liked it, it seemed decorative and homey, and it looked lovely in our living room. Then we got a cat. The cat was convinced that The Plant was eminently scratchable, and we came home eventually to discover that a large percentage of its leaves had been turned into fringe. The cat stayed - even though she also ate a bamboo plant down to the roots and had many other misadventures, some chronicled right here in this blog - and The Plant went back to my mother-in-law, to nurse its wounds. In the seven years since, the cat has become a little more sedate (not much), but more importantly, The Plant has grown at least a foot, putting even its bottom leaves out of reach of certain members of this household. So it has finally moved to its new home:


Welcome home, Plant. Thanks for making our house feel a little more finished.

caught!

Sorry I haven't posted. We're in the dead of summer here - literally, as fifteen people have died this summer of heat-related causes in Baltimore - and it's hard to do anything but sit around appreciating the air conditioning. What little energy I have goes to work, as we are swamped and understaffed. Scheduling issues have meant that not a lot has gotten done on the house, anyway. But frankly, as long as the air conditioning keeps working, I don't really care.

because you need to know about her sleeping habits

The cat has finally deigned to sleep in the cat bed I bought her. After she ignored it for months, it had been tossed in a corner of an empty bedroom currently used as storage. Once I discovered she was actually sleeping in it, I moved it into our bedroom. She's very smug about it.

straight from the cameraphone

New stairs. (Cat installation priced separately.)

everybody likes the new subfloor

how the cat spent all day saturday

Apparently huddling nervously under the blanket avoiding the construction noise is much warmer than her usual practice of huddling nervously under the bed.

proof!

Ever since the plaster got cleaned out of the front porch ceiling, I've been hearing mysterious thundering from above while I work during the day in the office downstairs. Come to think of it, it sounds awfully like one small and yet mysteriously dense cat jumping back and forth on the the loose plywood pathway over to the construction side, where she is very definitely Not Allowed. But she's always sitting innocently on the bed when I go up to check on her, or she comes down to twine around my legs and look cute before I can get up there.

I'd given up catching her in the act, so to speak, until one day I heard her howling miserably like she does when she's gotten stuck somewhere. I grabbed the camera and went upstairs and lo! Finally, proof! One small Cat, being quite Bad.


And yes, she was howling because she'd gone over there to sit and had somehow immediately forgotten how to get back. Even though she'd been running back and forth for a week. I did not rescue her. She howled for about fifteen minutes, then got up and figured it out as soon as she heard me in the kitchen downstairs, preparing food that she was convinced might be for her, despite years of evidence otherwise.

a belated anecdote

So, that plaster area over the top of the front porch? Inaccessible by any means other than joist-walking? Guess who made her way over there back while I was in Washington because it looked like a great place to nap and then got stuck, couldn't figure out how to get back over to the "safe" side, and howled her heart out until Don took pity on her and managed to get across the joists to rescue her?


Yeah. And then the ungrateful little monster made a panicked leap for the bare wall you see in the picture when he was halfway back across the joists with her, nearly knocking him down into the living room below, and then got stuck THERE until he finally managed to pry her loose and get her onto firm footing.

For once, she seems to have learned from a negative experience -- we haven't caught her over there since, no matter how tempting a nap-place it must seem.

She also managed to crawl into the underside of one of the upstairs bay windows while I was gone -- Don called me in a panic at three in the morning because she was howling and he couldn't reach in there to get her out. Three phone calls and some cussing later, I told him to open a can of tuna and stick it next to the hole she'd crawled through and ignore her. Lo and behold, one free cat (with some help -- once she got close enough he was able to grab her and help her out, as the drop was honestly too high for her to jump back up). We've blocked up those holes. And imagine, since I got back to pay attention to her at all hours of the day we've had only the normal kitty craziness. Spoiled!

i'm back and my clothes are clean

Count Don among the multitudes offended that I haven't been posting here. "Why haven't you AP'ed?" he asked me in an aggrieved tone a few days ago. He knows the answer very well, of course: this happened, sending me winging off to Washington for two weeks, and then this was released, causing much household excitement, and of course this is coming up, meaning I've got a lot of stuff to do. "You could do it yourself, you know," I said. "You know the passwords."

He rolled his eyes. "I don't want to blog," he said. "I want to be blogged about."

Well then. In the interest of maintaining his Internet celebrity status, allow me to give you the big, huge, incredibly exciting update:


We have a washer and dryer. And they work! When I got back from Washington, Don met me at the airport with flowers, took me out to dinner, and then whisked me out the next morning for a full day of shopping with no complaining on his part (I know, he's awesome). In addition to ogling jewelry and watches we would never buy, trying on strange clothing items, and buying some long-awaited new shoes for him, we also managed to (finally!) agree on and purchase a washer and dryer. Don and his dad had actually finished with all of the necessary plumbing before I left, although I didn't expect him to be willing to buy anything yet. But lo, Sears was having a sale, and they had the models I wanted, and there we were. So, rather than spending three hundred dollars each (!) on platforms to raise the machines up to the level we liked, Don spent the week before the delivery building a serviceable platform that cost nothing, as we had all the appropriate lumber around from working on the floors. We will eventually replace it with something sleek and fabulous (and maybe with storage) when we re-do the mudroom, but for now it -- and the temporary plywood floor, and the bare walls -- will do.

We've decided to open the mudroom up and make it part of the kitchen, giving us better flow and a little more space. This means that mudroom renovations, for now, went just to the point of getting the laundry facilities in place and functional, and all the rest will wait until we undertake the big kitchen renovation. The machines were delivered last weekend, and I've spent the last week washing anything and everything made of fabric in the house, up to and including the cat.

Okay, maybe not the cat.

nothing to report

Family emergencies (on his side), work overload (on my side) and a bad cold (both of us) prevented anything getting done on the house this weekend. Figures. Scheduling is once again up in the air; we know what we'll be doing next but we just need to find the time to do it.

In the meantime, I'll be lying here in bed with a box of tissues and a vat of cough syrup, watching the cat ignore me because the new bay windows? With squirrels outside? SO much more fun than being petted or snuggled. Or so I've heard.

and then this happened

Every contractor should have one of these in his tool bag.

someone in this house has pinkeye

household duties

The cat likes to help me fold the laundry.

no one here but us sleepy kitties

I have no updates for you. The upstairs bathroom is not yet demolished, the attic is still full of trash, the stairs are covered in plaster, and we haven't heard back from HVAC guy (surprise!).

Also, Don has the flu, and I have three proposals and an office move to deal with. So all I can give you right now is this picture of a sleepy kitty:


Enjoy.

all she knows is now i annoy her even more

The cat is not nearly as impressed with my new macro filters as I am.

a hint of what's to come

Well, since SOMEBODY who lives in my house doesn't check their email and didn't get my note to take some pictures of the upstairs yesterday before it got dark (hint: it's not the cat), I have no pictures for you of the end result of Saturday's work.

Here's a little taste of what demolition looks like, though -- I took this one while Don was destroying the plaster that remained above the stairwell window so that he could install the pulley for the dumpster chute.



And now I'm going to go sign the cat up for her own email address. She might need it for her fanmail.

why we can't leave the sock drawer open

studio helper

I was trying to take some bead photos to list some stuff on our Etsy shop the other day, but I had a little unexpected help.


Also, I need a macro filter like whoa.

on her way to a hip kitty nightclub

No paparazzi, please.

office space

new office
Originally uploaded by jamailac

The last thing Don did this weekend before he left for his business trip was to move our office downstairs. He even took the ceiling light/fan from the upstairs back bedroom that had been serving as the temporary office and wired it into a temporary setup to give us some overhead light! He really struggled to get it all done before he left on Sunday, and I really, really appreciate it.

This photo's kind of dark, so you may want to click through to see the larger version on Flickr -- I've put some notes in there to identify everything, if you like that sort of thing.

I'm really excited to finally have some usable surface space in the house. You can see that the Anapurna stuff is currently strewn all over the two tables on the right that we set up for exactly that purpose; I'm going to try to organize it a bit so that those tables can be used as crafting space, leaving the extra table in between our desks available for us to use for more office-y purposes (right now it holds the printer, my week's to-do list, and a test setup for some photography that I was trying out, having dug my tripod out finally). And for the cat to walk on, of course. She's already indulged herself in that privilege several times since I put the table up.