Revivalized

Coinky-dink? I don't think so.

2007-08-15T12:27:00.001-04:00

Since posting my beloved kitchen design, I've run across two very similar examples.

1) Ina Garten's Hamptons Kitchen

2) A kitchen from Real Simple's article "The Well-Organized Kitchen" (looked much better in the magazine)

I have this visceral reaction to them. First, I love the green - it's our favorite color. We have painted three rooms and counting different shades of green in our house. Second, the white cabinets look so clean and retro. Last, I am really fond of open/glass-faced shelving for its dramatic qualities.

But...

here's the big but...

there are also parts of them I decidedly do NOT like. In general, I'm immune to the whole dark-as-possible, must look like stone counter craze. I think in 10 years black counters are going to scream dated, just like avocado appliances and shag carpets do now. I don't feel as strongly against stainless steel appliances, but I'm not drinking the kool-aid on them either. It just seems so disgustingly goosestepping-to-the-trends yuppie. We're cheap, we bought a white refrigerator, and as scary as it seems (since we're - you know - slobs), we'll probably be buying other white appliances too.

Soooooo...I don't know what to think. My guess is that the look is a whole, and taking out some elements would diminish it. But maybe not. Maybe I can pick and choose what I like.

Love This Quote

2007-08-15T10:50:00.000-04:00

From Truman Capote, The Grass Harp (found via an old issue of Real Simple magazine that I picked up from a recycling area):

"If you sweep a house, and tend its fires and fill its stove, and there is love in you all the years you are doing this, then you and that house are married, that house is yours."

I love what it says about both housekeeping and marriage.

Eureka

2007-08-14T14:20:00.000-04:00

I found the link! Here's the source for my dream kitchen. While you're there, you could also find a lot of inspiration at the Smallest, Coolest Kitchen contest.

(Hint: Have you figured out what project we're contemplating?)

Kitchen P*rn

2007-08-14T13:50:00.000-04:00

I stopped reading Brownstoner's blog when the original owners finished their renovation and announced they would be involving the general public in the interior design. Fine for them - but I like me the interior design! But I've just ventured back there today, and hoowee is it a lively community now? Lots of different bloggers are chronicling their brownstone renos, and best of all, there's lots of drool-worthy kitchens going on there:

http://www.brownstoner.com/brownstoner/archives/renovation/

Plenty of inspiration and discussion there. But let me show you the kitchen I am in love with:

It was submitted as a part of one of Apartment Therapy's contests. I just love it. Even though it's nothing like what I ever pictured wanting a kitchen of mine to be.

Two Items

2007-08-09T14:25:00.000-04:00

Today, I discovered Backpack, which looks like it could be very useful AND fun for house renovation projects.

Also, I was directed to Debi Warner's Renovation Psychology website by the New York Times.

Cool stuff!

Good Advice

2007-08-08T10:40:00.000-04:00

From Not Martha about lessons learned in real esate. Go and add your own in the comments.

Long Time No Blog

2007-08-03T15:54:00.000-04:00

While we may have been radio silent for most of the past year, some progress has been made around the house. Probably the biggest project was upstairs, where we took the extraordinarily dark hallway and made it much much brighter:

Its amazing how much nicer the place felt after a clean coat of paint, especially one that was took the room from "Plum Peacock" to "Vanilla Brandy".

While I was in the middle of painting, I spontaneously decided to also get rid of the neon lime green that was on the walls in the laundry room -- luckily there was not much fear that K. would object to that decision, as she in general seems to shy away from the neon wall colors. That room is also much nicer now -- at least on the walls. The floor and other aspects of it could still use quite a bit of work:

Why did we decide to do this project when we did? Well, we knew we wanted to paint the hallway, but it was never that huge a priority. But it was something that I knew I could tackle in a weekend and a couple of evenings. And, more importantly, it was the first domino to fall that enabled us to start a chain reaction of house projects...but those will have to wait until another post.

Reminiscing

2007-08-02T12:21:00.000-04:00

I recently watched the movie, Bridge to Terabithia, and it has awakened memories of my favorite books as a child. Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson was one of them, the others were:

Tuck Everlasting by Nathalie Babbit
The Westing Game by Ellen Raskin
Several by Zilpha Keatley Snyder: The Headless Cupid, The Egypt Game, The Velvet Room. (If you don't know ZKS, you can learn more here. She was a local writer where I grew up, and she even visited our school when I was in the fifth grade.)

When I started thinking about this last week, I realized that they all have something in common: elements of the supernatural or magical. Which makes sense. I still love the magical and supernatural. But I've also realized a second theme running through them: the love and care of old houses.

In Terabithia, Chapter Seven - The Golden Room includes a wonderful bit about house restoration:

First they ripped out the boards that covered the ancient fireplace, coming upon the rusty bricks like prospectors upon the mother lode. Next they got the old wallpaper off the living- room wall-all five garish layers of it. Sometimes as they lovingly patched and painted, they listened to Bill's records or sang, Leslie and less teaching Bill some of Miss Edmunds' songs and Bill teaching them some he knew. At other times they would talk. less listened wonderingly as Bill explained things that were going on in the world. If Momma could hear him, she'd swear he was another Walter Cronkite instead of some hippie." All the Burkes were smart. Not smart, maybe, about finding things or growing things, but smart in a way Jess had never known real live people to he. Like one day while they were working, Judy came down and read out loud to them, mostly poetry and some of it in Italian which, of course, less couldn't understand, but he buried his head in the rich sound of the words and let himself be wrapped warmly around in the feel of the Burkes' brilliance.

They painted the living room gold. Leslie and Jess had wanted blue, but Bill held out for gold, which turned out to be so beautiful that they were glad they had given in. The sun would slant in from the west in the late afternoon until the room was brimful of light.

Finally Bill rented a sander from Millsburg Plaza, and they took off the black floor paint down to the wide oak boards and refinished them.

"No rugs," Bill said.

"No," agreed Judy. "It would be like putting a veil on the Mona Lisa."

When Bill and the children had finished razor-blading the last bits of paint off the windows and washed the panes, they called Judy down from her upstairs study to come and see. The four of them sat down on the floor and gazed around. It was gorgeous.

Leslie gave a deep satisfied sigh. "I love this room," she said. "Don't you feel the golden enchantment of it? It is worthy to be" - Jess looked up in sudden alarm - "in a palace."

The Old Westerley Place is a main character in Headless Cupid:

Right out in front of the landing and at almost the same level was the hall chandelier, and beyond that the fan-shaped colored glass window above the front door. When the sun was low, it shone through the glass and was spattered by crystals of the chandelier into hundreds of shivering spots of red and green and gold. The front door was wide and thick and set in a carved frame of shiny dark wood. To the right and left, doors led into the living room and parlor and dining room, and if you leaned against the bannisters, you could also see th ekitchen door, farther down the hall.

The staircase itself was one of the best parts of the house. It was not very wide, but it was made of the same dark shiny wood, and the bannisters were elaborately carved. The fanciest posts were at both eends of each flight. They were carved to resemble a thick vine, twirling up to a huge wooden ball, and on each side fat wooden cupids reached up to touch the ball with chubby fingers. David's father said the bannister was very unusual and in good condidtion considering its age. There were only a few places where the wood was chipped or cracking, and there was one cupid, there on the landing, who had a missing head.

The Westing Game is All About Real Estate. The characters all live in Sunset Towers:

Sunset Towers faced east and had no towers. This glittery, glassy apartment house stood alone on the Lake Michigan shore five stories high. Five empty stories high.

It is the apartment you've always dreamed of, at a rent you can afford, in the newest, most luxurious building on Lake Michigan:

# Picture windows in every room
# Uniformed doorman, maid service
# Central air conditioning, hi-speed elevator
# Exclusive neighborhood, near excellent schools
# Etc., etc.

You have to see it to believe it. But these unbelievably elegant apartments will be shown by appointment only.

The building is built next to Old Westing House, an empty mansion once occupied by the famous founder of Westing Paper Products and subject of the mysterious game.

Growing up in San Francisco with a mother who was a sucker for an old decrepit house, it's not a surprise that this was an interest to me. But it's always so fascinating (to someone who changes as much as I do) to find these roots of my current day interests back in the little girl I once was.

Musings on House Value

2007-08-02T09:27:00.000-04:00

Today's New York Times article, What’s My House Worth? And Now? by Michelle Slatalla, reminded me of how strange it is to not know what our house is worth. I generally stick with the selling price in my mind, because that feels safest. The Professor thinks that the work we did increased the value, but the market is stalling where we are. We have a quite a few friends who are wanting to buy, but not willing to pay the prices that sellers are asking for. So properties are staying on the market for a while. It must be outsiders (like we were) buying them.

When we got here from the Big City, prices looked low to us. I mean, we winced at paying hundreds of thousands of dollars, justifying it to ourselves that it would seem like nothing when we are 60, but in return we got a huge house with wood trim and pocket doors and high ceilings. And we're happy. Our mortgage payments are high but doable on two professional salaries, though paying extra each month feels like pouring drops in a black hole for all the effect it has.

The house feels more and more like it's ours. At first, it seemed so foreign and filled with Grandpa's stuff. But painting helped. And filling it with our furniture. Putting art on the walls was a HUGE help (thanks, D., you rule!). And just living there for a while, having it become a part of our daily life.

It is like a marriage. Where once I had an yearning emptiness, now I feel fulfilled. Like the house has satisfied a deep need of mine. I grew up moving every few years and never felt settled. My parents don't live in any of those houses/apartments any more. There's something so profound about the sense of belonging someWHERE, in the same way that belonging to someONE is. It's been two years now (I know! Incredible, isn't it?), and I've accepted the house, imperfections and all, as a part of my life and a part of me.

It must be that feeling about the house that makes it so hard to evaluate worth. Just like when you're happy in a job, you're not thinking about salary, but as soon as you start feeling dissatisfied, you focus all of your unhappiness on how little you are being paid. I hope Casa Revivalized has retained its value, I hope that nothing we did has lowered the value, I hope that the market doesn't crash. But I really have no idea.

And it doesn't actually matter.

Because we're not selling. I see lots of lovely homes, especially along my 30-mile drive to work every day. And a little of that lust comes back, but it passes too. I'm so happy with our house, our life, our friends who are just a few blocks away that it's just not that tempting.

By the way, I did check, and none of those sites could estimate our current house value. I think it's because the technology is younger than two years. And some didn't even cover our rural area. But I did see what some friends of ours paid, which made me feel a bit better.

Reading Houses

2007-08-01T15:25:00.002-04:00

I've also checked out this book from our local library: House Thinking: A Room-by-Room Look at How We Live by Winifred Gallagher. So I'll give you a run-down of that, after I finish it.

S*x and Real Estate

2007-08-01T11:48:00.000-04:00

So you have to understand - back when I was an itty-bitty college gal, I lived and died by Marjorie Garber's brilliant analysis of gender. So to find that she's written a scholarly book about real estate is very exciting! I couldn't find it in the library today, but I did find this summary:

Sex and real estate: why we love houses
Garber, Marjorie B.

Summary: Sex and Real Estate is a witty, informative, and thought-provoking study of our complex relation to the ideas and actualities of house and home. With vast erudition lightly carried, Marjorie Garber - professor of English and director of the Humanities Center at Harvard University - ranges through literature, art, film, journalism, criticism, and the hard evidence of everyday experience, and gives us an acute analysis of the ways in which we think about the places we hang our hats. She discusses the House as Beloved ("Your house is the other person in your life," declares an architectural designer.), as Mother ("The house, we would like to think, loves us."), as Body ("both an ancient figure and a persistent desire"). She writes about the Dream House, the Trophy House ("We could call the purchasers of celebrity homes 'house-groupies.'"), the House as History, and the Summer House ("When you're seventeen, you dream of a summer romance. When you're forty-seven, you dream of a summer home."). Each chapter is a superb, individually constructed essay. Taken together, they add up to an enlightening and challenging exploration of one of the most familiar - but also most emotionally charged - elements of our lives.

Reviews: Anyone who has looked, even casually, at what are called "shelter" magazines, or who has engaged in the exhausting process of buying or selling property, will have been struck by the peculiarly erotic quality of the language used to describe the houses we live in or seek to own. Perhaps prompted by her own foray into real estate, Garber, author of Symptoms of Culture and Dog Love, among many other books, applies her richly stocked scholarly imagination to a consideration of the cultural role of the house. In a series of witty essays on the "House as Mother," as "Beloved," as "Body," as "Trophy" and the like, Garber segues smoothly in the course of a page or two from Freud and Jung to Chaucer, Shakespeare and popular film, effectively elaborating her contention that the house is not just something on which we lavish our erotic or emotional attention in lieu of a more appropriate object, but is also "a primary object of affection and desire." As a professor of English at Harvard and director of its Humanity Center, Garber is an established academic. While dazzling, her erudition is not intimidating; this book is bound to prompt lively after dinner discussion and perhaps a little abashed self-recognition in the nation's suburban great rooms and downtown lofts. (Credit: Cahners Business Information, Inc. Appeared in: Reed Elsevier Inc.)

Despite the title, this book is much more entertaining and witty than frivolous. Garber (English, Harvard Univ.) has published books on the psychological aspects of cross dressing, "symptoms" of culture, and dog love. Her new book has an easy writing style, appealing to the academic researcher, the student, and the browser. She advises in the introduction that her "chapters explore the cultural role of the house as mother, lover, body or self, fantasy, trophy, history and escape." Whether the book is cataloged as a study of architecture, house and home, sexual fantasy, or the home in popular culture, there is something of interest to a wide audience. (Credit: Mary Hamel-Schwulst, Towson Univ., MD Appeared in: Reed Elsevier Inc.)

Harvard University professor Garber has placed her latest book precisely on the desirable property line between academic and popular literature. Her theme draws parallels between romance and real estate. After all, Garber writes, we dream of certain houses. We "cruise" a house before making a proposal. We may yearn to possess a house anxiously, for weeks, before acquiring it and living with it; eventually, we leave it, hoping for something better. Garber's chapters meditate on different aspects of the home: the home as beloved, as a status symbol, as a reflection of our relationship to our history (what's that butter churn doing in your living room, anyway?). Drawing on diverse cultural references, Garber reviews the history of houses in society, their architectural styles, the various uses of rooms and furnishings, and the always-booming "nest" magazine industry (today's "yuppie pornography"). For professional realtors hoping to glimpse into the windows of their clients' psyches and for any reader who shares Garber's romantic attachment to houses, this book is sure to be a very hot property, indeed. (Credit: James Klise Appeared in: Syndetics Solutions, Inc.)

Despite its title, this is a serious and literate book in which the author addresses why and how we love houses. The romance of real estate and architectural seduction impinge in wondrous ways on our lives. Even a reader who has lived all of her or his life in the same house will find emotional reference and behavioral relevance, if not opportunity for domestic self-reflection, in this cultural study. Indeed, the author asserts that our relationships with our houses and their spaces are as fulfilling, and perhaps more self-conscious, than are our relationships with lovers. Full of literary references as well as factual anecdotes, the book covers cabins to castles; dream houses, trophy houses, and summer houses; and topics ranging from the house as body, as beloved, and as mother, to the house as history. The book is enjoyable and accessible to all educated readers and should provoke interesting academic discussion. Credit: Syndetics Solutions, Inc.)

Table of Contents
Introduction: Sex and Real Estate 3
1 The House as Beloved 25
2 The House as Mother 48
3 The House as Body 71
4 The Dream House 100
5 The Trophy House 120
6 The House as History 150
7 The Summer House 181
Epilogue: Why We Love Houses 205
Notes 209
Index 231

How cool does that look? Now I just have to find it!

The Itch

2007-07-30T11:12:00.000-04:00

After a long hiatus, during which Revivalization seemed inconceivable given our busy jobs, social life, and volunteer commitments, I think we're starting to get the itch again.

In the July 26 New York Times article Someone’s Watching Your House, I read:

Marjorie Garber, a professor of English and visual and environmental studies at Harvard, goes further in “Sex and Real Estate: Why We Love Houses” (Anchor Books, 2000). “In our present-day culture,” she writes, “the house often plays the role of lover, partner, significant other — the dream date and the dream mate, the one who will realize our desires and give a purpose to our plans and days.”

I'm so excited about this book and can't wait to read it. Because it really builds on my own thinking about the experience of house ownership, which I detailed in my post about the romance of real estate. So I couldn't wait to share the link with you, and hopefully soon my thoughts on the book.

In the meantime, we'll be posting some projects we worked on during the hiatus, plus I'm going to update the house tour photoset (it's woefully inaccurate), and I'll start laying out some of our future plans (hint: they involve the kitchen!).

The After

2006-10-09T10:04:00.000-04:00

It took them less than a week, despite some less-than-perfect weather, and now our house is all freshly painted:

As you see, for the porch floor we decided to go for a red instead of the grey it used to be or some equally innocuous color. The idea was that it would stand out a bit while still matching the red bricks of the structure. I have to admit that we have somewhat mixed feelings about the result. I like the color a lot by itself, but it does reflect quite a bit of redness onto the whole porch that I am a bit unsure of. But my guess is that it will grow on me. And I sure do love the green fishscales.

All in all I think the house looks a lot better, and I'm very happy that we got it painted both for appearances and for preservation reasons. I'm especially happy because we live in the historic district intown so the borough was willing to give us a grant to do some of the work and a loan to pay for some more of it, all of which means that despite my cheapskate tendencies I am only freaking out a little about th elarge checks we have written this week.

Windows Update

2006-10-06T09:47:00.000-04:00

No, I'm not asking you to download anything.

I just thought that I should thank you all for your helpful advice and let you know that the window problem was solved. And, as expected, despite the large number of hours that the Head Painter and K. and I all put into trying to solve the problem, it took the carpenter that the painter brought in approximately six minutes to solve the issue. Basically, he just removed the whole storm window frame from the outside (including the storm windows) , and then we were able to access the top window (which you may recall had fallen down) and push it up to the top where he nailed it in to keep it from sliding back down. It then took a few seconds with a paint scraper to loosen the paint on the lower window and now it opens and closes as if nothing happened.

Hoorah.

Getting Better All The Time

2006-10-06T07:58:00.000-04:00

I don't have much to say, unless you want to hear about how my students did on their linera algebra exam, but the painting is progressing on pace and I thought I would share with you some more pictures of the progress made by the end of day four:

Heck, even the stairs are starting to look better, though there is still some work to be done:

The painters said that they were going to finish today, but its raining pretty hard outside so my guess is that the project will extend into the weekend. But it will all be done soon.

Two Midnights Gone

2006-10-03T19:37:00.000-04:00

We haven't solved the window problem yet, but the painters have now finished two solid days of work on the house. And today I chose to work from home (file under: Joys Of Being An Academic) so I could chat with them a bit and watch them work and, yes, take some action-packed photos of the progress being made on the house:

While it is a lesson that I probably should have learned last year when we did all the painting on the interior of the house, I have to say that I am amazed at how much better things can look even after a single coat of fresh paint. Combine that with the warmer shade of white and a little bit of color and....wow! It seems like it will be a whole new house. And that is before they have even started working on some of the things that most desperately need the new paint job, like the porches and the stairs:

Zeno's Window

2006-10-03T11:10:00.000-04:00

The painters are hard at work on their scraping and painting, and pictures will be forthcoming. So far, we have hit two bumps in the road. The first is that they started to paint some of the trim the wrong shade of white (and yes, like the Box o' Vinegars, it feels way too grownup to be spending lots of energy differentiating shades of white) but luckily we caught this before it went too far and the painters were very gracious about re-doing that work.

The other problem seems like it may be harder to overcome. You see, we have this window in our dining room. And at some point shortly after we moved in we noticed there was a problem with this window and that the top part of the window got pushed down behind the bottom part. So far the only way that this has negatively impacted us is that on the top there was only a storm window between us and the outside which is not exactly the best insulation, but we dealt with this in a very ad hoc manner with many sheets of plastic, all of which were nicely hidden by our curtain. But now we need to remove the storm window for the painters. And we cannot do this because there are not one but two big pieces of glass between us and the little buttons we need to push to remove the storm window. And neither of these parts of the window move because (according to the painter) they are jammed in too tightly with the storm window and the screen. And even after removing some of the molding to try to access the window, we don't see a way to get it out. Oh, and did I mention that the ropes have all broken, too? Hmm.

Anyone know of any magic ways to remove windows?

The Before

2006-10-02T08:06:00.000-04:00

Between K's new job and me drowning in stacks of exams to grade, we have barely had a chance to think about working on the house, other than the bare minimum needed to take care of the garden (and sometimes not even that, as evidenced by the foot deep grass I mowed this morning). And that has meant that no work has gotten done which in turn means that we have had very little to share with y'all.

But that's about to change.

No, we aren't entering easier times at work. Nor are we quitting our jobs to devote more energy to our house, as tempting as that may be. No, we are contracting out some work. As astute readers may have noticed, the exterior of our house is in desperate need of a paint job. My completely untrained and unskilled eyes would estimate that it has been a decade since the trim and porches were last painted, and it definitely shows:

So this week some painters are coming in to scrape, paint, and spruce up the exterior of our friendly little abode. But before they could get started they needed all of the storm windows removed, so that is what we got to spend our Sunday afternoon doing:

I would like to buy you sunflowers...

2006-10-01T15:53:00.000-04:00

As mentioned previously, one of the most successful elements of our garden this year has to have been the sunflowers.

I have sunflowers in my backyard that shine like diamonds when you squint your eyes - David Garza

In fact, it is without an ounce of exaggeration that I can say that several of these flowers grew to be literally as big as my head, as demonstrated here:

But nothing lasts forever and the sunflowers have begun to die, and we decided it was time to decapitate them and cut down the flowers. At one point we had grand visions have harvesting the sunflower seeds and eating them, but it has quickly become apparent that we are not that patient, and unless we get a pet monkey that we can train to harvest and shuck the seeds, I think they will soon find themselves in the compost bin rather than allowing us to do our best Mulder impersonations.

We're ba-ack.

2006-09-03T19:29:00.000-04:00

It's been a long month since we last posted, with much news about the home renovations to report on, as evidenced by the following pictures:

OK, you caught us. Those are actually pictures from our two week vacation in the Yucatan, which was amazing and wonderful and which caused us to be very behind in our jobs and so we were working like maniacs to catch up and not be too far behind when classes started last week and we are finally taking a moment to breathe this weekend. But maybe sometime soon we'll get to work on the house again. In particular, I've been thinking that we should emulate ancient Mayan society more, in which all of the mathematicians lived in palaces like this:

Vikings In Our Kitchen

2006-08-08T11:02:00.000-04:00

You may have noticed that the "Painting First Floor" progress bar over on the right hand side of the page has been stuck at 80% since last October. That's because we have painted four of the five rooms downstairs, but we have not started work on the kitchen. This is part of a bigger issue, where we aren't really sure what we want to do to the kitchen, at least not until the day comes when we can afford a complete overhaul (and even then we aren't sure what we will do with the cabinets, although the pink stove is sure to go). Every once in awhile we start talking about when to paint it or redo the floors, and there is the perennial question of whether we can find a place to put a dishwasher in, but pretty quickly we get overwhelmed and move on to another project.

For the last year we have merely been looking for additional storage space for the kitchen, as even the new organizational systems haven't solved all of our problems, but we never found anything that was perfect. But last weekend we were going to be entertaining some of our dearest friends in the world who were visiting from out of town (with all apologies to the rest of you who are also our dearest friends, but you should come visit too!), and so we decided that we should no longer wait for perfection and we should just buy something that will work and that won't be too expensive. And so you all know what that means? A trip to IKEA.

And before you know it, we were the proud owners of a nice set of GORM shelves. (Because how could anyone resist a name like GORM? Say it with me: GORM. He was the king of the vikings, ya know) And our kitchen has some more space and a little more organization behind it. Someday the plan is to stain them a bluish color and to paint the walls yellow in a whole Mexican vibe, but now that the cookbooks and wine bottles (and potatoes) are all set up -- and we have these giant boxes with nothing to put in them -- I'm not sure we are in much of a hurry.

Gratuitous Malkmus Reference

2006-08-07T22:04:00.000-04:00

A couple of weeks ago I was working at home one day, as we academics are prone to do over the summer, and all of a sudden I heard a loud crashing noise coming from the alley next to our house. And then I heard a bunch of raking and started to smell a strange smell. So I went over to the window and looked outside to see that the friendly folks at the borough had decided to re-pave the alleyway:

It certainly needed doing, as there was a big hole in part of the alley and lots of plants growing out of the concrete that I was getting tired of weeding. But as they moved up the alleyway they started to do a worse and worse job, and t he weeds continued to grow through.

And then, about two thirds of the way up the alley they just stopped. In the words of the immortal philosopher Steve Sanders (while discussing his girlfriend Laura's request for him to hurt Brenda), our driveway doesn't go all the way to the street. Only I'm not speaking euphemistically.

For the next week or so I kept expecting the workmen to come back to finish the job, but they never have. And since its not technically our alleyway (even if we are the only people who use it) -- not to mention that they haven't really fixed up many of the other alleys in town -- I don't really have a leg to stand on if I complain to them. One of our friends has speculated that they must have had some leftover gravel from another project that they just dumped in our alley to get rid of it. And, you know, I'm starting to think they are right.

Oops!

2006-08-07T14:23:00.000-04:00

Don't forget the tomatillos - the common green and very striking purple.

Garden Report: 8/7/06

2006-08-07T12:09:00.000-04:00

This is what I like to see:

Dead Japanese Beetles. The chemicals I used kept them away for about two weeks, then I did another application. I hoping that will get us through the season - and that next year won't be such a bumper crop.

The sunflower is fascinating to watch. Its first day:
As the flower bloomed:
Turning to seed:

I planted two more sunflowers in the side garden:

One blossomed today:
We are also happy with the morning glories:
Though I sometimes worry that they are bent on taking over the garden.

The harvest is starting, with the first tomato:

A few French Breakfast radishes:

A nice tender zucchini:

Did I ever show you my "Mediterranean Herb Garden"? Here's what it looked like when I planted it two months ago:

And here it is now:

So that's all for now. We're off to hotter and humider climes for rest and exploration.

World Tour

2006-08-06T21:57:00.000-04:00

As long timed Revivalized readers may recall, when we first moved into the house last summer we set the bed up in what is now the living room, as the upstairs was still far from done, and the living room already had a window AC in it (it was July, after all). Several weeks later it was time to paint the living room but the upstairs floors still weren't ready so we set up the bed in what was to become the dining room for a week or so.

Then in mid-august we moved the bed upstairs, and while the precise location of the bed bounced around the room like a pinball -- and, for that matter, we upgraded from a dinky queen sized bed to a luscious king sized bed -- we spent the next eleven months sleeping in that single room. Well, except for one day between when the aforementioned heavenly pillow-top mattress showed up but before I finished building the bedframe when I napped in K's office.

And then came last week's heatwave. One of the downsides of the fact that we insisted on an old house is that we of course don't have central air, and for a variety of reasons we can't really put even a window unit in our bedroom. But we do have one in the guest bedroom, and when last week's heatwave settled in we promptly moved back to the guest room, a room that we have blogged very little about in part because I go months at a time without setting foot in it. But last week I made an exception, and we spent the night in relative comfort.

But trading in a large cloud-like bed for a medium sized decent bed was just the first step in a slippery slope, as the next night the heatwave got even worse, and when we went up to turn on the air conditioner an hour before bedtime the room measured 95 degrees. We then realized that we had a stronger AC in the den which had already cooled the room quite a bit while we were catching up on DVR'ed Rescue Me episodes. More importantly, we had an air mattress that would fit in the den just perfectly, and very quickly it was inflated and we added the den to the list of rooms we had spent the night in.

So after thirteen months in our house we have now slept in every room except the bathrooms, the kitchen, the laundry room, the basement, the attic, and my office. My guess is we won't be adding to that list any time soon, but you never know.

Bam! Kapow!

2006-08-02T12:35:00.000-04:00

Last night we escaped the ridiculous heat by going over to a friend's house for dinner and board games. When we got home, I headed straight to the refrigerator to pour myself some nice cold water, and K. came into the den to check her email. But then she let out a blood-curdling scream of "oh my god! oh my god!" which to me could only mean one thing: that she had stumbled across a corpse in the den.

It turns out that I have been reading too many Lawrence Block novels, as there was no corpse. And while there was a visitor in our home, it wasn't even human. It was a bat.

Yes, there was a bat flying in circles around our living room. And then into our dining room. And then through all the other rooms in the house. We have no idea how it got in the house, but it was very freaky to watch it fly around in circles everywhere, wondering if it was going to break anything or just scare us everytime it came right at our heads.

This is when a good blogger would have rushed to get the camera and take pictures to show you, but, much like criminals, we are a cowardly and superstitious lot and we wanted to get the bat out of the house as quickly as possible. (Besides, K. worried that the flash would blind the bat.) So we slowly lured it from room to room until it opted to fly into the basement. Once it got down there I closed all the doors except the one to the outside, and I left it alone down there. A little while later I went back down to the basement with a broom in hand ready to shoo it out forcefully, and the bat appeared to be gone. Now, maybe it was just hiding somewhere and for all I know it is still down there, lying in wait until it again pounces. But I looked around quite a bit, and until it hurts the homebrew I'll take my chances.

This never would have happened in Metropolis.

Pride and Pests

2006-07-19T21:16:00.000-04:00

I'm so proud of our garden.

The tomatillos are really tall, with puffy little balloons that are filling out. There are cute little tomatoes and even the melon plant is starting to branch out.

After all the garlic was pulled, I transplanted a zucchini plant (which I hope will survive the move) and planted a whole bunch of new seeds (fava beans, tomatoes, zucchini, fennel, cavolo nero).

The sunflower is incredible. See for yourself!

It's 10 feet tall!

All this garden happiness is, sadly, becoming clouded. By a HUGE swarm of thousands of japanese beetles.

Eating, fornicating, and defecating. It's seriously creepy.

Right now, they're devouring the bee ivy, but they've started moving on to the rose and grape. I really want to kill them, just to minimize the ooky factor. D. wants to kill them because he's sick of me saying "Why won't the birds eat the bugs?" But above all I want to protect my precious vegetables, herbs, and butterfly bush.

What can I do?

93 Heads

2006-07-19T10:13:00.000-04:00

Let me ride on the wall of garlic one more time
Let me ride on the wall of garlic one more time
You can waste your time on the other rides
But this is the nearest to being alive
Let me take my chances on the wall of garlic

(with apologies to Richard Thompson -- and Nanci Griffith and REM, for that matter)

Two Car Garage

2006-07-18T16:51:00.000-04:00

Tis the season for anniversaries of a variety of kinds, both personal and house related. And I didn't even have a chance to post about the first anniversary of us actually moving to Smallville, which coincidentally coincided with the [mumblemumble]th anniversary of K's birth last week.

But this past weekend also marked the one year anniversary of when we became car owners after three long years, as we bought our Toyota Sienna -- also known affectionately as "the Lexus of minivans" or simply "The Pod". And it has served us very well over the last year, but now that K. has to C-O-M-M-U-T-E to her J-O-B, we decided that we needed a second car, and so a year to the day from when we bought the minivan, we spent a long day car shopping before finally purchasing a 2000 Honda Civic EX Coupe:

It may not be a hybrid but it gets significantly better gas mileage than the pod -- or so all the reviews say -- and the price was definitely right for us. And now I can run errands or go to the doctor while K. is at work (or, in the case of this sweltering heat, wimp out and drive to my office, but don't tell Al Gore) and even though this is not something I do often, it will be very convenient. Now we just need to get her an MP3 player so she can listen to something on the part of her commute that is in an NPR Dead Zone and we'll be all set.

Yes, in just about a year we have gone from urban hipsters (or some very rough approximation thereof) who believed in public transportation above all else to small-towners who have two cars in their garage. Sigh.

Inch By Inch

2006-07-11T10:31:00.000-04:00

There are some house projects that you do because you are excited about them and there are some you do because you know you will appreciate it later and then there are others you do because some aspect of your life is driving you bonkers and you need to figure out a way to deal with it. The organization of the kitchen falls into the latter category here at Casa De Revivalized, and while we have spent the last year looking off and on to no avail for the perfect cabinet or shelving unit to put in the kitchen to help us out. But out cabinets were overflowing and we needed some system, so we recently hit the Target and got a number of baskets and sliding drawers to install that will hopefully make things a lot nicer (and also gave K. an excuse to break out the label-maker, which is always a good day)

Another aspect of the house that we haven't been so good about has been curtains. We have bought a few sets for a couple rooms, but for the most part we have just been making do either with the ugly curtains that came with the house or with some of the many options that K. had in her many boxes of textiles (he says, grudgingly admitting that there is some upside to having a wife who collects and hordes textiles of any kind).

Last fall, when I was redoing my library/office I knew that we needed curtains for the bay windows. And while the white wispy curtains that had been in the room weren't ugly they weren't really what I was looking for in my office. We had seen some beige curtains that I liked over the winter at Bed Bath and BeaArthur, but had put off buying them for a variety of reasons (mostly financial).

So imagine my delight and surprise when K. bought them for me and installed them as a present to celebrate her first day of work!

I think they add a nice color, and the thickness will be much appreciated when it gets cooler come winter even if they feel pretty heavy for this time of year. Also, they are a wonderful microsuede that is so soft and fuzzy that I can't help but getting up from my desk every few minutes to go rub them.

Oh, and yes you did read that right. K. now has a real J-O-B. I'll leave it to her to tell y'all more of the details (or not), but the important detail is that she decided to buy me a present for her first day of work. I'm still not sure I understand that logic, but I'm not gonna complain.

Of Grass and Gas

2006-07-09T12:34:00.000-04:00

In my first year as a homeowner, I have discovered one of the ironies of academic life which I never noticed when I was an apartment-dweller. All through the academic year I thought to myself about how much more time I would have over the summer to do work on the house and spend time doing the projects that I was postponing. And then summer arrives, and first I am totally burned out and by the time that goes away I am so far behind on my to do list that I don't know where to start with research let alone house projects. But that's not the irony. The irony is that any extra time I do have to spend on the house is immediately sucked up by the extra work that taking care of a yard requires over the summer.

Now, we have a yard the size of a postage stamp. And a significant portion of that postage stamp is taken up by our various garden beds. But there is still lawn that needs to be mowed and weeds that grow all over the place.

When we moved here from Metropolis, we of course needed to buy a lawnmower. And despite the great sales pitch that one of our friends has given us to buy a robot lawnmower like the one that he has (which does everything except bring you drinks or let you check your email, and they are working on those features for the 2007 edition), we went to the opposite end of the technological spectrum and bought a push mower:

That's right: no electric power, no gas power, no riding seat. Just me and my own two legs (or K, but somehow the task of mowing the lawn almost always falls to me). We went this route not because it was cheaper (although it was) or because it was more environmental (we had yet to see an inconvenient truth at that point) but because last summer when we had borrowed a gas mower it was more work to get its bulk to and from the garage than it was to actually mow the lawn. And this mower is much lighter and easier to carry.

In addition to grass that grows really fast, we of course have a ridiculous number of weeds. And after the angry letter we got last summer from the borough we aren't taking any chances. Which means we let our weeds grow until they start to seem like we might get another angry letter (which coincidentally is also the same time when they start being hard to pull out and need to be trimmed or whacked with more serious machinery) and then we chop them down. And this is how I spent my morning today, which means that I am very sweaty and our compost pile now has an extra three foot pile of weeds on top of it.

Catch Up and Catsup

2006-07-07T11:49:00.000-04:00

The astute Revivalized reader may have noticed something interesting about that last post that we hadn't had time to tell you about yet. In particular, you may notice from the background of the photos that the 'four seasons room' -- that behemoth of a vinyl sided addition that the previous owners built onto the house at some point that we want desperately to destroy -- is no longer filled with boxes. Yes, eleven months after moving into this house we finally finished unpacking everything. Where by "unpacking" I mean "either unpack or move to the basement or to the attic." And while the four-seasons room worked very well as a staging area for the unpacking, it is also nice to suddenly have yet another extra room that we don't know what to do with:

The motivation to clean this room out was the impending visit of K's sister and our nephews, and the need for a space that the five year old and ten year old could run around without crashing into anything important. And this space worked very well for this purpose, and has added another area for us to sit and read and the like. Oh, and for me to continue experimenting with homebrewing, which is going quite well thankyouverymuch.

Also for their visit we finished readying the arbor/shed area that we had been working on -- and then played a lot of "find the rusty nails on the ground" with the boys, a game that they enjoyed far more than our lawyers recommended -- and it is no longer just an area for trash and windchimes. We now have a grilling station all set up, and while we haven't used it as much as we had planned this summer, hopefully that will change as the more grillable vegetables (as opposed to Bok Choy and Swiss Chard) start coming in.

Vampire Avoidance Redux

2006-07-04T09:48:00.000-04:00

Aside from that one so-sugary-it-gave-me-cavities-to-write-it post, we haven't been writing much here lately. But that's because we've been really busy. K's sister and our nephews were in town for a week, which involved spending several days getting the house in-law-ready and several more days of recovery after the five year old left the premises. And then there was college world series, which didn't end the way I wanted it to but had The Owls stick around long enough that I spent lots of time in front of the teevee. And then I went out west for a week to do some research with a collaborator. So it has been a busy few weeks without much time to keep up with the blogs I read, let alone post here.

However, I returned home a couple days back to find that the garden had gone crazy with all of the rain that the eastern half of the country got in my absence. The sunflower was taller than I was and the mint was threatening to take over all of Smallville:

But most importantly, the garlic was ready to harvest. Yes, the long wait since we first planted the garlic last November was drawin to a close, and many of the leaves had turned brown so it was time to start digging and see how the bulbs had done over the course of the year.

And the results: they seemed to turn out quite nicely. Some of them are smaller than we would have liked, but we aren't sure if that is because of something we did -- plant them too close together? not get them fancy enough soil? -- or if its just the varietals we chose. You may recall that we planted about a half dozen different kinds of garlic, and since several off these are kinds you can't find in many stores we don't really know what size they are supposed to be. But in any event we washed the dirt off and cleaned them up and now we have to wait a little bit longer for them to dry out and then it will be time for some good eatin'.

Now, if you are like most of our friends you are looking at that garlic and saying "my lord, how will you ever eat that much garlic before next year's harvest comes in?" But that's not what we say. We look at that pile and say "that should last us a month. maybe two. and then we'll have to break in to the other half that we haven't harvested yet":

Did I mention that we eat a lot of garlic?

Anniversary

2006-06-23T09:41:00.000-04:00

Five years ago today, K. and I got married.

Like most couples I know, we agreed ahead of time that we were not going to exchange gifts on our wedding day -- I mean, other than the rings and the wedding itself and the large number of gifts that other people gave us and, oh yeah, a legal and spiritual commitment of half of everything we owned or ever will own until the end of time -- and, like most couples, we did in fact exchange gifts. K. gave me a very nice watch inscribes with something mushy, and I gave her a set of windchimes.

OK, that sounds bad. But they were nice windchimes. And K. had often discussed her fantasies of having a house with a yard and a front porch where we could sit and listen to windchimes. Of course, little were we to know that the vagaries of the academic job market would have us spend the first four years of our marriage living in big city apartments without a porch or even a yard so those very lovely windchimes stayed in a box in a closet somewhere (meanwhile, I got to wear the watch every day, although interestingly the lack of windows in one of said apartments made the solar-powered aspect of the watch a little difficult to deal with).

But now we have a house. And a yard. And, after several long weeks of work, a very lovely grapevine-covered arbor to hang them in:

It may have taken us five years to have an appropriate place to hang them, but they've been a wonderful five years. And I hope we have many more of them together. Happy anniversary, honey.

Revivalized Mailbag

2006-06-05T10:04:00.000-04:00

Letters. We get letters. We get lots and lots of letters. Let-ters.

A loyal reader writes in to ask

Hey! You promised us pictures of the finished foyer. And it's been a full week. What's up with that? - Impatient In Impanema

That's a good question, and I'm glad you asked it. I did make that promise. So without further ado, here is the finished version of what the top of the stairs now look like.

The green comes out a bit greyish in certain lights, both in real life and in photoland. And it is only finished in the sense of the painting being done and the masking being pulled off -- there is still some cleaning to do and maybe, possibly, someday some art to hang. But we've made progress.

I need more blogging! Please write about everything that you do, no matter how dull or mundane it may seem to you! -- Mara in Bethesda

Thanks for your letter, Mara, but you really don't know what you are asking for. In particular, would you really want a whole blog post on how I installed a light in my office?

I mean, its true that there were some hijinks as I tried to install a fancy modern light from Home Depot on some ancient wiring, but it wasn't really that exciting and nothing burned down. But now I have light in the office which is especially nice now that it is summer and I "work" "from" "home" most days.

Now, if you could get K. to post about the Handmade Modern-esque headboard she made us...now that would be an interesting post!

OK, I understand that you are pulling the roof off the shed. Which seems like a good idea given how ugly it appeared. But what are you putting in its place? - Roofless in Seattle

That's a good question. And, as we've mentioned before, we're sort of winging it when it comes to the shed. But this weekend we borrowed a friend's really-effin-tall ladder and the three of us (me, K, and the ladder) finally got the last pieces of the roof off. And right now K. is experimenting with putting the grape vine over the beams that are on top to create an arbor-esque feeling.

We may add an awning over part of it or we may do any number of other things. We're making it all up as we go along -- we just wanted to see something other than tar and asphalt when we were on our upstairs patio, and we wanted the space inside the shed to feel more open. And I think we are on our way.

OK, we have time for one more letter:

What's the deal with that last pair of pictures? Is it tinted red due to the coming apocalypse that Rambaldi predicted or does Smallville lie on top of a Hellmouth or is my computer monitor just messed up? - A. Sloane

Actually, the problem is on our end. You see, our digital camera is starting to get a bit cranky and it seems to have something to do with the connection between the memory card and the camera itself. We've been having slight problems for a year or so, and they seem to be getting worse as the camera approaches its third birthday, which seems to make it ancient by today's standards. We're hoping it holds out for a while longer, but if any of you have suggestions or recommendations for a new camera -- or if you want to contribute to the "Buy Revivalized A New Camera" fund, feel free to let us know and we will give you our PayPal account number.

Making Good Neighbors

2006-06-04T18:18:00.000-04:00

The major development of the last week has been in the backyard. And it's a doozy. We finally have a fence. You may recall that we love our backyard, as small as it is, but we didn't like the complete and utter lack of privacy from the neighbors, made worse by the particulars of one of our neighbors. So in order to get full use of the backyard we needed to build a fence. Or rather, to have a fence built. You see, dear readers, we cannot really take any credit for this fence other than the money that was used to pay for it. It was built by the fine folks at Home Depot and installed for us by a pair of young men that were not us. Pretty much all we did was choose the fence and make some decisions about how to deal with the incline. And now we get to enjoy our backyard in relative peace with a mojito and a book of Robert Frost poetry in hand.

While we are doing so, enjoy some photos of the process:

When The Cat's Away

2006-05-30T19:59:00.000-04:00

As I previously mentioned, K. went away for a couple days this weekend leaving me here in Smallville to work on the house. So, other than the brief time spent watching the parade yesterday, I spent my holiday weekend commemorating those men and women who have given their lives for our country by tearing down a shed and painting a foyer. You don't get much more patriotic than that.

First, the foyer. Yes, it has been nearly a year since we painted the bottom half of the foyer and promised to paint the top half "shortly", but what can I say -- we are procrastinators. (Incidentally, if you think that's bad then you don't want to know that the door I removed as the very first Revivalizing project on the day after we bought the house is still sitting in exactly the same spot that we put it on that day in what is now the laundry room. And we have no intentions of moving it elsewhere anytime soon. THAT'S how procrastinatory we are).

So right after K. left for her weekend in the city, I grabbed my spray bottle and my scraper and I started scraping the wallpaper off the top of the stairs. Goodbye, blue flowers! We won't miss you at all! I then pulled out the plaster washers and the drill and the plaster and started patching up the wall, as it really wasn't in very good shape (the previous photo is a good indicator of the shape the wall was in, though it is actually from the lower half of the foyer). Luckily, I have become an old pro at making cracked plaster look somewhat passable (although still far from good -- but that's what hanging big pieces of art over it is for, right?) so this didn't take so long and I could get on to the fun part: priming and painting!

(Again, I apologize for the absence of photos from the first part of the adventure, but for some reason K. thought that taking pictures of old friends who she hasn't seen in a decade was more important than sharing with you all yet another set of photos of plaster and pulling down wallpaper. Go figure.)

Stay tuned for photos of the finished product, coming soon to a blog near you.

At the various points over the weekend where I was waiting for plaster or primer to dry or waiting for K. to return with the car so I could stock up on supplies, I worked on the shed. And while there is still a good deal of work to do both in getting the last of the roof off as well as making it into a nice space of some sort, I did make some good progress, as over the weekend it went from this:

to this:

I wish I could say that there was some easy and fun technique that I used to pry those pieces off, but alas it was just a lot of time with me, a hammer, a crowbar, and a ladder. And lots of pounding and prying. And now I am sore in my arms and shoulders and in muscles that I haven't known existed since we pulled up the carpet last summer. Oh, and of course Memorial Day Weekend means the beginning of summer, which the weather here took quite literally as the highs jumped from the 70's to 90 or so just in time for me to spend all day in the sun working on the roof. Oh joy.

Memorializing

2006-05-30T08:05:00.000-04:00

One of the aspects of small town life that we are still enjoying getting to learn about is the way that various holidays are celebrated/commemorated. We already told you about Halloween, and while we never posted about the New Years celebration in the town square, believe me when I tell you it was a fun time. And yesterday we got to experience our first Smallville Memorial Day. Conveniently, we live between the VFW hall and the cemetery so the parade route went right by our house. And yesterday afternoon I took a break from watching the paint dry and K. and I went out to our front porch to watch. I have to admit that it was quite a sight seeing the number of people lining the street we live on, sitting in their portable chairs and waving their American flags despite the heat and the sun.

And then the parade started. For about an hour we were entertained by marching bands and by antique cars and by scout troops and by lots and lots of veterans, some of whom were actual veterans and others of whom were reenactors, pretending to be veterans from just about every period of American history (yes, even those French-and-Indian-War reenactors). And it was only after the parade that it struck us as odd that the fake veterans got more applause than the real veterans.

It was a nice diversion for a little bit, even if we didn't follow the parade to the
cemetery for the real ceremony. It was interesting being someplace where Memorial Day was treated as something other than a day off and a chance to BBQ and time for the first trip to the Jersey shore. And while small town parades may not have the same oomph as the Macy's Parade or the Mummers, I quite enjoyed the charm.

And now, some photos:

yes, they even had "orphans of the civil war" reenactors

Burnout!

2006-05-29T11:28:00.000-04:00

So the academic year is now over and it is summer. Time for me to get down to business and get serious about research. Unfortunately, I am still completely and utterly burnt out from finals and everything else that the end of the year brought, and so I am not being as productive as I would like. I don't feel like I can take time completely off -- I have several vacations planned for the summer, and a pretenure review in the fall looming -- but that would probably be a good idea. So instead I wake up every morning and try to start working. And I've been pretty good about getting an hour or two of work in before I get distracted by email and websurfing and playing video games. And then I keep pretending like I'm working, sometimes moving around the house to get away from the computer or away from K., until mid-afternoon when I give up and start working on other things around the house. Which isn't really being lazy, now is it?

After all, if I don't brew the beer then who will?

On second thought, don't answer that.

In addition to brewing beer, I have been doing some productive things around the house, spending an hour or so a day fighting with the roof of the shed and trying to tear it down. That's a project that is coming along slowly but surely, with a number of scars from rusty nails to show for it -- there's nothing wrong with that, is there? I've also been working on cleaning out the four seasons room (and not just because that is becoming the home of the Revivalized Brewery) and various other small projects around the house. I would post pictures, but K. has gone away for the weekend and taken the camera with her, so that will have to wait for another day.

Domestic Archeology

2006-05-18T14:48:00.000-04:00

When I was a child, I wanted to be a paleoanthropologist when I grew up. I wanted to discover ancient humanoid fossils! Later, after college, my interests turned to classical mediterranean archeology. I wanted to spend my summers digging up ancient cities. Well, after the last month, I've changed my tune. In addition to the near constant digging up lawn to make way for flower and vegetable beds, I've been battling with a beast. The fence bar that wouldn't come out.

When I first started the project, I oh-so-naively thought it had fallen at some point and was simply buried in the dirt. But no.... I dug and I dug, it wouldn't budge. I started to get the idea that it was buried in concrete. First I had to dig out the old paving stones. It was so fascinating to uncover the big, beautiful stones that used to line the alley and how carefully they were fitted together. I reused them as the edgers for my backbed and the home for my moss garden.

Finally, in the fourth week of excavation, I succeeded! Here is the result:

One side is relatively smooth and flat, but the rest seems like someone dug a hole, filled it with fragments of brick, marble, and oyster shells then poured sandy concrete in. Was this some tradition in the 40s or 50s that I don't know about? Not putting the first fencebar in straight? Was it structurally supporting the fencepost? With the beast out, I built a little retaining wall out of bricks we had in the basement:

Because we "weedwhack" this area, I wanted to make difference between my plants and the weeds clear. Then I got on with the regular business of gardening: amending the soil with vermiculite and composted manure, then planting the seeds.

Hopefully someday, this will be a lush garden of climbing nasturtiums and sweetpeas in the back, marguerite and marigolds in the middle, surrounded by a groundcover of pennyroyal. The little bush looks like a peony, but it has no flowerbuds. I thought I'd give it a chance and see what it can grow into.

So, now that I know I'm not cut out for digging for a living, I can rule out my dream career of archeology, as well as do whatever I can to stay off the chain gang. But what about my dream of becoming an organic gardener? Or a goat farmer? Can I do those things without constantly wielding the shovel? Maybe I could find some big strong men who could help me...

Amazing

2006-05-18T11:32:00.000-04:00

Last year, this rose bush was so swamped by bee ivy that you couldn't see it at all. I didn't even know what color the roses would be.

I'm so happy with the touch of crimson in the garden. These are the first three, there are lots of other buds. I wish I understood why buds grow on some stalks but not others.

So I guess I'll continue with the fertilizer and the watering. It seems to make a difference!

The end or the beginning?

2006-05-14T15:21:00.000-04:00

As of about an hour ago, I am now officially done with the semester. I submitted my final grades and while there are still various administrative meetings to attend to (not to mention graduation), I am considering myself done. I had planned to celebrate by relaxing in front of the Braves game on TV, but it turns out that the TBS coverage is blocked out here despite the fact that we get no other coverage, so instead I am relaxing by thinking about the summer. And yes, my mind has turned to Revivalizing and all of the projects that I can undertake while I should be doing research in preparation for my upcoming pre-tenure review. After all, I have to catch up with K. who has clearly been doing a ridiculous amount of work the last few weeks. Here is a list of some of the ideas of what I want to undertake:

Doing something with the shed. We aren't sure what, and it will probably be made up as we go along. But something will be done.
Finally finish painting the foyer and touch up some of the earlier paint job.
Install a light fixture in my office. This might also entail playing some chandelier-go-round and moving light fixtures around the house
Paint the upstairs hallway (and possibly the guest room)
Build one last set of bookshelves in the library. This is especially important because it will allow us to finish unpacking the books which means we can finally...
Empty out the Four Seasons Room. It has served us great as a 'staging area' for unpacking over the last 10 months, but eventually we need to decide its future fate. And while we are hoping that the architect will be helpful in this regard, I think that I won;t be able to really envision what it can be until I see what it is like without all the boxes of books and photos in it.
Organizing the tools in the basement. We have such a large basement that we should really use it properly. This will also likely entail moving my homebrewing stuff down there.
Hang some art. We've gotten better about this, even adding 1924, 1972, and 1996 to our displayed collection of olympic posters, but we still own more art that is lining the floors of several rooms, and I would like to remedy that fact.
Figuring out some storage system for the closet in the den. Right now we have lots of crap just piled on top of itself, and I would like a better way to store our DVDs/Board Games/etc.

They won't all get done, and I'm sure projects that aren't listed will be undertaken, but that list is a start.

Ch-ch-ch-changes

2006-05-14T12:29:00.000-04:00

D. says that my guiding philosophy is "Why finish a project when I can start two new ones?" I admit that I have a tendency to want to do everything at one, and that is even more exaggerated in the garden where I don't have D. to hold me back and I'm often working in small chunks of time.

So I've done some work in fits and starts. I moved the rain barrel to the other end of the yard:

But I haven't actually drilled the hole and connected the drainpipe. That opened the space in the backbed:

That's a beautiful rock sculpture that we bought from the artist on our honeymoon in Nova Scotia. This gives it a really prominent position, but doesn't it make the white drainpipe stand out? What can I do about it? Should I paint the whole trellis wall white? Or dark green?

Actually, I also moved that piece of limestone in front of that bed, so I can have a place to stand when I'm weeding.

You can see my other project: trying to plant moss between the back bed and the lawn. I harvested the moss from the alley next to our house:

Based on something I once saw on Martha Stewart, I coated the bottom of each piece with yogurt and stuck it to the rock or soil where I wanted it:

Here's to the moss thriving!

Garden Report - What's Growing 5/13/06

2006-05-14T12:10:00.000-04:00

Bed of veggies

Mammoth sunflowers

Super italian squash (the oval non-variegated leaves are the first leaves out of the seed!)

A forest of garlic

Allium flowers

Shadows

The Lumber Yard

2006-05-12T17:27:00.000-04:00

In our town, there's a store for contractors called The Lumber Yard. It's across from the Super 8 Motel that we stayed in when we were house-hunting, and we used to joke that it sounds like a bad name for a gay bar.

We also have a mini-lumber yard in our garage that looks something like this:

Basically, one of the previous owners was a woodworker and used that space for storage and working. A couple of weeks ago, I went into the garage and started pulling down the lumber. It's one of the "It seemed like a good idea at the time" projects, and I swear that I had a good reason when I started. Though I can't really remember it now.

Each piece of lumber had an inch (and 50 years) of sawdust piled on it, which came falling down on me. A few hours later, I was sneezing, coughing, eyes running, and covered in a fine layer of brown.

Today, I went back and finished the project, and I found a treasure:

It looks like a Victorian/Classical overmantel designed to hold a mirror. I can't figure out if there are other pieces among the rest of the lumber, but it's a start!

Slow and Steady.

2006-05-10T19:59:00.000-04:00

Here's what the alley side of our property looked like:

What do you think of our two fences? How would you ever choose? Between the ugly peeling-painted-white-metal fence and the aging-pressure-treated-uneven-dogear-wood fence? Well, the answer for us was the taller one. Something about how we didn't want our entire lives to be exposed to the parking lot.

So late last fall, I removed the wire part. Pretty easy stuff, until the hauling away of a five-foot-wide roll of fencing. Since November, it's looked like this:

Not much improvement, eh? What can I say? So all winter long, I've been saying to D. how we need a hacksaw to remove the crossbars/pipes. His response was that I had to be able to list at least three projects for which I would use the tool.

For at least a month, I've been trying to dig out the farmost bar:

Oy, is it a pain. I can't get the left end out, and the right end is buried is a huge block of concrete. Ugh. I've been feeling a bit like Tantalus, battling this rock.

Then the other day, I just gave one of the bars a little (strenuous) push, and out it popped. In ten minutes, I had all but the beastly one out:

All that's left is hours and hours and hours of digging up posts, which I'm sure are anchored in concrete. Sigh. My poor aching forearms.

So it's only 10 months later, and I've done maybe 40 percent of the job. That's what I call slow and steady progress.

The Architect Has Left the Building

2006-05-09T18:13:00.000-04:00

Last summer, we focused almost exclusively on making the interior of the house liveable and presentable. There are still some rooms that need attention, but our work held up well over the winter. We were happy, cozy, and comfortable with the results of our work (and cost outlays on furniture), plus we were pleased with our first efforts at entertaining our new friends.

Now that spring is sprunging, you can see that our minds have turned to the exterior of the house. While we are gardening every day, we are planning some BIG projects:

1) Add a privacy fence on the property line with our neighbors - a luxury but essential to our sanity and ability to use the yard we are paying so much for. We've submitted the application to the Historic District Review Board and been approved for our permit. We have our contractor and fence style chosen, so we just have to figure out when we can afford it.

2) Paint the exterior wood trim and porches - a necessity to preserve the structural integrity of the home, plus a really nice way to show our neighbors that we're here and we care about the way our house looks. The architect said his sons have been calling our house "sad and empty looking" for years. Eek! Yes, flowers and a bench on the porch would be a great improvement, however they must wait until after the painting work is done.

We're thinking of shifting the white to a warmer ivory and adding an accent color (either sage green or federal blue) on the fishscales and a few other spots. I've talked to two painters, and I'm waiting to get written estimates from them.

We are lucky enough to have a local program that funds exterior work on historic buildings. If we qualify, the organization will grant us 20 percent of the project cost and give us a no-interest loan for an additional 40 percent. The stipulation is that we need to get two estimates for all work.

3) Figure out what on god's green earth to do with the four-seasons room and wooden shed. This is how we get to the architect. Click the photo to for a tour of what we're dealing with:

Basically, we hate the four-seasons room, as you can see from its use as a dumping space. We have so much space in general and storage space in particular that we don't need the room at all. It's ugly - inside and out - and it takes up precious gardening space. What's worst: it doesn't have the main thing that you want from a sunroom, the feeling that you are outside. The windows are too small, the ceiling is too low. Ick!

What can I say about the shed? I guess we have a hope that it could be used for grilling and eating, but I think it was just built to hold trash. Honestly.

We asked the architect to give us estimates on his services to draw up plans for what we can do. Normally overendowed in the vision category, we are just stumped here. We don't know what direction to go, or even what we want. We'd like to have the back returned to its historic appearance, but we also want some outdoor dining/entertaining patio area. I definitely want more gardening space, but No Way do I want to pay to demolish hundreds of square-feet of concrete foundation. Some days I want a pretty little greenhouse, but everyday I want privacy from the neighbors. Whenever we start talking about plans, we end up in circles.

The architect seemed easy to get along with, very down-home. He's lived here for almost 30 years, and he remembers what our house used to look like. I think he has a real affinity for historic architecture. He does LOTS of work in the historic district, lives a block away (his son delivers our newspapers), even did the exterior back of the B&B two houses away from us. In fact, he chairs the Historic District Review Board and originally approved these additions going up!!!!

What was most promising to me is that he clearly had Ideas! And, let me tell you folks, what we need here is Ideas (seriously, if you have any suggestions, please pass them on. We are desperate). So he was here, he's left the building, and I feel optimistic!

Whoopee!

2006-05-09T16:29:00.000-04:00

We have our permit! Yay! I got an email today notifying me that our building permit is ready as soon as I bring by the fee of $12. Because our project is so "simple," we qualify for "administrative approval" from the public official, and we don't have to appear before the controversial Historic District Review Board. Double yay! Even more, we don't even have to get a county permit, because our budget is under $2,500. How cool is that???? A fence, imagine.

Plans Are Afoot

2006-05-06T13:43:00.000-04:00

Reminded by Chicago Two-Flat, I should let you know that yesterday we submitted our application for approval to build a fence. Yes, a fence!

Specifications: 6-feet high, 48-feet long
Materials: Pressure-treated lumber (gack, isn't that horrible? But that's what the other wood in our yard is, and we just can't afford to replace it all with cedar.)
Style: Shadowbox or "good neighbor"

Location: Along property line between our yard and neighbor's

So, have we moaned bitterly here about the lack of privacy from the neighbors? Well, if we haven't, just imagine that we did. And imagine that we desperately need a fence in order to enjoy our hard-won and well-loved backyard.

Here's the thing: we live in the Historic District. So before we can apply for a permit, we have to get approval of the Historic District Review Board. Which, in principle, we are in favor of. I used to work in preservation organizations, and we generally believe in maintaining historic appearances of buildings.

But....it's pretty big step from theory to reality. 1) I really have had the knee-jerk reaction of "Hey, this is my property! How can they tell me what to do with it?" 2) Apparently, this board is the fiefdom of a long-entrenched and self-important public official. While I don't have the impression that they actually reject reasonable proposals, I have heard that the head can be mean and condescending, if he thinks he can treat you that way. In fact, there has been a whole controversy abrew, covered in the Hometown Times, about how a lot of citizens are upset with the HDRB because it infringes on their rights.

So, in 10 days, I have to go attend the Board meeting and defend our projects.

I'm not so worried about the fence, because hey, it's a fence. But I am concerned about the second project we want to do: remove the roof and one lattice wall of the shed.

There are a couple of reasons for my insecurity. 1) We don't really know what we're doing. We just know that we hate the shed. 2) We don't understand the structural implications of what we're doing. When I called the municipal office and chatted with the code enforcement officer (the same woman who sent us a letter on our first day in the house, telling us our weeds were too overgrown), she seemed to think, based only on my very vague and indecisive descriptions of our plans, that the shed would deteriorate and fall down without a roof. Which, in fact, wouldn't be such a bad thing to us.

Anyway, fence and contractor selected (no, we're not DIYing like lots of other housebloggers, for which I feel endlessly inadequate. I'm just not enthusiastic about posthole digging and concrete)). Application submitted. Meeting scheduled.

I'll keep you posted on the developments.

For the Record...

2006-05-06T13:42:00.000-04:00

The last post was supposed to be named: Garden Report - Lightpost Bed #1. And it's only days later that I realize what it is named. Didn't any of you think it was a wierd title?????

Garden Report - Light Bedpost #1

2006-05-04T10:54:00.000-04:00

Along the concrete path (which I think is hideous), there are two light posts (with unmatched lamps, don't get me started). In my ongoing effort to reduce the amount of lawn, I'm building flower bed around them. I finished the first, closest to the house.

I found the cool ridged bricks in the area behind the carport that I cleared out last month, and interspersed them with recycled bricks that I find around the house.

The three existing plants are orange daylilies I transplanted last fall. I've interspersed the new irises a friend sent me, plus planted seeds for sunflower, black hollyhock, Oaxacan marigold, marguerite daisies, and Roman chamomile. I can't wait to see it after they've all grown!

Garden Roundup - What's Growing

2006-05-04T10:06:00.000-04:00

The first unfurling leaves of the Royal Red Norway Maple...

...have filled in, waving like flags in the wind

The tiny pink buds of the grape leaves...

... grow into leaves that shelter the future grapes.

The inherited tulips started out yellow with a tiny bit of red on the tips...

...but they developed into these beautiful ombre orange flowers.

The "seeds" we planted last fall have grown into a wild garlic patch...

...but the most exciting development is ... SPROUTS!

Garden Roundup - Back Bed

2006-05-03T14:50:00.000-04:00

In front of the carport, there's what I call the "back bed."

It get a few hours of gentle morning sunlight, but is in the dark for the rest of the day. Thanks to feats of elaborate engineering worthy of the Roman Aqueducts, it is Not Wet. Currently, there is a jungle of daylilies, peonies, ivy, and one single solitary fern growing in the bed. I've also discovered this, which I think is some sort of celandine:

Does anyone recognize this little variegated ground cover? It's pretty, but not very ambitious.

I'm going for some sort of a woodland garden feel, so I've planted hostas, trilliums, bleeding hearts. I have some donated irises I might put in, but I wish I had more ferns! They're so pretty.

I topdressed with leaf soil, dug a little ditch in front of the bed, placed old cobblestones as edgers, and then mulched the whole thing. The cobblestones and limestone slabs (behind the bed) are a whole 'nother story, which I will get to soon.

This is also the temporary location of the future rain barrel:

My uncle had a beautiful organic vegetable garden in the backyard of his Noe Valley, SF Victorian home when I was growing up. The garden is perhaps most famous because I was traumatized by its chayote vine. These presumably lovely Mexican squashes have a fiercesome appearance, and when my aunt served them to me for dinner once (with tofu), I thought I would be eating prickles! Still can't eat tofu to this day...

However, I still remember the musty, rich smell of the rainwater in my uncle's wood barrel. So I shelled out the money for this former Jim Beam Whiskey Barrel, which will also looks gorgeous to me. It was a steal at $40 (thank you Wally World), but still a big investment (and another darn garden project, sigh).

Garden Roundup - Carport

2006-05-03T13:23:00.000-04:00

No, not that nasty pesticide. Just a review of all that's been going on. And it's a LOT.

Remember this?

After three separate days of pruning (more like hacking), including a little bit of death-defying:

(Okay, it doesn't look that high, but it was very scary.) I present to you .... the carport!

You probably didn't even know it was there before! Please note the absence of John Ashcroft's Eagle and check out the rose bush gently climbing the trellis.

It was there all along, but it just couldn't compete with the beast of the ivy. In the week since I took this photo, the rose has been leafing out, with red shoots and little rosebuds waiting for just the right moment to flower. I gave it some manure and have tried to remember to water it a bit more - hopefully it will like that.

Revivalizing Envy

2006-04-26T19:29:00.000-04:00

Those of you who aren't academics (and who don't have to live with us) may not be aware that this is, hands down, the worst time of the year for those of us who are. The pile of things to grade is far too big, the number of meetings on campus of groups or committees that are just trying to get a little more done before everyone scatters to the wind for the summer is far too long, and the number of cranky students who are suddenly worried about their grade for the first time when there are only a few weeks left in the semester is far too large. And this all comes at a time when we are all incredibly burnt out -- especially those of us who tried to cram lots of research into ~~Christmas~~Winter Vacation and Spring Break because we don't get nearly as much as we would like to get done during the semester.

And that gorgeous weather outside marking the beginning of spring? That only makes things worse, as I tend to be stuck in my office grading papers and writing exams and meeting with meetings when I would rather be outside drinking margaritas and relaxing -- or at least outside grading papers, which can happen on occassion but not as often as this teacher would like.

And things are made even worse by the fact that K. has been working so dilligently in the garden. There are so many amazing changes that I will let her post about at some point (not the least of which is that some new sprouts poked out of the dirt today) and she has been doing lots of good things¹, but it just makes me wish I could be outside helping her instead of inside on the couch fiddling with Excel spreadsheets fulled with exam grades. Sure, K. has been very gracious in saying that she doesn't mind doing all the work outside (she is unemployed, after all) and she's being a very good housewife. But it's not as much guilt driving me to want to help as it is a desire to be doing projects and really doing anything other than grading yet another problem about the ratio test.

But in a mere three weeks things will be different, and it is this time of year that a young professor's thoughts turn to house projects (because you need something to distract you from the research you should be doing). First on deck is finally finishing painting the foyer, a project that has somehow fallen off the radar for only....oh, nine months or so.

----------------

¹ - Although full disclosure forces me to report that K. did remove the eagle adorning our carport. You know why? Because she hates America.

Housiversary

2006-04-24T21:57:00.000-04:00

One year ago this morning we sat in a Panera in the Next Town Over with our real estate agent, eating our Asiago bagels, debriefing from a long weekend in which we saw quite a few dud houses and at least one other house we liked and trying to decide where to go from here. And then we made the decision and we started filling out the paperwork -- right there in the Panera -- and decided to take the plunge and make an offer, even if it was 10% below asking price. As we made the decision I remember my hands started to tremble I was so nervous -- in ways both good and bad -- and the whole drive back home to Metropolis that afternoon we debated back and forth whether we would be more relieved if they accepted the offer or if they turned it down and we had to/got to start from scratch. Within a week the owners had agreed to our terms and soon we moved from frantic-househunting-mode to frantic-packing-mode(both of which were better and less stressful than the earlier frantic-job-searching-mode, but not by a wide margin) and three months later we arrived in Smallville and the Revivalizing began.

This evening I sat out in our backyard grading papers, watching the garlic grow and enjoying the spring weather, and was amazed to think how much the house -- and life -- has changed in the last year. I was mostly thinking about the joys of home ownership and teaching at a small liberal arts college instead of focussing on the six figure debt we have now incurred (in addition to the long list of projects destined to plunge us deeper into debt) but I suppose you take the good along with the bad. Those are the Facts Of Life, after all.

What Is and What Will Be

2006-04-22T14:24:00.000-04:00

Yesterday morning, I was sitting at our newly acquired outdoor table, drinking my cuppa tea and reading the Hometown Times. It's lovely to have a few minutes of calm in the morning, enjoying the sun and surveying the day's developments in the garden. I take great joy in the tiniest changes in the plants - the first two-leaved sprout, the opening and closing of flowers with the sun, even the dying of the flowers after they've bloomed. There's a Zen, focus-on-the-present and appreciate-the-small-things benefit of caring for a garden. We are always amazed by the "miracle of life" - that a whole plant and a summer of food for our tables can grow from a single seed.

I am reminded of something I learned at the Easter service I attended last Sunday - when Moses asks the name of the deity in the Burning Bush, and it responds "I Will Be What I Will Be." It's interesting that the divine is a plant, because to me this seems to be the miracle of seeds. With very little influence from us humans, seeds will be what they will be. I often think of the seed that when planted, after thousands of years, germinated and grew.

(Is it significant that this seed also has biblical/Jewish history?) I find it comforting that only the most egregious errors on our part could interfere with the natural processes of life, which thankfully will produce a bounty of garlic, peppers, tomatillos, and herbs for us to enjoy.

But there's another, darker side to the life of a gardener: never being satisfied. Of course, this is especially exacerbated in your first year in a garden long-neglected by previous tenants, but I understand that this same phenomenon happens to veteran gardeners. A landscape-designer friend who had been tending a stunning, double-wide garden for three decades confessed to me that she couldn't even sit in the garden and enjoy it, because all she could see is all the work that needs to be done. She described it as "hundreds of children crying out" to her.

During my seemingly idyllic breakfast, I was struck with awareness of this tendency in myself. I look at the back shade garden and see only what's wrong with it, how it needs more plants and some flowers, how I need to move the rainbarrel and create an edge. The areas around the lampposts are begging to be dug and seeded. What to do about the holly bushes? I really want to get the sunflowers in the ground, but will building the fence disturb them? The whole to-do list of the garden (which reasonably could be planned over the course of several years) comes rushing in at me every morning, noon, and night as I walk through or look down on the yard.

I think this same "Improver's Eye" afflicts home restorers. We have the right-now, this-month, and long-term plans for our properties. We look at falling-down wrecks and imagine what castles they can become. We see layers of paint and envision gleaming woodwork. We happily commit every cent of discretionary income, every moment of free time for the foreseeable future to our grand plans. Everything is a project. And while "the process is the reward," this constant striving for What Will Be does prevent the simple enjoyment of What Is right in front of us.

So, housebloggers, have you found a third path? A balance point? Do you have strategies for setting aside the To-Do list in your mind and enjoying some peaceful moments?

I Know I'm Houseblogging When...

2006-04-19T20:40:00.000-04:00

...I'm showering at least once a day.
...My hands are cramped in places I didn't know existed.
...I'm washing down the aspirin with whiskey.

It really does feel remarkably similar to last summer, when I was just pushing myself to the physical extreme.

This spring and summer, the focus is on the exterior of the house. I've been doing lots of work in the garden, getting it into shape for the growing season and the sitting-outside-enjoying-the-yard season.

The difference between interior houseblogging and exterior: uh, the sunburn.

We built the second bed, filled it with soil mix (compost, peat moss, and vermiculite), and planted it today. Sounds easy, huh? But it actually involves hauling around hundreds of pounds of soil amendments, followed by the back-breaking work of mixing them. Ouch!

I rounded up a bunch of folks to join a CSA with me, which will provide most of our basic produce for the summer. So we're growing interesting vegetables (mostly Mexican, because D. makes a mean mean mole) and herbs (which are so great to have fresh from the garden and no farm could keep up with our demand). We planted Ancho Chile Peppers, three varieties of tomatillos (green, purple, and pineapple), Principe Tomato (specially for sundrying), marigold, nasturtium, epazote, cilantro, and basil. We use the square foot gardening system of raised beds.
We also planted oregano, flat-leaf parsley, sage, fennel, and more cilantro in pots.

I've pruned some of the grape vine and most of the bee-ivy. That was easy work. Preparing flower beds is not so easy. Even mowing the lawn is work now that we bought a push-mower:

Even with all that complete, there's a long long list of things to do in the garden.

In addition, we're working on a couple of major projects on the exterior. I've been getting estimates on a fence between our yard and the neighbor's and for painting the exterior wood (windows and porches). The fence requires a building permit and approval by the local architectural review board (because we're in the historic district).

The best part about spring: we bought an outdoor dining table at IKEA this weekend, and have already started enjoying it in the evenings.

What Am I Doing?

2006-04-05T14:42:00.000-04:00

Remember how I abruptly stopped posting - and stopped work on the house - last October and haven't had even a moment to explain why. Well, this is the story.

I was working! Starting in mid-October, I had a freelance job that required me to be in an office in professional clothing every weekday starting at 8:30 am. It was brutal, to tell you the truth. The best thing about it was that it was only a five minute walking commute, so I could come home for lunch and a bit of HGTV most days. The gig was temporary and ended in early February.

But...then I had two freelance projects that were home-based but going full-steam. One was a big event that ended on March 24. The second was a consulting project that predominantly ended on Monday, though there is still some cleanup work to do. There is also the possibility of a new contract with that client.

We didn't consciously intend for me to become a freelancer, but it does have its advantages. I like the flexibility and variety. The downside: not so much of the income. And, now that I'm not even working those gigs, I'm no earning anything near what we need me to be secure...and to actually fund home improvement projects.

As I think many a freelancer/houseblogger has bemoaned, this is a vicious cycle. Being at home most days means I am attentive to what needs to be done and have discretionary time in which to do projects. But I have no money to fund the necessary tools and supplies. When I am working enough to have the money, I have no time to even notice the projects on the To Do List, let along work on them.

Luckily, there are quite a few projects that I can do without any additional investment, the ones that require only my time and effort plus the tools at hand (though "at hand" doesn't seem to describe the lost crowbars). You might also recall that I had the beloved unemployment, and I can still collect for a few more months.

But honestly, I really do need to get a job. A real job. With a real paycheck.

Found!

2006-04-04T10:38:00.000-04:00

What makes me happy every day:

What made me happy yesterday:

M.I.A.

2006-04-01T17:02:00.000-05:00

No not us (though it may seem like it to you readers), but the digital camera battery recharger. Doesn't seem that important to home and garden work, does it? But to the blogging of said work it is crucial.

I can't SHOW you any of the wonderful garden happenings around here, but I can break the cardinal rule of writing and TELL you about them:
- The crocuses have finished blooming.
- The daffodils are blooming - why do I have two kinds? I don't know.
- The garlic/shallots bed is growing like gangbusters, especially on warm days. D. got excited when I told him that each leaf represented a garlic bulb.
- Little green leave are appearing on the butterfly bushes - am I supposed to prune the old growth? One neighbor did, one didn't.
- Daylilies are sprouting up all over. Some in the places I transplanted them to, and a whole bunch in places I didn't even know I had daylilies :)
- The peonies are sending up little red shoots, but they are very subtle at this point.
- Violets, I love them. All the violets in the weed patch behind our garage have bloomed, way earlier than I expected. I transplanted them anyway, into about seven areas of the yard. I was worried, but after two day, they look perky and happier than ever. The blooms are so cheerful.
- The Bradford Pears (D. and I call them "popcorn trees") are starting to burst into blossom. And, better yet, the main east and west streets in town are lined with them. It's a popcorn tree parade!
- The lawn looks like crap - are we supposed to do something to it?

I ripped out the wierd wooden "fence" and climbed up to the back of the carport (on the left of most of our pictures), and I ripped down all of the bee ivy. I hate that bee ivy, and this section was totally overgrown. It hardly affects us at all, but maybe the fact that our neighbor has to walk through a gauntlet of bees all summer contributes to why she is so unfriendly to us.

I found a bunch of cool stuff back there - stones, slate, brick edging, and an old marble doorknob. And I scared out a funny little three-legged mouse. He was tiny, maybe and 1.5 inches, and his back right leg was totally lame, just hanging behind him like a second tail. But he scooted around just fine without it.

I've ordered seeds, scoped out a local source for free compost, and will pick up lumber for new vegetable beds next time we hit the Lowe's. So, let the gardening begin!

A Carport With Balls.

2006-03-22T07:57:00.000-05:00

When we first moved in last summer, our carport was covered in vines and greenery which made it look very nice, even if it was a bit unkempt and attracted lots of bees:

It stayed that way through the summer and most of the fall, green and bushy even if it wasn't producing the delicious grapes that some of the other vines on our property were. Then as winter approached the greenery started dying off, as greenery does, and we just had the bare vines covering the carport. It was then that we first noticed IT poking out, and we could see IT in passing. But IT wasn't too prominent, and at first I wouldn't have even noticed IT from most angles. As the winter carried on and the vines fell away IT became more prominent, but it was only this weekend after K. worked in the garden and cut away all the vines that IT became a prominent feature of our yard:

Yes, in addition to all of the other crazy things that the previous owners left behind, they left us with an eagle statue prominently adorning our carport, at least for several months of the year. Now, every time I walk to the car I feel like I am crossing through the set of The Colbert Report (and yes, I know that this is probably ironic payback for my dreams of installing The Daily Show set in our living room...)

But worst of all, at least as far as K. is concerned, every time I see the eagle -- or really even think about it, for that matter, I can't help but break into song. What song, you ask? Well, I start singing the classic "Let The Eagle Soar" by Governor/Senator/Attorney General John Ashcroft. Sure, I don't know any of the lyrics beyond the first two lines despite the fact that I was once in a musical with Ashcroft's son (True Story). But those first two lines are stuck in my head pretty much constantly these days. Say what you want about Ashcroft as a politician (and, believe me, I do), but the man can write a song.

The Tablympics

2006-03-18T17:58:00.000-05:00

As I mentioned earlier, it's spring break. And unfortunately, both K. and I had too much work to do to undertake a major project in the house. Today I faced a large stack of grading to do and a colloquium I am giving at a nearby college to write and some midsemester evaluations to write, not to mention the fact that I really really wanted to finish and send out the preprint that I have been working on. And K's To-Do list is no shorter than mine. So what did we spend the day doing? Lots of minor projects around the house. For K, this mainly involved working in the garden, and I'm sure she will post photos and descriptions of all of her work later. For the first part of the day, I also worked outside, cleaning out our shed (doing some prep work for a future Revivalizing Project which we will disclose at a later date) and finally throwing out the last of the boxes that have already been unpacked from the move - yes, many of those have been sitting in our shed all winter, doyougotaproblemwithdat?

After lunch, I came inside and started the main projects of the afternoon -- putting together the many tables that K. bought during her IKEAdventures the other day. Yes, dear readers, our long national nightmare is over as we finally bought bedside tables after many moons of looking. We did in fact go for the tables that K. suggested in that earlier post, the Tovik bedside tables. And I have to say that K. has great taste, and that they match the bed I built a little too well, and now I think people will assume we bought the bed at IKEA as well:

Sure, they look quite IKEA-y, but I finally have a real bedside table, and I am very excited about that. Also at IKEA, K. picked up a couple of side tables for the den. And because I had so many more important things to be doing today, I decided that building four tables was better than just building two and I proceeded to put together the Leksvik sidetables that she had picked up to match the previously purchased entertainment unit. And now our den is a little closer to being fully furnished:

Astute readers will notice something else about that last picture -- yes, after 8 months of living in our house we finally got the nerve up to actually hang some art. It was scary and emotionally trying to put holes in the walls that we poured our blood, sweat, and spackle into, but I got up the nerve to do it, and hung three prints, newly framed in some frames that (all together now) K. bought at IKEA. When we got married, my dad gave us a collection of prints of the posters from all of the Summer Olympics that he had gotten during the Atlanta games. For the last five years we have looked for frames but never found ones that worked because they are somewhat awkwardly shaped. But IKEA's fetish for the metric system came to the rescue once again, and we were able to pick up a few frames that pretty much are the right size. And now we have hanging in our den the official posters of the first Athens games, the first Stockholm games, and the oh-so-hip Mexico City 1968 poster. Next time we go to IKEA we will pick up a few more and cover more of the modern era, though we have a family dispute about whether we would actually want to display Robert Rauschenberg's poster from the Los Angeles games, which features the cutting edge and hightech picture of calculators.

Newly emboldened by hanging that art, I moved to my office where I hung a few things including my diploma (because unlike Doctors, mathematicians are not required to display their credentials in their place of business) before calling it a day:

Spring Break!

2006-03-17T10:30:00.000-05:00

When we lived in Metropolis, we were 19 miles from the airport we generally flew out of (and that's according to Google Maps rather than as the crow flies). Here in Smallville, we live 72 miles from the airport we generally fly out of. Ironically, the difference between relying on mediocre public transportation and being able to drive it ourselves generally means that in both instances getting to t he airport took 90 minutes or so -- if anything, it's faster to get to the airport nowadays than it used to be, and certainly much easier than dragging bags on the trains and busses.

But despite this similar time to get to the airport, one crucial difference is that here in Smallville the college I work for has a shuttle service to take me to the airport. And since K. and I share a single car and I had a 10am flight last Friday, I took advantage of the college's transportation. Now, under normal circumstances they allow us faculty to pay a little more and get a private shuttle, but on the day before spring break they were rather taxed and so I had to ride with the ~~commoners~~ students down to the airport while all of our luggage would travel in a separate cargo van. Which didn't sound like a big deal when they first told me, but when I arrived at the shuttle stop to find that I would be on a bus with 25 students, 22 of whom were about to spend a week backpacking and
rock-climbing together, and none of whom had slept the night before and several of whom still reeked of whatever beverages they had been drinking the night before -- well, suffice it to say that it was not the most pleasant shuttle ride as the students (none of whom were actually my students, thank god, though one was someone I failed last semester, adding ever so slightly to the awkwardness) partied on the bus while I sat there reading my newspaper and trying to listen to the podcasts of Le Show instead of listening to their tales of wild R-rated exploits. At some point during this adventure the students mentioned that they were flying to Tucson for rock-climbing, which was also the location of the conference I was flying to, and I had panicky thoughts that I might also be on a plane with the loud and excited spring breakers, but it turned out that they were flying through ATL while I was going through PHX.

And then, of course, the shuttle broke down on the side of the road. Something about a tube breaking and smoke coming out the back and overheating and they weren't really sure what it was but somehow the bus we were on was stuck on the side of the road about halfway to the airport and the driver of the cargo van was making lots of panicked calls on his cell phone. And my flight was only an hour away.

Some sweet talking on my part convinced the shuttle drivers that I should go ahead on the cargo van to the airport while the spring breakers waited behind for the bus to be fixed, and so off we went, leaving the hung-over students on the side of the road as we went ahead to the airport, where I made my flight.

All in all, it was a very eventful trip to the airport (and, incidentally, a nice conference visit as well although the fact that I spent spring break doing math means that I didn't get any work done on house projects and I am not exactly re-energized for the second half of the semester, alas and alack.). But I'm still thankful that upon my return I was greeted not by the college shuttle but by K. and the minivan. Picking me up gave her an excuse to come into the big city and get into lots of trouble at IKEA and Target, but I'll let her tell those stories.

Spring Is Nice But...

2006-03-16T15:52:00.000-05:00

Friday was positively balmy. I walked quite a bit around town, so much my feet actually hurt. A high point was that I scared up a beaver by a stream! We stared each other down for several minutes, then the beaver won and I continued on my walk.

I decided it was the day to take up all the "mulch" over my bulbs. You may recall that we dismantled the Christmas Tree, then its boughs served a second life as mulch, and now it's going to a third use as fodder for the compost pile. So basically now we have a spruce bough pile.

This exposed all the little green shoots, so they could get sun and fresh air. In the few days since, the garlic bed has really gone to town. Check it out:

Then - shazam! - we had our first crocus!

(Those are the fallen pine needles on top of the normal mulch - I hope it doesn't hurt the little flowers.) It looks like I might have lost a fair number of my flower bulbs ... to the chipmunk, I think. There were all of these little burrowing trails running through our grass and flower bed after the first big snow melted.

But my daylily transplants seem to be about 75% successful. Yay for spring. Now I just have to prune the bee-ivy and grape vine, order seeds, build planting beds, buy soil, and on and on and on...

All of which is very exciting, but I have to tell you about a very decided downside of all this spring business. Uh...the smell. It was by walking to all different parts of town that I came to the conclusion I really wasn't imagining it. The town really does smell like manure. Which isn't that bad, except when you think you're having olfactory hallucinations because everyone's just walking around like normal, la-dee-da, while you are trying to figure out where the Odor is coming from.

It's a lovely town. The agricultural landscape is gorgeous. Hey, there is a herd of cows two blocks away. What did I expect?

It Wasn't Really an AHA....

2006-03-12T14:55:00.000-05:00

....as much as an Aaaaah!

The Real Estate section of today's New York Times is featuring an article that claims "buyers often unknowingly seek out spaces that are physically evocative of havens from their childhood."

Which reminds me of the story of why we chose this house over The Other House. Amidst the many duds, we saw two great houses on the same day. The Other House was wonderful - a cute snug foursquare on a busy street in the Next Bigger Town Over. It had intact woodwork, a woodburning fireplace, french doors between the living and dining rooms, and the most stunning oak beadboard ceilings in the enclosed porch room. It was cozy, an effect that was emphasized by the Capital-C Country decor of the previous owner. There was an adorable reading nook in tucked into the back stairway, an original root cellar (I've had a long obssession with root cellars), a charming backyard. Oh, I could just go on and on with how lovely it was. We loved it and felt like we would be so comfortable there. Like we could move right in and get on with our lives. Two drawbacks:

- If our family grew to include more than one child, we would have to move. From the small size of the rooms to the limitation of only one bathroom, it definitely had a feeling of a starter house.
- It's location meant that D. would have a 25 minute commute every day, each way. And we wouldn't be IN the community where he worked, which could adversely affect our social and professional networks.

Did I meantion it was really really really really really inexpensive? Like we could easily have afforded it on D's salary alone.

Then there was Our House. With the yucky carpet, dingy walls, and smoky smell. Oh yeah and peeling exterior paint, nasty bathrooms, and vinyl-sided addition. At twice the cost. Its condition was nowhere near as bad as some housebloggers, but we knew it would take years of work and thousands of dollars to get the house to what we wanted.

Let me remind of its advantages: four blocks from campus, one block from the town square, 10-foot ceilings, intact oak woodwork and pine flooring on the first floor, four large bedrooms and the option for a fifth, separate den and living rooms, all totalling 2,600 square feet. It was spacious in every sense, and that was very seductive after three years in a way-too-small city apartment.

We spent all night and most of the next morning going back and forth between these two houses. We're not the King and Queen of Decisionmaking, so it wasn't clear how we were ever going to come to a conclusion.

We visited The Other House a second time the next morning, and it hadn't lost any of its appeal. Our (fabulous) real estate agent was pretty sure we were going to choose The Other House.

But....that's because she didn't know about my dream. In the night, I had dreamed about my childhood house - a large Victorian in San Francisco. The only house I remember both of my parents living in. My grandmother even lived with us for a while. Its layout was actually very similar to Our House. It had a foyer with a bannister I used to slide down and a door on the right to the living room, just like here. In my dream, I saw again the tall ceilings and large windows, the brightly colored walls of the 1970s.

I remember being swaddled in a towel after a bath and standing next to the radiator to warm up. I remember my dad carrying me through the house when I was sick. I remember the "mountains" of cereal and pancake letters that my father would make us for breakfast. I remember my 5th birthday party, when I got my favorite childhood book. (I bought myself Alala again for my 35th birthday.)

And I think that was the deciding factor in making me choose this house. It felt familiar, like I could just let my my breath out here. And that feeling of comfort has just increased - as we chose deep bold colors for our walls, as we found new and old furniture to fill the rooms, as our heirlooms give it character, and as we start having friends over. It was in January that I started feeling this way, like it was OUR house now (which honestly has contributed to my lack of motivation for further improving the house). Often, the feeling is accompanied by the memory of that dream I had the night we first walked into the house. As if it was a premonition of what Our House could be.

Lessons from a Small Town

2006-03-10T11:49:00.000-05:00

1) Do NOT ever leave the house in sweats. A simple trip to the bank or to get milk can turn into a nightmare if you aren't dressed in something you'd like to be seen in. I have run into the President of my non-profit's board at the payment desk of my doctor's office. Because we live on a well-trafficked street, I can't even step out onto my porch to get my newspaper without trepidation.

2) Everyone is RELATED. If you're in a meeting and someone's name is mentioned, chances are that 1/3rd of the people in the room are related to him/her.

Corollary: 2a) People with the SAME NAME are rarely related. No matter that there are five businesses, a road, and a historic mill all with the same surname, they know nothing about them.

3) Be NICE. There's no big city anonymity here. If you say something snarky about the newspaper while at the diner, be prepared for the editor to be sitting in the next booth. If you criticize the theatre performance, it's a good chance you'll be overheard by the Executive Director of the sponsoring organization. And you'll be seeing these people over and over again for the rest of your life, so you really don't want to piss them off. They'll be the ones who decide whether you get a job or whether your non-profit gets a grant someday.

It's like the final episode of Seinfeld, where the Snarkastic Four get put in jail. It's starts because they jaywalked (which is Not Nice), then it just escalates because they don't understand the social mores. As surely as cynicism and irony are a successful coping strategy for isolated-among-11-million-people big city life, niceness is the grease that makes small-town life function.

More to come...

Whoa! Houseblogs in the NY Times!

2006-03-05T13:34:00.000-05:00

I posted too soon. Without reading the whole Magazine. Look! Here.

Stephen Metcalf manages to combine a whole slew of my interests and rants (housep*orn, Jane Austen, Orson Welles, romance) into a cohesive narrative of Houseblogging

Because I can't just keep posting about the magazine (we have an Oscars party to prepare for), why don't you just go read it yourself then come back here and we can chat. Okay? Okay.

Putting the Fat in Tuesday

2006-03-05T11:40:00.000-05:00

In addition to eating pancakes on Shrove Tuesday, I also bought a dozen Fastnachts from the local Lutheran church. I just love the idea of the little Lutheran ladies staying up all night to make me donuts, also I love donuts. But I happened to get sick in the tummy (maybe from all the treat eating), so we didn't make it through more than two Fastnachts total. D finally asked me: "Why do you keep taking only one bite of different donuts?" "They all look so different, some small and solid, others big and puffy, some light and some dark - that I think they might taste different." But they didn't and my stomach would not stand for any of them.

So on Wednesday night, I decided to do something about the ten remaining Fastnachts. What would you do? Well, I attempted my first ever Bread Pudding. (Go ahead and google donut bread pudding. I'm not crazier than other people.) So I beat together some milk, cinnamon, nutmeg, vanilla, and the really cool green eggs that we get from a local farmer (they're not green on the inside, just like normal eggs).

And I tore the donuts into bite-sized pieces, then tossed it all together with some raisins. To tell you the truth, I didn't make enough liquid custardy stuff and I didn't let it soak long enough. I think I chose the wrong kind of pan (deep instead of wide), and I think I might have cooked it too long. So it was a wee bit dry.

D basically turned up his nose at the results. Sooooo....I decided on Thursday that there was only one possible course of action: to soak the whole thing in booze. But the only alcohol I had to spare was the tail end of a bottle of brandy (left over from a party grogg, a great recipe I inherited from my mom), so Bob's Your Uncle that's what I our liberally all over the Fastnacht Pudding. Until it was drowning really. I kept trying to bail the brandy up and over the top, but it just wasn't soaking through.

D, who has little tolerance for the hard stuff, pronounced it inedible and, I believe, said something along the lines of "You have got to stop experimenting in the kitchen." So on Friday, after 24 hours of soaking, I poured out the excess brandy, mixed it with some butter, sugar, and vanilla, and made a really delicious caramel sauce. Mmmmmmm. That was goo-ood stuff. I removed the remaining pudding to a pie pan, poured the caramel over, and baked the whole thing to dry out the overpowering presence of brandy.

And finally, I produced something my husband would eat! After three days of noodling around in the kitchen, I basically had made upside down cake without the pineapple. Well, it doesn't matter because we ate it up in no time while watching Thumbsucker, the indie film released last summer and based on the novel by Walter Kirn, who happens to have written a really cool essay on the emotions of homeowning and interest rates in today's special Real Estate issue New York Times Magazine.

Question of the Day

2006-02-28T10:18:00.000-05:00

What do you wear to a Shrove Tuesday Pancake Breakfast at the Fire Hall? I never seemed to have this problem in the city!

We live in the country, so I'm thinking people will be dressed casually. But I'm there to network, so I want to present myself like the Executive you want to hire. But the Executive you want to hire knows how to relate to the country people. It's a tough call.

I settled on blue jeans (casual) with a stretch cotton top and a blue wool blazer (Executive). And I didn't feel like I stood out. There were a lot of casually dressed people, retirees and moms, but the business people were dressed like they were about to head to work. Which of course they were, because it's Tuesday.

My host, a local marketing Executive, was a little more dressed up than me. Her blazer a turtleneck matched mine, but she had black slacks on to my jeans. Black slacks are pretty popular workplace attire hereabouts, especially with a solid colored top. Women in offices also tend toward color-coordinated "outfits" that you see in stores like DressBarn, with a solid and a print (preferably floral) that match spot-on.

Well, anyway, enjoy your pancakes and Fastnachts! I know I did.

Radio Silence

2006-02-19T16:00:00.000-05:00

Boy, we don't post much here anymore.

I would like to say it's because we are out leading exciting lives, or because the house is now completely perfect, but those would both be lies. In fact, it would be a lie to say that I don't post because I don't have any time to post -- while I am incredibly busy these days, I certainly still waste my share of time on the interweb, and if this was a place dedicated to posting my random thoughts about the Olympics or silly things my students do, then I would probably write much more. But we promised to try to keep this blog somewhat on the topic of renovating our house and adjusting to small town life, and those are things that I haven't had the time to do much of recently.

Yesterday we did take advantage of some calm between the storms in our jobs to do some shopping, though. We started by going to a local HOME SHOW, where we hoped we would be able to talk to people who could help us paint the exterior of our home (if we ever get the money to pay them) or install some new cabinetry in the kitchen (again, if we ever have the cash) or all kinds of other home improvement projects that are slated for summertime. But alas, the place was primarily filled with developers who wanted to build us a new home and banks that wanted to help us finance said home, along with a few people selling granite countertops and lots of gravel. So mostly we just wandered from vendor to vendor taking advantage of the door prizes and the free bananas (did I mention that this HOME SHOW had a tropical theme?) and after about 30 minutes we left.

We then hit a number of used and new furniture shops. While we aren't currently looking for any major furniture, we still like to browse. And I am completely desperately in need of a new bedside table. Ever since we moved here I have been using some crappy shelves that used to hold towels in our bathroom as a bedside table, and it is a very unstable set up that is ugly, at that. And ever since I built the new bed, I have felt even more desperate for a bedside table. The problem is that we have yet to see ones that we like. Granted, this problem could be solved the way that most problems are solved -- with a trip to IKEA -- but I am worried that even they wouldn't have what we are looking for. The kicker is that I have no idea what I am looking for, and it's not like I am constantly in search of some Platonic Ideal of a bedside table -- K. wants them to have drawers (though she is flexible even on that point), and we want them to be roughly the right height and be able to not get waterstained from the large number of water glasses that I let pile up on my bedside table -- but somehow none of the stores we went to yesterday, or in the other shopping excursions, meet our standards. Sigh.

The Case Of The Dead Cable Modem

2006-02-10T07:56:00.000-05:00

A couple of weeks ago, we returned home to find a note hanging on our front door knob, talking about leakage and emissions. No, it wasn't some real-world version of porn spam, it was a note from our cable company saying that we might have leaking cable signal coming out of our house. And that we need to call Adelphia to set up an appointment immediately.

Which we totally did not do.

So a week or so later, we got a voicemail from Adelphia, explaining that we really might be emitting cable signals from our basement, and that if we don't call them to set up an appointment ASAP then we were violating FCC rules and that any plane crashes in the mid-Atlantic states would be completely our fault.

But we still didn't call.

In our defense, it wasn't out of apathy or malice -- God knows that we don't like plane crashes -- but that we've been insanely busy. Life in my department has expanded from a 60 hour a week job to an 80 hour a week job due to some major goings-on, and K. has more freelance jobs on her plate than you can shake a stick at -- though they all seem to end in late March, so she is also expending energy finding more. Also, we like to emulate Bob Costas and for weeks leading up to the Olympics we lock ourselves up in hotel rooms and study up in preparation for the Big Event. (Go Ohno!)

So we were slackers.

Then yesterday, while K. was working here at home partway through the morning, the internet pooped out on her. And after checking all the obvious things, she also noticed that the cable had died as well. So she called Adelphia and they had absolutely no idea what the problem was so they talked her through a bunch of possible solutions, none of which worked. So they agreed to send out a technician to look at it in the afternoon. We of course needed this problem fixed right away partly because we are totally addicted to the internet and partly because tonight happens to be both the opening ceremonies of the aforementioned winter games of the 27th olympiad and also the final episodes of Arrested Development -- a DVR night if ever there was one -- She then asked if the technician could also address this whole 'cable leakage' problem, but the Adelphia person had no idea what she was talking about. So she set up an appointment for the afternoon and then called me to tell me I needed to come home from work early to deal with the Adelphia guy as she had a meeting elsewhere.

So I came home early, and was eagerly working on research in our den when I heard the cable guy arrive and just outside the window I heard him talk on his cell phone/walkie talkie to someone back at the home office who was saying "yeah, when I was out there this morning the wire came out that hole and it was the one on the left or something". I was confused why they had already been to visit our neighbors this morning, but I left it alone. Eventually, the cable guy came in and started asking me a bunch of questions about our wiring set up and our house. I asked him what their relevance was and he said he needed to know the answers to address the leaky cable lines.

I then asked him about the fact that our cable/internet was dead and if he had any ideas about how to fix them, and he gave me the answer that you have all probably already figured out by now, as I have laid it out like and Encyclopedia Brown mystery (alas, I don't know how to write upside down in HTML) -- Because we had never responded to their queries about the cable leakage, Adelphia had decided to "pad" (which is cable guy lingo for 'padlock') our cable and shut it down.

Now, you might be asking yourself a few questions -- If they are going to lock down your cable, why don't they leave a note explaining that they are doing so? If they intentionally lock it down, why did the person at Adelphia tech support not know anything about this and why did they talk us through other possible solutions? If someone was at our house to lock it down, why didn't they RING THE FRIGGING DOORBELL so K. could let them in to the house to do what they needed to do? -- these are all good questions, and the best answer I can come up with is that Adelphia is completely incompetent.

Let's Go To The Movies, Annie

2006-01-23T07:58:00.000-05:00

As many of you know, one of the things we liked least about living in Metropolis -- yes, up there with everything costing twice as much as it should and not having any space in our apartment -- was going to see the movies. Like everything else, they were far more expensive than they should have been, but that wasn't the worst part -- we also found that you almost always had to get to the theater an hour ahead of time and even then the show you wanted to see was often sold out or you were lucky to get two seats together. And you had to deal with more crowds and craziness than I often wanted to put up with in order to see whatever movie it was I wanted to see.

Now, when we first moved here we were excited at how much better movie-going seemed. Sure, we had to drive 20 minutes to the-next-town-over to get to the the multiplex, but to be honest the subway ride in Metropolos took at least that long (and you were at the mercy of the train schedules), and the luxurious seats and empty theaters and never having to worry about things being sold out were all well worth it. (Not to mention that the theater was immediately between Lowes and Home Depot, and we always want an excuse to go spend money there). But as the months have passed, we have grown a bit weary of the multiplex -- not because it isn't a good theater (did I mention that despite the small-towniness it is the only latest-generation-digital-projector in our state?) but because we missed independent films. I love cheesy Owen Wilson comedies and blockbuster scifi flicks as much as the next guy -- I mean, I'm not the kind of guy who wants to see Yi Yi or anything, but every once in awhile I want something a bit more independent and small budget. (Though to be fair to that multiplex, Brokeback Mountain did open there this weekend when it went into wide release)

So imagine our pleasure when this weekend they opened up a two screen indpendent theater RIGHT HERE IN SMALLVILLE. Only two blocks from our house! I may have mentioned before that I have never in my life had a driving commute to work, but I have always had to drive to a movie theater -- until now. And it is a nice new "50's-style Theater" (which seems to mean just that it has a modern carpet and wall treatments). And its only two blocks from our house. So on Saturday night we got all dressed up for a night on the town, prepared ourselves to see Good Night, And Good Luck and walked the two blocks, arriving fifteen minutes before showtime...

...and the movie was sold out. Yes, we may have independent cinema here in Smallville, but -- at least on the very first weekend that movies have shown in town in over five years, and a movie that was The Best Reviewed Film Of 2005 is showing on a screen with 80-odd seats on a Saturday night at 7pm -- we are back to dealing with Metropolis-esque sold-out shows. Oh well. At least the tickets were only $7. And when we went back on a Sunday evening there were plenty of tickets to be had.

Den-volution

2006-01-05T17:11:00.000-05:00

Previously, On Revivalized: Den

"This house is great, but the den sure needs work"

"sure it took us four tries to find the right color, but this one really works!"

"The nice paint shows off just how ugly our furniture is"

"Sure, D. built us a great IKEA entertainment unit, but when oh when will those couches we ordered show up?!?"

Today's episode actually began last week, when we took the occasion of having my parents here to move that monster of an entertainment unit onto the back patio to clear space for the new furniture. We also took the opportunity to get rid of that ugly ugly carpet -- the second of the two ugly carpets we inherited with the house -- and replace it with our new many colored shag rug that we bought on that aforementioned IKEA run.

We did all this even though the furniture store we spent a ridiculous amount of money at told us that it would be two more weeks until the new couches arrived. So you can imagine our surprise when they called on Tuesday saying that the couches were now here and that they could deliver them today.

This morning the guys showed up and the first words out of their mouth were "these things better not be going upstairs." You see, it was the same people who delivered the bed a couple weeks ago, and while I never told you all about it, there were quite a few hijinks trying to get a king size bed up the stairs of our 1920 home. But the couch and loveseat were staying on the first floor, and while there were a few tricky corners that they had to navigate, they did so with quite a bit of ease and ten minutes after arriving, the two furniture men rode off into the midmorning, leaving a fully furnished den in their wake:

Sure, we still have to hang some art and remove the tags off of those couches, but the den is very close to being a finished product.

Next Time on Revivalized:

"I like the den, but does the sofabed really have to go in the dining room?"

"We have to be careful not to let the Christmas-Tree-Eating Virus DESTROY US ALL!!!"

We Three Kings

2005-12-24T10:07:00.000-05:00

You may have noticed a flurry of posts by yours truly over the last few days. And the more astute among you may have put together that this flurry has coincided with the end of my semester. Which means that for three glorious weeks I have nothing to do -- well, other than trying to plan my courses for next semester and prove a few theorems and write a book review or two and all of those kinds of things. But I figured that after a long hard first semester in my new job I deserved to take most of this week off from thinking about math and/or teaching. So how did I spend the week? Did I just lie around in my pajamas all week playing video games, catching up with back issues of The New Yorker and watching West Wing reruns on Bravo?

Well, yes. I did all that. But I also built a bed. You may recall that several weeks ago we bought a Sealy Reatta Pillowtop Mattress Set as we were finally ready to graduate from the cheap-o Queen Size bed that I had bought when I started graduate school into a fancy-shmancy KING SIZE BED. (Not that there is anything uncomfortable about the Queen Size bed -- and now we have a real bed for all of you to sleep in when you come visit us!) In any event, the new bed was finally going to be delivered this week. But we had delayed buying a frame to put said bed into, knowing that even the cheap metal frames would cost about the same as the tools needed for me to build one, so I took the opportunity to show off my mad revivalizing skillz and I built us a bedframe.

Now, before you get too impressed, I should say that the bedframe is nowhere near as elaborate as the one that K. wanted, so she is still pouting like Carissa Gaghan. In fact, I based the design on a bed designed by my boss's significant other, and the design looks like this:

As you can tell, it is quite possibly the simplest bed design that one could imagine, consisting only of a bunch of 2x12's, 2x4's, and 4x4's. So off to the Lowes I went to buy the wood, properly cut for me since a saw is not yet a part of our toolshop. First I stained and varnished it (that's Golden Pecan for those of you keeping score at home):

Then yesterday I spent the afternoon carrying the wood up to the bedroom and assembling the pieces into place. I became very close friends with our drill and lots of L-brackets:

And finally, when K. got home, we were able to move the whole thing into place and we had our finished product. A King-sized bed that feels like a cloud.

I'm quite happy with the way the whole project turned out: I like the simplicity of the frame, and I think that the color looks quite nice. And if it isn't apparent from the photos, the 4x4's I used for the legs of lots of cool knots in them. The other moral of the story was that building furniture was both a lot easier and a lot more fun than I had imagined. Next up: I need to build us some bedside tables!

I Came In Through The Bathroom Window

2005-12-21T23:19:00.000-05:00

For those of you who haven't committed the blueprints of our house to memory, there are four doors into our house from the outside:

There is the side door, which we in theory have keys to but we have no idea where they are -- presumably somewhere in the Big Drawer O' Keys that we inherited from the previous owners.

There is the door in from the upstairs back porch, which we do have keys to but which has a screen door which flaps around in the wind so we keep it latched from the inside with a hook that is un-openable from the outside.

There is the back door, and the door from the Enclosed Patio into the house works great and all is smooth, but dear readers, there is a secret that we have been keeping from you. You see, a couple months ago the latch on the screen door broke.

One day I was minding my own business and turning the key to lock it, and when I removed the key the lock mechanism came out with it. And while the door worked perfectly fine from the inside, it was impossible to open it from the outside if the door had latched closed. Several times we attempted to jury-rig it in various ways, but none of these were particularly successful and so every time we leave the house we have either had to prop the screen door open with something or walk around to the front of the house when we returned.

So for those of you keeping score at home, this means that only one of the four doors into the house is actually openable from the outside. At least, normally. Yesterday, I returned home from some last minute holiday shopping to find that even though my key seemed to be turning the latching mechanism, the door would not open. Clearly something was holding the door in place, and it seemed like it was on the inside of the house. Now, we like our door very much so I didn't want to be too rough with it, so I tried to find an alternate way into the house.

Of course, as I said above, there is no alternate door into the house, and while Santa would come down a chimney, our only chimney leads straight into the furnace so despite the big bag of gifts I was carrying this didn't seem like such a good idea. So instead I was left checking the windows to see if I could make it into any of them. Of course, like good penny-pinching kids, we had closed most of the storm windows, making it that much harder to get in through the window. But at long last, I realized that I could jimmy the window from the upstairs back porch into the laundry room to get into it and therefore into the house:

Note that in real life, the table in the picture was actually covered with stacks of laundry which I have been too ~~lazy~~busy to put away. So I swam through the sea of socks and t-shirts and made it into the house.

I went downstairs to see what was wrong with the door, and all I could really tell at first was that the lock seemed to work just fine but that the door seemed to be holding the door in place and now it seemed like it was on the outside. So I removed the lock and various other things until I was able to get the door open and realize that the problem was that somehow the metal strip on the side of the door (which presumably has a name, but for the love of Google I couldn't figure out what it was) had developed a bit of a buckle which held the door in place, refusing to let it budge in either direction..

At this point, my many months of Revivalizing skills kicked into gear and I developed a high-tech super-elaborate plan in order to fix the door: I grabbed a hammer and pounded the metal strip back into shape. And now the door works just fine.

Of course, just to be safe I decided it was finally time to fix the screen door into the back patio, and so I just removed the locking mechanism altogether so now the door never locks closed. Of course, it also never locks so now anyone could just wander into our back patio and steal the very small number of things that we have there. So let's just keep this between you and me, ok?

Till Debt Do Us Part

2005-12-21T09:40:00.000-05:00

This past weekend we had a wedding to go to in a nearby big city (congrats to the couple!), so we hopped into the minivan and drove through the snow-covered fields to the city. And just like most small-town residents who explore the big city, we were very excited to take advantage of all that the city had to offer. For some people this means ethnic restaurants or live music or art museums -- and there are times that this would be the case for us as well -- but on this trip it meant one thing: shopping.

Yes, we ignored the fact that we had lots of Holiday Presents to buy and that we just spent a boatload of money on furniture as well as finishing paying for our lovely Toyota Sienna, and we took advantage of the trip to the big city to spend lots of money at Barnes & Noble, Best Buy, Whole Foods and, of course, IKEA.

At the latter, we once again proved that we can't walk into the store without spending several hundred dollars, but we left with a new rug for the den as well as a spiffy new corner entertainment unit:

Sure, we already owned a behemoth of an entertainment unit, but the new couch and loveseat will require a reorganization of the den that needs a corner unit, and we found this one we liked at IKEA. And a very small amount of assembly later, we have a unit. We also bought a new rug for the den -- a shag rug like K. wanted but multicolored like I wanted -- and now we are just sitting around waiting for the sofa to show up and twiddling our thumbs.

My Husband Is So Wonderful

2005-12-16T22:01:00.000-05:00

Over the last year, I've read about auctions at 1902 Victorian and RestoreHouse. And since we moved here, I've been tracking our local auction house's website. I thought it might be a good way to get our enormous house furnished at not too outrageous an expense. I saw lots of good stuff online, but we never felt we had the time to get to an auction...until this week!

We didn't intend to buy anything, just to check out the scene. How does it work? Is it fun? And we answered some of those questions, but now we have others...like how much does furniture really go for? (We didn't stay that late.) And how do you win a bid? We hung out, checked out the merchandise, watched the scene. We were pretty unenthusiastic, until the auction started. And things started selling for a dollar at the most. That's our sort of price tag! So my husband watched for a while, got the hang of things, and won me a set of flatware:

For only $3 - how wonderful is that! I wish he would be so wonderful as to build me a bed like this:

But there is that little detail about not having any of the appropriate tools...so I'll continue to look like this:

Bonus photos - our town square at Christmas:

The frost on the pumpkin on our porch this morning:

The Slippery Slope Of Laziness

2005-12-14T08:22:00.000-05:00

It all started last week when the The Great Christmas Tree Adventure of 2005 activated some tendonitis in my ankle (and gave me a bit of poison ivy, but that isn't relevant to this post). So for a few days last week I couldn't walk -- at least not without a good amount of pain -- and so I drove in to campus.

Now, I have had a walking commute since I graduated from high school. Well, one year in college I lived off-campus and about a mile away from my classes, and so there were some days when I would drive even though I tried to bike most days. But throughout grad school and my postdoc I lived a walking -- or occassionally biking -- distance from the office and parking was so expensive near campus that I couldn't have driven in even if I wanted to. And now that we live here in Smallville, we live all the way across town from my office which means it takes me about 12 minutes (pretty consistently 3 songs on my Ipod) to walk to the office. All of this is to say that I have never really driven to work before. But last week my ankle was bothering me enough that I did. In fact, last Wednesday I had to go get my campus parking permit, which was totally free and allows me to park anywhere on campus -- yet another joy of teaching someplace other than an urban campus.

By the end of the week, I had gone to see the podiatrist who had loaded me up with some anti-inflammatory medication and over the weekend the medication and a lot of lying around helped the ankle so that I could walk pain-free. But on Monday I decided that it was better to be safe than sorry, so I hopped into the Toyota Sienna and drove to campus.

Yesterday morning one of my classes had their final exam at 8:30 in the morning. And this was pretty darn early for me to make it to campus, especially since I needed to get there early to rearrange the tables in the room. And I decided that I wanted to bring them in doughnuts, so I thought I should drive to campus.

Yes, you can see where this is going. The walk is perfectly pleasant and quite short, but driving is even shorter and more pleasant, and I am now addicted to driving in and looking for any excuse I can. Today's excuse: The temperature outside right now is 3 degrees Farenheight. Of course, before those of you who live in Minneapolis and Ann Arbor think I'm a wimp, let me point out that with the wind chill it feels like it is THREE DEGREES. I think that's a pretty darn good excuse to drive in. Don't you?

My Husband Is So Exasperating

2005-12-09T09:49:00.000-05:00

He wrote two wonderful posts about our amazing tree, but he neglected certain key facts. So, I just have to blog for myself.

The tree is a Colorado Spruce and was grown on an organic tree farm. We paid for 7.5 feet of tree, but it seems like it must be taller than that, since it very nearly touches our 8'8" ceiling. It is 6 feet across at the widest point.

The first night especially it had the most incredible fragrance that filled the whole house.

It is the Prickliest, Most Painful tree EVER. Honestly, you can't even touch it because the needles hurt so much. We don't know why this is, because it looks like a normal un-painful tree. Which is why it's so crooked - the effort to right it was just so painful. It even gave D. a rash on his hands!

It drinks 1 gallon of water a day. I am the only one who remembers to do this.

Okay, that's all. Go about your business. And I'll get back to shoveling the snow (with the shovel my dear husband bought me last night). And dreaming about my real husband, Mr. Fitzwilliam Darcy of Pemberley Estate:

And my other husband, Captain Frederick Wentworth of the Royal Navy:

A Thousand Points of Twinkly Light

2005-12-08T08:48:00.000-05:00

Twas the night before my students were coming over for dinner, and all through the house
We realized how silly the giant tree in the middle of our living room looked when it was as barren as our house

So even though K. had a lot to do and I was more than a bit gimpy
We decided it was the night to decorate our Christmas/Yule/Cha-noo-ka-hah Tree.

We started by getting out the many boxes of lights
And strung them all up so we could see through the night

Then up went the garlands, one as twinkly as the aforementioned lights
and the other one made in some foreign land and sold to us by Mennonites.

Over the next several hours we decorated the tree all happy and chipper
as we listened to christmas songs by Julie Andrews, The Chieftans, and Squirrel Nut Zippers.

This was our first tree together, so few of our ornaments had sentimental attachment butthatwasjustfine
Instead we hung mostly ornaments we got at Walmart for $3.99.

It took less than 10 minutes for me to break one of the glass balls
And we struggled with the top of the tree -- almost 8 feet tall.

We still want to string some popcorn and break out the Christmas wardrobes
but K. refuses to let me buy a Giant Inflatable Snow Globe.

By the end of the night the tree was decorated and that was perfect timing
So let me show you some pictures and spare you more of this stupid rhyming.

It's (slowly) Beginning To Look A Lot Like Xmas

2005-12-05T23:35:00.000-05:00

In the past, we have done some decorating for the holidays. Typically it has involved a mishmash of our blue and white ~~Hannukah~~Christmas lights, our Adventsstjarna, cards we receive from our friends and loved ones (most of which seem to feature ridiculously adorable babies), and an assortment of other odds and ends that we have picked up. But in the five previous holiday seasons that we have spent together, we have never had our own Christmas/Yule tree. We have helped to decorate them at our various parents' homes, but never had our own tree.

Until now. And what a tree it is. But I'll get to that in a moment.

This year we decided to begin our own traditions here in Smallville rather than traversing the country to visit our families. And while our hopes that our families would spend Christmas with us were somewhat foiled, we continued onwards and decided to decorate our new home for the holiday season for the very first time.

Last week I began by stringing some lights up on our front porch:

(for the record, these were originally all white lights, until K's dear late mother -- from whom we inherited the lights -- decided to add a single blue light at the end of each strand. Yes, there is a reason everyone described her as eternally patient.)

But the real fun only got started yesterday when K. and I went out to a local Christmas-Tree-Farm-Slash-Cohousing-Community to cut down our very own tree. It was probably not the wisest of decisions to go do this the day after our first snowfall of the year, but to us it only seemed like it would add to the festive holiday spirit -- and besides, there was really no other good time to go. Of course, the weather made the adventure involve quite a bit of driving around the muddy roads of the farm -- the first time we wished that our Toyota "Lexus of Minivans" Sienna had off-roading capabilities.

But after a good amount of driving and tromping around the woods, we finally found the perfect tree for us. Or at least a tree that seemed somewhat-better-than-merely-acceptable as my socks were getting wetter and wetter. So we pulled out the handy saw that they had given us, and sawed the sucker down:

We started to carry it back to the main shop ourselves -- did I mention that there was live bluegrass music and free hot cocoa to make the whole thing more festive and more fun -- but we were unable to carry the tree ourselves, so K. called in the reinforcements who helped me carry the tree back through the icy mud and the muddy ice to the place where they baled it up while I drank my hot cocoa.

We then strapped the tree down to the top of the Sienna and drove it home, where we wrestled with it long enough to get it in the stand and standing up in the living room.

Yes, it's big. Bigger than we had anticipated -- while we had a good sense of the height and how it was pretty much what we wanted, the girth of the tree seemed much narrower when it was surrounded by other trees and wide open spaces than it does sitting in the middle of our living room. In fact, I don't know much about metaphors -- except for what I learned from the films of Morty Fineman: Metaphors are Like Dreams and Similes are Dreams. But it doesn't take an English professor to realize that there is something deeply symbolic and the tree is a lot like the house: it looks great, and its very large, but we have nowhere near enough ornaments (ie furniture) to fill it.

Now, the original plan was to come home last night and decorate the tree. But when we got home we were far more tired and sore than we had anticipated. More importantly, it seems that in all of that walking around on icy muddy hilly terrain, I twisted my ankle. And so I went on the DL, and I have been lying around resting, icing, compressing, and elevating my ankle except for the teaching I had to do today. Hopefully we'll decorate the tree tonight, but first we need to watch Arrested Development.

Let It Snow

2005-12-04T12:37:00.000-05:00

Right after I wake up in the mornings, I like to walk back to the laundry room and look out over the back porch and our little yard. I don't know why I do this, but it's just nice to get a sense of the day. Here's what it looked like this morning:

A light dusting of snow came in the night, giving a taste of how wonderful the snowy days of winter will be here. Everything looks so much more quaint and charming.

We were just speaking of the skies, and two mornings this week, the sun was rising just as I was surveying my "property." Trust me, this is an indication of how late the sun is rising, not how early I am up! One morning, the sun's first light was clear and butter yellow, but the other everything was suffused in pink radiance.

Yesterday was a gorgeous blue-sky day, and we attended the first of the local holiday events, an open house at our county Historical Society. D. and I have a fondness for checking out local history museums, or "heritage centres" as they are called in Canada, when we travel, and we were happy that ours was probably the best we've been to. It had very few hand-written exhibits by fifth graders. Here's a nice view of D's building from the historical society:

We ran into a few people involved with my new job. It's important that I am seen as involved in local activities, and that's good because I'm happy to throw myself into local culture. In fact, I'm excited because the job has asked me to serve on a Chamber of Commerce committee. Yay! I love Chambers of Commerce!

After that, we casually spent a mind-boggling amount of money at the family-owned since 1949 furniture store. We chose - for the den - a Broyhill sofa and loveseat:

That's style 5079, for your information. What a romantic name, huh? Conjures up vision of math class. Maybe that's why D. liked it. No actually, we both thought it was the single most comfortable sofa we tried in three months of testing. You know - that really hard work of sitting on your ass over and over again. And, apparently 5079 is a very popular style hereabouts.

We spent a LOOOOOOOOOOOOOONG time considering that gold fabric above, which would have matched our walls perfectly, but in the end went with a contrasting and more contemporary fabric. Kind of like this:

But moss and olive green, instead of purple. For pillows, we went with a really fun fabric that ties together the gold walls with the green upholstery and adds some fun red and purple for us to play with in the rest of the room:

Now we have six weeks to wait for it to show up. In the meantime, we'll be looking for area rugs, entertainment armoires, and considering whether to get "spaghetti sauce insurance."

Oh yeah, we also just happened to pick up a mattress set on our way out. No biggie, right?

When we went a couple of weeks ago to check out sofas, we tried out a king-size mattress that I've been fantasizing about ever since. Because it was a floor model, they had only one and it was on super duper sale. It's a Sealy Reatta Pillow Top mattress, and seriously it's like lying on a cloud. The King-sized cloud will go into our bedroom, and the queen will move into the guest room. Just in time for D's parents' holiday visit. How convenient!

We haven't found a bed frame we like, but that wasn't a problem when we didn't have a mattress either. D. has some crazy ideas about building a bedframe himself, which I play along with. But, people, we don't even own a saw!

Settling In for the Winter

2005-11-28T21:44:00.000-05:00

Some friends have been questioning whether I have forgotten the blog, and it almost feels like I have. There's nothing happening around the house, though D. is starting to peep about doing a project over winter break. We're just settling into life in our own place, starting to feel comfortable and at home.

I was scrambling to get a lot of garden work done before it got too cold. Really working myself ragged on Sundays, then moaning about how sore I am for the rest of the week. After the garlic bed was built, I got busy dividing the huge, old clump of daylilies. In the end, and working until after dark, I had planted 20 new daylily bunches. In fact, I have been gardening in the dark quite a bit. Ever since daylight savings time, it's getting dark by 5 pm. So my garden photos look like this:

I seem to be much more aware of the sky here, I guess because there aren’t any buildings to block it. I think the tallest building in town has maybe five stories. So I notice the sun and the clouds. On blue sky days, it’s glorious here, but I feel much gloomier here on overcast days than I ever did in BIG City. No museums and movie theatres to escape to. I notice the glorious sunsets and the dark coming upon us so much earlier in winter.

I notice the moon as it moves through its cycle. It’s just a trick of the mind, but it seems to me that the moon swings across the sky each month. In reality, I look at about the same time every evening, and the moon has traveled a little bit farther across the sky each day in the cycle. At the full moon, the moon rises as the sun sets. The moon is dark when it sets as the sun rises.

Last month, a day or two after that full moon, D and I were driving, and I spotted this enormous red glowing orb on the horizon. It was hard to see because of the rolling hills, and it was oddly lopsided due to the wane. But D said the funniest thing, he said: “That’s not the moon, that’s some kind of a building.” Now it would have been totally reasonable for him to say it was a UFO, but a building! I teased him mercilessly for the rest of the ride, as the building rose in the sky and lightened to a butter color.

Actually, we were driving to the nearest Thai restaurant for D’s birthday dinner. (What’s a birthday without a little mockery? Mocking is love in our family.) Alas, the restaurant did not live up to the hype. It was good, and we need to try more things on the menu, and we’re happy it’s there, but it was noway-nohow any good as what we get in the city.

I’m not really complaining about it, because honestly our dining out budget is 20 percent of what it was in the BIG City. And for a while, I was really enjoying all the access to delicious produce – and all the great cooking I could do with it.

Now I’m too busy. Working. Four jobs. Eek! So I really haven’t had time for housework, gardening, blogging, or anything! Some of the jobs are good, some are more stressful, and one is really exciting. It’s working with a non-profit to help preserve the special rural character of our county. Who better to do that than a newcomer?
The big news in town is that we're getting an independent/art film theatre at the end of December. I'm so excited about this, because I've become desperate for independent film. Don't get me wrong - I love our multiplex, though it's not clear how long we'll actually drive the half-hour to it, since a new 12-screener is opening at the edge of town. But I just hate not seeing the cool flicks.

Because I'm that sort of a person (with a very poor memory), I keep a list of the movies I want to see, and it now numbers 15. Since July, people. So, with the holiday lull in TV about to be upon us, D. has finally agreed to give Netflix a try. Yay!

We headed down south to Florida to see D's family for Thanksgiving. Fun and food was had by all. My house restoration skills came in handy at Grandma’s, where I busted out one of her screwdrivers and re-aligned her kitchen cabinet doors and replaced a busted cabinet pull. Everyone was mightily impressed – or at least acted like it.

We spent a lot of time with D's 92-year-old grandmother, which we enjoyed. She told us stories about growing up on a dairy farm in Wisconsin and found us her family recipes for Norwegian foods. Lefse, lutefisk, sandbakkels, and even the prized julekake recipe. Which I might have to try to make over the holidays. Our Norwegian heritage is one thing D and I share - though you'd never guess it from looking at us. Both have glorious hair, but mine is red and curly and his is black and straight. I'm going to be so happy to have authentic family recipes to cook every December, especially around Santa Lucia.

This year, I'm taking my beloved goddaughter to her first Santa Lucia Fest. I’ve told you before how much I love Luciafest, and I’m so excited to share it with the most special little girl in my life.

We're gearing up for a cozy little Yule/Hanukah at home. Before that we have the college president's holiday party and even an open house with our local state representative and congressmen to attend. We'll host D's students for dinner, and we will be decorating the house though. We have boxes of lights that have been in storage for years, and the adventsstjarna and a set of angel chimes are two of my favorite holiday decorations. We're really looking forward to chopping down our own tree, but our tree-trimming party will have to wait until next year. We're just not prepared to organize it at this point, and everyone says D. will be less overwhelmed next year.

For New Year's Eve, the town has a few events planned that sound like fun. Including fireworks, which is my absolute favorite thing to do to ring in the new year. I'm hoping the town square will be filled with people, and the whole thing will be as fun as the Halloween Parade. Sadly, we missed the Christmas Parade, which happens the day after Thanksgiving and leads up to the lighting of the Christmas Tree in the middle of the town square.

The transition to small-town life feels so gradual that I hardly notice it. I've been reading some interesting books about small-town living, including Moving to a Small Town and American Towns: An Interpretive History. It’s helpful to put things in perspective, and I feel so fortunate to be living the life I dreamed about for so long. If only there was a goat in the back yard.

Over The River And Through The Woods

2005-11-22T07:33:00.000-05:00

It would be fair to say that a lot has happened since we last posted here. In particular, I have been obscenely busy at work, with all three of my classes having exams last week which needed to be written and proctored and graded in addition to some extra review sessions. Also, I had a research collaborator up for a day to chat about our research and to give a colloquium talk, and I had a one day conference in the Big City we used to live in, so K. took advantage of the visit to play with her goddaughter and we ate at my favorite restaurant in the world. As if that wasn't enough, my campus has been depbating major campus political issues taking up lots of everyone's time and energy, and I have several deadlines that have passed and several more to come. Oh, and somewhere in there was my birthday, complete with various small celebrations and a trip to a nearby town to see Jeff Tweedy.

So yes, it's been very very busy. And that's just my stuff, and K's life hasn't exactly been bon bons and HGTV-watching either. We haven't had time to blog, let alone time to do anything with the house which is remotely blog-worthy, except for a brief and fruitless trip to a furniture store to try to look at sofas.

This week we will have all the time in the world to blog, but we will be spending it at my 92-year old grandmother's house (yes, the one who gave us her china) and while I haven't explicitly asked her, something tells me that she doesn't have Wifi. So you'll have to live another week or so without us.

Happy Thanksgiving, though.

Election Day Report

2005-11-09T19:44:00.000-05:00

Don't ask me why D. didn't vote yesterday, because I just wouldn't be able to explain without sniggering. I, however, did my civic duty. I have always been a very enthusiastic voter. Like the saying goes, I like to vote early and vote often.

So yesterday morning, I was all raring to vote. Then I realized that I didn't know where my voter registration card was, and if you remember the dire warning that the town sent me with the card, you'll know I didn't want to show up without it. I didn't want to be turned away from my opportunity to vote for school board or sheriff or whatever else rinky-dink little offices were at stake. It's a Red county, so my minority vote is important.

On my lunch break, I looked through my files and found the precious card, but didn't make it to the Municipal Building (a half block from our house) until my way home from work (I know, I know, I'll get to it someday). I walked over with one of the faculty members who was going the same way. We compared voting strategies and notes about candidates. As we walk up to the polling place, which actually turns out to be the Town Council chambers, the Green Party candidate for Town Council was campaigning outside the door., And a nice older gentleman tells us to vote for his candidate for Sheriff. My friend and I are non-committal as it's not clear what party his candidate is.

We walk in, I sign in just like usual. During a slight lull in the action, I ask the nice voting registration lady (no different in appearance from the nice voting registration ladies in all eight precincts I've voted in over the last 13 years of BIG City life) if it would be alright for me to laminate my voter registration card (what with me being required to carry it with me at all times). She said she couldn't see why not and ushered me along to a nice gentleman, who handed me an aluminum clipboard type of thingy???? and a pencil????? I hadn't been able to see how people were voting, because of the drapes of course, and it still didn't register.

Even when I got into the booth.

And didn't see any levers or switches.

Or punch cards and a stylus.

Or when I read the sign that said I MUST use the pencil provided.

And I MUST fill in each circle completely.

Only after I pulled the piece of paper out of the metal container did I realize that I was going to be voting with a pencil and paper!!!!!

Almost every category had a write-in option, and I found out this morning from our town newspaper that the "Democratic" candidate for Sheriff was actually a registered Republican who had been written in during the primary. I voted for the Green candidates and the Dems and the women, filling in my circles just like back in high school, then it was done.

I left the booth and waited for the nice gentleman again - what do I do with this? He was very kind and patient. "You rip off this piece here as your reciept, then you put this here." He demonstrated by inserting the metal ballot container into a slot in a metal box, tipping it, and pulling it out again empty. My vote was cast! In a box! Can you imagine?

I was happy this morning to find out that some of my candidates won, but disappointed that the Green party woman didn't. And that Sheriff candidate that the campaigner told me about, the one who was a "Democrat" so I voted for him, he won...by 32 votes.

[Not including the 282 absentee ballots that will be counted on Monday.]

Books. Lots of Books.

2005-11-08T17:14:00.000-05:00

The other big project of the last couple of weekends has been the Building Of The Shelves to finally make the library complete. As you undoubtedly recall, we decided to go with Effektiv shelves from IKEA, which means that they cost a lot more than the Billy's that we all had when we were in our 20's, and look quite a bit more solid, but still require assembly in just the same way that those cheap-ass ones did.

Now, I had grand plans of liveblogging the entire building process, which fell apart for a variety of reasons, one of which was that we ended up spacing the building out over two full days and then another partial day of securing the shelves to the wall and several days of unpacking books. And another of which was Halloween getting in the way of the whole thing. If I had liveblogged the whole thing, then you would have been subject to lots of entries like this:

1:23pm - K. and I just spent 10 minutes quasi-bickering about the pattern that the shelves should form. You see, there are two different heights of shelves -- the taller shelf actually consists of three small shelves, and the smaller shelf consists of one bigger shelf. Confused? So are we, and to be completely honest I remember that we decided to put them in the order low-high-high-low, but even now I can't remember if "low" referred to the smaller shelf unit or the small shelves in a big unit. Sigh. Now you see what K. has to put up with, and I acknowledge that my Ph.D. is not in either memory or shelf-design.

and this:

2:06pm - One of the (low/high) shelves is now finished as well. These are actually fairly easy to put together -- I am not sure if I just exaggerate the confusing IKEA directions in my mind or if they have improved since the last time I put together IKEA furniture, which was September 9, 2001 -- maybe this is just one of those things that has improved to prove to the terrorists that they cannot squash our spirit. Though I notice that there are not any IKEA's in either Afghanistan or Iraq or the caves of Pakistan that Osama is likely hiding out in. At least not yet. Now that Atlanta has one, I figure that Baghdad must be next.

and even this:

2:44pm - Putting together the tall one (with the short shelves) was a lot like putting together the others, if we were midgets. Everything was much bigger and required more hands to operate, so it was good fortune that this is when K. decided to join me, and we got it up in very little time. So far we have been interested in the variations in the colors between the shelves. When I first put together the plinth, it did not seem to be the same color as my desk, but these other shelves are closer in color to them. None of them are too far off, and all look like natural variations in the wood.

I know, I know. You are all crushed that you didn't get to enjoy that level of witty banter. Maybe someday we will liveblog another proect. Maybe we'll even jump into the next part of the 21st century, and videoblog. In the meantime, here are some photos of the whole process that you can print out and make a flipbook out of.

And the finished product, after many many trips carrying boxes of books upstairs (well, almost finished. There are still a few more boxes of books that will have to wait until we decide that we can afford another shelf for the side wall. But at least the patio is getting closer to empty. Well, other than the empty cardboard boxes we are now drowning in. But I digress):

Bonus points if you can figure out the organizational system on the shelves!

Vampire Avoidance

2005-11-07T16:03:00.000-05:00

I think it began a few years ago, when K's aunt gave me a copy of the book Garlic Is Life for Chrisyulenakkuh. I mean, I had always loved garlic, and cooked with it as much as humanly possible, and one of the ways that I knew that K. was the right woman for me was that she not only humored my interest in garlic, but actually seemed to enjoy it as well (although she doesn't like eating Habanero Pickled Garlic like candy the way I do). But when I read that book, I realized two things: first, I learned about the sheer number of varietals of garlic, and that even the best grocery stores in Philly seemed to only carry California White. And secondly, I started having dreams of becoming a garlic farmer.

I never wanted to do it professionally, except for a brief few weeks during which my dissertation was going particularly poorly and I wasn't getting called back for academic jobs, but K and I would often fantasize about having a garlic farm. Well, in our fantasies I compromised and allowed it to be a goat and garlic fram, and she compromised and allowed me to throw an annual Goat And Garlic Farm Folk Festival.

When we moved to Smallville, we decided to give up on the goats (yes, K., we did) and the folk festival, but we still wanted to plant garlic. And on Saturday we discovered a true garlic (among other things) farm at which we bought several different exciting varietals, and yesterday we at long last planted 16 square feet of garlic. Some Inchelium, some Music, some Ozark, and more. As long as we can stop ourselves from eating the garlic greens all winter -- the last time we planted garlic we couldn't resist temptation and ate them on salads which was very yummy but hurt their ability to grow -- we should end up with 70 or so heads of garlic. That might even last us a week.

This is where I would post pictures, but pictures of a planted bed are not that different from the pictures of the unplanted bed, so I won't waste you pixels.

That was probably the highlight of our weekend. More details to come.

Small-town Halloween

2005-11-01T09:58:00.000-05:00

I'm going to spare you my rant about how Halloween has become so trendy and commercialized that it's lost all meaning, and I'm going to get right down to business: how fun the holiday has been in our charming little burg.

We kicked it off last Tuesday with the Halloween Parade. The rainy night didn't dampen spirits for this festive event. We walked a half-a-block towards the town square and ran into good friends who have an adorable four-year-old daughter. The parade includes marching bands and floats and costumed extravaganzas and a healthy dose of small-town pride. I loved it. I had no idea how much candy they would give out though - handfuls and handfuls of booty. Next year, I think I want to brew up some of my mom's Grog recipe (wine, apple cider, brandy, and spices) and invite people over afterwards.

I also think I want to decorate our porch next year. We've paid very little attention to the outside of the house, which makes me sad because people don't know there are new owners who are so proud and very civic-minded. Also, I'm worried about how the wood will survive the winter. But we have to stick with the plan, which has us focusing on the exterior next spring. For Halloween next year, I picture cornstalks attached to the columns at the top of the stairs and lots of jack-o-lanterns flickering. I don't think I will do cobwebs or scary things. Festive is more my style.

It's hard for me to imagine we could get more little visitors than we did last night, but I hope maybe we can.
We had bought three bags of candy at our normal grocery store, but I had to make a run to the closest store at 6:30 because we were already running low. I grabbed five more bags of whatever they had, and this is all we have left:

Pretty amazing! Kids came in huge clumps and elaborate costumes, I was so impressed. There were a few junior high-age boys who weren't dressed up, but that was nothing compared to what we were used to in the BIG City. Here the kidlets were charming and sweet and shy and well-behaved. Especially the Mexican families were teaching their kids to say thank-you. There were lots of vampires and other scary black costumes - is this a nationwide trend?

The winner by far: the Von Trapp family singers. Mom, Dad, and a gaggle of kids all dressed in hats and vests and woolen bottoms lined up and serenaded us with "My Favorite Things." It was awesome!

Over the weekend, we also did more socializing than we have in months. Friday night, we hung out with a bunch of faculty at the local brewpub. Saturday, we were invited to a Halloween party (I dressed as a Gypsy lady "We prefer to be called Romany or Rom." and D. dressed as himself.) And on Sunday, we went to our friends' house for dinner. We had a wonderful, relaxing visit, and everybody enjoyed the rustic apple tart I made. So my baking efforts might be improving. Though I think the locally grown apples didn't hurt.

Fall in the Garden

2005-10-31T21:38:00.000-05:00

I've done some gardening in the past, and I remember that it was hard work. But I really wore myself out on Sunday. First, I created a bed for flowers, laying down newspaper then mulch to kill the grass. Inspired by the butterfly bushes, this is a purple flower bed so I planted Iris, Allium, and crocus, plus mixed daffodils for contrast.

At this point, my knees, back, and hands were sore. But I couldn't stop. I'd actually been putting off the garden day for weeks (to do silly little things like work all day and tile the bathroom floor).

My next step was to create 16 square feet of soil, according to the recipe in Square Foot Gardening. Okay, this is hard work. First I hauled about 350 lbs. of soil ingredients into the yard, then I dumped them all together and mixed them up with a shovel and hoe. Sounds so much easier than it is, especially when you don't do it every day.

In the end, D. and I shoveled the soil into the 4' x 4' bed we built:

In the spring, we'll do this three more times (ouch! ouch! ouch!), but we only need one now in the fall for the most important crop: garlic. We're going to plant two varieties - Music Pink (hardneck) and Inchelium Red (softneck). We really hope that with this good soil, full sun, and TLC we'll get a garlic crop out of it. But even if we don't, we love to eat the garlic chives that pop up in the spring. Yum!

Liberrys

2005-10-25T19:16:00.000-04:00

It was just over three months ago that we were the kind of couple that didn't even have a dining room or a second bedroom in our apartment. And so it still feels weird to me to think that we are now the kind of family who has not only a second bedroom and a dining room, but also a library. I'm not really sure what made us walk into a room that was the most stereotypical young girl's room that I could possibly imagine and immediately envision it as a study where we would retire to read dense novels and compute cohomology classes associated to elliptic fibrations, but that is exactly what happened. Of course, before the room would suit that purpose lost of things would have to change -- I may rehang the Mary Kate and Ashley Olson posters at some point, but the pink walls needed to go.

I suppose it was inevitable that I paint the library a deep blue, given that this is the color not just of the Braves but also of all three of my alma maters. And that is exactly what I spent this past weekend doing, painting the library while K. floored the bathroom.

Some pictures of the process:

And the finished product:

Hopefully next weekend we will set up the room with the desk and the aforementioned bookshelves and possibly the time will finally come to unpack the many boxes of books which have remained unpacked since early June.

Or maybe I'll just catch up on the rest I didn't get this weekend.

Heirlooms

2005-10-24T22:15:00.000-04:00

I guess we are turning into one of those houseblogs where there is a flurry of activity on Sunday evening and Monday morning, and then we don't post again all week. I suppose it is inevitable, as we don't really spend all that much time working on the house during the week, so unless we are going to post stories about my crazy students or recipes for butternut squash soup, there isn't much to write about.

I'll fight the inevitable a little bit by NOT posting the photos and the report from what I was doing to Professor Plum in the library with a paintbrush while K. was busy tiling the bathroom floor quite yet. And hopefully, if we're lucky, I will get around to posting those photos in a relatively timely manner, unlike last time. But we'll see. Maybe while my students fight with the chain rule on their exam later in the week.

This weekend did mark a few milestones with our possessions, though, which got me thinking about heirlooms. And, in particular, when an item becomes an heirloom. Dictionary.com simply says that it has to be passed through 'successive generations', but I have to admit that most of the belongings that I get from my parents I don't really think of as heirlooms, no matter how much I love them. And it isn't just about the generations it has been through, because while I consider some of my grandparents' possessions to be heirlooms, I have to admit that the dining room table I inherited from one of my grandmothers just doesn't have that feel to it (again, no matter how happy I am to own it), probably because she bought it in 1995.

In any event, I certainly consider my grandfather's grandfather clock to be an heirloom, and this weekend I finally got around to having someone out to fix it. Or, rather to "fix" it, as it turns out that the only thing wrong with it is that my parents had removed the chains to move it up here without either reading the minds of the inventors or going back in time to find a copy of the instruction manual. So for the low low price of $35, a very nice clocksmith (clockworker? clock-dude?) came out and fixed it so that now every fifteen minutes -- like clockwork, as they say -- it chimes throughout our downstairs. It's very exciting.

(yes, dear reader, that photo could have been taken before the clock was fixed, and there is no way for you to tell that it is indeed chiming. you'll just have to take my word on it)

And today I arrived home to find two large boxes that had been shipped to us from my other grandmother (my father's mother, in case you are keeping score at home) and which primarily contained her wedding china:

When we registered for wedding presents almost five years ago, we decided that we were not Fancy China people and that instead we wanted to be Casual China people, which it seemed ironic to us was actually significantly more expensive. (our actual pattern is Denby's Energy Leaf line, if you are wanting to get us that belated wedding present) And while we have both remained happy with that choice, it is quite nice to now own a real fancy set of china, even if it means that in addition to finding guests to come over for dinner, we now have to find Fancy Guests.

We are both honored and touched that she gave these to us, and extra happy that we have them now and that we can send her photos of how nice they look in our house (while we consider it a success that our parents read this blog, we won't push our luck with Grandma). She also included several other nice items, including a McGuffey's Reader from the turn of the (last) century which she received when she retired as a schoolteacher and which will find a nice home in my newly painted library, which I'll tell you about another night...

Weekend Developments

2005-10-24T20:34:00.000-04:00

On Saturday morning, I was overjoyed to discover that I really do get the new season of New Scandinavian Cooking on our local PBS station. Yay! I've already told you about my love for all this Scandinavian, and I was dying because I hadn't seen the new hostess. Double yay! (Which in Norway would be spelled jag and would mean "I." Which reminds me of how my dear friend Jay's Norwegian grandfather always called him Yay. Which I think is funny.)

On Saturday evening, we went out to the downtown Italian restaurant for the first time. It always has long lines, and we had to sit in the smoking section to get a seat (Ask me sometime about how wierd it is to move from a state where there is no smoking in restaurants and bars to a state where they still allow this ridiculous practice.) The service was fast and pleasant, and the food was passable. Very Spaghetti Warehouse! I don't think we'll be going there very often. We make good pasta at home, so when I go out for Italian, I want something special. Then we saw a Belle Epoque French farce at the College. The theatre was lovely, and the farce was very farce-y. The acting was surprisingly good, but the costumes only only passable. We finished off the evening at the local diner for desserts. Eh. Mine wasn't that good, but I'm willing to go back to try the cheesecake.

On Sunday, we headed to the farm stand and bought a red, white, and orange pumpkin, a half-bushel of apples, and some of the season's end tomatoes.

Somewhere in there, I found time to lay Vinyl Tile in the upstairs bath. Let me remind you what the bath looked like originally:

The floor was 1958 flecked linoleum:

Eventually, we'll renovate this bathroom completely. I'd love to raise the ceiling again and bump out into the hall closet and some of the utility room for more space. When that day comes, we'll pull up the floor. But that is years away, so we've gone the quick, easy, and cheap route. Vinyl tile.

Almost two months ago, we were looking at tile options, and we asked you, our dear readers, for your input. The popular vote went for dark grey faux-slate tile, and I was swayed. D. was not, but his favorite was out of stock at Lowe's last weekend. So, abracadabra, the popular vote wins.

Here are the results:

We're happy with it. I'm looking forward to getting used to it, because right now, it's a little disconcerting to pay so much attention to the floor.

The process was fairly simple, though I am clearly not very good at it. I swept the floor, then primed it with KILZ latex. It wouldn't have been hard to paint the floor at this point, if you were so inclined.

Then I spent about an hour arranging the tiles in every conceivable way (grid, grid plus offset, diamonds, diamonds plus offset). I also shifted them a half-dozen times to test out aligment with different parts of the room. Eventually I just gave up and chose the simplest thing. It only took a half hour to get all the full tiles down, then a long time cutting in all the edges. Ugh. That's when my back started to hurt, and my hand was sore from breaking off pieces of the tiles.

But the bottom line is that it was an easy, inexpensive (<$50) project that could be done in one day and freshens up the bathroom immensely. So thanks, Internet, for helping me choose vinyl bathroom floor tiles.

Little Visitors

2005-10-23T19:50:00.000-04:00

In our first weeks here, I said something that has turned out to be more prophetic than I imagined. We were contemplating the "bee ivy" that has overtaken the back half of our yard.

Grandpa's son, who was technically one of the sellers but who never lived in the house, told us during the final walkthrough that it was Boston Ivy and that it was an offshoot from a 250-year-old plant at some farm in the next county. He also said it would have "really nice purple berries in the fall." Which I was glad for, because I might have torn the whole thing out if he hadn't told me that.

It's badly overgrown and during the summer it is completely covered with bees, yellow jackets, hornets, and wasps. I don't know what the swarms like about it, but you have to walk right through this vibrating mass to get to and from our car. It is also right next to the compost pile and surrounds one of our planting beds.

For now, I think we're keeping it, but pruning it back significantly (once all the bees go away for the winter). It is after all the Ivy League ivy, and actually I saw it on a brick building in a town nearby and it looked really cool.

But, in July, we didn't know what we were going to do, we had just gotten here from the BIG City, and I said: "Maybe we just have to get used to more bugs here in the country. They're probably a normal part of life, like garbage and rats in the city."

And, hoo-boy, ain't that true! In addition to the constant drone of the bee ivy, we have regular visitors to the butterfly bush: monarchs and other butterflies, those big fuzzy bees, and once the tiniest hummingbird I ever saw (not really a bug, I know). Crickets jump away from every where you walk, prune, weedwhack, or mow. A few spiders have freaked me out, and of course the compost pile is crawling with the creepies. That's just the garden, it's inside the house that I'm having a hard time getting used to.

Insect visitors have included:
- Big old buzzing flies, who seem impervious to the fly strips,
- Little web-spinning spiders in all the floor corners,
- A big old scary millipede, who ran so fast I couldn't squash him,
- A big old black wasp, who buzzed around the library for a few days,
- A few city-type small roaches in the kitchen,
- Daddy-long-legs slowly crawling across the ceiling, and
- Crickets crickets everywhere, from small to the size of my thumb, and they never seem to know how they got here or how to get out.
Mercifully, there have been no ants. I've even gotten a little buggy, thinking I see out of the corner of my eye something black crawling across the floor, then turning my head to find nothing at all.

I'm not properly scared of bugs, but I don't like them. Maybe after more than three months of country life I'll get used to all the jumping, chirping, web-spinning, crawling creatures of the field, but for now I'm still reacting like a city girl.

Safehouse

2005-10-22T14:56:00.000-04:00

One of the things that's really different about life in a small, old-fashioned town is the vastly altered view of home security. I've lived in cities all my life, so nothing really much scares me. "Bad" neighborhoods, late nights, walking alone - no problem for me. So I've always been pretty laissez-faire about home security. I mean, I locked my doors, but I didn't double-triple-bolt them or anything. And I never had any problems, so there was never any reason for me to get more freaked out.

That said, I am ASTOUNDED by the way people think about home security here. It's not that people say we shouldn't lock our doors, because they don't. They say, "Lock your doors at night." Then they tell me it's completely okay to leave doors unlocked during the day. And everybody's windows are open and not locked anyway. There are no bars on any windows. People leave chairs, tables, decorations, baskets on their porches.

It's the contradiction, don't you see, that gets to me. I haven't studied the crime figures here (I'd love to get my hands on those), but let's be honest with ourselves, is there really any more risk at night? Is the risk during the day really so negligible that no security measures are needed? See, I think it's wierd. If we're the kind of town where we can leave things on our porches, do we really need to lock our doors? Maybe we do, I don't know, but it's strikes me as sooooooooooooo irrational. Based on fear and myths, rather than any reality.

What brings this up now? Well, I ordered a bunch of things from drugstore.com to take care of my auburn mascara/organic skin care dilemma. And the lovely UPS delivery lady, who has been on the route for 17 years, happened to catch me at home when the box arrived (that was back when I wasn't working more than full-time out of the house, which I'll tell you about at some point.) After I explained that we were the new owners and it was only one unit now, she said, if I left the door to our back porch unlocked, she could leave packages for us there. (The electric company has asked us to do the same thing, so they can get to the meter. I asked two different meter-readers in a row to call us the day before they want to read the meter, and we'll either be here or leave it unlocked. But they seem to have lost that memo, because they haven't called, have left little notes, and have been estimating our bills.)

Because half of our belongings and almost all of my inheritance is currently in the enclosed porch, I'm a little reluctant to leave them completely open to anyone who might be tempted to walk in. Irrational, maybe, but after you've spent a thousand dollars shipping everything you'll ever get from your mother, you can tell me I should leave it out in public.

The UPS lady gave me another option: I could put a box, like plastic, on the front porch, and she could leave packages inside it. Then people wouldn't see my package, and presumably steal it, before I got home. Oh the nonsensicality! Is this a safe town - where we leave our porches unlocked - or is it someplace where people steal your mascara and toner off your porch? Which is it?

Writing this, I realize that the compromise solution is clearly to put a box outside the BACK porch and asking her to drop off packages in that. (Which doesn't solve my electric meter problem, but ... whaddayawantfrommeperfection?) Duh. That's my Seven Sisters-educated brain at work, the one they pay me to drag into the office every morning. But that doesn't really solve my overall mystification about whether to lock my doors, close my windows, install bars, and worry about burglary. As I said, my natural tendency is to not worry about it.

But don't get me started thinking about the possibility of a fire. Because that's scary.

Of Roofs, Batman, and Pumpkins.

2005-10-17T15:21:00.000-04:00

So what was it that we were doing instead of posting the pictures over the last few days? Well, I wish I could say there was one big exciting thing that was going on, but alas that is not the case. Instead, we spent the weekend doing little odds and ends, most of which are not even remotely blog-worthy. A few of the highlights:

We may have gotten rid of the beast of a window-unit air-conditioner left by the previous owners a few weekends back, but there was still the little matter of the DirecTV dish that was making the front of the house oh-so-ugly. So on the gorgeous autumnal day on Saturday I crawled out of our bedroom window onto the roof above the patio with our electric screwdriver and tackled it, the whole time singing that little song about the girl asking for proof. Woohoohoo woohoohoo indeed.

The end result: some stripped shingles which may need to be fixed, a much prettier front view of the house, and a leftover mini satellite dish which goes for $25 on ebay and will likely end up in the dumpster:
I spent some time struggling with my grandfather's grandfather clock and trying to get it put back together. My parents say that the clock stopped working at some point before they so generously transported it to us, but I can't even figure out how to reassemble it to see what is wrong. I went online to find the instruction manual, but the only ones available are for more...shall we say 'contemporary' clocks. I think I'm going to have to call (and, worse yet, pay) someone to come fix it. Ugh.
I unpacked and alphabetized the cd's and put them in the racks in the living room. Yes, even the Everclear cd.
While I didn't get around to putting together the new bookshelves -- that project has to wait until after I paint the library a deep blue (we're thinking of painting it either Braves Blue or Rice Owls Blue but certainly it will be something far more manly than the pink it currently is) which will hopefully happen this weekend -- but in the meantime I did read the plans and fantasize about building a secret passage that could be triggered by a book on the bookshelf, Batman style.

OK, not really, but how awesome would that be? Seriously, go look at those pictures.
Autumn means one thing and one thing only here in the Revivalized house: autumn squashes. We may have a ridiculous amount of summer squashes growing in our yard, but my heart belongs to butternut and acorn squashes and pumpkins. And while I love pumpkin ravioli and similar dishes, when it comes to cooking these squashes for ourselves I tend to stick with the soups. And it is with this in mind that I present to you the first squash soup of the season.

It turned out a bit fruitier than I normally make it -- possibly because I roasted the squash in apple cider rather than water, and possibly because the squash was more of a pumpkin than a butternut -- but it still had enough garlic and ginger to be quite tasty. Which is good, because I made about seven gallons of it. If you want to come over and try some, just let us know. Next up: The First Mole of the Season!

Get Color

2005-10-16T21:52:00.000-04:00

I wanted to add my two shekels about Homestead Ballroom Gold. It's dark. You can see that in the photos, that it's not like a background neutral color. Now that's okay with us, we're people who paint every room a different, really bold color. But I wouldn't want you to get the wrong idea. We refer to it as tan or beige, but for most people it would be too dark to qualify for those monikers.

Going on, it really gave all the charm of the inside of a baby's diaper. We were worried. Have we told you already that we didn't swatch the color before buying three gallons? Oh, we did. Okay, because we were worried.

But now it's distinctly caramel, butterscotch even. Very appropriate for the season, I guess. And it definitely achieves the rich, deep, camelhair coat look I was wanting. You can't tell from the photos, but it matches very well with the Mincemeat orange in the dining room. In the end, a lighter color just wouldn't have held up to the orange. Homestead Ballroom Gold is still much more soothing and relaxing, homier as Jocelyn put it, than the other colors we have chosen.

Another thing we did differently in the den is painted the same color on the ceiling as the walls. In the living room and dining room, we used ceiling white tinted with the wall color. Which, honestly, left us with pretty gnarly borders where the ceilings and walls meet. In this room, where a cozier feel was desired, we went the lazy way.

Okay, that's all I had to say. I'll leave you with this picture of the one little tomato that has ripened from the plants I scavenged at the grocery store in July:

Pretty cute, huh?

The Big Reveal

2005-10-16T19:34:00.000-04:00

I know, I know...we promised you final pictures of the den and the new paint job several days ago, and we have yet to give you the payoff. Well, as we often did here in La Casa De Revivalized, we asked ourselves "What Would JJ Abrams Do?" and of course the overwhelming answer was to make you wait much longer than you wanted to find out what is in the Rambaldi's hatch that we call the den. Hopefully not too many of you have switched the channel, and for those of you who have stuck with us now all will be revealed:

As I mentioned last time, we are quite happy with the way the color turned out, and we will be even happier once we can afford real furniture to make the room even nicer. But it is starting to feel better and better.

Ooh Ow Oh Sneeze Snuffle Ow Ugh

2005-10-12T12:03:00.000-04:00

Shoulders - sore, arms - sore, back - sore. Even my fingers are sore from yesterday's labors. I remembered how hard house restoration was ... somewhere around 3am, the fourth time I'd awakened from pain and stuffiheadedness. Yes, it appears that I truly am allergic to paint. (And polyurethane too.) I had tried to write off that two months of sneezing, snuffling, and stuffiness to ... moving ... living in the country... maybe a dusty house. But now I have to accept that the day we started painting is the day all of my symptoms returned. And boy do I feel crappy. What's worse is that I have a networking meeting tomorrow - a really important one, at the college. Now there's never been any guarantee that job would come out of it, but it seems all the less likely when my nose is all Rudolf and I'm trumpeting my snottiness every two minutes. Sigh. I've opened all the windows, maybe that will help. And I probably shouldn't watch TV tonight - but ALL my shows are on tonight. Double sigh.

Anyway, one of the reasons I am so sore is because I did a bunch of heavy yard work yesterday. You know, as a break. While the paint was drying. I transplanted the two peonies that were in my designated compost area, then turned all the compost. That kind of shoveling always wipes me out. I wanted to share with you this enormous peony root:

For those few wimpy little sprouts, the root is the size of your head!

What I Did On My Columbus Day Vacation

2005-10-11T20:39:00.000-04:00

I may not have gotten Labor Day off, but I reaped the rewards of that this weekend, as my college gave us a nice four day weekend, officialy entitled "Reading Days" though I'm pretty sure that none of my students did any reading. And while many of my fellow faculty went camping or slept a lot or at the very least caught up on work, I spent the time Revivalizing, as K. and I finally found the time to paint the den. This weekend was not ideal for painting, not just because I was exhausted but also because we got our first rainfall in months which made everything dry very very slowly (at least compared to the drying speed in the 138 degree weather in July). But I figured the provost wouldn't especially want me to take a four day weekend next week, so we forced ahead with out plans and painted away.

As you may recall, we were flying without a net, as despite putting three different swatches on the wall, we opted to go with a fourth: Homestead Ballroom Gold. I think it ended up a little yellower than I had planned and a little darker than K. had planned, but at this stage we are pretty happy with the color.

Anyways, our weekend in pictures:

We tried to watch baseball while painting, but it just didn't work...

...but thank god we were able to stay online the whole time

It was a long weekend (in more than one way), and the end of working on the den is almost in sight. Well, the end of Phase One. This room more than any other needs a serious dose of new furniture, as that rug is even uglier in person -- we got around to throwing away its twin brother earlier in the weekend -- and we really want a new couch and buying one is very high on the priority list once we can afford it (Is it worth pointing out that my birthday is coming up? And Christmas? Hannukah?) But for now we just have a bit more clean up to do, and you should all stay tuned for the big "final" reveal, coming tomorrow to this very blog!