• BIG news

    New Windows!

    window guys

    I know I have some unfinished business to blog about but guess what!!! Today is a big news day! So the other stuff will have to wait while I fill you in on the latest installment of OUR NEW WINDOWS!!!!!

    checking out the view

    Remember how the window fell out in the middle of the night more than a month ago? We’ve been living with a carefully taped up plastic tarp over that window all this time and it has been FRIGID!!!

    We got used to it though. We’ve been trudging around the house in sweats and socks and a hoodies in the early mornings and night. I put an extra blanket on my shoulders if I sat on the couch near the window. And the noise, well what difference does it make? We live on the highway. You can’t hear yourself think for all the harleys, sirens, leaf blowers, wheezing buses, and that pesky noisy air conditioner on the roof of the restaurant in front of us anyway. It’s just part of urban living.

    they are almost art they are so beautiful to me

    WELL NOT ANYMORE!!!! It is as peaceful as a cottage in the country here now!

    I’m sitting by the window and I can see the cars going by on the highway out of my peripheral vision. I see them whizzing past but I do not hear them! I hear nothing! It’s soooooo weird. You know what I hear instead? Crickets. The crickets living in our house are putting on quite a concert. I guess I never really noticed them before because the constant buzz of road noise blocked them out. It’s surreal what a difference real windows that actually fit make.

    I’m in love with them!

    new windows make the whole place look newer!

    Everything is just brighter and cleaner and quieter and warmer. Better better better all around. Although the newness does make the rest of the house look like it’s falling down even more. I guess I’m going to have to break down and make a new couch cover after all. The one we have now looks like bird puke next to our new white windows.

    The guys who installed the windows said this would happen. They said, first you fix the windows and then you have to repaint and next thing you know you’re fixing up your whole place. We’ll see. We don’t own this place so it’s hard to justify investing a lot of money into it and our landlord certainly isn’t interested.

    looking west

    We paid for these windows to be put in ourselves with a spectacular agreement with our landlord: that she won’t raise the rent for two years. This is really cool since we used to live under the constant threat of eviction. She’s a crazy old lady and we know the property value is more than we pay in rent. We knew our days were numbered. But with our new agreement (on paper! in ink!) we’re good for two more years. It’s kind of nice to know that one thing is not going to change for two years when the rest of your future is up in the air.

    cleaning the smudges

    Of course getting the smudges off them is a whole other story. That just might take two years of elbow grease.

    More photos here.

  • Bug,  place holder posts,  Slow News Day

    it came to pass

    whoorl's bug eyes mirror

    It’s 3 am and I should not be typing a blog post but I feel compelled to let all the monday morning readers (love you guys!) that everything is going much much better than it was in my last post. I think that one day was particularly bad because of the vet and the no-nap/no-lunch combo. A tired, hungry, whiney toddler is much less manageable than a normal whiney toddler.

    I’ve learned some things about Bug lately. (That’s what I’m calling her these days… she’s less and less of a baby every day.) She needs the constant (and I mean CONSTANT) assurance that I’m there. So when she asks me five-hundred-zillion times if she can have a cookie it isn’t really because she is dying of hunger and needs a cookie but more that she wants to make sure I’m right there and paying attention to her. I haven’t suddenly lost all gravitational pull from the earth and gone hurtling out to space to visit my other kids on mars.

    So we’re working on that.

    Pounce seems to be getting better too. He’s not his old self, yowling at five in the morning for his canned cat food but he is up and moving around. He’s responsive to petting and chooses to sleep with Bug at night so at least he’s getting up from his sick bed once in a while. When I came home tonight from a fun Oscar’s party at whoorl’s (yay! just the two of us and our 272 twitter friends) he actually greeted me at the door and gave me a scratching-the-floor-with-his-claws welcome. That is a good sign.

    spider-bug!

    Hey, one more thing. I’ve been thinking it’s time to do an un-finished business post. You know, like a catch up on Forrest and a why-I-painted-my-refrigerator-red story, or an answer to “will you ever make sludgies again?” etc etc… sort of post. Do you have any old niggling questions that I keep ignoring in the comments? I’m trying to be more responsive in the comments but I am baaaad, I know. I always mean to answer questions right away but then something calls me away and next thing I know I’ve let the question slide in with my fifty emails I need to write back to.

    So maybe if I set aside time to just answer questions, I’ll be better. And maybe it’ll be a fun blog post? Or not. No pressure to come up with a question if you don’t have one. I can always just post pictures of Bug.

    And that’s all the news that’s fit to print at 3:28 in the morning. Out!