Particular D
Today Devon spent the day with Elaine, since Walt and I were both working. We decided to take a trip to Home Depot over our lunch hour, since the heat is really on vis a vis the apartment. I gave notice this week in our current place, and now we have to be ready to move by the end of the month.
I'm feeling skeptical that the apartment will be in good shape, though. Walt just called Guillermo today -- our painter -- who is supposed to start on Monday. Turns out he's vacationing in El Salvador! After a rather heated discussion, he thought he could probably start painting by July 14 or 15 but definitely not on Monday. Argh! I have had enough of these tradesmen (please refer to earlier posts for more on this topic), I really have. I have some sympathy for Guillermo because we've been rescheduling on him like crazy due to other tradesmen flaking out on us (again, refer to earlier posts) -- but my god, we had at least two conversations about starting on July 10. It's just endless with these people. I guess the only good thing is that our carpenter might actually be able to finish up the trim work, since he, too, has been attending to our place intermittently. As it was, there was no way he was going to be finished on Monday anyway.
All of this news was delivered on the way to HD, so I was already hot around the collar by the time we got there. Then our trip turned into an epic tour of Home Depot, which is not an activity I'd recommend for anyone. We still have some of these 20% off coupons, so we're trying to pack a bunch of purchases into one event so we maximize the coupon use; today just turned into an endless search for bath fixtures, insulation for the water heater, roof tar and the like. When we finally got to the cash register, the manager came swooping in and declared our coupon a "counterfeit," absconded with it and then, belatedly, offered us an olive leaf by saying that she'd give us 10% off. This actually happened while I was upstairs trying to sort out a special order, so I heard it from Walt after the fact.
I was enraged, both because I had aleady spent way too much time in that place and because no one else in any Home Depot had given us any kind of hassle. I made our checkout person page the manager again and then when she proceeded to arrive, I think the nicest way to put it is that I steeled myself to "get Israeli on her ass." My father will understand this, since years ago he and I missed a flight from Israel to Turkey because the Israeli security took hours searching our luggage. I had to raise holy hell for them to put us on another plane. I'm happy to say that it didn't get to that level this time, but suffice it to say that we got our 20%. She had the last laugh, though, since we had to have them check everything out and then void the process 3 times before they could figure out how to apply the discount. Nothing short of hideous, truly.
Devon was in a great mood when she came back from Elaine's. She's been fixated on the stroller lately, and she went out in the hall for about 20 minutes to play with it. This primarily consists of getting it in, getting out of it and snapping the buckles closed. She hasn't figured out how to open the buckles, so once she closes them, she yells for one of us to come so we can open them for her again.
She also decided to change her bedtime routine. Normally we have dinner, then have a bath (which she's been rejecting lately, so it's a bit of a chore to get her in), then read, then sing "Rock a Bye Baby" (actually Walt and I sing this while she launches into her filibuster) then go to bed. Tonight, however, she wanted to play with her blocks. I really have no idea how this came into her head -- maybe she was playing with them earlier -- but she got really excited about stacking blocks up.
Then when she got a sufficiently tall tower (say 3 blocks), she'd clap her hands and yell, "Yay!" She was surprisingly good at stacking blocks -- or perhaps my expectations were just very low -- since she actually did get a few towers of 3-4 blocks up and balanced. 
She later wanted to dump the entire box of blocks out and smash them around. Then after that she wanted to put them back in the box. Walt and I sometimes call her "Particular D" because she can be really particular about things -- stacking blocks, putting them back in the box, etc. I mentioned this in an earlier post, but her babysitter Kaaren keeps predicting that she'll be an engineer because she's got this persnickity streak in her.
I'm feeling skeptical that the apartment will be in good shape, though. Walt just called Guillermo today -- our painter -- who is supposed to start on Monday. Turns out he's vacationing in El Salvador! After a rather heated discussion, he thought he could probably start painting by July 14 or 15 but definitely not on Monday. Argh! I have had enough of these tradesmen (please refer to earlier posts for more on this topic), I really have. I have some sympathy for Guillermo because we've been rescheduling on him like crazy due to other tradesmen flaking out on us (again, refer to earlier posts) -- but my god, we had at least two conversations about starting on July 10. It's just endless with these people. I guess the only good thing is that our carpenter might actually be able to finish up the trim work, since he, too, has been attending to our place intermittently. As it was, there was no way he was going to be finished on Monday anyway.
All of this news was delivered on the way to HD, so I was already hot around the collar by the time we got there. Then our trip turned into an epic tour of Home Depot, which is not an activity I'd recommend for anyone. We still have some of these 20% off coupons, so we're trying to pack a bunch of purchases into one event so we maximize the coupon use; today just turned into an endless search for bath fixtures, insulation for the water heater, roof tar and the like. When we finally got to the cash register, the manager came swooping in and declared our coupon a "counterfeit," absconded with it and then, belatedly, offered us an olive leaf by saying that she'd give us 10% off. This actually happened while I was upstairs trying to sort out a special order, so I heard it from Walt after the fact.
I was enraged, both because I had aleady spent way too much time in that place and because no one else in any Home Depot had given us any kind of hassle. I made our checkout person page the manager again and then when she proceeded to arrive, I think the nicest way to put it is that I steeled myself to "get Israeli on her ass." My father will understand this, since years ago he and I missed a flight from Israel to Turkey because the Israeli security took hours searching our luggage. I had to raise holy hell for them to put us on another plane. I'm happy to say that it didn't get to that level this time, but suffice it to say that we got our 20%. She had the last laugh, though, since we had to have them check everything out and then void the process 3 times before they could figure out how to apply the discount. Nothing short of hideous, truly.
Devon was in a great mood when she came back from Elaine's. She's been fixated on the stroller lately, and she went out in the hall for about 20 minutes to play with it. This primarily consists of getting it in, getting out of it and snapping the buckles closed. She hasn't figured out how to open the buckles, so once she closes them, she yells for one of us to come so we can open them for her again.
She also decided to change her bedtime routine. Normally we have dinner, then have a bath (which she's been rejecting lately, so it's a bit of a chore to get her in), then read, then sing "Rock a Bye Baby" (actually Walt and I sing this while she launches into her filibuster) then go to bed. Tonight, however, she wanted to play with her blocks. I really have no idea how this came into her head -- maybe she was playing with them earlier -- but she got really excited about stacking blocks up.
Then when she got a sufficiently tall tower (say 3 blocks), she'd clap her hands and yell, "Yay!" She was surprisingly good at stacking blocks -- or perhaps my expectations were just very low -- since she actually did get a few towers of 3-4 blocks up and balanced. 
She later wanted to dump the entire box of blocks out and smash them around. Then after that she wanted to put them back in the box. Walt and I sometimes call her "Particular D" because she can be really particular about things -- stacking blocks, putting them back in the box, etc. I mentioned this in an earlier post, but her babysitter Kaaren keeps predicting that she'll be an engineer because she's got this persnickity streak in her.
posted by Devon Szalva at
10:02 PM
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