The Thing
The apartment is really starting to come together, at least paint-wise. Walt and I went by there today, and the painters have first coats on all of the rooms and second coats on some of them. We really like the colors, although I mentioned earlier that we're still not entirely sure about the living room; it's darker than we anticipated, and something about that shade of brown is definitely different writ large than it was on the 1"x1" paint chip. But I think once the floors are uncovered and we put a rug in it, it will look a lot different.
We did realize today that we had a bit of a setback with the lighting, this time entirely our fault. We won two items on eBay that we wanted to install, one in the hall and the other fixture in the living room. We bid on these back in July and still haven't received them, and after some correspondence with the sellers, it turned out that both had sent the lights to the wrong address. Then after more investigation on our side, we found that Walt had screwed up the shipping address when he sent the PayPay payment -- they were both addressed to Planet-3, c/o Intuit Bldg. 1. Of course no one at Intuit has any idea who Planet-3 is (they would never associate this name with me), so I'm pretty confident that both of them were returned to sender. Ugh, what a mess. I am just hoping that we get these things, especially since one of the fixtures was a very expensive Art Deco one and god knows where they are. I won't bore any of you here with my rant and desperate hope for personalization of the U.S. Postal Office. The day that FedEx is legally allowed to deliver daily mail is the day I will be throwing a party! The days of waiting for 30 minutes to be "helped" by a single surly clerk who is reading her horoscope in between customers and making $30/hour will be over. But anyway, we really don't need fixtures immediately, although once we move in, we won't have any lights (at least built-in ones) until the fixtures get put in. So it wouldn't be a bad thing to have at least a couple of them installed before our moving date.
Devon and I spent a long morning at the farmer's market, leaving Walt at home to do some work. We walked down, since soon we won't be able to get there by walking, and we actually got about 3/4 of the way there before she insisted on getting out of the stroller. This wouldn't be a bad thing, really, just that it's very slow progress; today, however, she refused to wear shoes, so she walked to the market (and then throughout the market) in her tights (which, needless to say, are pretty gross now) and then barefoot. After a couple of hours at market barefoot, she looked like one of the urchin extras from "Oliver." She put an extra filip on this look at the end, where we were meeting Walt (he was luxuriously picking us up, since I failed to realize that once I had filled the stroller with produce, it would be significantly more difficult for me to take the bus home). We were walking back and passed a puddle at the edge of the lawn (something that you might see if someone had made a tire rut in grass); Devon, drawn to water like a magnet, stepped in it. It turned out to be deep up to her knee, and then since she wasn't expecting water that deep, she fell in it; so at the end of the market she was filthy from running around barefoot and then wet and spattered all over with mud. She fell asleep in the car for what I suspect was a pretty crusty nap.
This became even worse later after she woke up. We went to 8th Ave, since we wanted to look at the paint job (see above) and we decided to make some headway on the backyard -- Walt on removing the last pre-patio concrete slab and me stringing growth wire for the honeysuckle on the back fence. Devon woke up from her nap in the middle of this work and proceeded to "help us out" by playing in the water (sort of watering the plants but extremely ineffectively) and then later playing in the dirt and tossing bits of broken concrete into the stump hole.
By the time we went down the street for a very late lunch, she had more than a passing resemblance to The Thing of the Fantastic Four (he's the guy who looks like he was built out of mud -- it took some Googling for me to get the name, since I could only remember the image and not the series or the character's name. Turns out the analogy is not very apt, though, since up on further reading I found that he looks "like a monster" and has superhuman strength -- but to me, the visual renderings look like a Marvel Comics version of a golem). Of course tonight was the night that she rebelled at taking a bath, so even after some wrestling to get her in the tub, she was out almost as quickly; I suspect her sheets will be a bit gritty tomorrow.
We did realize today that we had a bit of a setback with the lighting, this time entirely our fault. We won two items on eBay that we wanted to install, one in the hall and the other fixture in the living room. We bid on these back in July and still haven't received them, and after some correspondence with the sellers, it turned out that both had sent the lights to the wrong address. Then after more investigation on our side, we found that Walt had screwed up the shipping address when he sent the PayPay payment -- they were both addressed to Planet-3, c/o Intuit Bldg. 1. Of course no one at Intuit has any idea who Planet-3 is (they would never associate this name with me), so I'm pretty confident that both of them were returned to sender. Ugh, what a mess. I am just hoping that we get these things, especially since one of the fixtures was a very expensive Art Deco one and god knows where they are. I won't bore any of you here with my rant and desperate hope for personalization of the U.S. Postal Office. The day that FedEx is legally allowed to deliver daily mail is the day I will be throwing a party! The days of waiting for 30 minutes to be "helped" by a single surly clerk who is reading her horoscope in between customers and making $30/hour will be over. But anyway, we really don't need fixtures immediately, although once we move in, we won't have any lights (at least built-in ones) until the fixtures get put in. So it wouldn't be a bad thing to have at least a couple of them installed before our moving date.
Devon and I spent a long morning at the farmer's market, leaving Walt at home to do some work. We walked down, since soon we won't be able to get there by walking, and we actually got about 3/4 of the way there before she insisted on getting out of the stroller. This wouldn't be a bad thing, really, just that it's very slow progress; today, however, she refused to wear shoes, so she walked to the market (and then throughout the market) in her tights (which, needless to say, are pretty gross now) and then barefoot. After a couple of hours at market barefoot, she looked like one of the urchin extras from "Oliver." She put an extra filip on this look at the end, where we were meeting Walt (he was luxuriously picking us up, since I failed to realize that once I had filled the stroller with produce, it would be significantly more difficult for me to take the bus home). We were walking back and passed a puddle at the edge of the lawn (something that you might see if someone had made a tire rut in grass); Devon, drawn to water like a magnet, stepped in it. It turned out to be deep up to her knee, and then since she wasn't expecting water that deep, she fell in it; so at the end of the market she was filthy from running around barefoot and then wet and spattered all over with mud. She fell asleep in the car for what I suspect was a pretty crusty nap.
This became even worse later after she woke up. We went to 8th Ave, since we wanted to look at the paint job (see above) and we decided to make some headway on the backyard -- Walt on removing the last pre-patio concrete slab and me stringing growth wire for the honeysuckle on the back fence. Devon woke up from her nap in the middle of this work and proceeded to "help us out" by playing in the water (sort of watering the plants but extremely ineffectively) and then later playing in the dirt and tossing bits of broken concrete into the stump hole.
By the time we went down the street for a very late lunch, she had more than a passing resemblance to The Thing of the Fantastic Four (he's the guy who looks like he was built out of mud -- it took some Googling for me to get the name, since I could only remember the image and not the series or the character's name. Turns out the analogy is not very apt, though, since up on further reading I found that he looks "like a monster" and has superhuman strength -- but to me, the visual renderings look like a Marvel Comics version of a golem). Of course tonight was the night that she rebelled at taking a bath, so even after some wrestling to get her in the tub, she was out almost as quickly; I suspect her sheets will be a bit gritty tomorrow.
posted by Devon Szalva at
8:55 PM
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