mo’s back home and up to his old tricks, albeit skinnier than he was earlier this week… if that’s possible! i suppose that when one’s metabolism is as fast as a puppy’s, losing a day’s nutrition is rather significant. we’re fattening him up with wet food mixed into his kibble, so hopefully his ribs will soon recede under a thicker layer of flesh. in the meantime, he didn’t even try to eat a single mushroom on this morning’s walk: a big relief.
mo spent some time this afternoon "helping" oats arrange art supplies in her studio
i woke up feeling like shit, and decided that going to school would not improve things. it turns out that staying home hasn’t been much better, but at least i can control my surroundings somewhat. also, it’s much nicer here, because oats and i spent saturday cleaning and organizing the house: i actually have a desk now, the bathroom isn’t icky, and the kitchen table is no longer covered in junk.
unfortunately, we’re dog-sitting again, and though i love dogs in general and have nothing personal against our latest visiting friend, he’s big and young and carries himself like a fucking mack truck. in fact, let’s make his blog name mack, because he’s moving in down the street and will no doubt become a regular fixture in our lives. anyway, mo’s about 1/6th of mack’s size, but that doesn’t stop them from wrestling and playing like a couple of… well, puppies. they are so engrossed in each other that most of mo’s discipline goes out the window, and mack’s not much better. the barking is driving me bonkers, and they won’t quit on their own. for my own sanity, i just forced a time-out, by shutting mo in his room and mack in the kitchen. now i’m going to take some drugs, and drink some tea, and possibly some gin as well.
boring blogger gets dog and becomes even more boring, by blogging only about said dog and posting boring photos of the circles under her eyes. once i get some sleep, i might consider how to not be boring.
mo’s sister is staying with us for the next 5 days. her name is a word that is most often used to refer to the end of the world, but we’ll call her po for short.
the theory is that two puppies will keep each other busy and tire one another out, resulting is better dogs. in practice, it’s been quite noisy and rather violent. the brief hours since she has been chez nous, they have fought so much that po has a neat scrap of fur missing from her left shoulder, though no skin was broken.
usually, mo roughhouses for a good 1/2 hour, then crashes on the closest lap in a deep sleep for the same amount of time. not so with these two pups together: they chased (terrorized?) one another for over an hour and a half, barking and growling and bouncing off the walls. now they’re sleeping, but only because oats and i have each held one of them firmly in our arms until they calmed down.
i’m damned glad we have the puppy room, originally a walk-in closet coming off the bedroom. when i first moved in here over a year ago, i took down half the shelving in the closet to hang my bicycles, and used the rest of the space for clothing and milk crates of art supplies/tools. once oats and i moved back here together and we knew that mo was coming to live with us, oats spent an evening re-purposing a wooden book shelf by making it into a beautiful gate on a hinge with a big brass latch, spanning the closet doorway. the floor is the same fake wood laminate as the rest of the apartment, which is easy to mop: voila, a puppy-den was born! even as they play rough with one another, mo and po can be safely contained. unfortunately, it doesn’t stop their noise from carrying.
the cool thing about moving back into an apartment that used to be my home at an earlier point in time is that it’s easier to know what needs to change.
usually, i’m the kind of person who takes months to get a place feeling like it’s lived in. last time i moved into this apartment, it was july of 2008, and i still had full boxes and empty walls in december. the only reason the artwork finally got hung is that oats did it for me as part of helping me set up for my solstice party. (this is also amusing because a freak snow storm hit that afternoon and of the forty or so invited guests, the only people who showed were oats, my upstairs neighbours, my bff, and my landscaper friends whose truck has 4-wheel drive. but hey, the apartment looked awesome!)
the point being, this time around i’m a lot more prepared. it’s a bit tricky since we’re now working with oats’ furniture instead of just mine, but for the most part i’ve got a handle on where things should go. there’s glasses in the cupboard next to the fridge, and we’re hanging old windows from the bedroom ceiling to create a defined office/sewing area in the corner near the door. guests and house-sitters will be annoyed that i’m again choosing the large drawer around by the window to hold cutlery, instead of the more obvious one next to the sink, but i’m sticking to my guns on that one. everything else is up for debate!
i used to cram dry goods into the same crowded cupboards where my dishes lived, which became an unsustainable activity and would be impossible with this household. oats and i cook even more than i did on my own, and also prefer to store a larger variety and much larger quantities of foods. with that in mind, the other night i tackled a tall shallow closet on the far side of our eat-in kitchen.
the last time i lived here, i had my computer printer and scanner on one of the shelves (oddly yet luckily, there is an electrical outlet in the ceiling of the closet!), plus different sorts of paper for printing. there was a vacuum cleaner in the bottom area, some boxes of fasteners, my toolbox, a bundle of kites (4 or 5?), and a couple big stereo speakers that came from a free pile (and went back to a free pile when i moved out). i think my canning was on the top shelf. i don’t know what else filled all the space. trash, garbage, and treasures that are hopefully making someone else happy cuz fuck knows i didn’t need them.
you know what i do need, however?
you know what would make me happy?
a pantry. a storage area that is full of dry/sealed food, where it is accessible yet safe. the kind of closet that i can open at the end of a rough day, and feel relief simply by seeing the possibilities it presents. even if school is frustrating, people are mean, and money is tight, i can bake muffins or sprout beans or roast some spiced veggies or otherwise make something from not much of anything.
it’s a practical tool for securing my belief in myself.
with some random boards that were kicking around (part of a wooden leaf support for an extending table, ballou’s former sky bridge to the skylight in oats’ old apartment, a rail from a futon frame that i gave away years ago, scraps from my subletter’s handmade kayak paddle), i added shelves between the existing ones, and tucked away all the bagged goods into labeled jars. the canning is spread throughout the back rows of all the shelves because there’s more of it this year and it’s heavy enough to bow the wood on its own. i’ve got one lower shelf devoted to kitchen appliances, and though the floor will soon become the puppy-safe shoe stash, for now it’s occupied by a 50 lb bag of onions.
i’m so pleased. in the past, right about now is when i’d feel a desperate need to dance around the kitchen while singing along with jawbreaker in order to regain punk points lost by my unrepentent love for organized food storage, but i’m over that. really, my punk rock ideology is all about do-it-yourself, and a good fucking pantry is allowing me to do-it-myself more than ever. i’m going to go bake some bread now, and maybe can some peach chutney.
celebratory bubbles stuck in the grass, at the garry oak meadow where k and w were married... congratulations, my friends!
it’s the sunday of the holiday weekend, and i’m laying on my old couch in my old living room, under my old duvet: all things i’ve been missing since i left here last april. the view out the window has changed somewhat, in that the greenery has become very overgrown and i’m mostly looking at leaves and the grey rainy sky. still, it is nice and comforting. if i keep my head turned towards the window, i can almost pretend that this couch isn’t the only accessible piece of furniture in an otherwise completely disorganized mess of boxes, tables, artwork, and electronics.
yes, we still haven’t unpacked from moving last monday.
personally, i feel as though i lost the last 6 days of my life. even the wedding on friday is a bit of a blur, despite the fact that i’d stopped swigging the codeine cough syrup on thursday night so that i’d be sober enough to drive around on pre-event errands.
after caring for me all this past week, oats has taken ill herself and is currently napping in the bedroom. there’s lentil soup in the crock pot, jello in the fridge, and another day off tomorrow, so we’ll be alright. still, it worries me to have been so sick, and now to have her going down too, because right now we’ve got so few responsibilities compared to our planned future. when the puppy arrives next month, and then kids a couple years after that, it’s not going to be so easy to simply drop everything and succumb to a chest infection. i mean, really: i just won’t be able to do it.
oats says we’ll have to have a much more organized life in general, so that things can keep going if one of us is sick. it’s a good point, i write as i glance around at the insanity that is our apartment… even though i don’t need a cheese grater or comic books or sewing machine at this very moment, it’d be easier to cope with being sick if i at least knew where these things were, if i felt like everything else was in order.
i like the rain, though. as much as i’m sorry for my friends who’d planned on camping/sailing/partying today and tomorrow, i’m glad that i’ve got this excuse for sticking close to home.
Filed under: Homebody
i attributed the wheezing this past weekend to cleaning-induced asthma, from all the dust flying about as we emptied oats’ apartment. the coughing fits began on monday: i figured these were from going up and down all the stairs, and loading/unloading the truck. yesterday i could barely get out of bed, and had added sneezing and a runny nose to my repetoir. finally went to the doctor last night, and it turns out i’ve got a chest infection aggravated by asthma, or asthma aggravated by a chest infection. today i have two new inhalers, plus some codeine-laced cough syrup, and i’m on hardcore bedrest.
i’m missing school, and thus will be losing my place at the front of my cohort, but at least i’m too drugged to feel bad about it. it’s so strange, to be laying here in my old apartment and tripping out on illness/opiates: the view from the windows is familiar, but everything else is different from what i’d expect in this setting. i’m surrounded by a mess of boxes and oats’ furniture, and the cat cuddled up next to my hip isn’t my old gamin but rather oats’ funny little ballou. i’m pleasantly confused by everything.
we moved today, from oats’ place where i’ve been living since returning from australia, to my old apartment that i’d sublet out while away. my beloved upstairs neighbour, puma, hugged me as we unloaded boxes in the driveway, and said “welcome home.”
some evening this week, we will have a house-family barbecue on the upstairs patio: us, captain pestou, puma, and the amazing landlady, whose house adjoins ours to the east.
oats made the move too, giving up her lovely little studio above the square… which is what made it a move, as opposed to me simply coming home to my still-furnished apartment. i say it’s not “me simply coming home”, but only because it’s so much more than that: this home is more home-ish than it ever has been before.
still waiting on word regarding puppy. am kicking self for getting into this sort of situation with a sweet but flaky hippy-type, aka the owner of the poppa dog… i probably shoulda known that “yes, four of these puppies are looking for homes, i’d love you to choose one!” actually meant something more along the lines of “well, i think you’re nice and i’d like you to have a puppy so i’ll offer you one even though i haven’t got any sort of arrangement with the person who is taking care of them and she may also be offering the same puppies to other people at this very moment in time”.
le sigh.
still packing, moving on monday. oats and i took apart the gorgeous phonograph/radio cabinet, or rather, gutted it: the innards were gladly received by a local shop that restores antique radios, though not before i took some photos of them (see new header image!). the cabinet itself is now light enough that i can actually lift one side of it, which is to say that it’s still one heavy fucking piece of solid wood furniture. we’re thinking of installing small speakers inside it, and a video projector, as a modern take on the entertainment unit that it once was back in the day.
still rocking it in the classroom: am at the top of my cohort, and feeling rather proud. tomorrow i’m meeting with a representative of a program that provides support to women studying trades, and i hope to be able to use their resources to leverage a job for the new year. that’s one thing my cleverness can’t help with: most of my classmates seem to have electricians in their families or social circles, and so will be getting an inside scoop on employment. me? nada… some friends have offered an introduction to a sailing friend of theirs, who is an electrician at the dockyards (which would be a great place to work!), but i’ve yet to actually meet an electrician and chat them up about job opportunities. it’s a hurdle, but i’m trying to figure out how to get around it.
i just had a complete sobfest freakout because the building manager told me off for the barbecue that we left down in the parking lot in preparation for tomorrow’s birthday party. i’m okay now, but… wow. i don’t know what the fuck is the matter with me, because usually i can handle aggression and confrontation pretty well. there was something about the way this person spoke to me, though: i felt small, and wretched, and bad bad bad. i almost started crying in front of her. instead, i just replied “okay” to everything she said, then closed the door and called oats at work before i started bawling my eyes out. she came home immediately and calmed me down, before going outside and sorting stuff out with the manager. i feel incredibly grateful to her, but also guilty because she had to use a co-op car, and we’ve already had two bookings this past week which puts our usage beyond the credit we get for cleaning one of the cars and our budget is already tight because we’ve decided to visit our families in ontario at thanksgiving. anyway. turns out we actually can have the barbecue, but only on the parking lot itself (not the wooden porch), and the manager apologized to oats for being rude to me. which is nice, but still i feel weirdly on edge. i was supposed to spend the day hanging out with 20-month-old C, but he’s sick… unfortunate for him, not to mention his mom, but also for me because i could really dig some uninhibited neighbourhood exploration and playground time. i need a bike ride.
Filed under: Bike Geek, Co-operator, Homebody, Music Lover, Romantic, Scavenger, Traveler
oats gave me an early birthday present!
it’s a reproduction antique compass in a brass pocket-watch-style case, and i LOVE it. i didn’t own a compass before this… which is odd, considering how important it is to my mental health for me to know my bearings. now i’ll always know what direction i’m heading, and have a something beautiful to look at whenever i’m fretting.
last night we went for a long stroll after dinner, down through the side streets to the ocean. right after we turned homewards, we came across an absolutely incredible piece of furniture at the curb. a quick discussion ensued, made urgent by the encroaching darkness and another passerby eager to check it out if we decided to pass.
the thing is, oats and i are suckers for anything made from solid wood, and we both love the lines of (most) old furniture. aside from that, we’ve been talking about diversifying our income by turning our scavenging into a more lucrative hobby, by selling the pieces that we refinish.
so, i stayed behind to guard our new treasure, and oats took off to find a co-op car. hooray for the car share: the closest vehicle was available, and it just happened to be a minivan! i’ll skip the drama of us trying to load, and simply tell you that i couldn’t even lift one side of this thing. we got it up to our 2nd story apartment by taking advantage of the kindness of burly macho men from downstairs who seemed pleased to work for a 12-pack of sleem@n’s.
and now! behold!
it’s true: we don’t actually need an RCA Victor Magic Voice combination phonograph and radio cabinet from around the 1940s. but it’s so gorgeous, and we got it for the price of some beer and a car booking (totalling ~$31, in case you were wondering). my original thought was that we’d gut it, refinish the wood, and use it as a sideboard with storage underneath… perhaps making the speaker section into a glass-doored display shelf lit from above. however, at the urging of the burly macho men downstairs, that thought is on hold as we try to suss out some more information about the piece. maybe it’d be smarter of us to restore it to working condition? we already have a functional and sexy record/radio cabinet, though very different from this one: it’s more 1960s, but still solid wood, with a low profile, modern lines, and metal legs. personally, i’d rather turn the Magic Voice into something that suits my more immediate need for attractive storage space.
or… sell it? the old sticker on the back says $445 (8th photo from top of series), but who knows what the value is these days. of course, any real value is dependent on what a person might actually pay, which is conditional on a few other factors that aren’t really in our favour: the economy’s crappy, we live on an island, and this thing weighs a ton so is hell to move. also, i like it, and i’m not desperate for cash at the moment. i think my minimum selling price would be $500, because that’d pay for oats and i to each put together a touring bike (using my stash of cherry components, a couple 2nd hand frames, and some new parts too). otherwise, i think i’d rather keep it.
all round, my birthday’s looking pretty great.
**********
i’m having a bday bbq this upcoming tuesday! it’s at oats’ place (now mine as well), above the square! 5 pm onwards! there’ll be sangria and mojitos and sausages! also, veggie stuff! also, cake! please come!
