Category Archives: Apartment Heresy

Ass gon’ give it to ya/Fuck wait for you to get it on your own

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And now I see, for whatever reason, that I am not getting notifications of when people comment. Hello to A. and suenos! My blog incompetence continues…now in its sixteenth year.

A. We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be. –Kurt Vonnegut

I always feel compelled to write when something significant happens. I got cut from my job yesterday, and it was time since it was almost wrapped up. I realized that I had my year anniversary in February of being in the trades. Recently I’ve finally been feeling like I’m not hopeless on a jobsite.

It’s really hard to explain how my skills are developing. I’m stronger, of course, and better at using tools, and knowing what the right tool is for the job. I think when I started on this path I thought there would be definitive answers and techniques. As if new construction was going to be like giant Lego bricks or putting together something from IKEA. (My blog throughline of “I am an idiot” continues consistently, I know you’re impressed.)

One thing that has changed is that I can look at a problem and be a little more creative now in solving it. A lot of times parts don’t work the way you expect, or fit right, and advanced skills include being able to make it happen.

There’s a phrase which I’ve always found really annoying and rednecky: “Get ‘er done.” But that’s it. You have to just make things work. Get it done, and move on. Just like life.

I feel a lot better at work now, overall, post medication. A construction site can be a very distracting place, and the key is knowing when to pay attention (here comes the crane) and when to just buckle down and work (the glaziers are talking VERY loudly about dealings with someone’s cousin who got ripped off by a bail bondsman and the merits and drawbacks of destination weddings).

I have asked myself if I could succeed in an office/tech now with my current level of allergy and brain meds. I really don’t know. I still don’t regret the switch when I think about being trapped indoors in a cubicle with all the fragrances and (for me) the pointlessness of my output being words or symbols or ideas that I don’t care about.

I believe I’m being kept by my current company for now, and transferred to another site, maybe downtown. Yesterday my boss didn’t have an answer yet, so I’m in limbo. I’m really relieved to be going, because while the job was great, and gave me a lot of hands-on experience that an apprentice might not otherwise get, one of my coworkers ended up being kind of a nightmare.

I’d like to say I’m a trusting person, but I’m totally not. As part of my assessment for Brain AIDS a few months ago, trust of other people was the thing I bombed on the personality test they had me take. It was one of those screeners where they’re looking for the big flags–schizophrenia, bipolar, anything else that can be caught. I looked antisocial and distrusting. I think part of this is my brain, which untreated can make me paranoid and full of social anxiety. When everything is confusing and all the balls are flying at your head: TRUST NO ONE.

Generally speaking, I am cautious with people and I don’t tell them my boring darkest secrets right away. I was getting that little prickle from my coworker that said, LOOK OUT. Let him talk more. I heard a lot about how much he liked working with women and how great he was at working with them and how some of his favorite crews have had women on them. Unfortunately, I’ve discovered this is a flag as well. Men who are easy to work with usually never mention the fact that I’m a woman right out of the gate, and later only if it’s actually relevant somehow. (My boss, who was awesome, mentioned a couple months in that he was the long-time apprentice of a woman who is nearing retirement age in our local and who is kind of a hero and legend because of how early she joined and how much butt she kicked.)

Then the pennies started dropping with my coworker. A couple of months ago he came up to me and told me someone in another trade onsite said something really nasty and sexual about me and him (meaning my coworker). My first response was, “Ok, that is very deeply weird.” I told him not to tell me ever if anyone says anything like that about me. Just don’t pass it on. I don’t need to know. I asked him who it was and it wouldn’t tell me. That was weird and vague.

So this sat in my craw and rolled around, like when that goddam pelican ate that pigeon. It niggled a little. But mostly I was relieved because I was able to look at it more calmly and objectively than in the past and I didn’t dwell on it. “Brain, we need to keep a brain eye on this,” I said. FILED.

A week later he told an elaborate story about how he got into it with the guys from that trade (one of whom supposedly made the anonymous sexual comments about me) and how he ended up hiding all of their tools and they looked for them for 45 minutes and he told them not to “fuck with him.” These guys were HUGE. Tattoo-covered absolute BRUISERS. Who were always very polite and sometimes joked with me.

Coworker retold the story during lunch and I watched people’s reactions around the tables. I watched how whenever someone told an interesting story he had a one-up. He didn’t just see one semi jackknife, he saw THREE at once.

He would talk and talk with no filter. If I made an offhand neutral comment (“I’m going to paint my basement this weekend”) he would launch into 15 minutes on the time he painted some building by himself overnight with no help and both hands. Uphill both ways. Everyone thought he was great. Hey, did he ever mention his mother was a compulsive liar? Hmm, no kidding. Let’s hear more about that. Well, I don’t have a choice, do I? That was a big tell right there.

His behavior towards me got worse over time. I felt like he was looking for some kind of angle where he could get at me. Sometimes he would start slamming me in front of the rest of the crew under the guise of teasing me. Or he would have some gross junk food or crap candy I couldn’t eat and said “You can’t have any of this, too bad. It’s not for you.”

He would nitpick little things, and not listen when I told him our boss had asked me to do it that way. He would pull me off work I was doing to make me walk around with him. This is not uncommon boss/apprentice behavior to look at the progress of the work and discuss what needs to be done, but he wasn’t giving me things to do. On Wednesday he was kind of thinking out loud about some changes that needed to be made in a room due to some lighting placements. “I’d ask you if you know anything about that, but you don’t know ANYTHING about lighting.”

I was leaving on time a couple of Fridays ago with some other crew and he was a little late, on the other side of the building. My boss had already left for a meeting and I didn’t see a reason to cool my heels waiting for my coworker. As I passed him, he sneered, “Leaving already, huh?” I was like, “Yep, goodnight.”

My independence and increasing competence was obviously becoming a threat somehow, though I am NO THREAT to someone with years of experience. I had heard him talk shit about every pipefitter who was on our crew, as well as every tinner who’d worked with us, so I assumed he was spending time badmouthing me to our boss as well.

On Monday after “leaving already?” he sidled up to me as I was working and looked friendly and pleasant, and almost too casual…the face I had seen him make with some other whoppers. I had learned his tells.

“So, our boss’s boss got an email from someone about us leaving early all last week,” he said. “We can’t do it anymore, so don’t clean up until 2:10.”

“Oh, weird. Who would send an email like that?”

“I don’t know!” he said, smiling slightly and shaking his head. “Probably one of the fitters.”

I followed this edict, returning my tools to the gangbox and locking up at 2:10, while noting that his tools were already in there and he was nowhere in sight on the floor. I came into the office and he was shooting the breeze with our boss, who was reaching for his coat and lunchbox. I had noticed that when we all parked in the garage he would always make a point to leave before me, or tell me when I could leave. I didn’t care. It was just noticeable.

A day later the fitter foreman, who is a real joker and general stickybeak, decided to talk to me as I was working away at 2 p.m. or so.

“Surprised you’re still here, SJ. Your boss is gone to a meeting, you know.”

“No, I didn’t know that.” I put on a worried face. “Unfortunately, we can’t wrap up early anymore, even though we’re ahead of schedule. Someone emailed Boss’s boss and said we were leaving early, so now Boss said we have to stop it.”

“What! Who would do that? Who would care?”

“I don’t know. Coworker just told me yesterday. He said he thought it was the fitters.”

Our lunch is an hour before the fitters, so the next day at lunch the office held me, coworker, our tinner boss, and the fitter foreman. The two foremen were talking about work stuff when my boss said he was going to leave early that day. The fitter foreman took the bait and brought up the email I’d mentioned. “I thought you couldn’t leave early anymore.” My boss said he’d never received such an email in front of the three of us.

“SJ!” the fitter foreman said. “There you go, making stuff up to make me look stupid! That’s the last time I’ll believe anything you said, not that I did before.”

I shrugged and said, “Sorry, I guess I was mistaken about some things,” and kept eating my lunch.

That’s when things got more openly nasty, because I had proved for myself that this guy was lying about stupid stuff (as well as some gross sexual fantasy stuff). He vacillated between being super extra nice and making snide comments.

I grabbed the fitter foreman the next day.

“I need to thank you, man, about what you said about the email to boss’s boss that you brought up in the office.”

“Oh?” he said.

“It proved some things I’ve been really wondering about. Coworker told me that, you know.”

He jumped on that. “Yeah, everyone knows Coworker bullshits constantly. It’s just how he is.”

“It took me a couple of months to figure it out,” I said.

As the finale to my five-month sojourn at the campus of everyone’s favorite search engine, I decided to treat myself to a company-sponsored respirator fitting. I didn’t realize there was a physical involved so I had to pee in a cup (waiting for the phone call telling me I tested positive for meth since I haven’t had cause to disclose the Adderall yet).

The interesting part was the lung test. I had to blow into a device, which the nurse said I was doing wrong. She gave me some tips since I’d never had one. My lungs already hurt and felt squished, since I’d come from work (spray paint) and the waiting room was full of perfumes and colognes. Finally she got a reading and said, “We’ll see what we can do with this.” ???

The doctor came in and did some things, and looked at my breath read out. “Do you have asthma?”

“Well, allergies,” I said. “It’s hard to breathe when I’m indoors. My lungs hurt right now and when I was blowing.”

“Hmm, looks like asthma.” He said my lungs sound fine, and don’t rattle.

A few minutes after I left I felt fine again and was taking my normal, non-painful breaths.

B. Perfect is the enemy of $9 orphan paint

As I mentioned, we broke from the basement bedroom, took a left at Albequakey and ended up in the furnace room. Rain and snow are making us concerned about doing things like replacing the windows at the moment. Pete, the good sport, was on board for my paint idea, since the walls had been whitewashed at some point but were a sad ombre grey blah as seen in my last post. Let’s do something cheap, quick, and cheery to make it feel like a room that won’t give me the sad ughs every time I switch laundry. My idea was to check out the orphaned paints at the hardware store, since I’ve had great luck with the paint lottery for things like chicken coops.

Grape Green. WHO THOUGHT THIS WAS A GOOD IDEA? And in a semi-gloss! Talk about your rooms to go insane in. Pete and I talked while we painted, about why people abandon paints after ordering them. Heart attack? Water broke? Maybe walking in to pick up Grape Green was the tipping point, your personal Dear Beyonce moment, when you realize your relationship absolutely cannot be saved and how were you married to an insane person for so long! I’m leaving. That tears it. I’m moving back to Skokie.

Their legal debt was our gain. We ALMOST got a sensible beige, with the thought that ZZZZZZZ

What was I saying? Who cares. Grape Green it is.


Fist pump for emphasis I reckon.

We got a couple of racks from the hardware store as well.

We built them slightly lower than their full capacity and then cut down the struts that were next to the window so we could still open it if needed. Kind of shaping the racks around the window.

Painting the room green made me realize I own a lot of red things! I also got a cheepy shade to cover the bulb and a new cheepy pull.

Not pictured are my laundry drying racks, which now do not live in the bathroom!! I really like the exposed joists as well, as opposed to the sagging ceiling. I was relieved at the relatively small amount of recycling, donation items, and garbage that was in the room. Mostly we needed Storage Solutions.

We were very industrious and also picked up our closet door, made to match the other basement doors.

“So, what are you going to do with your clown painting collection?” Pete said.

“Hum, I should probably consign them, I suppose.”

“Oh good.”

I felt sad. And bad. And slightly murderous at this thought. Like a clown.

I tucked them away on the wall next to the furnace, mostly behind the door. Now I feel happy!!

“ARRRGH WHY,” Pete said.

PROTIP: get your mental problems written into your marriage vows somehow, so you have backup later.

I scored some FREE!! destined-for-the-trash carpet from my previous job, and am going to make a runner out of that, carpet the dog stairs finally, and possibly make stair runners when we redo our horrendous basement stairwell.

I will snap pics of my carpet progress this weekend. Happy almost spring!

We Are Vagabonds/We Travel Without Pampers on

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My wanton swath of destructiveness (and rebuilding) through my house continues. If this chapter of my life had a subheading, or at least one bit of metadata attached to it, it would be: INDUSTRIOUSNESS.

So, something bad happened in the furnace room. Actually, several somethings since we moved in. I’ve been using it as “temporary” storage for things that should be stored permanently and well (camping stuff, canning stuff), things we should not keep at all (random router I don’t remember buying???), and half-finished projects. Just until the bedroom remodel is done and we get our space back in the garage, I said. As our various home projects march into year FOUR, I realized that I had to stop treating the furnace room as Stuff Limbo and turn it into a real space. And make some goddam decisions already, which is something I have always struggled with. OR HAVE I?

This realization coincided with Franny asking for a way to make some serious money, not a $5 little chore. “You could…clean out the furnace room?” I said, hesitantly. I said something vague about trying to divide all the things into rough categories so we could store stuff or Goodwill it. I mean, it was a weird hodge podgey disaster that I knew I was going to have to tackle, and I was super dreading it, and it seemed mean to inflict it on someone else. But it had escaped my lips and was in the air now.

The furnace room. The rest of my house has been kept pretty clean, or has BECOME organized and tidy A.P.M. (after proper medication), and I have made regular pilgrimages to Goodwill. But this was our house’s secret angry bald patch under the rest of the long flowing tresses.

On Sunday I fucked off to a friend’s house with a small shepherd’s pie for a couple of hours, with final terms left undiscussed and unnegotiated. When I returned home, she was in there, grinding away at it. I went downstairs to paint the basement bedroom ceiling (not pictured), and she piled everything up in our bathroom, around the tub and in the walkway. Since Sunday night Pete and I have had reminders of our packratting and dereliction of proper organization as we ablutinate.

We discussed what to do with it. He thinks I am a little cracked (as he does daily) because I want to paint the sad concrete walls. I also want to lay a trail of carpet tile from the door to the washing machine and replace the classic murder room combo “stark bulb with ancient pull chain” with some kind of shaded fixture. Nothing fancy. I don’t want to hang out and tat to Miles Davis in there, but I would like it to be less creepy.

We did immediately agree on one thing, and that was to tear down the ceiling. It was the original 1950s wallboard with trim tacking it up to the joists. When this house was switched from oil heat to gas lines, the iron piping was run over the top of the wallboard. Then the house was replumbed, and hey, let’s run the copper over the ceiling as well. This house is a sturdy monster and I love it, but “improvements” that came later were needed but executed strangely sometimes. People cut into the wallboard over the years to add cable, pipes, more electricity here and there, etc.

This about sums it up. Iron piping, holes, The Bulb.

Here is an original mahogany hollow-core door that originally hung in the kitchen that was in the basement when we moved in and I cannot bear to throw out yet. Every time I make a change to the 50sness of this house I feel I’m cutting off a hostage’s toe.

CAN THIS ROOM BE SAVED? I don’t know! But it’s going to get some shelving, some bins, and an ATTEMPT. Franny was filthy and tired when she was done (seven hours) and I told her I would pay her $10/hour for her labors. Which she is promptly spending on more hair dye.

The bedroom is still crawling along. I don’t know if I mentioned, but we have a spreadsheet now. With DO THIS dates, that we mostly adhere to. We have windows in the basement that were meant to be installed last weekend (we nixed it when it snowed all morning), and a closet door to pick up that matches the other ones.

The paneling is farther now, but we’re pausing to install the door and then see what needs to happen with trim. So this is a very specific snapshot of what is happening with my house right now, and my life pretty much TODAY, which was my intention when I started this trash heap anyway. I am hoping to blog more…I have it set as a task now (lame) because I miss it. When your memory is so porous it’s good to have a record. When I am senile from sucking on paint chips I can look at this all and say, “what idiot could have done all of these stupid things?” and then go back to pooping myself.

I’m sure I’ve had enough to know when I have had enough

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Soo I had a memory of posting sometime in December, but apparently I didn’t. I’m trying to set writing on my calendar now and I’m hoping it’ll be easier now that the holidays are over. Also now that I’ve made so many changes to my house and life. I went through a big teardown period where I noticed everything that was wrong or broken or dirty and I had to fix it. Not in a OOooOOH METH way, though. I swear. I just needed systems and some order again. And to internalize what life felt like when it wasn’t on hard mode.


I know just how Horace feels. I don’t want to leave my warm bed either, even if someone is trying to make it.

I’ve got about 12 new perspectives on things. That’s not just my usual blizzard of ideas, either. (Okay maybe the inside of my head is still blizzardy in sections). It’s that my brain is working differently. I can look at something I’ve looked at for years and see a totally new solution to it. This is keeping me pretty busy. I’m also trying to find time to just fuck off and feel good about it. WHICH I DO.

The biggest change after the white noise falling out of my head is getting my energy back. The one daily dose of Adderall I was on worked for my brain and getting things right at my job, but it was wearing off after about six hours. After a normal day of work, I would limp around and my back would hurt, and I’d be exhausted. I’d be exhausted on days I didn’t work, either. (I was exhausted before when I worked in an office too.)

The second dose that I take at lunch is finally getting me up to bedtime. I am a reasonable amount of tired after work, but I don’t feel broken or extremely sore. I thought that was normal, since I’ve felt this way since I had standing jobs in high school and college. Hell, I was tired out as a young kid. I used to force myself to exercise for years, too, because I thought that would give me more energy like everyone said. It never really did and I often injured myself doing relatively minor things (like cleaning my house) no matter how fit I was.

This is the vaguest, most unscientific explanation, but I have been reading that malfunctioning brain receptors don’t just affect mood and focus, but can also affect how your body deals with pain and energy. I think I was a flickering bulb with dirty connections before. It’s been astounding and a huge relief to me that speed is bridging the gap in there.

I shared a house with my mother briefly when I was in my early 20s and I was pregnant with Franny. She was around my age now and I remember her being in chronic pain and in bed very early every night, and not sleeping well. She was often in bed by 8 or 9 when I was in high school too. At some point after her early 30s, she just kind of…ran out of gas. She was given a diagnosis of fibromyalgia, which I had my doubts about. “She’s just getting old,” I told my sister, like an ignorant asshole. My sister was having chronic pains, too, and doubted what I was saying, I think, though at 13 she was less likely to disagree with me about anything.

By the time my grandmother was my age, she was finished working for the rest of her life. She was dizzy, in pain, slept poorly, and lived on black coffee and cigarettes. They took one of her inner ears, thinking it would help with her Meniere’s disease diagnosis. (I had vertigo and tinnitus for 20+ years until I stopped eating corn and assumed I had inherited her condition.) I don’t know if she was collecting disability, but she probably should have been. I was worried I was heading in that direction myself.

Now that my own oxygen mask is on, I’m trying to help Franny with her health issues. It seems that she’s gotten my dud wrists and we’re exploring carpal tunnel surgery, before she goes to college. I’m not sure if I mentioned this, but I took her a few months ago to have a vein in her nose cauterized and her chronic nosebleeds that she’s had since she was two stopped. I’d like it if the stuff I suffered with for years (especially related to my digestion) could just be avoided for them. We’re working on her breathing issues as well. I’m hoping life doesn’t have to be hard mode for the girls.

SO. What have I been doing since Thanksgiving.


BYE UGLY

1. In addition to taking blurry cameraphone photos (sigh), my stove died. HOORAY! This was early December. I was making pizza as usual on Saturday night and when I took the last one out and turned off the broiler, it wouldn’t turn off without being unplugged. We are going to redo the kitchen, I hope starting this summer, so we talked about whether we wanted to try to repair this oven, which we didn’t like, or spring for a new one now. We sprung.

I have never had a new stove, let alone one I loved. I was incubating this fantasy of putting in a double oven on one wall and just having a gas cooktop, but my kitchen is not terrifically large as it is. It turns out that double ovens are kind of a thing now, which I had no idea about. There is more available burner space on top, as well as a long oven burner in the middle for a griddle or a big gravy pan. As a bonus the lower stove is so low that Mere can watch bacon cook. It just cooks better. No more random burnt cookies.

It is very interesting having serious food allergies and living without a stove for a few days. We did a lot of microwaving and even some wintery grilling. In the past I would have just fucked off out to dinner.

2. Goethe got ill. She is my little trouble cat. Jail visits, face breakage, and now this. She was living to drink out of our leaking bathroom faucet and was getting matted fur. I worried that it was hyperthyroid or diabetes, but her blood etc came back normal and it looks like it is something common in cats, IBS. They are all on the nicest kibble but switching to wet food seems to have made her feel better immediately, and all the animals are enjoying being back on wet food. I went to kibble because the dogs were stealing the cats food, but I feel like this is something I have the energy to monitor now.

3. The basement is moving again. It’s never easy to work full time and do home renovation, but obviously we’ve had some challenges. Recently Pete dyed the floor a russet-y color of my choosing. We talked about making the color variegated, but neither of us had handled the dye before or knew exactly how it would turn out once it was try.

Well. I hated it.

See the kind of blotchy parts that look like spills? “Looks like a murder happened,” Franny remarked. “Several of them.” It’s not showing up in this photo, but the dark blotches were actually reflecting back a weird iridescent green. He got back in there with some water and a sponge and smoothed the transitions between the lighter and darker spots.

I like it a lot better now, and even more so after he sealed and waxed it. It’s hard to see because this is more of a glamour shot, but it turned out well. More photos to come.

Still on the to-do list is to find an egress diggin’ company, design the walk-in closet, replace the regular windows, hang a closet door, paint, and more. Piece of cake, RIGHT? Yikes.

4. Right before xmas we fucked off to Port Townsend, because they claimed they were having their Yuletide festival. We didn’t see the train rides or Victorian carolers, and the Victorian home tours were sold out by the day we left. Also the gingerbread house contest had about 3 entries. Get your shit together, Port Townsend.

But we had fun walking around in the falling snow.


Blurry! Bummer.


I bought a painting in a junk shop for my tropical bathroom paradise.


Last day of the farmer’s market.


In the Palace Hotel.

5. As part of my campaign to reorganize parts of my house, I tackled the pantry early one morning. It’s really more of a broom closet that Pete put shelves in when we moved in, because I guess all the other people who lived her before me were okay with a pretty small amount of kitchen storage. BUT WHERE DID THEY KEEP THEIR TAJINE? I said when I moved in. Ahem.

In the very very back of the original top shelf I found Spot Bee Gone!


It still had its Bon Marche price tag.


Made in Seattle!! The Henry Building was at 4th and University and Rainier Tower is there now.

6. Franny wanted to redo her room, so for Xmas I gave her a “gift certificate” entitling her to paint, curtains, and some new throw pillows. She wanted it to be less tweeny (pink, purple, orange, and yellow). Now it is a matoor blue.


Three lighter walls and one darker. “It’s not DONE!” she yelled when I came in. She is always a little dramatic when her boyfriend is over.

She’s also cleaned out a lot of her clutter and kid things she doesn’t use anymore, and we took a massive trip to Goodwill.

Her bedpost started to peel down to the color it was when we bought it and she’s picking at it. I think we put latex over oil paint. Whoops. I like this halfway look. It’s kind of representative of the metamorphosis she’s going through at the moment. I told her she can’t strip it yet because it needs to be done outdoors and it’s been too cold and wet.

7. Other than my everyday cooking, I haven’t been doing much. Xmas was pizza, and it was delicious. Strudel is obsessed with the old Harvest Moon games for Nintendo, and asked me if I knew anything about “moon dumplings.” I did not, but now I do!

I love mochi anything, and these were relatively quick and easy. We’re going to explore more dango now.

I’m not feeling particularly reflective on the new year or at the close of the old one as I often am. I will say because I had so much positive change this year (especially at the second half) that I don’t hate 2016 like a lot of people did. So I will just say: Happy new year!

Stick a Cursed Tiki Fork in It

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Much later, after the plumber problems and the leaks and the inspection hell, I’m finally using this room. This is what I started with. Not bad, not bad.

I hung up my tiki masks today. I think I took a bath that was 1% cocoa butter yesterday. And yes, I decided to go with an orangey red contrast for the green. The water closet is more of a coral. It’s hard to find towels in eye-searing coral. A lot of the stuff in my bathroom is from the junk shop. It’s easy to find 60’s Hawaiian kitsch around. Also, extremely low-light loving plants. I have a couple of seaweed balls (marimo) on the vanity and I find them totally pointless and charming.

I like that if I get bored of this I can style the room with greens, grays, purples, all white, etc. Once I started getting the hang of the 50’s tile thing I realized there’s a lot of choices. I have a couple more angles at the end of my Flickr album. I’m going to tweak a couple more things, like spray paint the inside of the metal window wells outdoors, and add some Gauguin prints to the w.c.

I had a taco today. Whoopie, I know. I was curious if it would make me feel funny at all. But my month of clean eating is over and I feel pretty good. For now I’m going to limit a lot of carb to special nights, like eating out, and stick with a lot of veg at home. Dairy does not seem to be bothering me, which is good, because I am going to crack into some serious kefir now. The dehydrated kefir grains I ordered are up and running, and already multiplying nicely. I love that quick fermented stuff just involves a lot of leaving inappropriate things on the counter in a glass jar and walking off. I can handle that.

Anyway, another extremely boring weekend comes to a close. I’m glad I’m starting to write again. I think it’s a sign I’m really getting over that last little lump that sometimes you need to have one final push over to say you’re better. And it’s good since I have no vacation and no money to take one after being sick. That’s okay, I’m perfectly happy being in bed at eight p.m. some nights. HA!

P.S. Whenever I start typing to bring my admin console up for I, Asshole in Chrome it gives me the tab title in the results. It seems to be stuck on “iasshole.org is not available” from when there were some kind of server problems. I like that and it makes me want to change my banner.

Function is the key

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UP BETIMES and writing for an hour. ~860 words. When I am at my peak I can crank out about 1,000 words an hour, preferably to the accompaniment of my 90’s R&B station on Pandora. Bel Biv Devoe really sautés my scallions at 6 a.m., YAKNOWWHATIMEAN? When I was really pushing it I could barf out about 2,500 words a day in addition to working 40 hours and being generally awesome. I am writing under a new pseudonym since this is a new genre I’m writing in. This is how I want you to think of me, up at dawn listening to Color Me Badd and writing terrible fetish porn for money.

I almost feel like this should be my last entry ever ending with that sentence. BUT NO. Sorry. What is the end like? I think it’s death. I should probably do like the NYT and put my obituary in a drawer.

I’m morbid on this beautiful, sunny day. I think it’s because I was sifting through the long ago, trying to sort my way into the future. Now that the bathroom is done, P. is chomping at the bit to demo the other half of the basement.

“Do you have ALL MORNING?” I asked.

“What!” he said, innocently. “We just need to move some furniture.”

False. I knew there was sorting to do, and a Goodwill pile, and more things to go in boxes. It would require THINKING. That’s the worst kind of cleaning, isn’t it?

We spelunked into the file cabinet. Here is the Jacob Marley part, showing you his cobwebby scrabblebag:

Why, it’s my court paperwork! Most of it, anyway. This is all from the first action (divorce). I saved all this because I did not think the bullshit was over. I was right, because then he moved, and then child support, and THEN 2.5 years to settle the parenting plan, and FML. That’s the synopsis.

I had a friend who was considering her own divorce from her husband, about a year after mine was finalized in 2005. I remember pulling this stack out and saying, “Look, this is a physical representation of the shitstorm that’s coming.” Hers was worse than mine in some ways, though I don’t think her husband claimed she was a Satanist. (Hail Vigoda.)

So today all of this went into the recycling bin. Fuck it. It’s done. Things are so nailed down now there’s no reason to refer to this stuff. Any action going forward will be a new action. I think there was a point to keeping it all at one time. How much have I spent on lawyers…maybe $25k in the past ten years? That might be low. My advice is to stay in your house as much as possible and wear your helmet when you go out. There is no birth control like an ever-present helmet, plus safety.

Of course P. had to rip at some of the walls after most of the stuff was moved out.

It turns out the studs are laid flat side down, so there’s no room for modern insulation at a proper thickness. The idea is that the walls, which are just studs and this terrible cheap paneling (a pale shadow of the nice fir stuff that’s on the upstairs walls) will go. The ceiling is panels, but after some research and due diligence none of it seems to be asbestos. I am fond of the lights, but they’re just not very functional in a low-ceilinged space that is meant to be a bedroom. I’m thinking about kicking some of them upstairs to the kitchen to replace the dire boob lights.

The window to the right will become an up to code egress. I am thinking about lightly limewashing the fireplace, since that is reversible, and will lighten up the room. I’m really okay with a dim bedroom, since the living areas of the house are so bright.

He pulled some paneling on the east side of the room, where there is (was) a wall between the living room and the furnace room, but now there’s nothing!

Here’s a view into a finished bathroom. YAHOOEY! The closet will go on this side, and it’s going to have to do double duty as a linen closet for the basement. It should be fine.

I want to hang a couple more things in the bathroom and then I will snap it….probably tomorrow, fingers crossed.

Born to be a god among salesmen

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Hooboy. For those who are not familiar, in the popular video game The Sims 2, there is an item your avatar can use to literally suck the skill out of another Sim. I mean, I’ve definitely sucked the skills out of people before, but it’s usually temporary and they recover with a nap or some therapy. So I guess I am looking at my last post date and feeling like someone has done that to me. Time is flashing by again, and all I’m doing is working, in spite of having a grillion ideas about what to write. I’m going to figure this out, mark my words.

So, check this cray shit: my bathroom, as of Monday, is FINALLY done. I think it’s been more than a month since construction finished. We failed the plumbing inspection three times because the plumber is a cock. It all involved something very boring called a mixing valve, and him installing the wrong one, and then fighting city hall and the League of Inspectors and losing. All of this took time. In the meantime we took a shower a few times, because YAY NEW BATHROOM.

ASIDE: an exchange I just had with Franny.

Me: Are you going to eat those Cheerios dry?

F: I don’t like almond MALK, MOTHER.

Me: Why don’t you just put some cream on that business?

F: I’ll have the shits all day. DO YOU WANT ME TO HAVE THE SHITS ALL DAY?

Me: …Is this a trick question?

That kid yells everything now.

ANYWAY. After taking a shower less than ten times, water started coming out of the wall. So the plumber had to come fix that too. I am kind of afraid to take a bath because I am afraid of water in the wall. I better bite the bullet, though, because this room is only under warranty for year.

The good news is that once the plumber started his cavalcade of shittery, we have not paid for any of it, thanks to our contractor. He told us more than once that he’s not using this plumber again. I looked at his Yelp page and I’m sure his reviews are all fake.

I’d rather just have things done, of course, than have my contractor foot the bill. But now they are…maybe. P. took a wall panel down in the basement last night and nothing was behind it, so now we can see directly into the furnace room. I need to take some pictures. This weekend is going to be moving the furniture out of the basement “living room” so demolition can start properly in that room.

Moving furniture is a sucky thing I can do now, because I’m feeling pretty much back to normal. I’ve been realizing I feel like I had some kind of weird mental reset, and now I super care about stuff I didn’t before and I don’t care about other stuff I did. I’m still trying to sort out what goes in which column. It’s really alarming, in a way that’s completely unapparent to the casual observer. I suspect my reserves were really low in February and I was headed for some kind of crash. It’s not good when your whole family licks food poisoning and you can’t shake it off.

I’m eating well. Kind of a lazy Whole 30. I don’t want to join the food/exercise cultists, I just want to eat and feel okay. I have a work comrade I like to go out to lunch with, and I thought I’d get a Thai beef salad, but the lunch menu was all rice and noodles. I just went with it, but it was really surprising. Other than the curry, I didn’t really enjoy any of it. I guess it’s been about a month now on a lot of hardcore veg and it’s becoming a habit. It’s shifting the steroid weight gain and I’m having very few sugar crashes. Very few headaches. I don’t “need” coffee like I did and I don’t drink it most days. I don’t feel like I’m about 90 and I’m a fucking walking thesaurus on the fly in conversation like in ye olde thymes. I was actually getting quieter around the time I got sick because I was struggling for words or the complete parts of a story I wanted to tell.

Franny’s ramping up to middle school graduation next month, and her trip to Japan. I had to have a talk with her about how she busted her promise to keep her grades up this year as a condition of this trip. I calmly told her she would be fundraising completely on her own to have future opportunities like this one.

She went into a tirade about how the Japan trip was my idea (it wasn’t) and how she didn’t really want to go in the first place (lies). I told her that was all irrelevant once she’d decided to go and agreed to the conditions. Her plan lately is to start yelling and try to blame everything for whatever the problem is rather than take responsibility for her actions. In short, she’s acting like a young human being.

I’ll tell you the truth, though, she’s so histrionic lately it’s hard to keep a straight face. I know she’s really feeling these feelings, but it’s over the top. She had taken a deep breath and was at the start of some fresh tack when her nose started bleeding. Franny has a fair amount of nose bleeds in the spring and summer, much like her father, so I wasn’t super alarmed.

“Oh honey, your nose is bleeding. Have a tissue.” I found myself making schmoopy “poor baby” face at her. I didn’t mean to. She was just so funny with her crazy yelling and then she had hysteric’d herself into a nosebleed.

“WHY ARE YOU LAUGHING AT ME ARGH!” STOMP STOMP STOMP SLAM.

P. came home shortly thereafter and she had recovered and was yelling some phrase at the table in between our sentences. He told her to pipe down.

“WHY? I’m not INTERRUPTING.” ($PARENT takes ten points of OBNOXIOUS DAMAGE!)

“You know, I’m not exactly thrilled with you and your grades right now, and this is not helping,” he said.

This set off an episode of “EVERYONE HATES ME” that involved more hysterics and us trying to calmly and briefly state that we no one hated her, we were just unhappy with her actions. As if I needed more multitasking during dinner. I am such an asshole–I had to turn around at the sink so she wouldn’t see me smiling. I do not know what my problem was yesterday.

P. even called her out on using “POOR ME AND MY SMOOSHED FEELINGS” as a distraction from what the real problem was, which was the decisions she made. It was pretty awesome. I knew he was going to be a good dad. He was pretty much a grandpa when I met him already.

“Are we DONE?” she asked, when we had, in fact, said our piece.

“Not until you’re 18,” P. said. ZING!

Other than the fact that her general obnoxiousness level has risen significantly in the past few months, which I can pretty much ignore, she’s pretty cool to be around most of the time. It’s obvious she’s just absolutely intoxicated with hormones and barely able to deal most of the time. I feel for her. But I am not going to let her skate, either.

Strudel, on the other hand, is an absolute dream right now. She practices her violin and is polite and wants to play games with us and is doing pretty well at school considering she has an absolutely 5-car pileup of a teacher this year. She’s got some of that nine-year-old spaciness, but I’m going to enjoy the crap out of this now, because when she hits 13 it will be like living with a psychotic corporate lawyer who can beat you at Scrabble.

My House is Filling with Chicken Grease Smoke and Looks Like Hoarders

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FRIENDS. Once again we dye the chicken abortions bright colors, and struggle for the next two weeks through a lot of egg salad. First, be warned, my house is totally cattywampus today. I don’t even think the table will be cleared off by the time this chicken comes out of the oven, though that will be good motivation to clear it. I’ll get to the why in a minute.


No tabletop in sight.


Strudel is doing very well; her knee bruises are fading.

I was partly prepared for egg dyeing today. I only had half a box of regular food coloring, and a little more than that in the neon variety.

Like every year, P. suggested we get out the intense dye–the kind you get at the cake decorating store that can legit make frosting black. (Trust me, there are three October birthdays in this house. I know from black frosting.)

I knew there was a reason we shouldn’t use it, but I couldn’t remember why. Since I had no rebuttal, the Jewess and her paterfamilias won and talked me into busting out the fancy colors. I quickly remembered that the reason we don’t use them for this is because they don’t mix with water and vinegar like regular food dye.


We call this egg “Womynist Mooncycle Expressions.” It was supposed to be purple.

Here is a little round up of a couple of things I did during my drug-induced mania.

I’ve been having a love affair with monstera deliciosa, as you do. I got one for the basement bathroom, because it is a low-light tolerant plant, and then I got one for upstairs, so they can race.

Speaking of the basement bathroom, I hear you asking, how did the re-inspection go? WHY, IT FAILED AGAIN. Jackass Plumber put the wrong valve on the hot water heater, in spite of the inspector telling us exactly what was needed.

“The next time I come back, I’m going to have to charge a re-inspection fee,” he said.

Of course my contractor chased up on the plumber very quickly to get him to come out and fix it. Jackass Plumber decided to ignore that email. So my contractor sent the plumber a FUCK YES CAPLOCKS email today, on Easter Sunday.

Because I am A. uncharitable and B. want to use my tub someday, I confess I loled. I have zero confidence in this guy at this point. We just want him to finish.

So here’s new monstera:


It’s terrible on this pillar, though, and I will be getting something so it can be lower. Also, if anyone is actually reading this (this is not a test) have you ever cut back a very leggy rubber plant successfully? I think we need to start over on that guy. [Not pictured.]

Moving the monstera to the pillar meant that I had to move the rain lamp, which I did not like in the dining room, because bronze on bronze weirdness.


I like it in the living room better. Look, it’s like a page out of Dwell magazine, if the room was decorated by a drunk okapi.


Y U SO PRETTY, LADY??? And you smell of melted crayons. It’s like my dream woman, really.

To finish Snake Plant Madness, I got plant stands of differing heights to “add visual interest.” I was talking to a friend yesterday about much I love the word “interest” used in that way, and how you only use it in two contexts: decorating and gardening. And gardening is just decorating outside, so there you go. And then I took that wood thing outside, and rubbed it all over with Murphy’s Oil Soap, and then rubbed teak oil into it. MAN it looks great now. It really does. I am so impressed.

WHO WAS THAT PERSON? WHAT THE FUCK AM I GOING TO DO WITH A FRINGE JACKET AND A GALLON OF TEAK OIL? Christ, what an asshole. I kind of want her back though, as long as the inside of my head is not going “EEEEEE/KILL ALL HUMANS.”

And look, there are some cords, and there is the ladder, leading up to the attic….

I started a carnivorous garden in a “comically” oversized brandy snifter, because I bought it and it was too big for my marimo to go in. Maybe someday the marimo will graduate into it, like when I am 90.

A carnivorous garden is something I wanted in the back of my head, like when I would be falling asleep at night. I’d say, “And it would be cool to, like, have a bunch of carnivorous plants in a jar and we can reenact scenes from Suddenly, Last Summer in the living room.” And then I would say to myself, “Self, pull the other one, it has bells on,” AND THEN I felt like I had hoovered up Cocaine Mountain 24 hours a day, so boy howdy was I ever doing seven projects an afternoon.


“We will eat all of the fruit flies that will bother you in August.” No you will not you fucking LIARS, there are TOO MANY.

I have a little twinge when I look at it, like it’s a gift from another personality or something, or something you did when you were blackout drunk. I actually did things like this when I was very drunk in college. I was like a very drunk retiree when I was on school holidays. “Mmm, drank two martinis, time to do some gardening.” SIGH, past SJ. You were pathetic. But STI free. EH.

ANYWAY. Am I the type of person who can actually maintain a fussy little window garden? We’ll see, I guess.

Now it’s shameful secret overshare time (a day ending in “Y.”). My poor mocha bathroom, the one with the insano teal walls, has been hideously abused. The guests only see the pink poodle bathroom, but today you get unfettered access.

I asked P. to switch out the exhaust fan because it was ancient and really not cutting the mustard, especially with four people using this bathroom. I’m kind of glad to have a delay on working on the basement, because this bathroom is turning into a 911.

Look at this mildew. There was a little patch when we moved in, and all this has spread this winter. The new fan has a “humidity sensor” and will run as long as it goddam needs to. And will be quieter!


CHEESE AND CRACKERS MAN. It’s IN the paint. THE CALL IS COMING FROM INSIDE THE HOUSE!!!!

So I got some of that Kilz stuff to coat the ceiling in, and I’m going to repaint as soon as he’s done putting the fan in. I figure there’s no point in repainting until there’s so more powerful sucking in this room. I know, why don’t I just stand in the bathroom? HA HA, you’re hilarious.

And then we have to address this poor sad bathtub. Horrifying, innit?

This poor house has experienced A LOT of benign neglect. I guess we’re the ones to turn that around. Anyway, hope your weekend is going swimmingly. Monkeychow out!

I Shaved My Dog Now I’m Not Sad; Or, Where’d You Go, Asshole?

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There is a lot of music that reminds me of other people, but the other people don’t know I was ever thinking about them, nor have they heard the music themselves. I realized this this morning when I was listening to Felicia Carter, who I haven’t listened to since last summer really. It’s like someone else wrote the secret poems for you.

Yep, we’re calling it spring. I even went outside in the 6 a.m.s and could see things. The birds are going crazy, but my chickens, who do get the pellet, not the worm, are sleeping in.

I think the plum tree is going to have a good year. I made like Obama with the turkey and gave it a pardon after its extremely lackluster performance last year. I figure if it wasn’t actively diseased or foaming at the trunk or anything it could stay.

“We could just plant a new one,” P. said.

“Let’s give it one more year,” I said. “It’s old. Maybe it’s just tired.” If plum trees ever sit in judgment of my root system I hope they will come to the same conclusion about me. Next year. One more year.

He sprayed it with salad oil. I don’t question these things, really. I mean, maybe he knows something, or maybe he is just crazy. (Cue the sound of “HEY” many hours later when he discovers this.) Something seems to have worked.

I am considering spraying salad oil all over my own face at the moment. I’ve got the Prednisone poof. I’m not full-on Om Nom Hamster but it’s not great, either. There’s this rise where the chipmunk action starts and then it stops and I can actually see normal face and cheekbone behind, so it’s not like when my face has just been fat. I woke up the other morning and my nose was swollen–I actually noticed it in my peripheral vision. I am down to one pill and I feel pretty normal and sleep isn’t too bad anymore. By Monday I will be on half a pill, and then done by Thursday. I hear it can take a couple of weeks for the swelling to go down. In the meantime I feel like I have grit in my eyes so I wear my sunglasses everywhere, but am considering a bag for my head. I think I have had more veins burst in my cheeks but it’s hard to tell at this point. When no one is looking I kind of fondle my fat cheek parts and they sort of feel like dumplings or like mochi or something. My anpan filling is: bile.

[As a fun aside, P. came by while I was editing this, marveling over how my face is totally back to normal now. He is insane and can somehow sense when I am feeling bad about myself and will take that moment to say the most untrue thing.]

Franny left on Friday morning and I happened to be here since I had a vet appointment for the spaniels, who had ear infections and ear mites. I kind of understood their ears were off when I was really sick and I was trying to keep them clean, but I hadn’t realized how bad it had gotten until Horace yelped twice at work when people were petting him. They got shots and I have ear cream and I am getting drugs for them, all is well. I am ace at cats but still kind of a dog novice, sigh.

This is one of those things that is so easy to deal with when everything is normal. But getting sick, followed by lice, and now dogs. Whoosh. I think everything is under control now. (HA HA, did I really just type that.) After work I washed my car and made dinner and just that was exhausting, but not in a bad way. It’s weird to go from being able to do 12,000 things in a day to having to pick three things and then being forced to stop.

But this is all an aside to say that we decided to have a fight on the way out the door. I, Official Monitor of Toothbrushes, happened to notice that hers had been untouched for a couple of days, since I had put a replacement head in the bathroom for her. I should have left it alone. Am I actually capable of not answering the siren song of neglected oral hygiene? I am not.

“Hey, you went to bed early last night,” I said.

“Yeah, I was tired,” she said.

“You ate a bunch of candy and then I know you didn’t brush your teeth and then you went to bed.” Wait for it, it gets worse: “That is a recipe for cavities, friend.”

“I’m not going to GET cavities,” she said.

“SAY WHAT, CRACKER?”

“I don’t get them,” she rephrased.

“Well, if you keep up on your teeth you are less likely to get cavities. Magical thinking like that is not going to protect you from anything.”

“I need to be POSITIVE, MOM. I can’t tell myself I’m going to get cavities.”

“No one thinks they’re going to get them, honey,” I said. “But there’s steps you can take…”

“ARGH. It is so hard having divorced parents,” she said.

I think this bout of drama is coming from a friend at school whose parents are fighting unceasingly, causing the girl to worry her parents are splitting. It is also causing Franny to be in the ladies’ bathroom with her during 4th and 5th period while the girl cries, which I don’t love. Franny is the resident expert on divorce.

“I told her what it is like to go through a divorce,” she said, on Thursday evening.

“Do you remember?” I asked, innocently. “You were only three.”

“YESSSSSS,” she sighed at me.

But back to oral hygiene.

“So what is so hard about having divorced parents?” I asked.

“You’re so STRICT, Mom! If I forgot to brush my teeth, my dad would just say, ‘Oh well, do it tomorrow.”

This is where I interject in my head only: There’s an epitaph for you.

“Your dad and I are different people,” I said. “You know that.”

There was a little more scrabbling and then she stomped off to her room declaring she “didn’t want to talk about it anymore.” This is her tack lately–get very defensive about something, then declare the conversation over.

Strudel was sitting across from me at the table.

“Do you want to live somewhere else?” I asked her sotto voce.

“Where would I go? I belong here.”

“The train station?” I offered.

“There is no one who loves me at the train station.”

Later Franny came out to pack her backpack for school.

“You know, honey,” I tried again. “Your dad and I are so different, that even if we were still together, we would have drastically different ideas about how you should be raised and treated. We did when we were together and trying to raise you. This isn’t just a divorced parent thing. This is a different people thing.”

She said nothing. I went on, because when things are going down the crapper I like to enhance the situation by sticking my head in tiger mouths I guess.

“P. and I don’t always agree on you guys, but we find compromises. That’s the key.” Silence. “Um. So. We’re not going to see each other for a week. Are you sure you want to leave things like this?”

She walked out.

“Bye, Mom!” Strudel said, following her.

Franny was like this last summer as well. Really, really shitty before long breaks or vacations. This was bound to happen if I’d brought up the tooth brushing or not. I have heard all the theories and I’m not going to spend the week fretting. I assume we will have a talk at some point. I hope someday we can have more of a “Bye, have a nice trip, see you in a week,” interaction.

Later, after school, Strudel surmised that Franny was jealous we are taking a trip to Portland without her. Maybe so…maybe not. I know Franny is going to Walla Walla for spring break.

In other “stupid things I have done lately” news I decided to “loan” my sister my ye olde butcher block table.


VANISHED! Now all the plants have moved and are in a terrible jumble.

It’s actually really good because their apartment needed an additional countertop. Their space is like ours–50’s apartment, instead of house, with a galley kitchen and an open nook and no counterspace. So the butcher block will be a counter and a workspace in the nook. You can make bread on it and chop things, which is what it was used for when SeaFed’s mother had it in her kitchen. Since I’ve had it, it’s been off to the side somewhere, holding plants, not actually being used. It was acting as a plant stand in this house, which is a shame. I just gave her the whole “If you move and you think you want to get rid of it, let me know first,” but really we will be here a while, and this kitchen will never magically expand to hold it as an island, and my ass needs drawers and shit. I did give her the “This is an Alexander heirloom” lecture since we West Coast meanderers have such few possessions that actually mean anything. I did have a sigh when I tucked it away into a corner in another house yet again.

So P. is like, “Yo, what is your plan for this corner now that you have given away a thing we had that was working.” This is a very legitimate question. Sadly, I do not have an answer. Yet. I think I need a Countertop Solution. I really like what’s going on at this house. I’m imagining sealing the “permanent” counters that are by the sink and stove, and leaving my standalone guy sealed with food-grade oils so P. can continue making bread there as he likes. But maybe something in the corner too. Well, I have done it now. Godspeed, little butcher block table. You made my mother-in-law’s 80’s kitchen look fabulous, and I’m glad I inherited you when she remodeled in the aughties.

I’ve signed up for fruit and veg delivery, which was kind of a little epiphany I had when I was sick and getting stacks of frozen Trader Joe’s food in. It’s not a proper CSA in that they use multiple sources, but it’s nice. I’ve been meaning to do it for years but the time was never quite right. It’s making me really creative, because I take it as a challenge to use everything up before the next delivery. I’m thinking about going back to Amazon Fresh too. I may never leave my house again, except for work. (I am working on a secret mole tunnel; it’s only four miles).

Anyway, I forced myself to quick pickle this asparagus before I left town so it wouldn’t go bad.

HAVE A GOOD DAY.

“I have to get up at five o’clock in the morning and SPARKLE, Neely, SPARKLE!”

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I wanted to show you my bathroom today, since it was supposed to be finished, but the plumbing inspection failed on Thursday. My least favorite plumber, aka Jackass Plumber, forgot to install a mixing valve on top of the hot water heater. Or perhaps he was not aware he needed to. It’s unclear.

The same inspector who approved the rough plumbing returned.

“Oh I see you went for the FANCY toilet,” he editorialized. There are way too many men in my house lately.

“Mmm hmm,” I said.

“Looks like this shower isn’t done.”

“It’s an open shower.”

“No door?” he asked.

“No door.”

He ran it.

“I guess the water’s staying in…”

And then a tick next to the word “failed.”

We get to try again next week. Also my vanity legs should be here by then. I bought vanity legs via my cabinet company. The legs–really more an idea of legs–were a very small black-and-white picture in the catalog that promised to be good metal companions to go with my retconned faux-nostalgic midcentury vanity that looks like something James Bond could have thrown up into, had vanities like this existed in the 1950’s. They did not. I’m enjoying this trend of thinking about what a credenza looks like and putting plumbing in.

But this isn’t Sears and Roebuck times. It is really bullshit to show me small black and white pictures at all. Sure enough, they arrived, and they are hideous. I didn’t really know what I was getting, which is not a defense. I asked for a picture or an internet link or a sample, but it didn’t really come to pass. First they sent two separate sets of black plastic legs, which was not what I ordered at all–so there was that delay.

Then what I did order showed up.


For size comparison, it cavorts among sauv blanc, water, and someone’s jank ass phone what needs a new case like whoa.

They were also kind of scratched or at least unevenly painted, and didn’t work at all with the actual vanity.

“Sooo the legs finally came,” I said, proffering them to my contractor. “Yay.” I was making bargains with myself at this point, just wanting to finish. I can do something else with the legs at some point, I told myself. He pulled one out.

“Do you like these legs?” he asked me, giving me a hard look.

“Well. Um. Maybe I can paint them, though?” He waited. “No. I don’t like them. And they’re kind of scratched up. I’ll go find some legs I actually like and have them sent immediately.” He nodded.

So I ordered legs from a site that does…midcentury legs. I figure they have ONE JOB, and they can do it well. RIGHT? Knock on knock-off legs.

It turns out the legs that we waited so long for and that I hated don’t even fit properly. So it was all moot.

We were hoping to start demoing the other half of the basement today, but it really needs to wait until the inspectors are done. One project at a time, please. So I have been futzing around the house today doing little odds and ends like painting a pillar on my porch that was getting very weather-ravaged, and test driving the DJ Roomba I bought with my tax refund. (R.I.P. Neato.)

Also I have been thinking about my kitchen today. There’s a couple of issues with it. It’s on the north side of the house, and gets a wee bit of sunlight in morning. It’s a candidate around here for a couple of those tubular skylights.

So this is what it looks like around 2 p.m. on an average April day. Dimmer than this picture makes it seem.

I decided to play up the primary colors feel between the yellow tile with the burgundy sizzle stripe and the teal-ish cabinets by adding a lot of primary red. The peace lily and the chevron bag is my sister’s for the little housewarming visit I made to her today. I had a squee. Among other things, I made her bacon peanut brittle and pickled eggs. I moved into that exact neighborhood when I was exactly her age, except her life is way less fucked up than mine was at 26. Yeh.

Also it’s L-shaped. Not much to be done about that. I like that it’s a one- or two-person kitchen and it’s pretty easy to convince people to beat it during parties so I can do my thing and get out.

Here it is with the lights on:

DEATH TO BOOB LIGHTS.

So here’s the tentative plan, but not for a while. Get ready for 50’s house heresy: I am taking out the countertops. I just cannot with the tiles any longer. Crud gets stuck in them constantly, liquid pools, and they always look dirty. I am thinking about doing wood but am not sure. I am keeping all the yellow backsplash, though. The cabinets are getting a new color scheme, and we have to redo the floors. The dishwasher leaked in January and it fucked up some of the underlayment. I feel lumps when I walk now. And the vinyl is going, of course. I am leaving the OG lights alone and the configuration, basically. It’s a nice cubey kitchen that is very 50’s sensible–no need to rip out the cabinets or anything. And it’s almost impossible to reconfigure an l-shaped kitchen so I am calling it good.

So now the question is how to work with yellow with a burgundy sizzle. I am thinking about doing something Frenchy Provencally after stumbling on a bathroom that is just like my kitchen, really (thank you, comments section).

Grey? Blue? Both? Cannot decide.

I am in the germinating phase now, since it’s far off.

This week was my last week of working part time. I’ve tapered down on Prednisone again today and it was a zap on my brain again. I dropped a bottle of rice vinegar on the back porch today–it was like it just left my hand somehow and shattered. I think I may actually sleep well tonight instead of my heart hammering at 2 a.m though. I’ve been sleeping 2-4 hours a night for several nights in a row and then I have a massive crash and sleep 12-14 hours and have a “good” day.

“How are you doing?” my contractor asked. It was before the plumbing inspector came, and we both thought we would pass with flying colors, and I would not see him again until maybe I asked him back to put in a gas insert in the basement fireplace.

“I’m okay,” I said. “The steroids are worse than the disease at this point.”

“Ah, I hear that,” he said. “I’ve been dealing with steroids for the last 25 years or so. I’m on my third heart.”

“Wow,” I said.

“And I’m a cancer survivor.”

“Holy cats, I’m glad you’re here.” We always say dumb things in the face of surprising information like this, right? Maybe just me, though.

“Me, too.” He said he owed it all to qigong and energy practice. I was not going to argue with that. I pretty much owe everything to obsessive attention to masturbation and the idea that tea tree oil can cure anything, including late-stage capitalism and jungle rot.

However. Cooking doesn’t require much thought at this point, which is pretty comforting. I can kind of just feel my way around. How many thousands of times have I sweated an onion? It sounds stupid but it really is so grounding to me. I had a little moment when I wasn’t able to walk or stand much where I was asking myself why I ever cooked, as we were hauling giant piles of frozen Trader Joe’s loot into the house that cost less than food that required marketing, planning, and chopping.

But now I’ve been doing a lot of cooking after work. On Thursday I made an asparagus and gruyere tart and then made Moroccan lamb shanks because why not? I’ve been cooking for so many years now that I think it’s keeping me from coming unhinged a little. Here is a normal thing. I was so anxious on Thursday afternoon I felt like I was going to have a panic attack, could not answer the phone, so I just focused on cooking. I had an alarm guy coming over and I felt like I was going to throw up, and made myself take an Atavan. It kind of freaks me out how I went from fish oil and an occasional Tylenol eight weeks ago to Valley of the Dolls so quickly. I hate this. I know it’s temporary, but I feel so trapped inside pointless, needless side-effectsy anxiety. I just kept rolling puff pastry dough and chopping garlic while he chit chatted at me about losing a cat from a hotel room during a cross country move.

I decided to see if I could bang together a Moroccan dish that tasted like Moroccan food with what I had in the cupboard and from memory. It was okay, really. I’d write it down, but I didn’t take a picture, so that would be kind of boring. It turned out. But here’s the tart:


Alien wiener tart.

I have been junking/thrift scoring plant stands for the house and bathroom. I liked my new snake plants but I thought they needed some levels to be finished. Behold my whirlwind life.

Now I’m happy with it.

Any thoughts about my kitchen are A. optional and B. would be welcomed.

I am guessing I have now paid off about 7/10s of the temples I burned down in a past life

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I take some steroids for breakfast, some codeine for DIZ-sert/
By the time they bring the pancakes, I’m only partly alert

(With non-apologies to Kanye West but I will link to the lyrics page because that seems to make them send me emails to ask me to stop linking to them. Jolly times.)

Up betimes and pretending to do my taxes, except actually emailing with my contractor, Jolly Mike Ehrmantrout, about some last minute plumbing stuff. It turns out the pipes under the bathroom sink faucet are not long enough to make a connection to the water below. Ha! Solutions are being solicited and bandied. I had to ride my tauntaun to the outlands of West Seattle yesterday to see if they carried a faucet that would come with long pipes.

Also:

Me neither, JME! This means I get to see Jackass Plumber again. The last time I saw him around Xmas he “fixed” my laundry set up, then left, and my basement trench flooded. I was not supposed to see Jackass Plumber on Thursday when he was here and was to be finishing everything up, since I was supposed to be at work, but I got derailed again (more on that soon). He came up to talk at me about pipe problems and give me some bizarre recommendations for faucet brands. I brought one recommendation to the plumbing store in West Seattle and they pulled out the catalog and said, “Er…see, that brand doesn’t really do residential, just mostly pretty plain industrial-purpose stuff.” Er okay.

Since Jackass Plumber woke me up, he kind of figured out I was sick. That and the giant pile of pill bottles on the table, which were not arranged so artfully then.

If we are keeping score at home, that’s two types of steroids now, an inhaler, Tylenol 3, Vicodin, and Ativan for sleeping. Last month I was taking the occasional Advil, and now look at me. My pill regime comes with a booklet with FUCK YES CAPLOCKS instructions on how and when to take all of these pills. Stapled onto it is a helpful pamphlet titled: “Will You Ever Poop Again? Your Guess is as Good as Ours.”

This could be the motto for blogging, yes? I should cross stitch this onto something.

I told the plumber, briefly, that it happened in Hawaii last month and was still kind of a mystery. He launched into a story about Kehei and how his wife tried snorkling but her fake boobs were too big and she kept popping up again? He said something about saline, but it seemed just as likely somehow that he thought that’s what regular boobs are made of. I am barely standing, here, bub. I don’t want to hear about The Wife’s (I think that may be her actual given name) “pontoons.”

Jackass Plumber promised to be quiet, but I was really worried about P., who was trying to sleep so he could function well when the girls got home. We are trying to stay very engaged with them in a normal way. For the first two weeks I was home when I was sleeping, sleeping (pre-steroid wakies) I would force myself to get up around the end of school and let them yam on about their day and ask questions and sign field trip forms and make promises for upcoming kid functions I hoped at least one of us could fulfill.

P. was so tired because he had gotten up with me Thursday morning at 3:30 to take me to the ER, since my breath was getting so short I was wheezing. This was one on my list of red flags supplied by urgent care on Thursday. “Go if your breathing gets worse or is labored.” This won’t get any worse, I thought. And then it woke me up. I’ve never had asthma, but I was told that’s what it looked like and sounded like. The ER is pretty nice at four a.m. on a Thursday. Apparently no one was out getting their arms sliced off or anything, so I had the joint to myself.

They checked for congestive heart failure, since the inflammation is traveling inward and that is a likely place for it to go, and cleared that. I had a CT scan on my lungs to look for blood clots. Being injected with iodine, if you’ve never experienced it, was not fun. It really burned going in, which I was not warned about, since it wasn’t supposed to happen. The pain hit my toes and I started crying. The tech started out by warning me that when it went into my veins it was very warming and I would feel like I was peeing myself, but I wasn’t. That hit me suddenly, and I did have to go, and I was convinced it was happened. “Well, this is it. I’m going to have to tell her now that I actually did it.” But I hadn’t. Dark magicks!

This bad boy took four jabs and two nurses to get in, but thank heavens it worked so they could proceed to poison me with iodine.

I was also given some kind of breathing mask thing that issues a mist that I was supposed to suck down for ten minutes to open me up. “I’m skeptical that this will work,” the ER doctor said, “since I don’t think this is an asthma-type reaction but some other kind of inflammation. But it won’t hurt.”

The nurse removed the mask when the medicine was gone. “Now how’s that?” she asked.

“Are my lungs supposed to hurt now?” I asked, in the most polite tone I could muster. No, she told me, surprised. I knew they were trying to help. Holy hell did I spend the rest of the day annoyed about that every time I coughed. Lung rage. I told them I felt like I had a small cat on my chest now instead of a great big one. I was back to wheezing by last night but now I have an inhaler which seems to be helping?

Also as of yesterday I am losing my voice, so I assume my vocal chords are inflamed as well? My nose is bleeding too (lightly), but I think it’s because my whole body is dry. I douse myself in the take-no-prisoners, wait fifteen minutes before sitting on a slippery surface, industrial-strength moisturizer anyway, because that is how my skin rolls, and it usually is happy for twenty-four hours or so. But my skin on my legs and arms is peeling off in sheets and pills, as if I sustained a bad sunburn weeks ago.

Everyone I see says the same thing–they cannot decide if it is auto-immune attacks (extreme body pain and inflammation), or if I still have an infection (extreme body pain and fevers). Or both. The roulette wheel has been spun and my primary care doc has referred me to an infectious diseases specialist. So I’m going to pay him a visit on Monday. More tests have rolled in–no dengue, no HIV. Still waiting on Lyme’s.

I’m thinking about writing up a little history of this to bring in since it’s long. The timeline. What I feel like now. What I felt like when it was acting like “normal” flu at first. What I feel like when they taper me off steroids right now. (Like this: ;;;;____;;;;) There’s a lot there.

I’m trying to get on part time at work next week and for the next little while. I tried to work full time last week and the first half of the day was decent and productive and the second part of the day was extremely painful and distracting. It’s pretty weird being on a double dose of steroids, now though. I think it’s making me a little manic. So I am shuffling around very productively. I cleaned the leather in my house, and busted out the Murphy’s oil soap and went to town on a midcentury tiled tray that needed some spiffing up. I used to eyeball trays like these at Antika (r.i.p) but they were always four times as much there. But now I have the hook up. I also oil soaped a giant tiki shield that I am going to hang in the bathroom as well, in case some Visigoths invade and I cannot find a towel. Basically I want to oil soap all of the old wood in my house now, especially my velvet painting frames which I can never quite undust completely. I think spring is making me projecty, which I will do very sloooowly.

I’ve been hitting my hook up spot for ye olde crap in search of tiki theme thinggummies for the basement bathroom, which is going to be a janked up fruity paradise wherein I could entice magically undead Gauguin in take a bath with me. (Note to self: procure Gauguin prints.) But of course I see other things there. Like the tray.

No scotch, which is for the best right now, but still kind of a sad look. Part of me wants to fill them with tea or pus or something decorative for just now.

Also, asking for a friend, do you know anything about the care and feeding of these jobbers? This is a lamp, which, when turned on, oil beads cascade down the strings. It is very classy, like courvoisier and pina colada butt lotion However, alas, a couple of strings are “jammed” and the spice does not flow. Also her center needs to be dusted so it’s off for now.

Observant readers will notice that this “friend” also has decided with her impeccable taste and infinite wisdom to paint her dining room bronze as well. Quelle coïncidence!

Seriously though I am going to have to sign P. up for some clubs or something so he can be gone more at dinner time, so he will not obstruct my view of her perfectness.

Okay, I don’t appear to be receiving my life’s guarantee of death today, so I better start its counterpart, taxes.