beowabbit

On Friday,

cathijosephine, and I went to see Eddie Izzard’s Force Majeur show, which was wonderfully hilarious. Can’t possibly do it justice. (And wow, the Wang Theatre is a stunning and stunningly restored venue!)

Beforehand,

plumtreeblossom and I had had dinner nearby at Empire Garden, which was the site of our first date almost eight years ago, and I had a scorpion bowl for the first time.

On Saturday, we went to Johnny D’s for brunch with

vanguardcdk for a late celebration of his birthday, and then headed to the Quincy house. I was exhausted — I’d been a bit underslept all week, and I had had to sleep without my CPAP machine the previous night because some bits were being cleaned — so I had a nice long nap, which is almost unheard of for me. Then I was thoroughly refreshed, and we did a bunch of yardwork (planting and watering our cosmos, and finally managing to take soil samples — previous efforts had been stymied by the weather). We finished just in time to enjoy a brief but torrential downpour from the dry comfort of the porch, had a yummy spaghetti and meatballs dinner, and then watched Ken Burns’ documentary The Shakers, from which we both learned an awful lot.

On Sunday we did a bunch more puttering around indoors and out (I was alternately working on house stuff and PMRP website stuff). I had a nice phone call with my mother

silverlibre (and left voicemail for my sister). Then around 2pm when we started to feel a little eleven-o’clockish,

plumtreeblossom had a culinary inspiration and made me a grilled-cheese sandwich for lunch with Cheddar, blue cheese, cream cheese, minced garlic, and roast beef. It was spectacular! And she doesn’t even like blue cheese herself. Now it’s her turn to take a nap, and she’s dozing in her room (which has become our nap room) while I catch up with the world.

How’s your weekend been?

When I haven’t posted for a long time, it’s hard to get posting again, because I want to fill in all the blanks, but that would be a post so long that (1) I would never get around to writing it, and (2) nobody would ever bother reading it. So I’m going to try to divide things up thematically. This post is about things.

I have a new camera that I am so far very pleased with. It’s a Samsung Galaxy Camera. It does 21x optical zoom (with optical stabilization), and has an automatic mode but also a fully manual mode (except for focus, but you can tap on the part of the image you want the camera to auto-focus on). ( More about the camera. )

I have my car back on the road, which is wonderful! If I’d realized how little it was going to cost to fix, I would have gotten it done a long time ago; I’ve spent several times that much on Zipcars in the interim.

( The car saga, and an auto-body recommendation in Quincy. )

I had assumed the car would be a few hundred dollars to repair. It wasn’t. So today [looks at clock] er, yesterday, I finally bought a powered lawnmower. ( On lawn mowing. )

I’m not saying I’ve lost my faith in the basic goodness and responsibility of my fellow human being. But trying to give away furniture for free on Craigslist tends to test it a bit.

Well, I had my first significant problem of this stormy day: My desk chair broke. (Not broke as in “dumped me on the floor”, but broke as in as in “suddenly dropped six inches and tilted at an unsettling angle, while making a snapping sound and depositing a substantial pile of rust on the floor below it”.) Since the closest thing I have to a desk chair now is a folding wooden chair, there go my plans for the all-night World of Warcraft marathon.¹ But I’m still warm and dry and happy, and the rain seems to have let up quite a bit.

¹ I understand World of Warcraft is a thing the kids are doing these days, and it has something to do with sitting at computers.

Power: on
Water: flowing and potable
Trees: standing
House: warm
Basement: dry
Cat: sleeping

My work is closed today, and the Boston subway shut down at 2:00pm, but all is well so far in Quincy. I hope things are going as well for everybody reading this.

Welcome to

weegoddess, who is renting a room from me for the next three months. I am really pleased about this! Yay for a wonderful and delightful housemate! And Chickenfinger is thrilled with the extra company.

She arrived last night, but I wasn’t home until this afternoon, when we spent some time rearranging the kitchen to make some space for her stuff. I threw out the two boxes of sugar which were solid blocks, so now I only have three boxes of sugar (and two bags). And the three unopened cartons of bread crumbs are now all together, next to the opened one. Consolidation! (Also, I am unlikely to wonder, “Mare’s coming over tomorrow; do I have any sugar for her coffee?” or ”I might want to make a meatloaf sometime this week; do I have any breadcrumbs?” for at least a week or two.)

It’s been so long since I posted what was going on in my life that I’ve got a lot to catch up on. Apologies for filling up your F’list. If you’re lucky, I’ll run out of steam and you won’t have to plow through all of it.

But before I start trying to catch up, I have to at least put my fabulous weekend of food, arts, and love with my honeywuzzle into (metaphorical) bullet points.

Food: Saturday dinner was beef, carrots, and potatoes in the crockpot. (Also a sliced onion, but that didn’t come out very well the way I cooked it; next time I might go back to French onion soup.) The base was (originally alcoholic) apple cider.

Sunday morning my wuzzle made me something amazing that had just popped into her head the other day: pineapple upside-down pancakes! They were awesome. There’s a photo and some description in her journal.

Arts: On Saturday we saw Cirque du Soleil: Totem, which is currently touring in Boston. It was spectacular and lavish and stunning and impressive, but it also had some race and gender/power stuff in it that made me very uncomfortable. And unfortunately the acts that were technically most spectacular happened to be the ones that bugged me the most in that way. I had read a little bit about that before I went, and through the first part (before the intermission) I was thinking to myself, well, yeah, there’s some weird ethnic fetishization here and there, but all in all it’s not as bad as I’d feared. But oh, my, the second half made up for it! I hope to get time and mental energy to write more about this at some point, but given how unlikely that is, for now I’ll just point you to— oh, wait, I can’t; that’s a locked entry. Well, this YouTube video will give you a notion of what I’m talking about, although I don’t think you can see enough of the costumes in that to get a full sense of the spectacular wrongness. And one of the trapeze acts involved a woman being led blindfolded to a man on a trapeze, and then finding herself lifted into the air with him. She resists his advances for a while, but it’s all OK in the end because no means maybe and maybe means yes and she ends up happily acquiescing. OK, circus (like opera) is not where I would go for originality or emotional truth or serious discourse about power and consent, but really? In 2012? (That was another one of the ones that was just stunning and beautiful and impressive as a piece of circus art — lots of instances of her dropping and him catching her by an ankle or a wrist, for instance — that was marred for me by the politics of the thin veneer of narrative.) And I found it more frustrating because so many of the acts didn’t have stuff like that that bothered me, and I wish I’d been able to just revel in the spectacle and enjoy all of them. All that said, I am still very glad we went and had a fabulous time. EDIT: This YouTube video gives a bit of a flavour of the show. (The Sioux hoop dance you see a bit of in that video was apparently actually done by Sioux hoop dancers and done in consultation with some office of the Sioux Nation; that’s not the horribly wrong roller-skating bit I’m talking about above.)

On Sunday we saw the Randolph Theater Company’s performance of Avenue Q, which was spectacular and hilarious and a great demonstration of the fact that racism in art doesn’t bother me nearly as much, if at all, when it’s consciously (even if frivolously) being addressed as a topic of the work.

Love: See above about the pineapple upside-down pancakes. While she was cooking me sweet love in a frying pan, I was doing her laundry. (The dryer at her house is busted, and three flights down from her apartment anyway.) And the first cosmos of the season blossomed this weekend while she was here; my flowers date from her giving me some wildflower seeds (notably cosmos) as a gift early in our relationship so they have a bit of a special meaning for us.

There was also a conversation in the car about cannibalism (with a detour into black pudding) which reminded me how well suited we are to one another. I love this wuzzle!

Um, I guess that was a bit longer than bullet points. Sorry!

So my last renters didn’t want to use the mattress that was on the bedframe in their room; they brought their own, and we took mine out to the garage. We didn’t get a chance to bring it back up together when they were moving out, and I wanted it back in the room, because (1) it was basically blocking the narrow passageway between cruft piles in the garage, and I needed to get that cleared so I could get to the cruft (and, knowing me, bring in more cruft), and (2) I thought the room looked more appealing for potential renters if the bed looked like a bed, rather than like giving up after getting Ikea furniture half-assembled and leaving it there.

So, after a couple unsuccessful attempts (and on the first day I’ve thought of it when the driveway has been dry so the mattress would stay relatively clean), I knuckled down and got it out of the garage, carrying it somewhat precariously on my back.

As of about fifteen minutes ago, I get it out to the sidewalk and am carrying it towards the front door, and a car pulls up right next to me and somebody yells out asking if I’m OK. Yes, I say, which wasn’t a lie; this was slow and clumsy but working just fine. The voice asks where I’m carrying the mattress. Just in here, I say (the front door already being open); I’m fine. They ignore me, jump out of the car, and carry the mattress in and upstairs for me, not letting me even help. Then they introduce themselves, say they live down the street and I should call them if I ever need help, shake my hand, and are getting in their car again before I have the presence of mind to ask if I can at least give them a couple beers.

So I got a full size mattress carried up the porch steps, up the narrow stairwell, and forced around the corner through the door into the upstairs bedroom for the price of two bottles of Negra Modelo. And I met a couple of very nice neighbors!

Since last weekend (Circus weekend!), I’ve been busy.

You might need to click this twice; I do, on two different browsers:

Monday was the regular Poly Boston dinner at Bertucci’s. Unfortunately plumtreeblossom couldn’t make it because of rehearsal. It was quite fun, with a bunch of cool new people!
Tuesday I had dinner with xmelancholia near (my) work; she introduced me to a new-to-me restaurant, Mulan. I loved their chicken in chili sauce. More importantly, I loved the opportunity to catch up with xmelancholia. She rocks, and I hadn’t seen her in a while.
Wednesday I usually get together with cathijosephine for dinner, but she was out of town for a funeral (my sympathies to buxom_bey, whose relative’s funeral it was), so plumtreeblossom and I went over to hang out with surrealestate, DD, and little J, and we had a blast. Love that little baby! (Actually, love all of them!)
Thursday I got together with teratomarty, who works near me. Among the impetuses (impetusses? impeti?) for getting together were some biological specimens (small animals, mostly arthropods) in jars that I had aquired, and wanted to pass along to him. I had enjoyed the food at Mulan so much on Tuesday that I suggested we go there again. Had a great time.
Friday morning in the shower I heard that the annual sheepshearing festival at Gore Place was going to be Saturday. Oops! plumtreeblossom and I love that event, and had tried unsuccessfully a month or so ago to figure out when it was. We ended up shuffling some plans around so we could go.
Friday night I drove to the airport to pick up bedfull_o_books, who was arriving at Logan after a very very long series of flights from Beirut. Got to hear about her fabulous visit to Lebanon and Egypt with r_ness, and she brought me some Lebanese coffee with cardamom which I look forward to making.
Saturday I slept really late (needed to; the flight was delayed, and I was sleep-deprived anyway to start with), so we were late to the sheepshearing festival, but we got there in time to enjoy epic fair noms, stroll among the vendors (and make some impulse purchases), and see the border collie demo (border collies managing sheep and goats). I had foolishly forgotten to bring my good camera, but I got a few photos on my phone which I may get around to posting eventually. Afterwards, we had dinner at Blue Ribbon Barbeque in Arlington, which I’d never been to before (although I’ve had it catered at work a few times). The brisket was quite good. (The sausage was good too, but, contrary to the menu’s assertion, it was not at all spicy.)
Today, after sleeping in (which we both needed) and breakfast at The Broken Yolk, I came home to Quincy for a very productive afternoon of yardwork and working on the house. I completed three of my four painting projects; just have a final coat on the office door left to do. I didn’t get as much cleaning done as I’d like, but I got lots of work done on the yard and I have the pleasant aches of a productive day of physical labour.

So, busy and happy (and as always, epically in love with my honeywuzzle).

There are some odd little white pawprints about the size of a cat's paw on my kitchen floor. I wonder hou that could have happened!

In unrelated news, I primed the formerly unfinished side of my office door, off the kitchen.

Had a nice evening with plumtreeblossom, involving dinner at Martsa on Elm (the Tibetan place in Davis Square), trying out for a show, watching the first cable or broadcast TV either of us had seen in a good long time, thanks to vanguardcdk setting up the TV for us, and hanging out and chatting with vanguardcdk, which is always fun.
Had a good meeting with a potential renter. I hope she decides to take the room.
Crazy day at work today, involving two meetings (one of which I’d forgotten about, so it came as a surprise, and one of which was called last-minute while I wasn’t checking my email because I was in the other one) and leaving work a bit early due to feeling ill. (Better now; I will spare you the details.)
Had a nice relaxed time with cathijosephine on Wednesday, with a lot of mutual squeeing over the cute babies in our lives. She’s been doing huge amounts of walking lately; she walked from her place in Malden to my office in Kendall Square to meet me. I wish I had the time to do that kind of walking.
I ordered a pair of Vibram Five Fingers toe-shoes when I saw them on sale recently. They arrived today, and I’ve got them on now, and so far I think I’m going to like them. The on-sale ones were not particularly a colour I liked, but I figured it would be an opportunity to see how they felt. The answer is pretty good. I may get another pair, now that I know how they fit me.
plumtreeblossom and I have a busy and fun weekend scheduled, with two brunches, a burlesque show, and a birthday party. Yay!
EDIT: Also, very productive appointment with my endocrinologist a few days ago, despite me not being quite as prepared as I would have liked.

Just wanted to mention that I still have a room for rent in Quincy, in case anybody who reads this is looking or knows anybody who is. $800/mo. all utilities included. Since Craigslist URLs aren’t persistent, here’s a copy of the ad.

I hurried home from work to meet a potential renter, and on my way home noticed that Venus and Jupiter were very close together, and on the other side of the sky was Mars, along with the Moon. I was running a bit late, but I couldn’t resist pulling out my binoculars when I got home (could see a couple of the moons of Jupiter).

Well, the person who was going to look at the room had something come up at work and needed to reschedule. So I went ahead and pulled out the telescope, and got to look at the three planets (plus the moon) in it for a while. As last time, Mars was just a featureless orange disk, but I could faintly see cloud bands on Jupiter, and could tell the phase of Venus more clearly than through the binoculars. Yay planets!

Current Mood: happy

One of my new housemates works in New Hampshire (when they moved in, he was hoping his job would have him working on the South Shore most of the time, but that seems not to have materialized), and the commute has turned out to be impractical for them. So I’m looking for a new housemate again starting January 1st or thereafter. The Craigslist post is here. (I’ll update this post when it expires; hurrying out the door right now.) Feel free to share and/or repost.

(On the train, a few hours late for my date with my wuzzle.)

Yay, the plumbing's back! Turns out the gas company didn't break the sewer pipe when they replaced the gas line; the road crew broke it when they put in the lovely new granite curb. (That makes me feel slightly less guilty about all of the trouble for my neighbour — it'd have happened whether I needed my gas line fixed or not.)

Hot showers are a joy!

While I was waiting for the all-clear, I called and had a lovely long chat with my parents,

silverlibre and

ka9sqb. Remind me to post about oak pipes and prairie fires when I have a chance.

Current Mood: relieved

EDIT: My sewer’s working again! They’re still filling back in the hole, but the plumbing work’s done. *Whew!* Off to see my wuzzle!

Well, if the folks from the sewer department are correct, we should be done with the stuff that involves either (1) me waiting to let people into my basement or my neighbour’s basement or (2) me paying for things. (The second visit from the plumber only cost me ~$150, ’cause of the frequent-customer discount.)

Verdict so far is that when the gas company fixed my gas pipe, they broke the sewer main. The repairs involve digging up the recently-almost-paved-but-not-quite-topped-off street, but should not require getting into our houses any more. (I do, though, need to clean some of the places sewage got that sewage is not supposed to get once I have water again.)

The digging equipment hasn’t shown up yet, but there’s a work crew with trucks and lights out getting ready for it.

Thanks for everybody’s well-wishes! (And thanks for

plumtreeblossom’s messages of love!)

Neither I nor my neighbour in the other half of the duplex have working sewer drainage. At all.

After a $369 visit from Roto-Rooter, it is clear that the problem is in the street.

The city sewer folks have been out here. They can’t get their snake in through the basement because an access cap was installed improperly when her plumbing was last redone. And they can’t go in the other end because all the access covers in the street were recently (temporarily) paved over as part of the repaving project.

Their best guess is that when the gas company was fixing my gas pipe, they clipped the sewer line, and it’s taken a while for dirt to seep in. (Or, I can imagine that the repaving work that finally made its way to my house today might have shaken more in through an existing crack.)

My poor long-suffering neighbour. I’ve had to have workers traipsing through her basement a lot lately. And it turns out that the latest problem is probably a result of the fix for my gas line (which runs through her basement even though she doesn’t have gas service herself).

And I don’t look forward to telling my new renters, who have just suffered through several days without gas, that they might have a couple days without water and sewer service. I’d basically need to put them up in a hotel at that point (after having already spent a bunch of money on the plumber’s visit, and whatever if anything the city might try to charge me if it decides that my contractors were responsible for the problem, although I don’t know how likely that is).

On the bright side, I do not have pancreatitis and I am not radioactive, my relatives are not hastening their deaths by ignoring serious medical conditions, and nobody I am close to has committed suicide lately. I have an interesting job that I am not in fear of losing. I have good friends I love and a roof over my head (if not, at the moment, a bathroom). And I love my darling honeywuzzle and she loves me. So, I think I will get through this.

My phone has died. My old spare phone is flaky and shuts down unexpectedly. Do not assume you can reliably reach me by phone or SMS for the time being. *Sigh.*
Well, five days, seven solid work-crew-hours, three work trucks, one backhoe loader, and one dump truck later, I have a working stove again. (They’ve been repaving my street, and evidently a few days ago had to replace a working gas pipe a non-working one. They eventually replaced it with one that does work. Given the two possible failure modes for a gas pipe, I find the fact that we had a non-working gas pipe buried under the street and front yard for several days somewhat unsettling. I also find the fact that my gas pipe runs to my neighbour’s house, through her basement, and into my basement — and that she doesn’t actually have gas service herself — somewhat unsettling. Good thing I don’t use gas for heat! On the other hand, while I didn’t have to pay for it, this must have been the most expensive stove repair on the block in a long time.)
plumtreeblossom and I just saw Hair at the Arlington Friends of the Drama, and it was fabulous — or groovy, rather. And we covet their space.

That thing with putting my house on the market didn’t work out so well, alas. So I’m looking for a housemate in my place in Quincy Center.

Here’s the Craigslist ad. Feel free to point anybody you know who might be interested at it (or this post). This ad is for the larger room, which I’m offering at $800/mo including all utilities.

( And here’s the text of the post, for convenience. )

Alternatively I’d be willing to rent the smaller room (which I’m in now) for somewhat less money. Haven’t figured out exactly how much, but maybe $600/mo including utilities. (The larger room is probably a better deal though; the small one is very small.)

I would like to try putting the house on the market again next season (for a sale sometime in or after the summer), but whether I do that and the timing could be influenced by a housemate. (So if a potential housemate wanted to stay through the end of the school year, or through the end of the summer, that’s almost certainly fine, and if they wanted to stay for a couple years or so that might work too.)

Anyway, feel free to spread far and wide! (And sorry I haven’t been posting much to LJ these days. I’ll fix that, just as soon as they put a few more hours in the day. :-)

Another delightful weekend. On Friday, I met

plumtreeblossom at her house (on the late side, because she had a surprise wedding to perform). Neither of us had had dinner, so we grabbed an exceptionally yummy dinner at Sound Bites. At her place we had a great time hanging out on the porch with

vanguardcdk, who is excellent company.

Yesterday, we went to the annual Earth Day festival on the Charles River Esplanade, which included a concert by OK Go. As we arrived, OK Go were performing a really lovely song on handbells. We wandered a bit, and

plumtreeblossom went swagging, said swag this year mostly consisting of food. It looked nommy. I took a little time out and just sat by the river, enjoying the first sunny day after a week of grey rainy skies, while

plumtreeblossom braved one of the muddier parts of the festival.

When we’d wandered through the whole thing, we still had a fair amount of time before we’d want dinner, so we decided to see a movie. We were choosing between Pirates of the Caribbean and Thor, and the schedule favoured Thor, which was what we saw. It was fluffy fun. After all the walking (and free samples) we weren’t all that hungry, so we went to the South Station concourse and got grilled cheese sandwiches from Cheeseboy, a relatively new grilled-cheese stand there, on our way home.

Today, which turned out again to be gorgeous and sunny, we spent a big chunk of the afternoon outside working in the yard.

plumtreeblossom weeded and tended the flowerbeds, and made a new one along the driveway; we sprayed for bugs (since some of the plants are showing signs of depradations), I mowed, and we planted new cosmos seeds. We’ve already got very vigorous lupines from last year. The potted grape and blackberry plants I got a few weeks ago are doing well (although the blackberry is a bit chewed up); the blueberry plant is so chewed up that I worry it might not make it. Then we did a little shopping (during which I got some pachysandra for a particular patch on the front lawn where currently nothing grows but the occasional sparse weed), and I drove

plumtreeblossom home.

Oh, mixed in there was a bit of concern about being able to get the car to start, but we eventually did.

When I got back home, I planted the pachysandra and discovered, perhaps, why that particular spot has trouble growing anything. Well, one problem is that it’s in shade almost all the time, but also, the soil is spectacularly rocky. It’s about half gravel by volume. But even if the pachysandra don’t do very well, they’ll be an improvement.

Oh, and I got enough sleep! That never happens.

So it was a delightful weekend!

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Resources: one time to cry...

Another former LJer, now mostly on Facebook

Entries tagged with house

A wonderful weekend of love, laughs, home, food, and family

Things

No good deed...

My first significant problem of the day wasn’t so bad

Five o’clock and all’s well!

I has a housemate!

Quick weekend summary

Wow, I have nice neighbors!

A busy week in review

News

My busy life in bullet items

Room (still) for rent in Quincy

Planets instead of renter

Seeking housemate(s), again

Plumbing's back!

Improvement?

The latest house catastrophe / perspective

Important PSA, a very time-consuming stove repair, and Hair

Looking for a housemate in Quincy

Another delightful weekend

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August 2016

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