House Woes

Le sigh. Ok, we don't really have house woes--our current problem does not amount to a woe, at least not yet, because we believe we know what the problem is.

When we moved in, the gas man came to light the pilot for our water heater/boiler et cetera and asked Dave if he should also light the furnace while he was down there (the house having three separate boilers and furnaces for the three separate tenants). Because it was the dead of summer, Dave said not to bother, and we continued on our merry way.

However, now it is not the dead of summer. It is the dead of Autumn, and Autumn in Cleveland is a chilly thing indeed. Our way, at least momentarily, is somewhat less merry than before. We went down to West Virginia this weekend for the wedding of our good friends Bill and Jenn, and then spent a night in Pittsburgh to hang out with old college buddies, and when we came back, our house was so cold that it required socks, four layers of clothes, an hour of cooking in the kitchen and a hot drink for me to reach a point where I felt like I was actually inside of a building and not standing outside in a remarkably breeze-free zone.

Unfortunately, the residual heat from cooking dinner did not last through to this morning, when dragging myself away from a pile of blankets and a husband who sheds heat like a furnace in the night became almost impossible, and made my teeth chatter.

This is a problem that has to be solved. I don't like to be hot, but I don't like to be freezing, either. Also, Dave's brother is staying with us this week and I feel bad having the house be a refrigerator when we have a guest.

Thankfully, it's a relatively easy problem to solve, now that we've put our heads together and remembered what we didn't have someone do in the summer. We put a call in to the landlord and asked if he could send someone to light up the furnace so that it can get hot and send hotness up from the basement to warm us.

If he has not come by the time I get back from work, I will be grumpy enough to consider going down into the Big Scary Basement and trying to figure out how to do it myself.

Potpourri

My dad and my brother both came down with the influenza, apparently. However, because my mom is a ninja and reads the same interesting things that I do (because we have the same Facebook friends, in this case), they've all been taking elderberry, which, as you may recall, is a magic gypsy remedy against the flu and all other diseases ever. As a result, my brother's already back in school and my dad was only really sick for a couple of days and is now just dealing with hoarseness and sinus congestion but not actual flu flu.

I am buying elderberry extract immediately. For serious. Apparently it tastes delicious, which is how you know it has to be magic, because since when does medicine taste good? Since gypsies invented it, that's since when.

Yesterday, I bought a sweater at Target. It was $20 on sale for $15 and tomorrow, after I get paid, I am going back to Target and buying the four other colors that they had, because it is a delicious and cozy sweater, and I'm a sweater addict.

One of my goals this year is to knit a sweater. I'm starting out slow with the knitting projects, though. For instance, in August and early September I knitted one (1) fingerless glove. That was to practice cabling, which you should look up on our good friend google. I didn't make a second glove, but I meant to. Now I am knitting two (2) socks.. that is to say, I'm working on a sock and hopefully will not be so bored with it by the time it's done that I refuse to start the second. Inertia is strong in knitting.

But next, oh, next I will attempt to knit a sweater. I feel like there is some degree to which one is not actually a knitter per se until something of that magnitude has blossomed forth from the needles.

Once again, I am delaying my leave for work until the very last possible moment, which means snuggling in bed with the computer and my husband under our heavy pile of blankets. The house is freezing, because we still haven't figured out how the heat works. When I woke up this morning, my teeth started chattering as soon as I made my exit from beneath the aforementioned blanket pile.

It isn't that I don't like my job, and I love making money, but it's so cold and 7:15 is so early in the morning to get up and 9 hours is a long day and you can insert more whining here. It gets repetitive after a while, I know.

I will bottle it all up inside of me for the rest of the day, and nobody will know. Except for you.

By and large, the cats are fab. We've been dealing with some litterbox issues, which is frustrating. 98% of the time, everything is fine, but after we go to bed one or the other of them seems to decide that litter boxes are only for when humans are awake to see where you're excreting things.

I'm knitting Dave a pair of around-the-house wool socks, because our floors get cold. We experimented yesterday with turning on the heat and as far as we can tell, nothing happened. We've got steam heat, and it's been so long since I lived in a house with steam heat that I honestly can't remember how it really works other than turning the thermostat on, so I have no idea how to check if it's working other than the ambient temperature of the house and the relative hot-or-coldness-to-the-touch of the radiators, which have remained solidly chilly.

It's good that it's cold now, because if there's a problem with the heat, I'd prefer not to be finding out the first time it snows or something like that. We may end up just getting a space heater for the bedroom and dealing with the chill in the rest of the rooms, since everything is well insulated and the windows, at least in the front room, are new. The kitchen heats up quickly if you cook anything, which makes up for the cold in there, which really only leaves the dining room and bathroom, since we use the guest room almost exclusively for storage at this point. And, like the kitchen, the bathroom is small and enclosed and heats up quickly if you do something like take a shower.

Not that you can shower in there right now (haven't been able to for the last two months), because there's a broken pipe that gushes water into the basement and results in no water pressure, so we bathe in the tub, because the broken pipe only affects the shower head, and wash our hair in the sink. But the principle remains the same.

I love our house, but it's an old house and the property manager has 14 others to deal with, which means that even major problems sometimes end up at the bottom of a long list. Throw in the fact that he's been having some health problems and, well, it's been about two months since I had a real shower. The stove shorts out if you use all the burners at once (as I found out several times while making jelly this past weekend) and you have to go down into the basement and reset the fuse.

I love our house, and I love our life, and I love our cats. But, like the cats, who still sometimes forget what a litter box is for (but only occasionally), sometimes the things we love can be endlessly frustrating.

Like Dave, who is snuggled under three blankets and sleeping soundly next to me while I write that I have to stop writing this entry now, because it's time to go out into the cold and wet and go to work for 9 hours. Grumpity grump grump.

(That's not true, I'm not frustrated with Dave at all. Just envious. I want to stay in bed all morning.)

I am writing this at 11:45 in the morning because I woke up with a migraine so bad that I threw up at work and, because I am not a glutton for punishment and prefer to be at home when I am not feeling well, I came home. I'm feeling much better, having swallowed half a bottle of excedrin and a handful of aleve (this might be an exaggeration) and no longer having anything left in my stomach to expel. But I'm still glad I'm not at work, because it frees me up to deal with another problem... and here is its story.

Last night, after work, I snuggled into bed with a piece of maple candy (food of the gods, by the way) and the first season of Dexter. All was going well, and Dave had just called to say he was on his way home from gaming.

About ten minutes later, I saw a shadow under the bedroom door, which has about a 1-inch gap between itself and the floor. At first, I thought it was the shadow of Dave, about to come into our bedroom, but it turned out to be someone very different.

Yes, that's right... we have mice.

I'm not particularly surprised. The weather is getting colder, and we live on the ground floor in an old house. It only makes sense that mice would come and investigate.

Artist's depiction of possible mouse

Being a hardy sort of girl, I stared at it while it twitched its whiskers and waved its tail and stared straight at me, trying to decide if it was worth the risk of coming all the way into our bedroom. Ultimately, it decided that it was not. Once it had left, I got up, stamped my feet hard on the floor, and opened the hallway door. Of course, the mouse had fled and was nowhere to be seen.

"We're getting cats," I announced without preamble as soon as Dave walked in the door. "Immediately."

"Um..." he said, in the tolerant and loving way that he has when his wife announces ridiculous or unpredictable things without preamble, "okay."

"Because," I continued, fixing him with a narrow stare, "we have mice."

"Ah," said my husband.

"Yes," I said. "I saw one. It came into our bedroom."

"Well, then, I guess it's time to get cats," he said, nodding wisely.

He remarked later that he was somewhat surprised, because we've seen no evidence of mice, but we agreed that the cooler weather is probably driving them inside and that cats are the clear solution. I say cats, plural, because cats are pack animals and if you only get one, they get pretty loco, which is Spanish for homicidal psycho jungle cat*.

After some online browsing and negotiation with various Craigslisters, we decided to go to the Parma animal shelter, which offers cats at $75 a pop--a hefty fee, but they're already fixed, de-wormed, tested for FIV, and vaccinated, so essentially you're getting a free cat and paying for all of its veterinary care.

We're leaving as soon as Dave gets out of the shower. Pics when our new kitties are home.

*With apologies to Bill Watterson

Is it October yet?

All the public rooms in our house are now what I can safely call--without even a shred of false optimism--done. Books are unpacked, artwork is hung, furniture is moved, floors are swept, and everything has found itself a home. As soon as I finish writing, I am going to put batteries in the wall clocks and set them so that unsuspecting guests do not wander from room to room thinking that at one moment it is perpetually 10 o'clock, and at another it is precisely 7:05 and 21 seconds. Then it will be really done.

The October issue of Martha Stewart Living came in the mail today, complete with a cover photo of pumpkins and squash arranged cunningly to look like giant, root vegetable-y toadstools. We sat out on our front step in the sun and read it together and enjoyed the burgeoning crispness of Autumn in the air while discussing the relative merits of apple cider muddled with cranberries and green curry served in a black cauldron at a Halloween party (verdict: cider is always better on its own, and green curry in a cauldron is clever and sounds delicious).

The arrival of Martha Stewart magazine is always a discombobulating event, because it comes some two weeks before the actual month in question is due to begin. Now everything feels October-y, even though there's a week and a half left in September. I had to forcibly restrain myself from buying a pumpkin and some pots of 'mums at Whole Foods this evening.

I went to Whole Foods because there was nothing left in the fridge but eggs and some spoiled ears of corn that we didn't eat because I did show some false optimism and assume that my husband would ever be in the mood for corn within the life of the produce. As soon as it goes out of season, he will crave it and I will shake my head and smile tenderly and offer him a pale memory of fresh corn out of a can and think wistfully of the delicious summer feasting that we let slip by.

Although I didn't buy a pumpkin, I did buy several pounds of organic fingerling potatoes (the gold ones and the purple ones; purple potatoes are a joy to my heart), a roast for later this week, some beef for dinner tonight, zucchini, mushrooms, and onions. I pondered long and hard over the many varieties of apples that are now available, but was so spoiled for choice that in the end I threw my hands up and decided that the choice was beyond me for the moment. I experimented dangerously, too, with bags of frozen vegetables ready to be tossed into curry or fried rice at any moment.

Curry and fried rice are two staples of our weekly diet. Curry because it is both easy and delicious--a tablespoon of curry paste, a can of coconut milk, whatever vegetables we have lying around, and whatever meat I pull from the freezer, along with a generous helping of basmati rice from our magical rice cooker of bliss. And then, with the leftover rice, I make fried rice, because it is easy, quick, and delicious.

I learned how to make fried rice when I lived in Alabama and was poor. The value of being poor is that it teaches you how to make delicious poor-people food (as Dave calls it). Rice is cheap and nutritious. So are onions. Garlic isn't cheap, but we always have it anyway. Toss in some scrambled eggs and any vegetables that didn't get put in the curry, throw in a handful (literally, I just scoop a handful out of the jar) of cumin and coriander, a little cinnamon, and some cayenne pepper, and we eat like kings. Fried rice is an end-of-the-week dish, when we're out of fresh meat but not yet out of everything else and so not yet willing to go to the grocery store.

Earlier today we had breakfast at Kalie's with Molly and Brittany, who came out from Grove City last night to play Scrabble and Cranium with us, and to sleep on our living room floor, because they are Good Friends. After we said our goodbyes and saw them on their way, we stopped at Susan's Yarns, a small yarn shop on the way home. I've been wanting to give it a look and see how it was, and I wasn't disappointed. It's everything a mom-and-pop store ought to be--dingy, dark, and disorganized. There were empty cardboard boxes on the floor and a giant bin of assorted buttons, and box after box after box of every yarn you could ever hope to want, with not a price tag to be seen.

When I'd found a yarn I wanted (I'm being ambitious and knitting some socks for Dave and myself, because the weather is getting cold o' nights and we have wood floors and dubious-looking radiators for our only heat source), I looked around helplessly for someone to tell me how much it might cost. Eventually, I found the owner, who was a tall, thin, and ancient-looking Australian with white hair and a white aran-style sweater so covered with cables and bobbles and mismatched wooden buttons that it looked like someone made a stitch sampler and then decided at the last minute to throw some sleeves on and call it a day. He knew the price for every skein, ball, and hank in the store, recommended the right needle size for the yarn in question, and looked scornfully down his nose at me when I said I prefer bamboo needles to metal. It was perfect.

I'm making faux-Indian food for dinner. Lamb at Whole Foods was a cool $15/pound, so I opted for beef instead. Cube the beef, fry it up with some onions, throw in some potatoes, cauliflower, peas, and maybe a little zucchini and then dump a bottle of pre-made korma sauce over it (I'm not proud, and I am lazy, at least in this instance--real korma takes forever to make) and toss some rice in the rice cooker. Twenty minutes of work and then two hours of enjoying the smell of softly simmering magic as it wafts through our beautiful apartment and warms everything it touches.

And then I'll get back on the computer and upload some pictures of said beautiful apartment.

Or maybe I'll run back to Whole Foods for those 'mums. They smelled so good.