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.

Not sick yet

Ok, so, here's the deal.

I work in childcare. Dave is a waiter. Both of those jobs involve a pretty high rate of exposure to pathogens, and when flu season rolls around that means that it's time to think about what the heck we're going to do to avoid getting sick. With H1N1 on a roll around the country, this only gets more true. Sick time doesn't just mean being sick, it means being broke.

So imagine my surprise and curiosity this morning to see a link to this abstract posted on my Facebook page, of all places (it pays to be friends with people in some type of medicine).

Seriously? The results of Elderberry Flavonoids compared favorably to the effects of Tamiflu and Amantadine? Correct me if I'm wrong, but seriously, doesn't this say that Elderberry works better against the flu than the $90 flu drugs that they sell at the pharmacy?

If this is true, and let's hope it is because that would be rad and I would laugh, it solves a problem, because I am paranoid about the flu and also have no desire to drop $180 on two rounds of Tamiflu if one of us gets sick.

So, I googled "Elderberry for flu", because google knows everything (duh). Apparently elderberry is an ancient gypsy remedy for flu, among other things. Gypsies, man. Everyone knows that gypsy medicine is practically magic and therefore has to work.

According to one slightly questionable site on natural medicine, they did a study of Eldberry and flu in Israel in the 90's and had a 100% cure rate in 2-3 days. Now, a 100% cure rate is less impressive with the low mortality rate of most influenzas, but the 2-3 days thing is pretty impressive, given that without it the flu takes 6-7 to go away, and on Tamiflu it still takes about 5. I have no idea if they're telling the truth, but it isn't like elderberry is bad for you. People eat that stuff for food. Also, they make wine out of it, so it's got to be good.

Homemade elderberry extract takes 30 days to make, and I'd prefer to start taking it, well, immediately. But, we don't live five miles from a Whole Foods for nothing. Have you ever seen the pharmacy aisle in that place? It is a cornucopia of herbal remedies and weird supplements, not to mention their plethora, yes, plethora of bizarre and outlandish teas. And I will also check CVS because hey, you never know.

If Whole Foods doesn't have it, there's a Middle Eastern import store and I am quite positive that google and I can locate a health food store in the vicinity. I probably wouldn't do it if it were just a bunch of naturalists and herbalists recommending it (much as I love herbal medicine), but an actual, legit study published in a legit science journal is worth checking out, and it can't hurt. The worst that happens is we drink a lot of elderberry extract and/or tea for a few months and still get sick and have to take Tamiflu. That isn't really the end of the world, right?

Ok, time to go to work. But seriously, you all think about that. And don't breathe on me.

My husband is not awake for over-coffee conversation, so a blog is in order

Once again, I am freezing and Dave is bundled up under three piles of blankets to continue sleeping until he chooses not to continue anymore, at which point he will get up. I'm snuggling in bed with him and the laptop for 15 more minutes, and then it's time to go to work. It was 40 degrees last night--Is it seriously time to break out the winter coat already? At 8:15 in the morning, it is 45 degrees outside, with a projected high of 65 for the day. Tomorrow, I am told, it will be 59 and raining. 59, I tell you! What am I supposed to make of that?

I have tomorrow off, which makes today Friday, in a metaphysical sense, and I am blissfully happy about it. Long weekends are the best, even if only working 24 hours in a week means getting paid much less than usual. I will cope, for the sake of an extra day of sleep to gird up my circadian loins before working 45 hours a week all through October.

Sock number 1 is about 50% done. I'm nearly finished turning the heel, and then it's just basic knitting until the sock is long enough to fit Dave's foot. The problem with socks, of course, being that once you get one done, you get to bask in your sense of accomplishment for like five minutes before you have to cast on and start the whole thing over again, and without the sense of curiosity and adventure that came with a new sock pattern the first time you knitted it.

I have decided that, at least as far as the Internet goes, people do not use outmoded exclamations often enough, by gum! I won't commit myself so far as to say that I will make an actual effort to use them (more) often, but if it occurs to me--if the spirit moves, so to speak--I will not resist.

After work, I will take some pictures of the cats, and of my jelly, and perhaps of the sock, and then there will not only be blog entries, there will be blog entries with pictures. By Jove.

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.)

Kitties!

Well, we made it to the Parma animal shelter in the middle of the afternoon on Thursday, only to discover that they're closed from 12-5 and then open again for 2 hours. So, rather than drive half an hour back home, we decided to look around for something to do in Parma.

Dinner seemed like a good option, so we consulted our GPS for local points of interest that were food related. Our first bid was for Polish food, but after driving 30 minutes to the only Polish restaurant that the GPS knew of in Parma, we discovered that the owners were on vacation and the place was closed for the week. We opted instead for German, drove another 30 minutes, and found ourselves at a place called Das Schnitzelhaus.

It was delicious, there was good draft German beer in 1-liter steins, delicious schnitzel, and tasty pierogi. That killed just enough time, we drove back to the shelter, and met the crazy cat ladies who run the place.

Seriously. Every one of those women was a crazy cat lady.

We ended up picking two cats, a boy and a girl, who we took home yesterday. Their new names (as chosen by us) are Schroedinger and Sappho. Schroedinger is long-haired and gray with a white face and white paws. Sappho is black and white. Pictures soon!

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