Moving Questions

1. Why would you wrap a 69 cent Lotus bowl in eight sheets of paper?


2. Why would you screw the bolts on the client's bed frame in so tight as to strip the threads?


3. Why would you mark 15 boxes "Misc. Items", thereby making it virtually impossible for the client to find her clock-radio or her telephone or her printer?


4. What does tea from an almost-full 100-bag box taste like after a year in storage?


5. Why would you store two heavy mirrors in one box and not mark it, alerting the client to challenges in unpacking?

. . .

and other random questions.

Noticing the Yo

I subscribe to the Zappo's blogs, and was thrilled this morning to see that their Rideshop blog had mentioned Austintown and Youngstown. Woo hoo!

How nice to see our area positively mentioned, instead of being dissed!

Ke-Rappp!

If you have known me long or know me well, if you have visited my home in the past five years, you know of my passion for George Huffman's "The King and the Queen of the Prom." This was a commissioned piece, based on Billy Joel's "Scenes from an Italian Restaurant."

I used to choose houses based on the size of my grand piano. Now Tyler and Jaci have that burden, and I choose houses based on the size of this painting, a mere 11' 4" long. Oops, when I looked at this house, I was thinking it was 9' long. Big Oops.

I thought TKATQOTP was going to fit in the living room and have been planning that room based on that fact. When the movers brought it into the living room today, I instantly realized I was wrong-wrong-wrong.

If you look directly above the "Parkway Diner" sign, you'll see the end of the wall where I thought it would hang. The light in the background is the kitchen light. Damn.

Now I've got to find some artist or framing guru who will 1) remove the painting from the frame; 2) remove the canvas from the stretchers; 3) move the canvas carefully upstairs to the family room; 4) take the frame apart; 5) move the frame upstairs; 6) reassemble the frame; 7) place the canvas back on the stretchers; 8) place the stretched canvas back in the frame; and 9) hang it.

Damn.

The photo above is taken on my iPhone with very low light in the living room. Here's a photo in glorious, living color, taken in my house in Continental Ranch, NW Tucson, where I lived from 2003 to 2006. Aren't those colors incredible? Can you understand why I'm so passionate about this work of art?

The Things Nobody Tells You

Aging sucks! Nobody will tell you that. You hear people say, "It's better than the alternative" and "Sixty is the new forty" and other bullshit aphorisms. But no one will tell you the down-and-dirty.

I noticed about eight years ago that when I clasped my hands (as to pray, in an earlier life), my fingers felt different than they had in earlier years. It was as if in my 40s, when I clasped my hands, I could feel the fat or fiber (Okay, I never took anatomy and physiology. Get over it.) around the bones. But suddenly, all I could feel was the bones. My hands felt very bony.

And my beautiful skin was gone. I've always been complemented on my skin, and I would attribute it to the amount of water I drink daily. But now all my skin has turned to crepe.

One of my favorite fabrics is satin-backed crepe. It's pebbly on one side and satin on the other. My skin is no longer satin. It's just crepe—ugly pebbly old crepe.

The backs of my hands: crepe. My neck: crepe. My décolleté: crepe crepe crepity crepe!

It's an evil trick of nature. Isn't it bad enough that we start losing our memory, that we have to walk from room to room trying to remember what the hell we were looking for? Isn't it bad enough that menopausal women are prone to put on weight no matter how active they are or how carefully they eat? Isn't it bad enough that our once-milk-filled breasts now level out at our waists?

My beautiful hands are a thing of the past. Now they're marked by bulging veins, what my mama called "liver spots", and crepey skin.

I think this is just another indicator that supports my son's belief that there's no God. A benevolent, caring God would not have done this to all of us big-hearted, caring, nurturing women who carry the world on our shoulders.

It's a cruel joke, and I'm not laughing!

One Floor at a Time

From Coronado Avenue

Work is continuing, fast and furious, on the new-to-me house. Painters are there every day, doing a fabulous job of patching-before-painting. I was very anxious for about a week at the slow pace of progress, but now I smile every time I walk into the house. Late yesterday afternoon Donny and Mike got into my sewing room, and found problems under the south window and in the ceiling. But they quickly drove over to Donny's to retrieve some drywall pieces and expertly patched the problems. These guys are not "professional" painters, but they're doing one highly professional job. The "family room" (southeast bedroom) is finished; by noon today my bedroom will be finished; and by tonight the sewing room will be finished.

On Thursday my Starbux buddy, general contractor Duane, came in and pulled the carpet up from the first floor. I had only pulled a portion by the living room fireplace and seen gorgeous oak flooring. Imagine my horror to arrive on Thursday night and realize the previous owner, at some point probably 60 years ago, had refinished the edges around the area rugs. Horrors. (This action totally falls into the category of "what were they thinking?!".) The picture above shows you what the floors looked like.

Yesterday (Saturday), the guys from Mr. Sandless came in to work their magic. These young men were incredible dedicated workers. They wet-sanded the floors with their special cleaning solution. The floor show (pun intended) included Jim falling on his butt as his feet flew out from under him on this incredibly slippery solution. Alas, the wet-sanding did not remove the excess of old varnish-or-whatever around the "area rugs". These boys got down on their hands and knees and sanded and scraped around the edges of the four "area rugs" to remove that excess. Then they put two coats of ginger-colored sealer, followed by three coats of polyacrylic.

From Coronado Avenue

This photo shows the same area as the first photo, after one coat of sealer. Big improvement, but not wonderful. I was thrilled with Mr. Sandless's work. I was not a happy customer, but I was a content customer. These guys did the absolute best they could. To have brought the flooring back to its original 1927 glory would have cost me a couple of thousand dollars more. My worst case scenario, if I feel I can't live with the result, is to place area rugs down again (which I'll probably do anyway).

From Coronado Avenue

The library is probably the most noticeable. This photo shows the room as the second coat of sealer is being applied. Closer to the camera you can see the portion of room that is dry with one coat of sealer. It was very interesting to see that the previously-covered floor in this room was much lighter than in the other rooms.

From Coronado Avenue

Contrast the light "area rug" in the library, previous photo, with that in the living room, above. But, "area rugs" aside, look at that gorgeous oak flooring.

I've mentioned that this house has a back stairs and a "maid's room". The seller's nephew, whose grandfather built the house, told me there were never servants in this house—it wasn't that kind of family. There were six or eight children in the family—I think he told me eight—and every bit of this house was filled with family, not servants. That said, the "maid's room" has pine flooring, as does the back stairs, where the "front" portion of the house has oak flooring. It makes me wonder if the grandfather/builder was building the house for someone else, who backed out of the deal, causing the grandfather to decided to inhabit the house himself. Oh, if these walls could talk!

So that's the Thursday and Saturday activities. On Friday, the security system guy and the cable guy were there. I now have a working security system, high-speed Internet access, Wi-Fi, and cable television in the family room and the sewing room. Yesterday the water was off most of the day, so I couldn't do any kitchen cleaning. For part of the day I just sat with a book in the family room. Happy as the proverbial clam!

Today I will get back to the kitchen. First I'll run to Lowe's to get felt pads for the legs of all the first floor furniture. Donny and I will carefully place the dining room furniture back on the pristine flooring. I'll measure the second-floor hall closet for Elfa shelving, to be ordered from The Container Store—this will become my shoe closet. I'll move some more boxes from Ty and Jaci's garage to the new house.

Monday will dawn, bright and early and very cold, with a predicted high of 22 degrees. (It's 3 degrees right now—brrr.) I will meet the movers at the storage unit at 8:00. It will be a long cold day, but by the end of the day most of my things will be in one place. And I'll be a happy homeowner.

I must tell you that with each hour I spend in the house, my love for this house grows. I've been uncharacteristically ambivalent about the house since I first saw it. I knew it was a beautiful house, and that—after my summer Tucson real estate fiasco—it was a residence I could afford. But the purchasing process was so long and drawn-out and—sans Realtor®—filled with the unknown and the unknowable, that I wasn't really sure the purchase would be consummated until two days before closing.

Now I'm past all the confusion and indecision, and I'm absolutely falling in love with this house. The maid's room stays as is and becomes the intimate guest room. I've ordered a yard of whimsical live-laugh-love fabric that will become the basis for a quilt for this room. Y'all come. I can't wait for my friends to see this treasure-house and fall in love with it as I am doing.

A New Word

I've been listening to Claire Messoud's "The Emporer's Children" in preparation for my book group next week. It's a delightful book, written the way I would have written it: jumping around from character to character and time to time to tell the story completely.

Ms. Messoud used a word—unfamiliar to me—several times. Then this morning I read the word somewhere again.

The word? Ineffable.

Isn't that the coolest word? Not necessarily its meaning, which is "indefineable", too sacred for words, cannot or should not be expressed in spoken word.

I just love the sound of it. It could be code for a curse word. You could use it in polite company and no one would know what you really meant, that you were verbally thumbing your nose at the offending persons or his offending ideas.

My favorite word is duck. Well, with an "f" instead of a "d". I love it as the inserted syllable. That diamond is educkingnormous. Your new house is induckingcredible. Yes, you can say ineffingcredible and have virtually the same meaning. But think about using ineffable. Maybe only those members of the Professional Organization of English Majors (thanks, Garrison Keillor, for this wonderful imaginary league) would catch your meaning, would know the definition of the word.

"That diamond is ineffable." "Your new house is ineffable."

I'll do another post soon on my list of favorite words. But for right now, "ineffable" is right up there at the top.

A Most Unusual Day

I am filled with pride in my country, to the point of tears. We can have hope for the future!

God Bless America.