Tag: home

Klotski and Labyrinth

Started moving boxes and furniture around so that we can actually have someone install cable. Moved some boxes into bedroom, made room in the closet for others, and dug out my corner desk from the corner of the living room where it’s sat since May. When we set up our computers in the bedroom, we left enough space for the desk, but never got around to moving it.

As it turns out, the desk won’t fit through the bedroom door.

It took both of us carrying it and rotating it about 3 feet in the air just to get it into the hallway, but there’s no way to get it from the hallway into the bedroom without removing the corner leg… and I’m not sure it’s possible to do that without breaking the thing.

So the desk is back in the corner of the living room, under a slightly smaller pile of boxes than before. I guess I’ll put some of them where I intended to put the desk.

Also: Watched Labyrinth. I still like most of the movie, but I can no longer take the goblins singing and dancing with David Bowie.

Weekend: Concert & Home

alenxa and I went to see Aimee Mann at the House of Blues on Friday. Rather than trying to eat somewhere in Downtown Disney, where no one takes reservations and everything is crowded on a Friday night, we just ate at Taco Rosa and drove up after dinner. It worked out pretty well — we ended up there after the doors had opened (so we didn’t have to stand in line), but early enough to secure a spot on the main floor, putting us closer to the stage than we’ve ever been before. The concert was good, but a bit strange in that her new album had only been out for 4 days, so most people didn’t know the songs. Older songs got cheers as soon as people recognized the intro, but the old songs were met with silence until she finished and the audience applauded.

And she told a funny story about how one of the songs started out as a sort-of commission for Shrek III. Unfortunately they wanted a happy, encouraging, “Come on, you can do it!” song, and she said she’s not very good at that kind of message.

House-hunting on Saturday turned up a few prospects. Meanwhile, did some cleanup at the apartment. Finally arranged the front of the living room so that the display case doesn’t block access to the window.

As for the goals I set for myself:

  1. Sort through old magazines. – Done. Tossed 2 bags of magazines & one bag of old papers (seriously, brochures for wedding services for a company we didn’t use?) into the recycling.
  2. Find desk lamp. – Tried, no luck.
  3. Put some actual content on Facebook profile. – A little, but not much.
  4. Finish website update on the Silver-Age Flash. – Wrote a lot, but didn’t finish.
Current Music: Tori Amos, Blood Roses

The Accidental Beekeeper

A follow-up on the bees we found in the kitchen last Monday. Management brought in exterminators on Tuesday, and aside from a half-dozen dead bees on the floor, they were all gone by Wednesday morning. Well, except for the ones alenxa found when she opened up the cabinet above the stove today:

Dead bees in the cabinet

Great, so there were several dozen bees in the cabinet by Tuesday. It’s a good thing we didn’t open it.

Current Music: Tori Amos: Sleeps With Butterflies (which, appropriately, is on “The Beekeeper”)

Escaping the Jungle

Or, rather, the jungle escaped.

Management finally got around to painting the new balcony this week. As you may recall, we had to clear everything off two days before Halloween, filling a corner of our living room with plants, gardening supplies, and patio furniture for what was supposed to be a three-day construction project. They tore everything out that Monday or Tuesday, and had the new balcony up by Wednesday…but then they didn’t paint it until two weeks later. (The leasing office told me that the paint was being shipped from Texas, so they had to wait for the paint to show up.)

It’s nice to have the space back. And it’s nice that we’ll be able to water all the plants without balancing acts worthy of tightrope walkers, or stretches worthy of Plastic Man. And the new balcony does seem to be better constructed than the last one.

When we moved in, we had a rickety, termite-infested balcony. The apartment complex changed hands, and one of the many things the new owners did was to replace the balconies. Of course, they told us to clear everything off in November, then changed their minds and decided to wait until January to do anything. And when they did put them up, they didn’t bother with things like properly-treated wood for outdoor use, and sap oozed out of the floorboards for months. Then the complex changed hands again. And the new new owners decided the balconies needed to be replaced again. They seem to have used the right materials for the structural elements. The floors feel more solid, and the boards are placed more closely together. But we think they reused some of the boards on the non-structural parts. We saw sap oozing from one of the railings as we placed our bench against one side.

The more things change…

Feng-shui Klotski

A good chunk of this weekend was taken up moving stuff around the apartment. Management has been rebuilding all the balconies. (This is probably a good thing, since the previous owners didn’t bother to use treated wood, and sap leaked out from the floorboards for several months.) On Thursday, we got the notice that they would start on our group on Monday. This means that we have to move everything off of the balcony.

Our next-door neighbors lucked out, since they just moved out on Friday. Though I suppose that meant they had to clear off the balcony anyway.

So Saturday afternoon was spent clearing space out of the storage section of the dining area so that we could move stuff out of the the living room so that we could make room for all the plants and the patio furniture. Then Sunday morning was spent hauling stuff inside. By the time we were done, a corner of our living room had been transformed into an indoor jungle:

Indoor Jungle

With any luck, they’ll be faster about it than the previous management was. The previous management warned us to clear everything off overnight, then changed their minds, and didn’t actually start work until two months later. Not that they told us they had postponed it indefinitely, so we went quite a while wondering when they would start, and assuming we couldn’t put things back, until we finally asked. Fortunately we had less stuff on the balcony back then.

Current Mood: accomplished

Sunset

Since about 7:15 (barring a break to bring in laundry), I’ve been out on the balcony with the laptop, doing Net stuff I’ve been meaning to catch up on. It’s been quite nice outside today, except in direct sunlight, but there’s been a light cloud cover most of the afternoon. But we just can’t seem to get the apartment cleared out.

There was a dicey moment when I was watering the plants, though, and somehow managed to overwater the plant that hangs above our patio table. So it immediately started dripping on the table and splashing the laptop and small stack of books next to it. It was closed, at least, so no harm was done, and the day was so dry that by the time I finished with the other plants the table was already drying out.

We don’t have a view of the horizon — there are too many trees and buildings in the way — but the high cloud cover meant a very nice sunset, and the parts of the sky I could see turned fantastically gold, orange, and finally pink before fading.

Now it’s dark, and while I don’t need to see to type (and the screen casts plenty of light for that anyway), one of the things I was doing was typing in the quotes we collected at Comic Con. The balcony light really doesn’t cast enough to read at this end, so I’ll probably have to either go over to the bench by the light, where there’s nowhere to put the notebook, or go back inside, where it’s still uncomfortably warm.

On the other hand, I won’t be able to hear my neighbor hocking loogies on his patio. He started about halfway through this post, and I hope he’s finished. Blech.

Current Mood: 🤔contemplative

I can see clearly now

The sun is shining for the first time in over a week, and the gardeners at our apartment complex are out in force, almost as if they were on call, waiting for a chance for it to be dry enough to work.

It’s always amazing how green the hills are after rains like this, and it always seems unbelievable that they’ll be golden brown again by summer.

Current Music: Guess.

Weekend Thoughts

Rain should not fall at an angle more horizontal than vertical.

Whoever came up with the idea for a warning chime to let you know your headlights are still on is a genius, and has saved my car battery many times over.

It doesn’t take much rain to screw up freeway visibility. I could swear I’ve driven in heavier rain and been able to see better.

Our apartment complex suffers from the same problem as UCI: no one bothered to build in decent drainage. Fortunately that’s only been a problem with the sidewalks so far, and not, say, parking or storage.

What the heck is “white whole wheat” flour? It sounds like raw Twinkies, or wild tofu, or Sweet ’n’ Bland. Is it a 50/50 blend or something?

If you run a Persian restaurant, and advertise belly dancers, no one really cares whether the dances are authentic. On that note, Caspian is very loud, at least on Saturday nights. But the food’s good.

The web is a stranger place than you think. Yesterday I was looking at website referrer stats, and discovered a link to our Comic Con photos on a site that specializes in super-heroine, uh, “fantasies.” I.e. dressing models up as superheroines and then, shall we say, reversing the process. Apparently with rope often involved, though that’s almost classic if you’ve seen any 1940s-era Wonder Woman. They had a page full of links to people’s convention photos, focusing on cosplayers.

Just how do they fit Christmas lights into the box? I’d rather let the cord tangle up and then untangle it next year than go through the exercise in frustration that involves trying to get them all into the plastic framework, only to have them pop out, not fit in the box, etc. At least when you untangle them to put them up, you get something out of it: pretty lights on the tree (or window, or roofline, etc.) All you get from carefully placing each light in the frame is a box you’re going to put away and ignore for 11 months, and you can get that much more easily just by jamming the string of lights into the box in the first place.

Tree!

Well, we’ve hit a milestone. The last few holiday seasons, there’s always been something preventing me and alenxa from putting up a Christmas tree. At long last, we’ve managed to accomplish this difficult feat.

You see, the way our furniture is arranged, we only have one spot in the apartment suitable for a tree. The broken desk that blocked it one year has long since been repaired. The boxes that blocked it another year have been unpacked. This year looked grim as well, but for once everything fell into place. Since we hosted a “Refugee Thanksgiving” for our friends, we had to clean the corner out. And the apartment management owed us a free carpet cleaning, so we waited a week before looking for a tree. And when we visited my grandparents that following weekend, they asked if we wanted a tree, since they’d been putting up a small one instead of a large one the last few years.

So we set it up last night, and went hunting for ornaments today. First it was storage, then my parents’ house (to pick up a collection I’d been making since childhood), then shopping. And so, I present to you: our first Christmas tree!

Our first Christmas tree (ambient light)

Current Mood: accomplished
Current Music: Tori Amos – Snow Cherries From France