Linens 'N' Crap

When we first moved into this house it was still full of the old owners crap. And I do mean crap. Well, not literally crap – I’d like to think I wouldn’t have bought it if that were the case, but with my judgment you never know. Anyway, what I mean was, you know, crappy stuff.

So we had to shove our crap (and yeah, I mean crappy stuff here, too) in with her crap and, to make a long story short, we’re still – three years later – finding things we’d forgotten that we owned.

My project over the past few months has been to make our closets work in the manner that they were intended, as in: put stuff in them; take stuff out; repeat. Not as in: cram them full and slam the door and never open it again for fear of all the crap.

The front closet went first. I emptied it out and scrubbed it down and only put things in it that belonged in there. Ahhh... This was the first winter since we moved here that I had a place to put my wet boots when I took them off. A hook to hang my scarf on. Hangers for my coats. It was exciting. I still had to go around the house everyday picking coats and mittens up and putting them away, but at least I had a place where I could put them. And the linen closet has proved even more satisfying...

See, as long as we couldn’t use the front closet, all the coats and hats and sweaters were shoved into the linen closet – which really wasn’t big enough for all of them, so we basically took out the two or three we used and left them strewn about the house for the best part of three years. The rest stayed in the linen closet, forgotten, until now.

The linens, meanwhile – which we actually used – lived for a year or so in the spare fridge in the dining room, until we got around to setting that up. Then they got shoved into this odd little cubby-space we have under the stairs. There were these sort-of shelves in there already that someone not-us had put in, and it was right across the little hallway from the bathroom. I dipped the shelves alternately in bleach and Teflon for about a week and a half, spread an old towel down on each of them, and put my linens and things in that odd little cubby-space under the stairs.

The funny thing about odd little cubby-spaces under the stairs, though, aside from the boy magicians playing with their wands, is that they’re shaped like the under of the stairs. Ours doesn’t have an inverted staircase on the ceiling or anything, but it is deeper than it is wide, each shelf according to its altitude. On the deepest shelves, which of course are on the bottom, you can’t reach all the way to the back. And the top, most depth-convenient, shelves you can’t reach without a step ladder. I tossed extra curtains up there I knew I’d never use.

Meantime one shelf – one of the middle ones – was designated the medicine cabinet because oh, yeah, we don’t have one of those yet, either. Well, actually we do, but it’s so hands-down disgusting that all we keep in there is Lysol, and even that we wash before we use. Anyway the odd part about the medicine-chest shelf is that it has one corner cut away, which you tend to forget about when looking for the Solpadeine, and then the medicine-chest contents wind up on the floor of the odd cubby space under the stairs. And you don’t want to know about the floors of odd cubby spaces under stairs in houses that weren’t cleaned out before you bought them. Suffice it to say we asked every Irish visitor to bring us more Solpadeine so we could maintain our schedule of sacrifices to the stair-cubby-space spirits.

But anyway once I’d gotten all the sweaters, hats and shoes out to the front hall where they belonged, Johnny washed the linen closet down and painted it, cut shelves to fit it (because of course there weren’t shelves) and painted them, pulled up the linoleum and washed the painted hardwood underneath, and voila! It sat empty for three weeks until I got around to transferring the linens…

Well, come on. Cleaning out that cubby meant cleaning out that sacrificial floor.

Eventually I did it, and it turns out we have less stuff than I thought. Sheets, tablecloths and pillowcases on the top shelf (I threw out the unused curtains); towels, face cloths and spare bathmats on the next; medicine-chest doo-dads on the third (three boxes of Solpadeine: two of them full); and the entire bottom shelf for toilet paper, which we buy in the Y2K-sized economy pack and have occasionally been known to store in the trunk of the car. On the floor? Get this: a first aid kit. A first aid kit! Me! Who woulda thunk it?

I’ll need it, too, if I ever broach the closet in my office…

Shhhh....

I fixed the toilet. Wanna know how...?

Shut the door. Can't hear it. Ta Da!

Hey, with Johnny gone I don't really need two bathrooms anyway. Course, he does come home tomorow...

I'll do it this weekend, I promise. Or, okay, maybe next weekend. Just as soon as I file my freakin' taxes.

In the meantime, if a tree falls in the forest...

Wet Work

My fingers are all wrinkly, and I’m afraid it might be permanent.

See, Johnny’s away, and I only realized this morning, while talking to a friend, that I follow a very precise pattern when he goes away. The first night, I drink a lot of beers all by myself in the apartment – I mean, house; I still can’t get used to that – with the radio up really loud and playing something he would never tolerate if he were here. This time I was extra-lucky because, when the soundtrack to Evita ended and I sat down to watch television, Thelma & Louise was on. I own it, on video and on DVD, but it’s still a treat to find a thing like that on the night your husband goes away. It’s like the universe is telling you to go ahead and take your bra off. Which I – well, which I had done already, to be honest.

Anyway, so the next part of my pattern when Johnny goes away is to not pick up after myself at all for the first couple of days. That bra? Stayed on the table where I dropped it. Dishes go unwashed, laundry goes undone, empty beer bottles stay wherever I set them after taking the last sip. “I’m leaving it there,” I think to him, wherever he is. “Ha ha!”

After a few days I’m grossed out. “Look at this place, it’s a pigsty!” But there’s no one else to blame…

This time I was lucky. He went away on a Wednesday, so by the time I was disgusted it was Friday night. Well, you can’t do anything about it on a Friday night, so I had a few more beers and listened to the Partridge Family really, really loud. Woke up this morning all gung-ho to do something about it. To spend the day listening to NPR (“Car Talk,” “Wait, Wait,” “This Life”) and cleaning up the pigsty that I’d turned my house into. (By the way, Microsoft Word offers “unattractive place” as a synonym for “pigsty” – but that just doesn’t have the same effect, now, does it?)

So but before I set to work this morning I went online and for some reason looked at this website I read about in yesterday’s Economist article. It’s about – well, hell, I’ll just go ahead and tell you it’s Iamfacingforeclosure.com – and I don’t know why, but I spent an hour reading the 426 comments on the post where he was (of course) asking folks to give him money.

Actually, I do know why: I started out thinking I might leave a pithy comment that would make all of those 426 people want to read my pithy blog. But instead the whole thing made me tense. I’m getting all worked up again now just remembering about it.

For some reason, reading about this idiot – who, by the way, dug himself into this hole by lying to get undocumented loans to purchase no fewer than seven properties in six months, and who started out on this quixotic quest after buying into one of those late-night get-rich-quick-by-buying-real-estate seminar dealies – for some reason, reading about this idiot made me all tense. Made me feel like it was happening to me. Made me get that “I’m in trouble” feeling in my gut.

And it turned out those 426 people were actually only him and seven or eight other dorks, staying up until four o’clock in the morning going back and forth on how much money it would take for him to post his resume or naked pictures of himself.

Ew!

Anyway, the whole thing left me feeling dirty, and tense, and rather like I’d done something I ought to be ashamed of. So – after talking on the phone to C and getting all of this off of my chest – I threw myself into my cleaning. I tidied and dusted and vacuumed and scrubbed, laundered and dish-washed and made beds and mopped. The house is clean now, and my fingers are wrinkly, but I’m still a little tense.

Anyway, so the end part of my pattern is that until Johnny gets home I'll keep the house hospital-room clean. I'll wash every spoon as it comes out of my teacup, throw every sock straight from my foot into the laundry. I will congratulate myself on my housekeeping skills, and marvel at the sparkle on the stainless stove – which I will dare not use, for fear of dripping something on it. And then Johnny will come home and drop all his crap everywhere, and I will kill him. And then I'll have to clean the house all over again.

Iamfacingforensics.com – what do you think? Wanna give me money? I ain't posting any naked pictures, though. And my resume is even more embarrassing...

The House That Jack(een) Built

I picked up a copy of The Economist this afternoon. I don’t read The Economist. The only other time I ever bought The Economist was when I was in Istanbul for two weeks and it was the only English-language thing that I could find. Which itself is something to be wondered at, now that I think about it. No Spectator, no New Yorker, no Cosmopolitan – well, okay, the Cosmo I can understand. They’d have to drape the entire newsstand in a somber black hijab. But still, The Economist? Anyway, what I learned from that little Turkish delight is that I don’t read The Economist, even when it’s the only English reading material in the entire country. Snoo-ooze…

But I picked it up today because it had a cover story called “The Trouble With the Housing Market” and I thought: why didn’t anybody think to contact me? I’m the freakin’ trouble with the housing market! Well, me and people like me…

They start out saying that “June is National Homeownership Month in America” – which I didn’t know and which, oh boy, I can’t wait for June. Then they go on to make all these puns about dry rot in the mortgage industry and crumbling foundations. Hey, stupid puns about housing debacles are my job, people! Can’t you just stick to desiccated prose and leave the jokes to those of us with bats in our belfries?

Anyway, The Economist – like everybody else these days – is blaming “The Trouble With the Housing Market” on sub-prime mortgages. Which, check, that’s me. They say (and I’m mixing direct quotes in with paraphrasing here) that those of us with sub-prime loans are poorer (check), that we’re “less likely to be white” (I don’t know how likely I am to be white, but I am, so I guess I beat the odds on that one), that we joined the party at the point when everybody else was looking at their watches and jiggling their keys (yup), and we got bullied into loans we couldn’t afford by brokers we couldn’t trust (who are you people, and why are you spying on me?!).

Ooh, but here’s something I didn’t know: in the biz, apparently, the shorthand term for “undocumented loans” – which is what I have (and which means just what it says) – is “liars.” Ha! Not that I would, you know. That would be stupid. I would never. Ever, ever. Again.

It gets better. The Economist, being a British magazine, is looking at the repercussions on the global – well, specifically, European – scale. The two countries, they say, who have fared the best from all of this, now stand to fare the worst. Those countries? Spain and Ireland. Oh, maybe I haven’t mentioned yet that we own a house in Dublin…

To make a long (long, long) story short, the house was Johnny’s mother’s. He was born in it and grew up to pay off the mortgage on his mum’s behalf. Mum, in remuneration, left the house to Johnny in her will. He has no intention of selling – a brother lives there now and always will, until he can’t or doesn’t want to – and the place is a pit anyway (apparently: I’ve never seen it). But it’s out there. And worth, the last we checked, about a half a million dollars. Like I say, we’re never going to sell, but it was nice to know that it was out there. Nice to think that we were, theoretically at least, worth a half a million dollars (plus a buck or two, if you count this shithole here).

But apparently no. The Economist is predicting a 60% drop in Irish housing prices, if – oh, wait, actually, no again. Now that I re-read it I see they’re not predicting a 60% drop but calling for one – “to return the ratio of housing-prices-to-rents to where it was around [the year] 2000.” Hey, you British bastards, back the fuck down!

Ooh, now the Limey twits are picking on my country! “Americans and others may be tempted to take heart…That would be a mistake." Plus: "Inevitably, Americans will ask what policymakers can do…It is too late.” And then the kicker: “[To] foster [homeownership] with tax breaks, as they do in America, is daft.”

Daft!

Okay, so I cut those quotations up a little bit. I left some key parts out. But still, daft? I so want to get all cliché on them now – so want to point out things like the fact that we, in America, actually own the land under our houses, instead of leasing it in thousand-year increments from some doddering old peerage. But I won’t...

There are four more pages in this housing-market exposé, but I won’t bore you. Suffice it to say the news is grim – and that’s just the facts, ma’am, not the Anglo-angled interpretation. Ah, well. When the whole thing collapses and we lose our daft little too-late American house, we can always go and live in our low-rent Dublin pit.

By the way, I paid $5.99 for my copy of the magazine. Not very economical, what? But now that I’ve written about it, I can write it off – just like The Economist did me.

Daft that tax break, you British buggers!

Gimme Swelter

I read a thing in the paper the other day where a person was complaining that his landlord wouldn’t do anything about his $300/month heating bill. I snuffed at that and chalked it up to innocence, but then I was reading a book this morning (a very funny book, by the way, which conforms to my rules, called Julie and Julia) and the writer found a $200/month heating bill shocking – in New York, of all places.

So I totted up my season’s-worth of oil payments. I guess I was feeling a little too secure, what with the fact that the furnace has held through the winter after all, and none of us have perished from the chimney fumes.

But as it turned out, actually, it was much less than I’d feared. When you have to get deliveries two times a week there are an awful lot of bills to total up, and the stack itself was enough to send me through conniption fits. The number I came up with, though, was frankly underwhelming.

Ready?

$2448.30

Underwhelming? I don’t know. I thought so at first. But then I started walking backward in my mind…

I didn’t turn on the heat until November 1st, and it’s not yet April. So that’s 150 days we’re talking about. In other words, five hundred bucks a month.

Still, that doesn’t sound so bad, does it? I mean, I had a one-room studio back in the ’90s where I paid upwards of $300 for electric baseboard heat. And that was back then, before fuel went all '70s on us. Of course, I’ve long-since realized I was getting screwed on that one, too…

Besides, this was a record-setting mild winter. It was 50 degrees here (in Boston) until mid-January, and probably at least a quarter of the time since then. I've kept the heat set at a moderate 66 when it was very cold outside, and turned it down to 64 at other times. I had to chase Johnny around most evenings trying to pull a sweater over his head, but the automatic thermostat came in handy then – when he’d duck me and crank it up it would unobtrusively crank itself back down.

So. Twenty-five hundred dollars? Yuck.

See, this is why I’ve been trying to get Keyspan on the phone…

Spring Has Sprung

Two weeks ago we ushered in daylight-saving time a little earlier than usual...

Last week the vernal equinox came right on time...

Seven days from now is April Fools...

And a Holy Week after that the Easter Bunny comes...

You know what all of this means, don't you?

It's time to take your Christmas wreaths down, people!

Rest In Pee

Okay, so this toilet that won’t stop running…

It’s in the new bathroom. Sort of a three-quarter bath, I guess, that we built (in a corner of what was once the rotten room) waaaaaaay back in 2004. And 5. And a little bit of 6.

We had a pair of plumbers, John and Bobby. John tall and white-headed. Bobby shorter, with dark hair and a hernia that made him look like he was smuggling footballs under his shirt. Johnny’s known them both for years, from a bar he used to drink at in South Boston. I first met them in, I think, 1998, when they installed the gas dryer in our apartment. They were already retired then, just doing little jobs like that for little money.

John’s the one with the license – come to think of it, I’m not entirely sure whether Bobby was ever actually a plumber or if he was just John’s best friend, keeping him company and handing him wrenches in their golden years. Not to disparage anyone or anything, I just don’t know. Maybe he was.

Anyway, John was the one with the license. He got the permit and met with the inspector and everything. But Bobby was the one that talked to me. And I liked the way Bobby talked to me. He’d joke and mutter, translate all John’s sentences from plumb-speak into English. And he didn’t treat me like a girl. He didn’t tell me dirty jokes or anything, but he treated me like I belonged there, like there was a chance I’d understand what he was saying.

It wasn’t fun, this plumbing project. They were, like I say, retired, so they would show up when they felt like it – every day, but at whatever time – take a break for lunch at noon no matter what had gotten done, and leave when they were tired but never later than, say, three o’clock. I’m no judge of what’s a fair price and what isn’t, but the inspector estimated the cost of our permit based on two times what they charged us, so who was I to comment on their routine?

My grandfather was a plumber, and though I never went to work with him or anything I’d seen him do some work in my folks’ house. Watching white-haired John on his hands and knees with a monkey wrench in his hand reminded me of Grampy, and so I kind of liked having him around. And, like I said, Bobby talked to me.

When the toilet was finally installed but not yet functional, I discovered that the tank wobbled if I tipped it with my finger. The boys said yeah, that was odd, but that’s the way it’s made: the bolt holes didn’t square so there was nothing they could do. I called the manufacturer and the manufacturer said um, yeah, no, it was not supposed to wobble. I called the inspector and he said um, yeah, no, a toilet with a wobbly tank would never pass inspection. So I called the boys and told them um, yeah, no, but they were going to have to figure something out.

They nailed a block of wood behind it on the wall. So it wouldn’t, you know, wobble anymore.

Ingenious, no?

Eventually they did get the bolts to go, and eventually it all did pass inspection. But it’s been making this weird dripping sound since almost the first time that I used it – not constantly, just when you sit on it and then for a while after. It sounds like its coming from under the floor, except for under the floor is a crawl space with dirt, so how could I hear water landing there?

And now it won’t stop running. That, I think, is just cheap plastic innards. I know how to fix it – I did it in the other bathroom about six months ago – but I haven’t gotten around to this one yet because I’m so annoyed I think that it should just go fix itself.

The other day John called to tell us Bobby died. Apparently his father passed away, then four hours later Bobby was taken to the ER short of breath. I asked about his mom but it turns out she’s been gone for years – so that’s a blessing, I suppose, on a day like that.

I still don’t know if Bobby ever was a plumber, but I know that he was my plumber – along with white-haired John. And, though it may not be the most sacred of memorials, I know that I will think of him every time I use the toilet they installed.