3 1/2 months old and pretty happy about it
An Update on Greasing the Shoehorn
So yesterday, after pumping myself up with that post about cleaning out my closet, I went and did it. I through all the shirts, pants, skirts, and dresses in my closet and asked myself, “Do I love it? Does it make me feel great?” (Turns out I should have been asking, “Does it still fit??”)
Because day-to-day classroom teaching is dirty work – I mean this literally; I was in contact with 150 public school students with varying degrees of personal hygiene a day, so sometimes I came home feeling like I’d been at the train station all day – I had a lot of work clothes that were serviceable, but not particularly flattering. In fact, I didn’t want to wear my favorite clothes to work because I was bound to come home with overhead marker on my sleeve and chalk dust in my hair. (This is no joke, I often referred to public school teachers as the ditch diggers of academia: lots and lots of hard, repetitive, under-appreciated work.) Also I was prone to procrastinating the ironing… suffice to say that I had enough dress shirts and outfits to get me through a month – easy.
So I filled two large shopping bags (mall size large) with clothes and posted them on freecycle as “Assorted Woman’s Clothes Size 6-8.” Within an hour I had a perky reply from somebody who’d just started a new office job and needed office clothes. I called her, we talked, I asked if she was a size 6 and she said she was. I got off the phone and decided to go through my closet again, even more deeply weeding out clothes.
I got rid of silk dresses, a wool ralph lauren skirt, ann taylor slacks, a silk suit (purple?!), and countless dress shirts.
I halved the clothes in my closet and it felt great.
Shortly thereafter, the woman who wanted my clothes arrived at my door. I gaped.
There was no way this smiling blond was going to fit into my clothes. She was a size 10 if that.
But what could I do? The point was to empty my closet after all. So as I turned to pick up the bags I swiftly grabbed a pale blue-green linen blouse that for sure wouldn’t fit her and tossed it back over my dining room chair, completed the turn, and handed her the bags with a fake grin plastered to my face. Enjoy them, I said. It was the only thing I could think to do under the circumstances.
Even more unbelievable? Several hours later she emailed to thank me and to say, Everything fits great!
How do I make that little steam symbol that always appears over Lucy’s head in the Peanuts comic strip?
I have to keep my eye on the prize though – there’s room in the closet! Plenty of space for Chad now. And really, when’s the next time I’m going to need a pair of lined wool pinstrip dress pants?
Posted in organizing
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With Some Elbow Grease and a Shoehorn
Boy, it is sure harder to move into a smaller place than to move into a larger one. From Joshua Tree, we moved from 1,100 square feet (just me and Bella) to 1,800 square feet (me, Bella, Chad, and his brother); and now we’re down to 950 square feet (me, Bella, Chad, and Christian).
Moving into a larger place felt like a large luxurious stretch with the added bonus of lots of (initially) empty space. I felt like I just unpacked my stuff and it disappeared. There was plenty of storage and little need to sort through old memory boxes.
Whereas moving into a smaller place requires lots of hard decisions and face-to-face confrontations with OBJECTS. It’s a struggle. But don’t get me wrong – I like it!
We got rid of lots of furniture (sofas, desks, TVs) before we left the old place. We have continued passing along old toys and winnowing books, but we are barely fitting into our new place. Take for instance, our new closet. Chad and I went from a walk-in closet and an additional closet (shoes and dresses) to a single regular wall closet. Poor guy, the clothes are packed so tightly that he can’t find his favorite shirts. And he’s already down to just a few feet of closet rod, having packed and stored his winter clothes in the garage.
Living squished up against your possessions is no fun, so, I’ve resolved: We WILL fit comfortably in this (very cute) new place.
That means I’m rolling up my sleeves. I’ve gotten rid of the clothes I don’t wear anymore, but I think now even the clothes I wear sometimes may have to go out the door. It’s going to be a tough love hierarchy; if I don’t LOVE it, I’m losing it.
Back to posting on criagslist and freecycle. And Salvation Army drop-offs.
Does anybody need some work clothes? I’ll be getting rid of some dress shirts this week, since I won’t be working in an office or classroom anytime soon.
My goal is to have as much done as possible by next Wednesday, when I host the bunco group for the first time ever. Twelve women getting rowdy and rolling dice. Can’t wait!
Posted in moving, organizing
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I Heart Edward
Book 1 of the Twilight Saga
Okay, not really. My favorite character is actually Alice, but you’re not going to see t-shirts with I heart Alice all over town…
But considering that I’ve just finished reading Breaking Dawn, the fourth book of Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight saga, which means I’ve read over 3000 pages of a vampire love story this summer, there must be something I really like about this series. That, plus the fact that I’m moping about the house wishing there was a fifth book to the series and that I’ve already put Meyer’s new adult novel, Host, on hold at the library.
I raced through this series with a thumping heart for the same reason I watch The Notebook, read Jane Austen, and snuggle with my husband – it is almost unbearably romantic. For its undeniable allure for teenage girls, I rate this series an A; for a classroom teacher, this series is a must-have-on-the-shelf set. However, for the discriminating adult I give it a lower rating of a B, because crazy charisma is not all that counts in the grownup world.
The underlying appeal is that Meyer’s writes about a true love that transcends time (and species!) Even though Edward has lived for 100 years he has never met anyone that he feels more uncontrollably attracted to than the self-doubting Isabella. At the very molecular level Edward can barely resist her smell – which makes their relationship fraught with tension. And Bella feels the same way about Edward; how could she not? As an immortal vampire he’s handsome beyond belief, strong and agile. Besides which, he and his family have had centuries to accumulate wealth and develop their particular talents for music, languages, art… Furthermore, Edward (named after Bronte’s Mr. Rochester and Austen’s Mr Ferrars) has old-fashioned values.
Book III
All the relationships in Meyer’s series are based on unequivocal loyalty and swoon-over-it deep love. We learn that one vampire couple takes decades (and the destruction of many houses) before the sheer physical enjoyment of eachother subsides enough to allow for other distractions. The werewolves, or technically the shape-shifters, “imprint” on their mates, which means that they are physically committed to love at first sight. Once a werewolf imprints, he or she is (happily) bonded for life.
Here is a description of one werewolf seeing the object of his imprinting for the first time. I’ve done some minor editing so that it’s not a spoiler:
“Everything inside me came undone as I stared at …[her]. All the lines that held me to my life were sliced apart in swift cuts, like clipping the strings to a bunch of balloons. Everything that made me who I was – my love for the dead girl upstairs, my love for my father, my loyalty to my new pack, the love for my other brothers, my hatred for my enemies, my home, my name, my self – disconnected from me in that second – snip, snip, snip – and floated up into space.
I was not drifting. A new string held me where I was.
Not one string, but a million. Not strings, but steel cables all tying me to one thing – to the very center of the universe.
I could see that now – how the universe swirled around this one point. I’d never seen the symmetry of the universe before, but now it was plain.
The gravity of the earth no longer tied me to the place where I stood.
It was… [she] that held me here now.”
My complaints are minor and make sense now that I’ve read a bit about how Meyer (a mother of two little ones!) conceived, wrote, and published the first book in six short months. Meyer actually dreamed about a scene that occurred in the middle of the first book, and without thinking of completing an entire novel, began to write chapters and sections based on this pivotal scene in the forest. When she wrote the first book, Twilight, I don’t think Meyer had any idea she was going to write three more books in the series, which explains why there are some crazy swerves in the plot in the second (and weakest) book of the series.
Book IV
Furthermore, while Meyer is a wonderful storyteller – these are her first books ever, and she is still experimenting with her voice and perspective, sometimes sacrificing clarity for style. There are moments where I honestly can reread a sentence four times and not understand what is going on. Bella, my daughter, not the character, mentioned that she jotted down some page numbers of sections she couldn’t make sense of – and she hates it when I criticize these books!
So, if your heart needs some tugging or if you’re interested in young adult fiction in any way – put these books on your list. But don’t be surprised if you are 144th on the waiting list at the library because the gorgeous and ever-faithful Edward is creating quite a clamor.
Read more about the origins of Twilight, the upcoming movie, or about Stephanie Meyer at her official website here. (Wait, she went to Brigham Young University – is she Mormon? That would explain her tenacious belief in immortal love…)
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Our new best friend…
is rechargeable and eats dirt.
His name is iRobot Scooba and we love him very much.
A while back when I was wildly spending my brother’s reward points on ipods and gift cards to GAP Maternity, my sister was (just as wildly) spending her portion of the reward points on a more eclectic assortment of rewards: an automated pepper grinder (with laser point precision??), a Brio wooden train set, a baby Samsonite penguin backpack, and a robotic floor washer. All of these things were delivered to my house and were duly stashed in the closet for the last half year.
I suspected then that she and her husband might find that lugging an extra 15-pound floor-washing robot back to Thailand less than convenient, but since I have never wanted a robot, I didn’t think much more about it.
My only experience of cleaning robots or floor droids, as I like to think of them, is from watching Buster feed cheetos to the vacuum robot on Arrested Development. Besides that, I’ve always assumed that they were more about novelty than practicality, and probably left a wake of crumbs in their trail.
Well, when Sue decided to leave the brand new irobot scooba here, I only felt a little irritated about having to deal with yet another box of something. The initiative it takes to learn the ropes on a new piece of technology is usually an obstacle enough to ensure the box never gets opened. Luckily, Chad has no problem jumping into bed with new technology.
We left him alone with the Scooba and ten days later we came back to clean floors! Very clean floors.
Scooba plugs into a base which we keep tucked away in the corner of the living room. When a section of floor needs cleaning (ie kitchen, hallway, living room, or bedroom) we pull him out and fill him up with four parts water and one part cleaning solution. We quickly whisk the dirt along the edges of the room towards the center, turn him on, and let him loose.
He turns in ever-increasing circles, vacuuming and washing simultaneously, until he hits a wall. Then he does a half turn and goes off in a diagonal – until the ENTIRE floor is sparkling clean. I’m not sure how he gets to every place, but apparently there is a video on the main website that shows you with a time-lapsed red tracer that scooba hits every spot on the floor at least once.
Scooba even came with a virtual wall; that is, a small electronic device that sits on the floor and emits a signal that Scooba can’t cross.
Now if we could just some kind of implant for Christian so the virtual wall could work for him…(Nabi Grace took a head-over-heels tumble down the first five concrete steps coming off our second story patio!)
Posted in cleaning tips
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Heavy Summer Reading
Being the officially uptight mother that I am, I didn’t want Bella spending her summer parked in front of her computer watching The OC reruns. A week or so after school got out, I asked Bella to read a book and do French (Rosetta Stone) for a half hour each before any TV watching.
To my surprise, she readily agreed and wanted two very specific books: A Million Little Pieces and A Piece of Cake. It turns out that both were memoirs about recovering from drug addiction and have been very popular with the high school crowd. In fact, Bella said that she’d seen kids carrying them around at school all year long and wanted to check them out.
Well, it’s fine line between encouraging reading (Bella rarely reads for pleasure) and censoring adult-themed books. In this case I decided to keep my mouth shut and let her try the books – knowing full well that she prefers flowery romantic scenarios to hardcore street living and gang talk.
Chad, the family librarian, got right on it and brought home both books the same week. He found a used-but-new copy A Million Little Pieces for just pennies at the Friends of the Library bookstore. All the Opray publicity ensured that there were copies of this book everywhere – and Bella could care less about the outcry over the embellished truth. Still, she was curious about this woman Cupcake and wanted to read Piece of Cake first. Bella got about a hundred pages in and then put it aside for Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight saga. Never picked up either of the memoirs again, but she has read about 3000 pages of torrid romance with a handsome vampire…
Out of curiosity I picked A Piece of Cake, and found myself completely dragged in from the get-go. Cupcake Brown is a real person who found her mother dead at age 11, and then began a hellish tour through the foster home system, which included rape, physical and emotional abuse, and countless attempts at running away.
Because of the intense subject matter, I do not recommend this book for everybody, however, I do give it a solid B+. It is well worth a read, and as strange as this sounds, it is actually an uplifting book, because Cupcake is now a practicing LAWYER in the Bay area. I have never had so much insight into the mind and life of a trashcan junkie (somebody who will do ANY drug available) and gang life (she was part of a gang in LA). Cupcake stayed pretty much wasted from the age of 11 to somewhere in her twenties to avoid feeling all the pain in her life – and being blitzed was so important to her that everything in her life was measured in terms of drug-buying potential: turning a trick was worth two rocks of crack, a TV was worth a bag of weed, her husband had a car, which she could use to score…Â Incredibly, during this time she learned how to talk “civilized” and was able to hold down several jobs at law firms – basically holding a job proved to her that she did not have a drug problem.
Cupcake writes with an authentic colloquial voice about street life that few people would be able to survive, much less survive and become an inspirational speaker and practicing lawyer. It’s fast read, and if you can stomach the heart-wrenching abuse she suffers in her foster home at the beginning, you’ll enjoy seeing how her sassy, brassy nature gets her in trouble (and saves her) everywhere else she goes. You can read more about cupcake Brown at her website: http://www.cupcakebrown.com.
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The Pros and Cons of a Segway Tour
Songbae looking like GOB from Arrested Development...
PROS:
- You get to ride a segway.
- You get to ride a segway.
- You get to ride a segway.
CONS:
As Songbae says, It’s almost as embarrassing as wearing a bluetooth.
It costs $70 for three hours.
It actually takes SOME coordination. (Bella crashed three times.)
You are required to do a half hour training session, and wear a helmet.
Segways are not allowed on the Mall, so despite the fact that you can cover more ground than by walking, you still don’t go to the Lincoln Memorial or Roosevelt Fountain.
Although you spend the good part of 2 1/2 hours on the segway, that also means that you don’t have time to go into any of the Smithsonian museums that you pass.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tVUvGMQ0aEw]
Posted in washington d.c.
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How Babies Spread Love
By chuckling with Grandpa
By giggling with Uncle Songbae
By needing to have his hands held while sleeping
By trusting he won't get crushed
By relaxing against your chest and listening to your heart beat
Posted in Christian Holden
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Renter's Rights
Chad and I let out a collective sigh of relief when our security deposit from our last place arrived in the mail yesterday. A sigh of relief and a whoop of joy, because the deposit on our last place was $4000!
During the course of moving out last month, our landlady dropped by unexpectedly at 9 pm the night before we had hired a moving truck. Needless to say our place was a wreck. She doesn’t speak much English (she’s Korean), so she had her realtor and his wife in tow. The landlady immediately began clucking about the condition of the rug.
The disgusting rug that had supposedly been cleaned before we moved in, but was still so dirty that we moved our boxes into the garage and insisted it was cleaned a second time before we moved into the house. The stained carpet that the landlady herself had told me it was time to change and that she blamed the large dog of the previous tenant.
After much heated discussion and blame throwing, we agreed to pay half the rug cleaning charge. She thought we should pay the entire bill. We pointed out that we could spend half again as much and rent a rug docor from Home Depot and that if she came for inspection and the carpet was in as good as condition as when we moved in that she would not be able to deduct anything from our deposit.
We had done our research and it turns out that a landlord cannot deduct for normal wear and tear, that all deductions must be accompanied by a receipt, and that the condition of the house must be only as good as it was when we started the lease. Luckily, we had extensively documented stains and other mars on the walls when we moved in. Furthermore, we let her know, that if we went to small claims court that the renter has a pretty good chance of winning; not only does the renter nearly always wins the security deposit back at the very least, but s/he can sue for double the deposit.
We also pointed out to her that it was actually illegal for her to drop in on us without any notice whatsoever. Tenants are entitled to something like 24 hours notice.
A few days later, our landlady agreed to pay half the rug cleaning, but then (this, via the realtor’s wife) she was going to keep our $500 pet deposit. We reiterated the above, but Chad especially, was doubtful that we were going to get the whole security deposit back without a fight.
Considering that her son had been doing the half-a**ed of patching the walls when we first looked at the place, we figured that she had just deducted a lump sum from the previous tenant’s security deposit and then had her son (not) do the work and pocketed the cash. We were determined to leave the house cleaner than we found it (we did) and to recover as much of our deposit as humanly possible.
Don’t get me wrong, we loved our old neighborhood and the space we had at our old place. But we are very psyched to be in a place with pergo wood floors.
Chad felt a little more hopeful when he went through the final inspection with the landlady, because everything she tried to point out, he was able to show was a pre-existing problem as per the move-in inspection.
The security deposit is due within 21 days of move-out date, but August 21 came and went. Chad and I had just resigned ourselves to writing her a nasty letter, when her check and a polite letter came from her yesterday.
That’s a big WHEW, because for all our noise we sure as heck did not want to go to court.
We got $3900 back. One hundred was our portion of the $200 rug-cleaning bill. Entirely acceptable to us.
For more information about a security deposit refund, read this article at the California Department of Consumer Affairs (and good luck to you).
Learning to Laugh
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5vfsZWgPqTc]
Posted in Christian Holden
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