This other stuff is important, too
Still thinking about that values post I wrote, and feeling like I left some out. When I wrote the other post, I figured Life, Freedom, Truth and Love were kind of gimmees. But then I thought, maybe they weren’t. And maybe it’s a good time to spell some things out.
So. Here are some more things we value at my house:
- Making it yourself
- Doing it the old-fashioned way
- leaving your light-saber, sword or pirate musket at home when we go shopping
- homemaking
- gay marriage
- science and research
- equal rights
- equal pay for equal work
- a woman’s right to choose
- truth
- independence
- growing your own food
- having the hardcover edition
- listening to the whole album
- watching the credits
- self-expression
- art for art’s sake
- craft for art’s sake
- Velcroing your own shoes.
House sneak peeks
Oh my God. It’s not the moving that takes a while, it’s the damn unpacking. Lord. Half this house is still a disaster zone. But I do have a few teasers for you. Which, hmm. That makes it sound as though you should be expecting something awesome. You should not be. It’s still all my same hand-me-down furniture, just in a different, older, draftier house.
Whatever. It’s MY house, though. I like that. I like this house. I sense great potential here.
bedroom
kitchen
kitchen detail which still amuses me
I think I nailed all the biggies, yes?
Siobhan, that great ape, tagged me in a recent post of hers. Because I like her so much, and because I drank another cup of tea this evening, and because I’m a wild and crazy girl, here go my answers to the writing prompt:
Six things I value
- A well-made bed. It’s pretty to look at, it smells good, it classes the place up. It shows respect for the partner you share it with. It’s the foundation of a clean and orderly home, and the thought of slipping into mine at the end of the day gets me through rather a lot.
- Competence, efficiency and drive. I tend to run low on those particular qualities which is why I enjoy them so much in my husband. I can be productive by proxy.
- A good vocabulary. One of the best parts of mothering a 3.5-year-old is teaching him new words, and I don’t mean the kind that get one into trouble at school. Today’s word: disembark. Note it.
- Newspapers. We recently finished watching the fifth season of The Wire on DVD. Besides making me stupidly nostalgic for Bodymore, I got a real high watching the newsroom scenes. I think it was especially poignant because I’m currently completely out of the business and unemployed and just really, really missing it. David Simon got an awful lot right about what it’s like to work for one. Sadly, he also nailed the corporate climate that turns what ought to be a public resource and watchdog into just another money machine.
- Dinner time. While I am lackadaisical when it comes to other meals (in terms of a balanced diet, in terms of presentation, in terms of reading at the table), these days I’m really appreciating the family sit-down dinner. I like planning the menu a week in advance and I like setting the table and I really like the four of us sitting down together, no distractions. Well, no distractions aside from Cormac’s avant-garde potato art.
- Potable water. Turns out one should never take tap water for granted. I feel like a first-world prick for even writing that but seriously, bring some Evian if you come to my house. The water here tastes like a koi pond. I’m not sure what’s up.
Six things I do not value
(This part is a lot harder. What do I deny the importance or preciousness of? Hmm.)
- Expensive cars.
- Sports of nearly every kind but especially Olympic beach volleyball
- Blog statistics
- The words coming out of Sarah Palin’s mouth
- organic food (really)
- fabric softener. I am more of a starch kind of person.
How to watch TV in a valley in Western Pennsylvania when you don’t have cable
Dudes! We’re officially in the new house. It’s fabulous. Mostly. I mean, there are a LOT of boxes around here, and we keep finding little nuggets of wtf (“tub diverter? who needs a rusty corroded tub diverter?”). But it’s mostly fabulous.
However, it’s also a tiny bit unfabulous. Yesterday’s wtf nugget was this: when we tried to plug the TV in so Owen could watch some Saturday morning “Toon-age Mutant Ninja Turtles,” we discovered that we get zero reception here. I’m talking Nothing. I’m talking the snowiest snow that ever snowed, on every single station. We fussed with the rabbit ears, we moved the TV around, we tried our digital tuner. Nothing.
“Oh crap,” I said.
“But the [redacted] Steelers game is going to be on,” said Iain. “I have labored long hours to make this house a castle for you, my queen. And this is how I am rewarded? I am bereft, too long deprived of that noble sport which makes Sundays worth getting up for.”
“I know, darling,” I said. “This cannot stand.”
“But wait,” he said. “Perhaps this indicates we should purchase a premium cable package? I do so enjoy the Discovery Channel. Also the National Geographic Channel. Also, the Steelers are supposed to be playing the Giants, if I haven’t mentioned that.”
“No, my sweet. We have no need of a premium cable package, even if the DVR service is included, which would seriously be cool. It’s far too dear. I will solve this problem for you. I will conquer the constraints of geography, distance to the transmitting station, and something about magnetic … curvature … dipole … rotational … something something, for you, my love, to bring you the football and other local programming you so richly deserve,” I said, indicating the lowly rabbit ears perched atop our mantel.
As you might have surmised, by this time I had skimmed Google’s offerings (mute before clicking) on the subject. The pickings were slim, and also kind of a lot too technical. But our heroine persevered, as she does when the topic might involve entertainment or the spending of lots of money on gadgets.
We went to Wal-Mart. (On a Sunday. Doy.) Instead of buying the 42” HDTV and looking up the number for DirecTV and dusting our hands of the matter, we bought a Phillips flat-panel array UHF/VHF indoor antenna with amplifier. Once home, tension mounted as we carefully unpacked the box, and lifted with gentle hands our possible $30 savior.
We hooked it up. Nothing. Twiddled the dials. Nothing. Moved the antenna as far as the coax would allow. Nothing. Hauled the whole setup upstairs. Nothing. Brought it back down. Nothing.
“We are at the mercy of the valley in which our new house apparently sits,” I said.
“Might as well return this dumb ol’ thing,” said he, boxing up our disappointment and hunting for the receipt.
“I refuse to concede defeat,” I said.
“Get the tinfoil,” he replied.
Our old rabbit ears were whisked back atop the mantel, nudged into a corner, and all the curtains thrown open. Iain carefully fashioned a sort of wing thing from foil, calculated the distance and compass location of the nearest Fox affiliate, adjusted accordingly, and crossed his fingers mightily.
He was rewarded. Not only did channel 66 come in, miraculously and replete with a subtitled telecast of a religious ceremony … but so did the local Fox affiliate. Every other channel was a blizzard of snowflakes, but that Madden guy’s face beamed out from our television. Victory was ours. Well, mostly Iain’s. But still ours.
There was much rejoicing. The Steelers played poorly and lost to New York, but at least they were on.
Later in the evening, after the kids had gone to bed, we surveyed the room for other ways of watching television, television that was not Fox. I gathered my iPod-compatible mini home stereo system and one of those cables with the red, white and yellow things on the end. Iain unpacked the digital projector he uses to show Keynote presentations at school and his MacBook Air. We hooked the Air to the projector and the projector to the home stereo speakers and pointed the whole setup at the big blank wall over our couch. We surfed to hulu.com. Thanks to the miracle of high-speed internet, office equipment, and the brainchild of a new media genius, we were able to watch Thursday night’s episode of the Office larger than life and three days late. As the theme song played and the credits rolled and Michael Scott said more hilariously inappropriate things on my living room wall, I drank a cup of tea, smiling at our ingenuity and not really mourning that HDTV/premium cable package thing all that much, I swear.
But later, defeated after all (woman cannot live on hulu alone) I ordered Comcast’s basic cable online ($11/month for a dozen local channels) (beware the tedious chat-room step) and sighed. Now I just have to return that antenna to Wal-Mart and wait for the installation technician next Monday so I can watch 30 Rock on Thursday nights, as it was meant to be seen (though the season premiere is on hulu right now, I’m saving myself for Liz Lemon Thursdays). Geography and distance to the transmitting staion and unwillingness to figure out how to set up an outoor aerial may have bested me in the end, at least as far as over-the-air signals are concerned, but finding a cool use for that blank wall space was worth it.
We’re on the brink
Today begins phase-one possession-moving, as I twittered last night. My husband and some of my in-laws are moving our stuff from the storage unit into the new, clean, fixed-up house today, while I stay at Grandma’s and kid-wrangle. I have a trunk full of new curtains and a burning, itching desire to get in that house and make some decorating. It’s killing me that I have to stay back when there’s unpacking to be done. I mean, I’ve been mulling furniture arrangements in my head for six weeks and hoarding copies of Domino like they were Twinkies.
I am ready. We’re so close I can taste it. Tastes like polyurethane and Sheetrock, but damn it, people, I’ll take it. Have you seen the light this place gets? Let me at it.
every road’s a scenic road
Add to my long list of things I love about Western Pennsylvania:
1. twisty turny beautiful treacherous roads
2. autumn
3. helpful people
4. autumn
5. the “Pittsburgh Left”
6. autumn
I’ll call this one “Oh my God, we still haven’t moved in”
Heya! Have we been living with my in-laws for three months? You betcha! Is my new house, for which I am dutifully paying the dumb ol’ mortgage every month without benefit of actually living in it, a big ol’ mess? You betcha! (or, “tu betchus!”)
I cannot believe I thought we’d get all this work done in a week or two. A WEEK OR TWO. We closed on this sucker Aug. 29 and Iain and my father-in-law (and me and my mother-in-law when we don’t have the kids) have been busting ASS at every opportunity. But as it goes with money pits, as soon as you solve one problem two more pop up. Right now the men are trying to get the wiring, which snakes through our black hole of an attic, to not be quite so much of a fire danger. Then maybe we can hang some ceiling fans, patch up all the holes in the ceilings, paint what hasn’t been painted and clean this place the heck up.
The good news is that we sort of have a deadline: Halloween. Or Halloween-ish. My sister-in-law and her family are coming in from Texas and there’s six of them, plus four of us, plus Ma and Pa, plus the dog, and those numbers do not add up to “three-bedroom ranch.” So we’re going to get us and our stuff out of the guest rooms by then and by God, if I have to do it all by myself in the rain we are going to move in to the new house.
Patience has never been a virtue I’ve been acquainted with.
Meanwhile, since we’ve been here Cormac has learned to walk and even talk a little bit, and Owen is using vocab words like “exhausted” and “autopilot.” I still drive him 45 minutes to school twice a week and last weekend I heard him say, when my mother-in-law mentioned this thing they have called Sunday School, “School on Sunday? YEAH!”
I also went to a fall festival in one of the many little towns ‘round here where I overheard this sentence, which quite perfectly sums up the region sometimes: “Oh no. You have hay in your mullet.”
Not that we live here yet, but this new town we’re moving to is Le Sweet. Did I tell you that yet? Holy shit. Stars Hollow minus Lorelai’s hyperspeed banter. I love it. And people actually TRICK OR TREAT around here, unlike the neighborhood we moved from in Baltimore, where the trick was dodging glass bottles and the treat was that mythical day you finally got your hands around the neck of the hooligan who knocked out a hole in your siding.
Ah, but that’s olden days. We’re in limbo right now, and I’ve never liked limbo, but soon (?) we’ll be in Small Town Paradise, and everything will be lovely, and you’ll all be invited to the housewarming.
A Falcon good time
I went to Homecoming with my sisters and some friends yesterday.
After many, many hours of walking around in the sun (and a beer or two from the BG News alumni tent) —
— and a couple of Pollyeye’s breadsticks, I arrived home feeling like a little kid who had been at the zoo all day. *Clonk! ZZzzzzzz*
Very fun. And I got express permission from Emmy, Katie, Dani, Jenny and Rema to put that group shot on Supafine, which was basically the whole reason for this post. Hi, girls!
It’s nice to see you
One of the more fabulous aspects about moving to Pittsburgh is the amount of time I am getting to spend with people I like (with the sad exception of my husband, who has a lot of lesson-planning dues to pay at his new school, although we have painted side-by-side every weekend since we closed on the new house and I suppose that will have to suffice for the present).
Recently I had the opportunity to meet one of you Supafine readers at a coffeeshop in my new town, further cementing my fervent conviction that I have the coolest and smartest readership in all of Blogtown. Just this afternoon I got coffee with my BFF and old college roommate, a social event during which I laughed so hard and so long that I may have developed a brief fever. At this very instant I am surfing the web, reading Sarah Palin’s greeting cards and watching NUMB3RS in a cheesy Dorito fog of happiness at my parents’ house in Ohio, my children asleep upstairs. Tomorrow I am going to the Homecoming hoopla at my alma mater, BGSU, with my sister and another old college friend. We’ll be visiting the BG News alumni tent and bugging my other sister for a few hours (she’s a freshman living two doors down from the dorm room I lived in as an obnoxious post-adolescent).
All these little joyful meetups would be impossible to undertake if I still lived eight hours east of here. So I’m very glad we moved. I’m glad that my kids are finally able to keep my five siblings straight. I am glad that I’ve gotten to see my folks more in the last month than I had the whole year previous.
I do kind of look forward to getting my husband back, though.
The gripping conclusion of our heroine’s tale
All right. I can’t leave that bit about the pants up there at the top of the page. Ugh.
Epilogue to the Sad Pants Story
I drove back to the mall, by myself. I reveled in the simple freedom of taking the escalator, unencumbered and light as a feather without two tots and a stroller. I smiled inwardly, remembering the kind Pittsburghers who had earlier in the day stopped to help a bedraggled young mother — me — get her two squirmy children and umbrella stroller up and down the escalator, politely ignoring the big yellow sign depicting a stroller and the big circle cross-out thing that means USE THE ELEVATOR, MORON. Down Escalator Samaritan was a young lass evidently on her way to her shift at Ann Taylor Loft. Up Escalator Samaritan was a middle-aged man, possibly a civilian contractor or maybe former Armed Forces, who had three grown children and had just returned from Asia, or someplace far away, because he hadn’t been to the mall in three years and didn’t know where the elevators were, but definitely remembered “those days,” and swore it wasn’t a problem at all.
Then I strode briskly to the Gap, and bought yet another pair of Long and Lean jeans in size 2 ankle. They fit pretty good. The end.
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