I love my little apartment, I really do. It's true that it has no central air, it's so beige that sometimes I want to rip my eyes out, it's very small, and it's in a neighborhood where cool arty people are mixed up with shady shadesters, but I do love it. Some things I love about it:
-Ten-foot ceilings
-Arches in my hallway
-Hardwood floors (at least, they look hardwood...) in my hallway and bathroom
-The view out the bedroom, bathroom, and kitchen windows are of a brick wall, crumbling in places. There are at least two of those metal stars on the wall, positioned so that I'm pretty much the only person who can see them.
-Being able to see the Radisson out my windows, lit up every night in a different color (last night it was green)
-All the shops etc. nearby. Within easy reach I have a coffee house, a school supply store, a bakery, a consignment shop, something that might be an art gallery, and a little grocery store that so far looks too shady for me to try out. And that's not even mentioning the generous handful of bars and restaurants.
-Hearing distant live music on weekends, and sometimes weeknights.
-Festivals right at my doorstep. I wish I hadn’t been burnt out when Maifest was here, else I'd have gone.
-There are train tracks about a block from my house, and for some reason I like to hear them pass by, even though sometimes they shake the building gently.
-There's a church a couple blocks from here (it’s a cool church too) and often I can hear its bells ringing
-Being on the third floor and waking up surrounded by views of sky and rooftops
-Birds landing on my windowsill
I wrote that yesterday morning, and just now I am not quite as happy with my apartment. The apartment itself, sure, but the appliances? And the occasional weekend insanity of people having screaming matches in the street at 2:45 AM? No. No. (So tired...)
I woke up yesterday morning at about 7:15 to a strange scrabbling sound, which at the time reminded me of someone typing on a keyboard. Finally, I looked around--and there were birds on my windowsill. They flew away, and I excitedly went to the kitchen and grabbed a few crackers, and crumbled them on the windowsill. (They keep coming back periodically. I put out more crackers much later in the day. This morning there was what I think was a mockingbird on the sill. Aw.)
It was one of those mornings where I was tired, but was thinking of too many things to fall back asleep. Which is sad, because I really wanted to fall back asleep. I read, I used the computer, I ate breakfast.
Actually, it's probably for the best that I woke up so early, because I needed to go to the CU, which closes at noon. So yesterday morning I cleaned my kitchen and hallway floors (and a little bit of the bathroom floor) and cleaned up my mail. And then I went to the CU, and after that, to Goodwill to drop off a garbage bag of stuff (and I sneaked into the store too and bought a drawing or something for $2), to the library to drop off my paper recycling and to check out some stuff, and to my mom's house to borrow something.
I'm in the market for a small bookcase to replace my nightstand. I had my eye on the Expedit bookcase from IKEA, but I just don't want to drop $80 on a bookcase. That, and it's probably not worth it. I need less IKEA stuff, not more. So after a stop at 7th Street for some tea tree oil (and some free hibiscus lemonade!), I ambled down to Sin City.
It's such a beautiful store, with so many lovely things. The foul temptress that most people would recognize as a pink satin dressing gown from the 40s was no longer there, but the printing blocks were, and other nice things too. (Since I was just taking a quick stroll through to look for a bookcase, I looked at everything but purposely didn’t linger.) But there was no bookcase.
And then I went to the Millenium Center. I went in there once before, and it's kind of an antique mall (I think the lady who runs the place gets everything from estate sales, so there's a lot of vintage stuff, but it's not quite as random and eclectic as an antique mall), but I don't like it. Something about the arrangement of the stuff, like a department store full of old stuff, kind of weirds me out. Anyway, every Saturday they have a "garage sale" and today I decided to check it out. There wasn't a lot of furniture, but there was some weird and interesting stuff. (Beautiful lanterns!) I bought a little print or something for $5. And then I took a peek into the actual store and was tempted by the West Elm pillows they had the last time I was there (lime green satin with piratey ships screen-printed in blue), but decided I didn't want one enough to spend $15 on it. (I want to go to the Salvation Army.)
Home. Lunch. Called father. Spent some time painting a picture frame with TV on in the background. And then came the nailing. A lot of nailing. I nailed up five things today. And while nailing up like the second or third thing, I was standing on my couch and holding a nail and nailing and then I very cleverly hammered my own thumb and it hurt LIKE THE DICKENS, I TELL YOU. For some time I was incapacitated as I swore and held a bag of frozen peas against my thumb and swore some more. It was so, so painful. And kind of embarrassing. I now have a tiny purple mark on the edge of my thumbnail (it looks like I slipped with a marker) and a weird bruise ring, barely visible, around the whole top edge. It continues to hurt.
My fridge leaks. On the inside. (It sucks. The water gets all over everything in the fridge and sometimes it freezes so I have to crack or shake ice off of stuff before I can open it, and then it forms a big puddle on the bottom of the fridge, often with ice floating in it…) I asked my landlord about it once and he told me to check something-or-other and because I didn't know what he was talking about, I asked my dad to come and help me look. So he did. We investigated, he tried to unscrew something in the freezer, and nothing worked. Finally, we moved the fridge, and I'm not sure what happened (our theory is that the puddle inside the fridge leaked out with the movement of the fridge), but suddenly there was water all over the floor and I was scrambling to find enough rags to mop it up. I've been living on my own for seven months--I don't have enough rags. I finally had to sadly use my spare good towel to soak up the water, lacking anything else big and absorbent enough. (The floor was clean, though I don't know how clean the water was, and I can wash the towel...sometime...)
(I regard calling my landlord kind of the way I regard calling the doctor when I am sick. Well, in the case of the doctor, it seems silly to call over trifles like a cold, and sometimes they tell me to just take x cold medicine or ibuprofin and then I am SO glad I paid them $30 to tell me something I could have figured out on my own. In the case of my landlord, I hate to bother him with stupid stuff that I sense I could fix on my own if I just knew how (the fridge is not this problem). In most cases, I would rather someone show me how to fix a problem on my own rather than take it away from me and have them fix it for me.)
So the fridge was a bust, though my dad did help me put my wayward storm window back in. I called my landlord right away, but got a voicemail. Alas. (Later he called me back but repeatedly we lost the connection as soon as I answered the phone, and I haven't heard from him since then. Great! I hope my fridge keeps spewing water on my floor!)
So: kitchen mildly flooded, thumb pounded with a hard metal thing. Not a great afternoon.
I spent some time later working on the AEFB notes and tackled one of the bigger parts I'd been hesitating over, and took out maybe five or ten pages of it. Sweet.
Later I went to see
The Wedding Singer at Highlands, and it was funny, and Margie was the very funniest of all in the song "A Note from Linda" (I think that's what it was called).
...I also finished
Bloodhound today, and generally liked it better than
Terrier, but was still not much impressed by it. I was really hoping that Beka's romantic interest would turn out to be a bad guy, just for some general interest. Hoping so much.
Hearing the live music in Mainstrasse this weekend makes me want to go out and find it. If only it weren't dark and the weekend in Mainstrasse! (Also, after last night's screaming match in the street, I never want to venture into dark weekend Mainstrasse. Well, I'll probably feel differently in a week or so.)
Also.
A couple of months ago, I posted about a solar system quilt I thought was really cool. Friday I tried to find the quilt again and found that my link had died, so I looked it up again. And then I discovered that this quilt--which I have been admiring and coveting and replicating in my mind--is on display at the National Museum of American History. The Smithsonian. In DC. You know, the one I really wanted to go to and only saw Kermit the Frog and Dorothy's ruby slippers and some presidential displays and the Star-Spangled Banner (...okay, that part was supremely cool, and something I forgot to mention. I adore the song and the actual flag is the size of a house. Beautiful!), and I could have seen the most awesome quilt of all time. *hangs head*
Something else: a month or two ago, Anton and I accidentally visited Robin at a Barnes & Noble regarding her book on gangster-era Newport, using mostly photos from the KCPL's vast collection. We chatted for a while, and she mentioned something about historic Newport bike tours, and I pounced on the idea. I LOVE walking tours, especially historic ones. I remember fondly the walking tours of the French Quarter and Garden District we went on both times we went to New Orleans, and I also love the historic homes tour in Newport. So yesterday I was about to go into Sin City, and there in the window was an enormous sign proclaiming gangster walking tours of Newport Memorial Day weekend. I wilted, and went inside. Later, I looked it up online, and discovered that they are still doing them! (I actually caught sight of one yesterday and thought it looked like a walking tour led by two gangster-types, but figured it was something else.) I CANNOT wait to go!
...I have twelve billion sneak peek links, so I shall link them in small handfuls, as I remember to.
One,
two,
three,
four,
five,
six.
Today: groceries, working on housework (I meant to do some massive cleaning yesterday but only did my floors), ItalianFest with friends, and possibly entertaining, I don't know. And in the evening (depending on how long the afternoon runs), show stuff and e-mails and even more incredibly boring hacking away at AEFB notes. (I just want to keep track of the information I wrote into the story itself. One character got two or three different names because I forgot I had given him one already, and several other characters got shuffled around repeatedly. It's necessary. Just boring.)