rivka

Look, here are some pictures of our new house!

(The same ones that were on Facebook, if you already saw those.) ( Read more... )

We won't move until October 15, but we're buying some new things and moving them in now. I am particularly happy about this lovely midcentury sectional:



I'm not a hundred percent sure how all our living room furniture is going to wind up looking when we have it in there together. The space is designed as one big living-dining room, and instead we're going to use it as a living room-study. Our current living room contains one very nice two-year-old dark chocolate-colored couch, and two awful ancient armchairs I bought secondhand when I moved to Iowa in 1995. We won't be moving those. Instead we bought this nice sectional and - this is the part I'm nervous about - a bright lipstick-red armchair. My hope is that the pillows on the sectional will help bring the colors in the room together.

The other thing, of course, is that having our study in our living room will mean that we have to keep the study neater. That's part of my master plan. This house has such a rational layout that I'm hoping we can set things up in the first place in a way that will foster better organization. (For example: all the homeschooling materials (1) together, (2) next to my desk, (3) with a table that is not also our dinner table, and (4) with plenty of space for Colin to play nearby. All the toys downstairs in a confined space. A place to keep the cookbooks in the kitchen. And so on.)

In other news, Colin is going to have a big boy bed in the new house. He asked for one.



We decided to forego a toddler bed this time and go straight to a twin. I'm a bit concerned about height (it's waist-high on Colin), but we can put a mat on the floor until he learns not to fall out. He's going to have transportation-themed bedding and also a wall border and, well, you see the rug. It's much more theme-y than anything we've ever done before, but we promised Alex that she could have her room painted and it only seemed fair to give Colin special decor too.

Alex has chosen aqua walls, and a beautiful sea-colored duvet and sheet set to replace the bright, cheery toddler bedding which now offends her sense of dignity. I think this new set will age with her nicely. We also got her a filmy tulle bed canopy and a fun, silly floor lamp from Ikea, because dignity or not the child is still six.

Oh, and Michael bought a self-propelled cordless electric lawnmower! Because we have a lawn now, and boy does it need cutting.

So our house is still almost empty, but it does have porch furniture (left by the sellers - we ordered new cushions, though, and we need to give it a good scrubbing), high captain's chairs at the kitchen bar, a sectional sofa with jazzy pillows, a couple of lamps, a lawnmower, rakes, and a big boy bed.

You know: the basics.

I can't quite believe I haven't posted to LJ in this long. I missed my ten-year LJversary on August 3rd. I didn't mean to stop posting... but it does seem like fewer and fewer people are on LJ anymore, which makes me less motivated to write here. I'm posting a lot on forums these days, instead. (Which is funny, because I originally moved to LJ from the "forums" of ten years ago, i.e., newsgroups.)

So. Where were we?

The big news is that we're buying a house. This house. (The listing has been taken down because the house is under contract, but fortunately, the seller's agent has a blog.) We close a week from Friday.

It's funny, because if you had asked me before we started looking about what style of house I wanted, I would never in a million years have come up with "mid-century rancher!" But I found myself completely drawn to them. Maybe it's just that we've spent the last eight years in century-plus houses, but I am so attracted to the clean lines, open spaces, and thoughtful, efficient use of space.

( way too much detail about our prospective new house )

It is such a house, guys. It's not anything flashy or imposing, but it is such an immensely comfortable and inviting space. We love it.

After eight years, though, we are leaving downtown. The new house is still within the city limits, about five miles north of our current location, in an old streetcar suburb the city grew in around long ago. There's a village center with shops and restaurants, and we're about a mile and a half from the light rail which takes us both to work. People who live there tell me that they still feel like they live in the city. It sure is going to be a radical change for us, though, to live in a neighborhood of detached houses with green, green yards.

We're ready for a change, though. There will be things I miss about downtown, for sure, but other aspects of it have definitely begun to pall. And we realized as we began to shop that, the way houses are priced right now, we would have to pay a premium of $50,000 or so to stay downtown. That made it an easier choice. But it still is kind of sad to be setting aside that city-dweller identity.

So that's our big news. How about you? Are you still out there reading this?

9:00 Begin working on study. Take embarrassing panoramic photos.
10:36 Fifteen minute break to drink water and make notes.

Accomplished so far:

• Study table and all its drawers cleaned out.


• Medium-sized collection of empty cups and glasses out of study and into sink or dishwasher.


• Closet totally emptied & closet items put away in new homes.


• One full bag of trash, one full bag of clothing to be donated.


• Large load of clothes to dry cleaner's.


• Three loads of clean laundry put away.


• Friends list and online forums successfully ignored. They are off-limits, even during breaks, until after 5pm.
  
• Listened to two Teaching Company lectures on the history of controversy regarding evolution.

I was just about to go downstairs for a basin of soapy water to wash down the closet shelves so that I can load them up again with their new intended contents, but the kids came home. I need to hide out from Colin, so washing the study shelves will have to wait for his nap.

Okay, my fifteen minutes are up. My plan is to do another 90-minute session and then reward myself with a trip to my favorite thrift store. Colin and I need long-sleeved shirts and Alex needs more Magic Tree House books.

I had just finished reading Alex a bedtime story. I crossed over to the study and sat down to write an e-mail, when I heard Michael say sharply: "Rebecca, I need you down here."

His tone made me stop typing in mid-word. I ran down the steps. He met me at the bottom. "The police are here; someone has reported a burglary in progress at our address. Colin is on the changing table." Then he disappeared.

I found Colin (abandoned halfway through a dirty diaper change) and got him cleaned up and dressed. The seldom-used front door was standing wide open, and a police officer stood in our garden shining his flashlight carefully over every inch of the front of the house. I heard a helicopter overhead. I got the officer's permission to close and lock the door and the tall iron gate that protects it.

The side door - the one we actually use; here's a picture of the layout if you're confused - was standing open. I found Michael at the back of the house, by the open kitchen door. He was leaning out the door talking to the police officers searching our back yard. He asked me, firmly, to take Colin upstairs to the study. As we were on our way up, the cops pronounced the yard clear and left.

Michael's story: He heard a couple of odd noises that sounded like something might have been knocked over by the wind. He checked the back door (which he found we had accidentally left unlocked) and then, after another strange sound, went to look out the front window. There was a scruffy man who looked homeless standing outside our gate, which was ajar. When the guy saw Michael looking at him, he left. Michael and Colin sat back down to watch the baseball game, until (a) Colin needed to be changed, and (b) Michael noticed several officers with flashlights in the garden, and one of them came up to knock on the door.

It appears that the sound Michael heard was someone trying to get in through the solid metal gate that shuts off the back of the house. The garbage can normally stands in front of that gate, and it had been moved out into the passage. We think the guy tried the gate, found it locked, and decided not to try to get over it. Michael saw him on his way out.

He may or may not have tried the metal gate that covers the front door. It was slightly bowed out when the cops checked it - there's a little bit of play where the two halves come together, even when it's locked. The wind could have moved it, or.

Here's what bothers me most: the lights were on in the living room and study. Michael had the TV on, too. He was moving around on the first floor. And the guy still tried to come in. It frightens me that he wasn't deterred by the house being occupied. I'm afraid he may have had a home invasion in mind rather than a burglary.

Very grateful that we have bars or heavy metal mesh on all the downstairs windows.

The National Weather Service in Sterling Virginia has issued a
Winter Storm Warning for... which is in effect from noon Tuesday
to 7 PM EST Wednesday. The Winter Storm Watch is no longer in
effect.

* Precipitation type... snow.

* Accumulations... 10 to 20 inches.

* Timing... mid-afternoon Tuesday through Wednesday.

* Temperatures... temperatures near freezing at the onset Tuesday
afternoon. Temperatures will drop into the upper 20s Tuesday
night and Wednesday.

This is no joke, guys.

The roads are bad enough that even though Michael dug the car out with the help of a passing entrepreneur-with-shovel, I'm not comfortable with the idea of taking the kids out tomorrow morning to forage for groceries. So when he got home from work today (he walked, with difficulty), I walked (with difficulty) to our little neighborhood grocery store to see what they might have still on the shelves, knowing that they wouldn't have gotten a delivery yet.

No milk, no eggs, not much fruit or fresh vegetables, no artisanal bread or whole wheat sandwich bread. I got the last loaf of decent-quality sandwich white; after that, all that was left was those long loaves of cheap squishy white. They did have some meat. I got chicken breasts, a small piece of beef, bacon, chicken apple sausages. I was able to restock our supply of pasta and buy supplies for baking cookies. (Fortunately, we already had eggs. And butter.)

The main roads have been plowed, at least in our immediate neighborhood. The secondary roads haven't. I have no idea when I'm going to be able to get back to work or when Alex is going to be able to get back to school. I have no idea when we'll be able to go to church or the library or, well, anywhere but the house and garden, with occasional forays to the drugstore or neighborhood grocery.

While I was waiting to check out at the grocery store, I heard the owner ask an older man who came up to the customer service window:

"You lived in Baltimore all your life?"

"Yeah."

"Is this the worst you've ever seen?"

"Yeah."

Ten to twenty more inches, guys. Ten to twenty more inches.

I mentioned a while ago that we were planning to reorganize our house. We've done some packing, planning, and cleaning over the past couple of weeks, and this afternoon three pleasant and diligent men from the Casa de Maryland Workers' Center (an advocacy and service center for day laborers) showed up to carry heavy things for us.

It's a very strange experience to partially move. Our house got turned upside down; only the living room, Alex's room, and the kitchen were completely unchanged. And yet the fundamentals of the house remained the same. We didn't have to put all our things in boxes, but there are baskets and bins of displaced objects everywhere.

I don't know how long it will take before I stop darting into the dining room intending to check my e-mail, or into the study - which used to be my bedroom - to grab a pair of socks or toss the kids' clothes in the no-longer-present laundry hamper.

Our bedroom is already in nice shape. It's no larger than it has to be to fit our bedroom furniture (queen bed, dresser, chest), but it doesn't feel cramped. The study is going to need a lot of work - we still have to assemble some of the Ikea furniture we bought for it, let alone distributing our things over the shelves - but our desks and computers are already set up and I can tell that it's going to be an extremely pleasant room when it's finished. The dining room looks like someone moved out of it. Once it's cleaned up and the piles of detritus are removed, I think it will feel peaceful and huge.

The overall effect of the move is to make our house feel much bigger. It's great.

Pictures to come when we have things a little more together.

Last night at 11:20 the power went out. I had just finished pumping milk - thank heavens - I still had the bottle of milk in my hand. I quickly stowed it away, grabbed a flashlight, and went to call the power company.

The automated emergency line took my report. Usually it has something to say about how long the outage is estimated to last, but not this time. Looking out the window, I could see Maryland General Hospital all lit up a block away, but on our street there was nothing. No streetlights, no house lights.

The phone rang. It was a real human calling me back from BGE. She said that they didn't have any information about an outage in my area and why didn't I go down and try throwing my breaker. She would wait if I wanted her to.

"It's not just us," I told her. "The whole street is dark."

"Well, you're the only one who called in. I can go ahead and send someone out, but if it turns out to be a problem with your equipment there will be an $80 charge for the service call."

"Send someone out to our house? It's not just us!"

"Well, you're our only starting point."

I told her not to send anyone unless we called back. I didn't really want to wait up past midnight for a service call.

After I hung up, we heard sirens and saw flashes of colored lights outside. We jammed on our shoes and went outside. A BGE pickup truck sped by, orange lights flashing. and rounded the corner on to Read Street. I followed it. Read Street was jammed full of equipment - at least four line trucks. Guys in hard hats stood around in clumps.

Michael approached one of them and came back to report: "It's a planned outage. They're doing some work."

"Okay, let's go to bed." As I undressed, the phone rang. It was the lady from BGE. She had just figured out that it was a planned outage. We should have gotten a letter, she told Michael. The power would be off for eight hours.

That was nearly ten hours ago. We still don't have any electricity. I'm starting to fret about the food. Also, I'm hungry. Michael lit the stove with our grill lighter to make me some tea, but we don't want to open the fridge to get out anything to eat.

I'm writing this on my laptop, but we don't have any wireless to post it.

Later: I called BGE at 9:30. The power should be back on in about an hour, they said. I scrounged some bread and cookies from the pantry. Unbelievably, Alex is still asleep - when she wakes up, I'll take the kids out for breakfast.

The thing about living in a row house is that it can be dark inside even in the daytime. Our living room is a center room, and it doesn't get a whole lot of natural light.

11:00 Still no power. Coming back from breakfast we saw four or five line trucks arrayed along the alley behind our house, basket arms extended and full of linemen. Called BGE again and was assured that we'd have power by 11:30. Uh huh. I asked if there would be any compensation to customers and she reacted with total incomprehension. I wasn't being charged for the power I wasn't receiving, so why did I think I had any claim on BGE beyond that?

If it was storm damage or some other disaster, I would totally understand. But this is scheduled work.

I wonder how long the power would have to be out before I would stop automatically flipping the switch when I walked into a dark room.

Final update: When I left to take the kids to a birthday party at 12:15, the power was still out. According to Michael, it finally came on at 1:50, went off again at 2:15, and finally came on for good at 2:30.

Unfortunately, in the interim Alex overheard me discussing with a neighbor what action I planned to take against BGE if my freezer stash of breastmilk thawed. Now she is asking inconvenient questions like "Mommy, what's firebombing?"

It's the end of the day, and they're both still alive. I have done my job.

I had planned to go in to work for an hour or two today, with Colin, to coordinate a new venture with my research assistants. But last night, we noticed that Alex was pale and overemotional, and her temperature read 99.6 degrees - just high enough to keep her out of school today. So I had them both home, and we stayed in the house all day.

She was pitiful when she woke up, then fine through the morning. In midafternoon her fever started to rise. She begged to watch the Charlotte's Web DVD she got for Christmas, which she'd never seen before, but about fifteen minutes in she started to sob when Fern is forced to sell Wilbur to the farm down the road. "Wilbur! Wilbur!" Alex cried, crumpling in a heap. I looked at her: genuine tears, pallid skin, red circles flushed into her cheeks. I reached for the thermometer, but I didn't really need technological evidence for her fever.

She remained miserable for the rest of the afternoon - "I'm huddled in a heap," she informed us disconsolately at the dinner table - and then got a bouncy second wind just when Michael and I were most exhausted.

Colin got rather shorted for attention, needless to say. He was pretty much continuously latched on, unless I was changing one of a series of truly astonishing diapers, but he didn't get much in the way of stimulating interaction or tender gazes. I figure that keeping his sister's germy hands off him was the best I could offer him. He chose to repay me by not napping for more than 15 minutes at a time all afternoon and into the evening.

Tomorrow should be a lot like today, except that we'll be having a new boiler installed at 9am sharp, plus the electric company will be reattaching the line to the house (don't ask) at 8am. To what extent will power and heat be disrupted? No one has told us to expect disruptions. I suppose that if necessary we can flee to the church for sanctuary... because our usual fallbacks, like the library or the science center, won't be open that early and, when they do open, will be full of kids who don't deserve Alex's virus.

I am exhausted. But it's the end of the day and they're both alive, so I have rocked my job.

In our big research study (not mine, but my boss's), there's a part of the study where we deliberately make the participants angry. It's a role play, and the instructions go something like this: "Pretend that I'm your landlord, and there's something around your place that needs to be repaired. You've left me messages and nothing has been done. Now you're going to run into me in person and discuss the problem. If this has happened to you in real life, you can use a real example - otherwise, I want you to make something up. But the important thing is to make it sound as real as possible."

Every participant has had this problem in real life. The housing problems they report are detailed and realistic. When we play our instigating role in the dialogue - and we are the most obnoxious landlords ever encountered; favorite lines include "It will get done when it gets done," "You need to watch your attitude - don't take that tone with me," and "Well, I don't know what you expect for the kind of rent you're paying" - they are well prepared to respond. More than half threaten to put their rent in escrow until the problem is fixed. They have been down this route, again and again.

Those role plays are on my mind today because we are having a heating problem. The front of the house has been heating just fine, but not the back; the final straw came yesterday when I went into the kitchen and the bottle of olive oil on the counter was congealed solid. To add insult to injury, the freezing cold in parts of the house comes alongside an outrageous $600 electric and gas bill for December. Michael went down to investigate the boiler and came back reporting that the pressure seemed oddly low.

Michael called the landlord this morning. And fifteen minutes later the landlord's handyman rang our doorbell. He adjusted our radiators and explained to me, at length, how the steam radiators we have now differ from the hot water radiators we had in the old house, and what the theory is behind their operation. (It turns out that steam radiators have a steam regulator as well as the little thingy that opens or closes the coils; we didn't know.) Then he went down to the basement and spent twenty minutes or so tinkering with the boiler, drawing off several buckets of muddy water which he said were preventing it from operating properly (and thereby raising our heating bill). He finished by promising that he would come back in the spring and do a full cleaning and servicing of the boiler.

When he left, I called Michael to report. And as soon as I got off the phone with Michael, our landlord called him to assure him that if the house isn't heating to our satisfaction by tomorrow morning he'll send in a full team.

The olive oil is still congealed, but we're going to wait and see what happens when the house cools off at night and then the heat cycles on in the morning.

Our landlord would totally fail as a role-play landlord. Damn, we're lucky. And privileged.