my year in cities and towns, 2023

An antique bed with a lot of blankets on it and two folded comforters. There is a small black cat sleeping on it.

I am enjoying staying put. No hotels at all. I did spend ten days down at my dad’s place (which needs a better name since my dad has been dead since 2011 and if I tell people about it who don’t know me well they think I’m going to go and see my dad and that is not what is happening) doing some unpacking of my mom’s stuff. What a journey! But useful. Saw my sister a few times which was great and she came up here which was even maybe a little bit better. I hope you got out as much as you wanted to last year. RIP Hank, you were a great cat.

Past years: 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008 2007, 2006, 2005.

skunk haiku

snowy ground with some skunk tracks lightly on it

Skunk in snow, black stripe
moves to driveway, turns into
two furry white stripes.

well well well

Photograph of a piece of paper from a three-ring binder showing the location of the house's well.

I was going to title this “The kid is back!” because I have now successfully been away from my home for more than just one or two overnights, first time since 2019. Not sure this is a huge accomplishment but it feels huge to me because I’ve not only become a bit of a homebody but also, like many people, experienced a real change in how my life works both since COVID started but also since buying a house. I haven’t been down to my dad’s house for more than a day or two in far too long. There is some deferred maintenance there, putting it mildly, and also the boxes packed from my Mom’s house, a house which now belongs to some nice family who seem to be taking good care of it. How nice.

So it was a holiday week and then a work week and then a “work on unpacking those boxes” week. In one of them, I found an old three-ring binder that had a story. And after reading this recent blog post about Writing Documentation For Your Home I decided to write that story down.

I assume people know but in case you don’t: my mom passed away in 2017. We sold her house, the house I grew up in, finally in January of this year. This was mostly fine. She was always like “Eh live your life, don’t keep my house if you don’t want it.” and we didn’t, so we didn’t. One of the things we needed to do in order to sell the house was get the water tested. To do this we needed to find the house’s well. NO ONE knew where the well was. We had a vague idea but no specific notion. No living person remembered. No documentation existed anywhere obvious. We just Paid a Guy With An Excavator to figure it out. It went fine. We had to do a bunch of other work and I know Kate and I are very happy that’s all behind us.

But back to this week. I am at my dad’s place, the house we DID keep (he died in 2011) and as I’m unpacking one-of-many boxes I find a three-ring binder completely FULL of documentation. It had maybe been in the basement of my mom’s house, it had all the early plans for all the renovations my dad did back when they lived together up til about 1981 or so. She just put that stuff in a file cabinet and, I presume, forgot about it. All that stuff got moved to my dad’s and slowly unpacked. I found it about 18 months too late.

I bought my own house in August 2022. I have all the manuals which I keep in a folder or as PDFs on my computer. I have a list of all the major fixit work I’ve had done, and who did the work. I’m still maybe not cut out to be a homeowner but I do feel like I’m at least doing that part well.

Virgo month of enforced leisure

In this color illustrated postcard, a snake is curled around a bottle marked with a skull and crossbones. It is facing a rabbit, which appears to be sick, with its tongue hanging out and lying under a white blanket. The background of the card is light blue, with a portion of a gold circle in the lower right-hand corner and gold rays eminating from it across the card. The snake and rabbit are on a red background. In the upper right corner, behind the rabbit there is a gold spider web.

So the Virgo Month of Leisure is wrapping up, an on-again off-again so-called holiday which I usually “celebrate” by doing something very complicated or time-consuming because I am me. This year I got COVID. And as these things go I was very lucky.

  • Lucky that I knew when I got it (at the library, from someone coughing on me) and so I was able to stay home and not infect anyone else
  • Lucky that I had tests at home and was able to confirm that I had it.
  • Lucky that I had access to both telemedicine and my local doctor so I was able to get Paxlovid even though I’m only somewhat eligible.
  • Lucky that I didn’t have Paxlovid rebound and found the metallic taste in my mouth manageable.
  • Lucky that my friends and neighbors stepped UP so I wanted for nothing except better health.
  • Lucky that my infection was brief (maybe four days of feeling pretty terrible) and didn’t include a scary cough and/or breathing problems because I am extremely anxious about that sort of thing.
  • Lucky that I had a lot of tests at home so I could test a few times and know I was safe to go out once my symptoms (fever, aches, lethargy) subsided.
  • Lucky that I was feeling mostly better by my actual birthday and, despite having to skip getting together with Jim over Labor Day weekend, we did have a very nice make-up birthday weekend the next weekend and fit in all of our favorite things.

The woman I got it from is likewise okay though she had a much rougher time of it. While I certainly have a lot of complaints about how COVID response is being handled nationally (go get your vaccination! free tests available September 25th!) my local response both personally and institutionally was not bad. I am happy to be better just in time to wave goodbye to the Virgo Month of Leisure. Better luck next year, me!

my circuit board home

a blue gary house, shown from the back corner with white tubes snaking along various parts of it. There is a man on a ladder

So I got heat pumps. Which is a weird thing to call them because, while they do pump in heat in the winter, in the summertime they pump in cold. I am just calling them “the chillers” for now. When I got a new toilet installed right after I moved in, the plumber I called (Walker Plumbing and Heating!) mentioned he also did heat pumps. I filed that news away for later and took care of a bunch of more immediate issues like getting a couch and upgrading some electrical stuff (and removing the power meter that was only for the hot water heater). But this spring, when temps hit 90° very briefly and the upstairs of my place became an oven and when I saw my plumber moving up and down the nearby streets installing heat pumps, I gave him a call. I expected this would be one of those “Call now to set up an appointment for November.” things but instead he was ready in a few weeks.

This house is quirky. In all the rooms but one, the window screens don’t move. This means that even if you want window AC units, you can’t have them unless you climb up the outside of the house to remove the screens. When people ask “Why is this weird back room your bedroom?” one of the answers is “It was where I could put an AC unit in.” Another answer of course, is “Have you MET me?” One of the back rooms had no heat in it at all. Now it does. Now my office can be less than 85° when I’m trying to work. And maybe Jim and I can watch TV without being under the electric blanket in the winter. Maybe.

The thing I did not really think about is the extent to which the outside of my house was going to be showing off more of its infrastructure now. I consider myself incredibly lucky that the pipes (or pipe covers, really) match the trim. I’m definitely leaning in to the fact that the house looks like a weird circuit board. People say about the pipe covers “You can paint them!” but realistically we all know I will not.

As someone who grew up completely without air conditioning (and, if I am being honest, without enough heat) I do not really know how to use it besides making my bedroom cold enough that I can actually get to sleep. It all feels very Queen-of-England to me to have access to this sort of technology, even as I regularly make use of all sorts of bonkers-style internet communication in my day to day life that was almost inconceivable to kid-me. The chillers are on the internet. I may take them off of it.

the noise of furniture

image of that weird piece of furniture I'm describing, sort of a wedge with two shelves in it

My office has gone from being too-cold-needs-heat to too-warm-needs-fan in one week. I consider myself pretty fortunate to have an office that I like and that is comfy or able to be made comfy. I also sort of like that now, on sunny days, it comes with a time limit. I can sit in here typing and sorting my paperwork and charging my devices and chatting on social media and tidying my virtual and real-life desktops, but after a time it gets too hot and I go downstairs. Downstairs has been taking a while to gel properly. The kitchen is fine. The entryway is odd. The front room is lovely. The bathroom is perfect. The tool room is getting there. That leaves the television room and the dining room.

The dining room had a wrong-sized table (it needed something and this one was free) and the wrong balance. The TV room had a wooden box that the TV sits on, a box that came with it, which was the wrong size and shape. I don’t know about you, but the wrong furniture, to me, can make a noise, enough so that walking in to a room with it just makes you want to walk right back out. Cacophonous. This is only about my own stuff, I don’t have this reaction to other people’s rooms.

Ronni’s place, where I lived for the 14 years before I moved here, is being sold soonish. Her niece asked me if I was interested in some of her furniture. So I, with significant help, brought over a few tables and a lot of chairs (as well as a weird and very heavy piece of marble that is now in my garage waiting for a purpose). One table replaces the dining room table, and it’s the right size. It came with six chairs, all of which were better than the ones I had. A friend took the old wrong-sized table, but did not want the chairs. The other table, more of a sideboard really, I thought could maybe go behind the couch (it couldn’t) or under the TV (nope) but is nice in my dining room. I got two more chairs, one of which was needle-pointed by an older relative of Ronni’s and is of-a-kind with a chair I already have which was needle-pointed by Jim’s grandma.

sideboard table with a lamp and some drawer things. in the foreground is a light colored table with some tulips on it

Later that day, on a walk, I was mentioning to a friend that I still use facebook mainly for managing the massive librarian group I help moderate, and to look for furniture. He asked what I was looking for, I described my dumb TV situation (it’s larger than I need, it’s what was available, it sits noisily in a corner, failing to fit, looking awkward) and he said he thought he had the perfect thing. His parents, who both passed away over the past few years, had a wedge shaped shelf thing, pictured above, which he’d had in storage and wasn’t using at all. He brought it over and it fit perfectly and now that corner of the room is… silent? Euphonious? Mellifluous? Whatever it is, it works. Now my only issue is that my entryway looks like a chair store. I got rid of the TV’s wooden box stand on facebook. Gone in an afternoon.

Best of all this means I now have a place to store all my old cassettes which I’ve been happily sorting this weekend.

one of those cassette head cleaners from an old tape deck

cooking

stovetop showing one pan full of sliced apples and one baking sheet full of roasted butternut squash

My new place doesn’t have an amazing kitchen. It’s better than my old one, and it’s good enough that I’m not always saying “How do I fix this kitchen?” but it’s small and somewhat cold in the winter. If you’re working in the kitchen it can be hard to talk to someone not in the kitchen which is one of the things I like doing, having Jim sitting nearby talking with me while I spin the plates involved in making a meal.

All that is to say I haven’t warmed up to it entirely, but I feel like I’m getting back to myself in some ways and I spent the weekend doing make-ahead food prep. This included prepping and roasting a butternut squash (olive oil, salt, and garam masala), making applesauce (apples, vanilla, maple syrup, salt, lemon juice), and two kinds of beets (sliced and boiled (with gorgonzola, parsley, and balsamic vinegar), chopped and roasted). I also made some stuffing from a box because that’s a winter comfort food.

The kitchen went from trashed to cleaned to trashed to cleaned again and I still have a pink tinge to my fingertips that I’m assuming is beets and not mercury poisoning (family joke). I woke up today with vaguely sore wrists from chopping and a fridge FULL of food in case I don’t feel like making a big fuss over dinner, which I almost never do. We’re expecting maybe a foot and a half of snow later this week and while I do have a bit of shoveling fatigue, I can safely say hey I’m ready for it.