Category Archives: House

Have I mentioned on the ol blog that we’re having a bit of a raccoon issue at our house?

I grew up in the middle of nowhere.  Long gravel roads, lots of trees, lots of land, screens in the windows optional, just generally the middle of nowhere.  And do you know that in that time we never had a single raccoon come in the house?  Black snake? Perhaps. Neighbor’s dogs? Definitely.  But not one raccoon.

I now have a house key and a sidewalk and it appears that we have a raccoon.  Scratch that.  We HAVE a raccoon.  And he’s ballsy.  He (she?) comes in after dark, helps himself to the cat food, does some splishing and splashing in the water bowl until he feels that he has thoroughly cleaned behind both ears and, from what I gather, is taking measurements of our kitchen to send to his interior decorator, Diana, so that the space will be just so when he moves in full time.

At first the mere sight of us would send him waddling.  Then our dog Grace took over and she would chase him out and, apart from the small heart attack that I would have at 3am when Grace would suddenly bolt down the hall barking at full force, things seemed to be ok.  Then there was one night that Grace was at my parent’s and the raccoon quickly realized that it was just me and him and the cat food.  He looked at me with a great deal of misplaced smugness, turned his back on me and went to town on the cat food.  Do you know what I did?  I knocked him silly with a broom.  I did, I whacked the s*it out of him, and he took the hint and headed out the door.  That seemed to take care of the problem for a little while, but then Grace passed away, and the raccoon didn’t take long to wise up and start deciding which corner he wanted to set his cigar chair in again.

How is this raccoon getting in?  Well,  I drew you a picture:

Up until this past weekend, the raccoon was a nuisance, but not especially destructive.  I would even go so far as to say that I was not overwhelmingly concerned with his occasional intrusion.  Well. WELL. We spent the night with friends on Saturday night and all I can say is, if any of you got an invitation to the rodent rager that was hosted in our kitchen and didn’t post pictures to facebook because you didn’t want us to find out about it?  The jig is up.

Ya’ll, the raccoon(s???) went bonkers in our kitchen.  They ate taco shells, they broke wine glasses, they opened cabinet doors, they bathed their muddy little feet in the sink and then WALKED ALL OVER OUR COUNTERS, they took empty tupperware containers out and spread them around, they lounged on the stairs and snacked on gold fish crackers and discussed the underwhelming amenities of our kitchen, I’m sure.  In fact, as I spent all of Sunday afternoon scalding every square inch of our kitchen, I could almost hear their little raccoon laughter hanging in the air around me.  They appeared to have a better time we have had in years, and Drew and I are pretty awesome at having a good time.

But guess what, Raccoon?  We’ll see who gets the last laugh.

Consider yourself warned.

We had to let go of our precious Gracie dog after 8 years.

It has taken me 2 weeks to try to write this post, I just deleted 8 paragraphs that I wrote immediately after about how we loved that dog and why, and how confusing it is to feel such sadness over a pet.  I wrote too much only to realize that I will never need to be able to look back at a blog post to remember her–Grace is so closely woven into the first decade(ish) of our lives together that she will always be a presence when we look back, and that will trump 8 paragraphs any day of the week.

Mary Oliver wrote,

“I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?“
(from “The Summer Day”)

and I can think of nothing that so clearly expresses what I love about the presence of mind that dogs bring into our lives.  To our Grace.

Did you know that one of the rules of blogging is not to start a post with things like, I’m sorry I haven’t written in so long or sorry I’ve gotten so behind or some other somesuch?  So let’s pretend that I’m not saying, hey team, I’ve been swamped with living life and haven’t turned on a computer for recreational purposes for about 2 weeks now.  And let’s definitely pretend that I’m not going to tell you that I have 3 weeks worth of pictures safely sitting on my camera’s memory card, and please by all means, keep pretending that I’m not opening with an apology about all of that.

Truthfully, I’m not feeling all that apologetic, I’m actually kind of feeling smiley and rife from how much fun summer is, even if it comes at the cost of getting the useful stuff done.  In the last two weeks I’ve had a weekend of fun with one of my best friends in the whole entire universe, we’ve ridden our bikes, we’ve had a visit from my stepmom and adorable little sister (who is more woman than little sister these days, but remember, we’re already playing make believe here, so let’s add that to the list) and we’ve splashed and floated and blended and dyed (the couch covers…more to come on that) and just generally ramped up the pace to 10,000 miles/hour.  Presently my mother-in-law is visiting which is such a treat, and this morning Asher stared into my eyes and touched my cheek and said mama with such familiar tender conviction that I thought the world might end on that little note of perfection and leave me tingling forever.

So, that’s what we’ve been doing.

Here’s a little peek…

Asher is still obsessed with airplanes:

Drew and Asher reading (airplane books) together is still one of my favorite visions of home:

And Charlotte (our friend that came to visit) is still beeeeeeeeeeeeutiful:

Charlotte (Coco to us, Auntie Coco to Asher) is a 6ish foot tall beauty who is taking on urban food systems with gusto and style and she is a whirlwind of good times and quiet times all at once.  In the two and a half days that she was with us we managed to squeeze in a little dash of everything from serious conversation over cocktails to causing a top 40 dance party in a bar to swounging (that’s swim/lounging) in a lake to cackling as we told each other really inappropriate secrets until 4 in the morning over a mountain of watermelon.  She inspires me…good friends should do that.  I love that we’re still making memories and still finding things to laugh about and getting better, it seems, with age.  I love this woman.

What else?

Well, I made my blueberry pie for the 4th:

And then took a rather unflattering picture of the final product:

And I also whipped up an airplane blanket for Asher which I briefly considered doing a tutorial on, but I’m afraid that it would read more to the tune of “If-You-Make-This-Don’t-Do-What-I-Just-Did” which isn’t overly helpful to anyone.  It’s janky stitching probably isn’t going to win any crafty competitions, but it sure does make Asher happy to go to bed every night blanketed in airplanes and so far he hasn’t noticed or seemed to care that a close look will reveal that this blanket was most likely sewn by a boozy 5 year old with a lead foot.

Although this is an incredibly easy and straightforward project I ran into a little trouble because the bias tape that I used wasn’t a standard width (it was more narrow) and I just kind of sucked at making the corners…no excuses there.  However, if you are a newbie that’s interested in doing this, I did find this tutorial about attaching bias tape by Amy Karol to be really helpful and oddly amusing.

Oh right.  Dyeing the couch.  So Drew and I bought a slip covered white couch and quickly discovered that white was not going to fly in our house.  No worries, we’ll just dye it right?  My confidence was boosted by this post on Young House Love, and by my friend Lindley’s success with dyeing her slipcovers but…well…we’re on our second round of dyeing (the first was a blotchy Ecru bust) and gearing up for a third.  I am going to do a whole post about this adventure, but I wanted to let all of you know that not only am I eating about 1/2 a watermelon a day these days, but we’re also currently sitting on one:

(That’s my sis holding down our pink couch)  In my attempts to dye the cover Crimson–you know, DARK RED–I wound up with pleasantly pepto.  More dye getting ordered, red couch to come.  I have to say that the Key West vibe in the living room is very summery and festive, but I’m pretty sure that Drew mentioned something about not having pink furniture right before the whole ’till death do you part’ bit, so I’m hoping to remedy this.

In reading back over this, it seems that I’m a little hit-or-miss with my domestic crafty bliss here, but I guess all I can say is that I’m having fun trying and learning as I go, and that if you check back in about 6 years or so, I might actually be able to share something in an educational capacity.  And remember how funny it was that one time that I tried to dye the couch red and it turned out pink?  Remember that?  Yeah, me too.  Good times.

In closing, I am going on a little solo adventure this weekend to a friend’s wedding, Drew is going to keep the home fires air conditioner burning blowing with his mom and Asher for company and I’m going to be really excited about being out and about in the world and I’m probably also going to choke up when I talk to Asher on the phone because that is one of the weird paradoxes of motherhood.  It’s going to be a lot of fun though and if I start to miss my fellas too badly, I’ll just turn to one of the 8 girls I’m sharing a hotel room with and ask for a hug, so that’s pretty awesome. More to come and…

This pink couch is for you!

The Asher Bean came down with a double earache this past weekend (nowhere near as amazing as a double rainbow, I assure you) and our wonderful pediatrician was on a quick vacation (the nerve!) so I was home Monday and Tuesday nursing the little man along until the doctor could see him and get some meds in him.  Now Asher’s back on top, and we’re getting back to normal.  I love that children want to feel normal and happy more than anything else.  Asher kept doing things that normally bring him a lot of joy and then coming over to lay his head on my shoulder, limply holding the truck that would usually make him happy and looking at me like, “this thing makes me smile. Why am I feeling lousy still?” and then he would attempt to play again because playing is a lot more fun than laying around.  So we cycled like that all day, little pops of fun followed by long hugs and longer naps.

During one of those naps I attacked our laundry room.  And now I will confess the following things to you: I’m only an ok house keeper.  Really, I’m kind of like a professional tidyer.  I keep things tidy, but often all that straightening up is really more like a “keeping up with the Jones’” housekeeping style, because you can bet your unmatched socks that all of that quickly grabbed stuff during a tidy just lands somewhere else until I come in with the scrub brush (trash bags) raised and just go to town.

This method has been taking place in our laundry room for quite some time for two three main reasons.  The first is that the laundry is in our dark creepy unfinished basement and there’s just nothing charming or inviting or organized feeling about the space. (Quick parenthetical aside since I’m confessing things? I have to suck my breath in every time I go down the stairs because I have a deep-rooted paranoid feeling about seeing someone–generally a man–just standing in our basement.  I’m never really worried about this fictional person doing anything, but I live in regular fear of being startled by someone just standing there.  That is weird.) The second problem with the laundry room is that it is the world’s best out-of-sight-out-of-mind catch-all, and the third and most obvious problem with the laundry room is that I loathe doing laundry.

So while Asher napped yesterday, I cleaned the snot out of the laundry area and organized and generally set out on a mission to wash every single thing in our house that needs to be washed.  I did 5 loads of laundry yesterday and intend to do about 4 more tonight.  The first 5 loads are dried, folded and stored.  The next 4 are giving me heartburn.  How did it come to this?  For a family that has the washing machine running almost every single day of the week, how is it possible that I have nearly 10 loads of laundry laying around needing to be dealt with?

Well.  No more.  I am turning a laundry corner.  Publicly.  I am making a personal (and now oddly public) pledge to knock it off, or more specifically knock it out and we will now be working smart and not so hard with this whole sudsy business.  Drew deeply believes that things that don’t go together outside of the washing machine shouldn’t go together inside the washing machine and thus he does his own laundry about 3-4 times a week.  I think this is almost as strange as my paranoia about seeing someone calmly standing in our basement.  He really doesn’t like to mix work-out clothes with work clothes with weekend clothes etc etc.  So I am going to talk to Drew about combining our clothes (I know! Gym socks! Jeans! All that co-mingling of unmentionables!) so it will all be done and I will start to feel like June Cleaver again.  You’ll note that I have not reduced the number of loads per week with this incredible domestic deduction, but I have now successfully incorporated my own laundry into the epic cycle and theoretically reduced the number of times that I laugh about Drew’s socks talking dirty to his t-shirts.  Smart not hard, team.

If you’re someone who’s reading this while sipping grown up cocktails and actually thinking about the horrible situation in Libya, shocked that I am blathering on about laundry when there’s so much that really matters in the world, well…what can I say?  Some days you think about saving the world, other days you think about selfish personal betterment to the tune of mastering a domestic skill that has been previously elusive.  The whole time that I was folding and scrubbing and throwing away yesterday, all I could think about was my on-going mantra that life is short! And if I can tighten up on this stupid laundry situation, I can get back to something a little more meaningful in my down time, because life is short, and as long as I live, I would like to never ever be in a situation of needing to do 10 loads of laundry in a 24 hour period ever again.  We can spin that in a heart-strings-make-Oprah-proud light, or we can just call a spade a spade and acknowledge that it’s time to tighten up.

How about you?  Care to share what you’re working on mastering?