spud says hi

An argh and two yays

Last night I had my first run in with a Harry Potter spoiler that I couldn't avoid because I didn't see it was coming.  It was on a knitting site, in a thread that gave no indication that it was about any such thing.  ARGH.  I realize this suggests that I'm a) five or b) taking this way too seriously, but I've been a little sulky about it ever since.

I should just buy the Canadian version, I know.

But, I also have two... well semi-raves.  Or, one "this was pretty good" and one rave.

This was pretty good as a quick summer meal that was thrown together with whatever I had around.

In a big saucepan I heated a bit of olive oil, threw in one chopped clove of garlic, salt, pepper, and some dried oregano and basil.

Then I tossed in about half a package of sliced cremini (I think... the ones that get sold as "baby bellas" or whatever) mushrooms and let them frizzle for just a tiny bit.

Then, a can of chopped tomatoes, juice and all.  I thinned the liquid with some vegetable broth and water (night one it stayed fairly thick; night two, above, I thinned it more to a broth).

Cover, let cook until mushrooms are close to done.  Then I just put on top of it all tilapia fillets (in this case one of those doubled pieces that I assume come from one fish), covered again, and let steam/cook for about five minutes.  At that point I broke up the (pretty thoroughly) cooked fish into the mixture.

On night one, I ate it over (and I know this sounds weird) mesclun greens, which got kind of wilty.

On night two, I thinned it more, picked out the frisee and radicchio from the greens mix, tossed them in at the end and let them soften a bit, and also cooked up some couscous to put under it all.  Oh, I also put in a couple sprinkles of cayenne to give it a bit of heat.

Both ways, delicious, if I do say so myself.

The rave is the Mr. Clean Magic Eraser, which my mom told me about.  Oh my gosh, my bathtub has not been so clean in... ever.  It really is sort of magic.  Doesn't seem to work on rust stains, but everything else?  Amazing.

Weirdest. Thing. EVER.

No, really.

So, as of this afternoon, I am no longer a homeowner.  I realize that becoming a homeowner is usually cause for greater celebration, but the process of selling my house as I moved to Canada was really long and really awful at parts and far more stressful and far less financially positive than would be ideal.  I'm reasonably happy with how it all turned out, and it sounds like the new owners are really excited, and I'm glad the house is getting new people who'll take care of it.  I liked it there quite a bit, and would have been far sadder to leave it if I hadn't been stressed by the fact that it hadn't sold, which instead made me just anxious.

But anyway.  That's not the weird part.

To explain the weird part, I must also talk about the owner before me.  I only met her once, and she was perfectly nice, but she was also a little odd and not the greatest previous owner in various ways.  There were a few dirt issues that were clearly of long standing, but a couple of things also struck me right as I moved.  For instance, she left a refrigerator full of food.  And we're talking crappy five year old condiments and things like that.  And though she'd told me she'd leave some garden implements in the shed, she didn't leave some of the more useful ones, and did leave a bunch of utter crap in the garage.  A random sign.  A couple of tires.  Stuff like that.

Now, I, too, was in some ways not an ideal previous owner.  Because although I cleaned out the shed quite a bit, I also did not touch some of the stuff the owner before me had left.  I don't know, I figured people find stuff in their new homes all the time, and sometimes it's something cool and useful.

But no, not this time.

During their walk through this past weekend, the new owners found something completely different.

ASHES.  Human ashes, from a crematorium, in a box, in the shed.

Holy crap.

Clearly, I was even less of a good organizer than I'd thought, because I sure as hell never found these. 

From other information I'd pieced together about the previous owner, I am fairly sure that SHE LEFT HER LATE HUSBAND'S ASHES IN THE SHED.

Can you imagine?!  I... I just don't know what to say about that.  When I talked to the Realtor today and she told me this, I was just pole axed.  I mean, gosh.  Why would you do that?!  A shovel is one thing, but ashes?

To move to a less macabre subject, I'll leave with this image.  Ziti today, as I sat at the computer, jumped from my desk up to the top of a nearby bookshelf.  As far as I can tell, this was a first.  I HOPE it was a first, because in order for the little ditz to get down he'd have to jump smack dab on top of my computer, which is not an acceptable means of descent.  To avoid it, I lifted him down today, and will hope that, cute as he is up there, this was a one-time thing.

How did this happen?

Yesterday morning, my furniture consisted of an Ikea chair, a crate, a box, a mattress pad doubled over on the floor, and a cat hiding place made out of another box.

The cat hiding place, I realized, was kind of necessary, due to the fact that cats don't really like wide open spaces all that much, and the emptiness of the apartment was kind of freaking them out.  Spud, at least, appreciated it.  Ziti instead took to sleeping behind radiators.  Whatever floats your boat.

(I had pictures of the chair set up, and the "bed" set up, but ended up deciding they were a little too pathetic and depressing to post.)

Today, I have stuff.  Um, a lot of stuff.  Like, I'm not sure how it happened stuff.

Sigh.

Unpacking, you are not fun.

The kitchen's mostly unpacked.  I've filled up virtually every available bit of cabinet space, but, still, it's mostly unpacked.  Yay for that.

The bedroom's not bad, either, really.  Except for the piles of shoes scattered here and there.

And the more living room half of the main room is really quite fine.There's one little crate that will get moved, and I've got to figure something out for the dsl modem, but otherwise all's well there.

And then there's my office.  Which is currently (or at least was currently when my books got there yesterday) uninhabitable, due to a mishap with the heating/cooling unit.  Mishap isn't the right word.  I went in Tuesday morning and discovered the floor was kind of soaking wet.  So it's being fixed.  I think.

Yeehaw!

Random thoughts

Yesterday was on and off lovely and not so lovely.  During one of the lovely parts, I decided to walk over to the public library to pick up a book waiting for me on hold.  On the way, I ran into a train (well, you know, not literally).  Train tracks run right down the middle of a street in the old part of town, and I have to cross them to get to the library and various other places.  This train was nothing but a loooooong line of tank cars, filled, according to their labels, with molten sulfur.  Oddly, this is the second such train I've seen in the recent past.  Really oddly, I could actually smell the rotten eggy smell of sulfur as it went by.  Not always, but whiffs of the icky smell kept coming off the train.  I have to say, I don't think that can be good.  Can you imagine a molten sulfur spill?  And what use is molten sulfur, anyway?

The not so lovely parts of yesterday and the continuation of not so loveliness into today made me, finally, turn on my furnace.  I was kind of thinking it'd be cool to make it to November without turning it on... but then I realized how literally cool that was going to be... and so I caved.  I was being weirdly obsessive about it, anyway.

Today I repotted several plants that have suffered at the paws of Ziti.  He loves my jade plant a little too much.  A lot too much, considering that he shows his love by knocking it over, ripping off leaves and batting them all over the house.  I think I'm going to have to bring it into my office in order to give it any kind of a chance at survival.

It came!

So, about a month ago, I ranted and raved for far too many paragraphs about my annoyance with the  process of buying furniture from companies associated with WilliamsSonoma.  Well, finally, this week the bed I ordered in June arrived.  It's pretty, it fits perfectly in the room, it's girly but not too girly.  I like it.  The delivery guys were very nice, it all got set up easily, all went well.  They even got it to me near the beginning of my four hour delivery window when I called before and said I couldn't be home for the full four hours (which was totally true).  So my complete and utter contempt for this delivery company and the whole process of ordering furniture has been somewhat tempered by this good process.

The cats are enjoying it, too.  He's hard to see, but Spud's in this picture.  When I first moved to CO, Spud started to sleep under the covers of my bed during the day.  He never does this at night, only during the day.  It happens when I make the bed, or when I leave it disheveled.  So he's the sort of lump next to Ziti, who jumped up and sniffed the lump and then sprawled out next to it.  Spud's response, of course, was "gwrowar."

And yet more to the story

So, it turns out that my annoying story wasn't over when I posted yesterday.  Amazing!  Truthfully, though, I'm basically annoyed out, so at this point I'm just throwing my hands up in disbelief.

I got home last night after going out to the bar I generally hang out at on Friday nights (and where I repeated my rant about delivery... oh, and where I was extra annoyed because I'd stopped to get cash and the ATM at my bank was broken so I couldn't, and because I got there and realized I'd left my bike lock at home, so had to go home and get it and then return to the bar) and noticed that the driver of the delivery truck had tried to call while I was out.  Hmmm, I thought, but proceeded to ignore the situation for the sake of my sanity.

And then this morning I got a call from the delivery company saying, chirpily, oh, gosh, we just happen to have the item you ordered sitting her on our dock!  Whee!  When do you want us to deliver it!  Smiley happy hearts and flowers!  We didn't mess up!  Giggle!  When you called last night and asked if it we'd messed up and we said, no, gosh, we were apparently just flat out wrong!!!

Well, actually, not quite, because admitting they messed up is apparently too grown up for them.

My response?  I've already canceled the order, so, no.

Actually, I feel a little bad, because I did kind of swear at the woman on the other end of the line.  Well, not at her, but I did use an obscenity when I noted that her company had fucked me around all week and I didn't really want to deal with them again.  Even though I'll have to, if the damn bed every shows up.

Sigh.

Too annoyed to function

&*@&^%$!!!@W^%$&!

I am enormously fucking annoyed right now.  And I must be profane.  Sorry if that offends, but, crap, I've just had to deal with the suckfest of annoyance that is the Williams Sonoma company (and, particularly their furniture branches). 

OK, first, I am not an enormous consumer.  The last piece of furniture I bought (before my annoyance saga begins) was two years ago, and that was a futon.  Then a year before that, I bought a little wicker table and two chairs.  Then probably five years before that, a sofa bed.

And although I do have plenty of clothes, I admit, a very high percentage of them come from Target.  And virtually everything else (and even, most often, the Target stuff, too) I bought on sale.  I do have a fair collection of kitchen implements, but I actually add to that very slowly.  I buy far fewer books than I used to, now that I live in a place with a good public library.  Although I went through a DVD buying phase, I don't do that too often any more.  I did splurge on an iPod last year, and that I don't regret at all, because it's fantastic and improves my life.

So what I'm saying is, I'm not a huge buyer (oh, wait, except recently of yarn, but that not only supplies clothing or gifts, but is a hobby, too).  I buy deliberately, more often than not.

Earlier this summer, I saw a bed (that is, a headboard/footboard) for sale in the Pottery Barn catalog that I liked, and was (being on sale) reasonably priced.  Since I'd been sort of thinking of getting a bed for a while, I ordered it.

Now, when you order furniture, you get a little "your order has shipped" notice, even though it might take weeks for it to actually get to you.  But once that little "your order has shipped" notice gets published on line, that's as far as web-based customer service will get you... it never changes.

So I was initially pleasantly surprised when I got a call from a Denver delivery company in mid-late July to set up a time for a home delivery.  And the day of the delivery, I stripped the bed, and washed the bed skirt, and moved the mattress and boxspring out of the bedroom to make room, and folded up the cheapo frame that came with the mattress 9 years ago and stuck it in my shed.

And then, towards the end of my four hour delivery window, the truck shows up, and the guys bring in... a frame.  A long, thin box.  That's it.

What?

So I call the delivery company and they confirm that that's all they have.  And I call Pottery Barn and they say, oh, gosh, the bed was actually on back order, so it'll still be a few weeks.

The hell?

I complained about having to stay home for a delivery twice for one bed (and, granted, I can and often do work at home, but I don't always want to do so, and often when I can't leave is exactly when I want to), and they offered to reimburse me for delivery charges.  Fair enough.

Shortly thereafter, I saw a file cabinet in the West Elm (another Williams Sonoma company) catalog that I quite liked, and was nice looking and reasonable.  Again, I've been thinking of getting one for a while now (I've actually currently got a couple of hanging file folder frames just sitting on the floor), so I ordered it.  Same thing with the web notification.

Now, while waiting for that, I started to wonder what was up with the bed, since time kept passing and I kept not getting the bed.

Oh, and did I mention that they charged me for it back in early July???

So I emailed their customer service team, since I had no desire to sit on hold, and the website told me nothing.  And they said they'd forward the message to the furniture delivery people who would contact me.

No one contacted me.

After a couple more weeks, I sent another, more annoyed email, noting that the fact that they'd had my money for months, while I still had no bed, was yet more annoying, and the fact that they had an email service option that didn't do shit was downright pissing me off.  So the offered to refund the money until the bed comes (when?  who the fuck knows, really... I'd just cancel the whole thing, except that now I've got this frame sitting on the floor of my spare room).  OK, not ideal, but there you go.

So then this week I get a call from the same Denver delivery company to schedule yet another delivery, this time of the file cabinet.  First, they give you a day for the delivery a few days ahead of time, and then a four hour window the day before.  Sort of annoying to begin with. 

I was initially set up for a Wednesday delivery, 1:30-5:30.  Wednesday morning, I get a call telling me they just can't make it that day, and can I accept delivery on Friday.

(Man, I'm thinking, what if I had an office job???)

So, yeah, whatever, OK.  Initially, I was told I'd get my delivery between 11-3.  Then at 10:40 or so, I got a call telling me they were running late, and it'd actually be between 12-4.  Aggravation was mounting.

The truck pulls up before 4, yes, it's true. 

AND IT'S THE WRONG FUCKING THING.  Not a file cabinet, but an entertainment system cabinet, or something.

OH MY GOD.

I refused delivery, called the Denver company, who insisted that it wasn't their fault.  Called West Elm, who offered no explanation, and instead wanted to know if I wanted a replacement "expedited" to me.  "What does 'expedited' mean?"  I asked.  Sent in a week or so, with the same delivery people.

No.  NO. NOOOOOO.

Yeah, I'm writing a serious long letter of complaint to the president of Williams Sonoma.  Chuck, I think his name is.  I'm sure he's a nice man, and he's obviously got good taste.  But at this moment, I can't stand his company.

Won the battle, lost the war

My house just defeated me.

I haven't had a light by my back door since I moved in three years ago.  The one that was there never worked.  I bought a replacement, got the old one down, and then got stymied by the totally rusted screws holding the old mounting plate to the gasket (I may have the terms wrong, but I'm going by the instructions for the new light).  I'd try to get it down every so often, but ended up messing up the screws even more rather than anything else.

So today I decided that my house project for the day could be to try again.  I sprayed on some WD40, in hopes that that'd loosen things up.  I got out some needle nose pliers, and gripped one of the screws... and it turned!  That may sound minor, but considering how unbudgeable they've been for, seriously, two years, this was a major victory.  I was actually able to get the mounting plate down.  Yeehaw.

Then there was the process of getting the new one up.  I got everything attached... I think.  The wires coming from the house were not entirely clearly "white" or "black" as they were supposed to be, but I think I had them right.  And getting the grounding wire attached to the "green grounding screw" also took a little doing.  But everything got hooked up.  Then there's the difficulty of cramming all these wires back into the small space in which they can go.  Then there's the screwing down of the new plate thingy.  Then there's the entire new mounting part coming loose from the gasket, with all the wires caught up in there.  Sigh.

I think I need to get someone in to replace the gasket thingy.  It's kind of loose, as it is, which probably isn't very good. 

But I really wanted to be able to do this myself.

And as a result of this failed effort, I also had to go around resetting all my clocks, since I don't know which circuit breaker to throw to just cut off electricity to the light, so I just did it for the whole house.

Bummer.

Late summer cleaning

With a new school year about to start, I've been really wanting to clean and clear.  I spent all last weekend clearing out a closet and cleaning floors and dusting and all of that.  Well, there was also the time spent scanning old photos that I found in the closet.  I learned that, as a kid, I did not so much have the ability to aim.  Or focus, although the camera was supposed to do that.  Of course, the camera was a disc camera, which had notoriously small film, and thus a fairly grainy result.  But it's bizarre to see a a picture of my grandmother, half of my mother, and an expanse of lawn.  Obviously, that wasn't my intent, but I'm not sure what happened.  Did I flinch?  Did I move?  Or was I simply incapable of lining up the view window thingy with whatever I was looking at?

Anyway.  I currently have a pile of bags ready to go to Goodwill, but no car with which to take it.  I honestly try not to continually gather new things, but, of course, sometimes you do.  And then sometimes you have to clear out the things that just sit around.  It's mostly clothes, sadly, but some sheets and blankets, too, dating badk to the point when I was far too likely to impulse buy sheets at Target.  Actually, I've got kind of much too much stuff that I've impulse bought at Target.  Though the all-Target New Yorker I just got in the mail kind of freaks me out a bit.

I also did a lot of removal of cat hair and dust and, in the kitchen, oiliness.  Which is odd, because it's not like I cook with all that much grease or oil.  I can't imagine how surfaces must get if you deep fry a lot.  As it is, I took down vases that had been sitting on top of my cabinets since I moved in three years ago, and wiped down the top of the refrigerator, and just tried to scrub everything out.  Not that I'm a particularly dirty person, but there are places and things you forget about as part of your regular straightening up and cleaning.

But now I feel fairly well cleansed to start the new semester.  And, tonight, exhausted from the hours of department meetings we had today.