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I haven't forgotten about this blog; it just seems like there are so many other things taking up all my available time these days. So as long as you don't mind, I'm posting some letters I've written to an elderly relative... they say what's going on in our lives but gives me a short-cut so I don't have to re-compose! I'll get back to blogging one of these days, I swear...
January 21, 2006
Dear Aunt,
It shouldn’t take so much effort to sit down and write a letter, especially when it’s a more pleasant thing to do than running the vacuum or doing the laundry (both of which seem to take up an awful lot of my time lately… ) but I can’t think of why I do it much more seldom than I intend!
The weather here in Massachusetts has been glorious the last two days (for January in New England) – temperatures in the high 40s and low 50s with sunshine. So of course we want to do things outdoors before the temperature drops and the snow flies again. We had a vicious rainstorm on Wednesday with high winds that felled some trees here in town, but luckily it only brought down a few dead branches in our yard. I was going to pick them up yesterday afternoon with J*****'s help but when he got up from his nap he was a little too cranky to fight with him over socks and shoes and jackets so we didn’t do it. It’ll be something to do today, after shopping and other errands. J***** has been invited to a birthday party tomorrow for another little boy at his preschool, so I have to go out and get a gift today… there’s a toy store in town where I got J***** a wonderful soft inflatable ball for Christmas, and he enjoys it so much that I think I’ll get one for his friend. I like it because if he does happen to toss it in the house it won’t break anything.
We are slowly getting adjusted to our new house. I think it’s a very comfortable house and that we’re going to be happy living here, but often it still feels as if we’re living in someone else’s house. There are a few reasons for this but the main one I think is that the former owner’s decorating tastes are not the same as mine! She liked raspberry and mauve and watery teal, all colors I don’t particularly care for. And she seems to have been an indifferent housekeeper. When we moved in there was 40 years worth of crud inside the kitchen drawers and cabinets – UGH! I know the people we bought the house from were only responsible for 12 years worth, but it was really gross. If it hadn’t been only 20 degrees outside I would have taken the drawers outside with a wire -brush and the garden hose. As it was I had to cover every surface with liner paper before I could bring myself to put our dishes and utensils away. The carpets are not very clean, either.
I’m in the process now of preparing one of the front bedrooms for the new baby. (By the way, it’s another boy, due the first week of June. The results of the ultrasound and amniocentesis show that he’s healthy and active!)The former owners had two teenage girls when they lived here, both of whom had moved out on their own by the time their parents sold the house. I don’t think the teenagers’ bedrooms had been cleaned since they moved out; maybe not since they became teenagers! The room I’m working on now has wallpaper that looks like clouds in a blue sky, which might not have been so bad if it had been in better shape. (In general I hate most of the wallpaper they’d put up in this house. They did all their own papering, but they weren’t very good at it, so the seams are crooked and ragged and are coming unglued in places.) What didn’t really register when we inspected the house prior to buying was that this room was covered with glow-in-the-dark decals. They’re on every surface – the walls, the ceiling, the doors, the windows. Some of the phosphorescent stars on the ceiling are made of plastic and were stuck up there with something that has the consistency of chewed gum. Needless to say that stuff doesn’t come off completely, so we’ll just have to paint over the residue. The decals can be scraped off, but then they stick to the floor and clog up the vacuum cleaner brush. I was going to leave the wallpaper until I saw how grubby it was, so now I think we’ll strip it and paint – at least then everything will be clean! There was melted candle wax that had dripped all down one wall, the baseboard heat register and the floor, and gummy glue from stickers on the window moldings. The curtains were so filthy I threw them away. (I thought they were ugly, anyway.) The girl whose room it had been painted a boy’s name on the ceiling with glow-in-the-dark paint. I’m sure Christine and I weren’t fastidious as teenagers but we would never have been allowed to treat our parents’ house that way, even in our own rooms! I scratched my initials on one of the rockers of a rocking chair that was in my room when I was a little girl and I remember what hell I caught for that!
One major frustration is that there’s so much we want to do with the house but our funds for home-improvement are very limited at the moment. The admissions committee at our co-op turned down our buyers’ application so we had to put the apartment back on the market. We’re back in contract with another buyer, but for $11,000 less than the first offer. We’ve been carrying the costs of both properties for a lot longer than we had expected to, though. We thought we would be closing the sale of the apartment two weeks after we moved out, then we hit one snag after another, ending with the co-op’s rejection of the first buyers just before Christmas. I was a little put off – I was on the board of directors of the co-op for two years and they refused to tell me why they rejected our buyers. I doubt we should have a problem with this new guy – he’s putting down 60% in cash. But since I don’t know what they found objectionable about the first couple it still makes me nervous.
Something I’ve been enjoying here that I couldn’t in the city are all the birds in the backyard. We put up a feeder outside the sun porch that we can see from the kitchen or the porch. So far this winter our bird visitors include a pair of cardinals, some Carolina wrens, blue jays, chickadees, mourning doves, juncos, woodpeckers and titmice. Oh, and a white-breasted nuthatch. My favorites are the cardinals. They actually seem to have personalities, so they’re the only ones that we’ve “named.” The female makes her presence known every day by flying repeatedly into two windows, one panel of glass in the sun porch and one of the livingroom windows. I was very concerned about this behavior at first because I thought she was going to kill herself, but so far she hasn’t. I call her “Dipsy” because I’m sure she’s demented. Her mate we call “Dude” as in, “dude, can’t you keep her from doing that?!” It’s so different from living in NYC, where the only birds we saw were sparrows and pigeons. There are a couple of grey squirrels I was ready to kill, though. They would climb onto the feeder and gorge themselves until there wasn’t anything left for the birds. I finally bought a “wildlife block” of seeds and corn and other stuff and put it on the ground under the feeder, since it looked like I was going to end up feeding those squirrels one way or another. There was still one squirrel that preferred to eat out of the birdfeeder, but I threw ice cubes at him until he got the hint. The black squirrels are better behaved, and they chase the grey ones. I consider them my allies.
I need to get started on the errands and stuff before too much more of the day gets away. I’ll try to write again sooner rather than later.
Love,
January 21, 2006
Dear Aunt,
It shouldn’t take so much effort to sit down and write a letter, especially when it’s a more pleasant thing to do than running the vacuum or doing the laundry (both of which seem to take up an awful lot of my time lately… ) but I can’t think of why I do it much more seldom than I intend!
The weather here in Massachusetts has been glorious the last two days (for January in New England) – temperatures in the high 40s and low 50s with sunshine. So of course we want to do things outdoors before the temperature drops and the snow flies again. We had a vicious rainstorm on Wednesday with high winds that felled some trees here in town, but luckily it only brought down a few dead branches in our yard. I was going to pick them up yesterday afternoon with J*****'s help but when he got up from his nap he was a little too cranky to fight with him over socks and shoes and jackets so we didn’t do it. It’ll be something to do today, after shopping and other errands. J***** has been invited to a birthday party tomorrow for another little boy at his preschool, so I have to go out and get a gift today… there’s a toy store in town where I got J***** a wonderful soft inflatable ball for Christmas, and he enjoys it so much that I think I’ll get one for his friend. I like it because if he does happen to toss it in the house it won’t break anything.
We are slowly getting adjusted to our new house. I think it’s a very comfortable house and that we’re going to be happy living here, but often it still feels as if we’re living in someone else’s house. There are a few reasons for this but the main one I think is that the former owner’s decorating tastes are not the same as mine! She liked raspberry and mauve and watery teal, all colors I don’t particularly care for. And she seems to have been an indifferent housekeeper. When we moved in there was 40 years worth of crud inside the kitchen drawers and cabinets – UGH! I know the people we bought the house from were only responsible for 12 years worth, but it was really gross. If it hadn’t been only 20 degrees outside I would have taken the drawers outside with a wire -brush and the garden hose. As it was I had to cover every surface with liner paper before I could bring myself to put our dishes and utensils away. The carpets are not very clean, either.
I’m in the process now of preparing one of the front bedrooms for the new baby. (By the way, it’s another boy, due the first week of June. The results of the ultrasound and amniocentesis show that he’s healthy and active!)The former owners had two teenage girls when they lived here, both of whom had moved out on their own by the time their parents sold the house. I don’t think the teenagers’ bedrooms had been cleaned since they moved out; maybe not since they became teenagers! The room I’m working on now has wallpaper that looks like clouds in a blue sky, which might not have been so bad if it had been in better shape. (In general I hate most of the wallpaper they’d put up in this house. They did all their own papering, but they weren’t very good at it, so the seams are crooked and ragged and are coming unglued in places.) What didn’t really register when we inspected the house prior to buying was that this room was covered with glow-in-the-dark decals. They’re on every surface – the walls, the ceiling, the doors, the windows. Some of the phosphorescent stars on the ceiling are made of plastic and were stuck up there with something that has the consistency of chewed gum. Needless to say that stuff doesn’t come off completely, so we’ll just have to paint over the residue. The decals can be scraped off, but then they stick to the floor and clog up the vacuum cleaner brush. I was going to leave the wallpaper until I saw how grubby it was, so now I think we’ll strip it and paint – at least then everything will be clean! There was melted candle wax that had dripped all down one wall, the baseboard heat register and the floor, and gummy glue from stickers on the window moldings. The curtains were so filthy I threw them away. (I thought they were ugly, anyway.) The girl whose room it had been painted a boy’s name on the ceiling with glow-in-the-dark paint. I’m sure Christine and I weren’t fastidious as teenagers but we would never have been allowed to treat our parents’ house that way, even in our own rooms! I scratched my initials on one of the rockers of a rocking chair that was in my room when I was a little girl and I remember what hell I caught for that!
One major frustration is that there’s so much we want to do with the house but our funds for home-improvement are very limited at the moment. The admissions committee at our co-op turned down our buyers’ application so we had to put the apartment back on the market. We’re back in contract with another buyer, but for $11,000 less than the first offer. We’ve been carrying the costs of both properties for a lot longer than we had expected to, though. We thought we would be closing the sale of the apartment two weeks after we moved out, then we hit one snag after another, ending with the co-op’s rejection of the first buyers just before Christmas. I was a little put off – I was on the board of directors of the co-op for two years and they refused to tell me why they rejected our buyers. I doubt we should have a problem with this new guy – he’s putting down 60% in cash. But since I don’t know what they found objectionable about the first couple it still makes me nervous.
Something I’ve been enjoying here that I couldn’t in the city are all the birds in the backyard. We put up a feeder outside the sun porch that we can see from the kitchen or the porch. So far this winter our bird visitors include a pair of cardinals, some Carolina wrens, blue jays, chickadees, mourning doves, juncos, woodpeckers and titmice. Oh, and a white-breasted nuthatch. My favorites are the cardinals. They actually seem to have personalities, so they’re the only ones that we’ve “named.” The female makes her presence known every day by flying repeatedly into two windows, one panel of glass in the sun porch and one of the livingroom windows. I was very concerned about this behavior at first because I thought she was going to kill herself, but so far she hasn’t. I call her “Dipsy” because I’m sure she’s demented. Her mate we call “Dude” as in, “dude, can’t you keep her from doing that?!” It’s so different from living in NYC, where the only birds we saw were sparrows and pigeons. There are a couple of grey squirrels I was ready to kill, though. They would climb onto the feeder and gorge themselves until there wasn’t anything left for the birds. I finally bought a “wildlife block” of seeds and corn and other stuff and put it on the ground under the feeder, since it looked like I was going to end up feeding those squirrels one way or another. There was still one squirrel that preferred to eat out of the birdfeeder, but I threw ice cubes at him until he got the hint. The black squirrels are better behaved, and they chase the grey ones. I consider them my allies.
I need to get started on the errands and stuff before too much more of the day gets away. I’ll try to write again sooner rather than later.
Love,
posted by jenn | 10:28 AM
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