I'm not sure that I've accurately conveyed the scale of the disaster that has been happening at our house these past two months, commencing promptly on January 2, when we discovered the poopriver in our driveway. In the eight weeks following that super-fun incident, all of the following events transpired:
These women definitely have great park strips.
When you grow up living in a New York City apartment, you do not think about things like the care and cultivation of of the "park strip" outside your front door (the part that isn't the sidewalk and isn't the street), as it is a spot most likely decorated with things like Diet Coke cans, and a stack of empty Chinese food cartons, and somebody's broken TV. You probably haven't even noticed it's there. You almost certainly have no idea who's taking care of it. And you definitely don't know the term "park strip."
As of two months ago, I know what a park strip is, because it turns out that in the suburbs, you own yours, and when it must be dealt with, it is you who must do the dealing. My park strip, for example, no longer really exists, as it was torn up by the city while they fixed the sewer line running down our street, and then they never came back. And charged me $3,500 for the pleasure. (Mmmmhmm you read that right. Apparently when the sewage from your entire street overflows into your driveway and you call the city to have them come fix it, they won't work on it unless the sewer access point for your property is within five feet of the street. So unless you want to continue accessorizing your front yard with your neighbors' poop, you will have to pay to relocate it. Home ownership, WHEE.)
Spring has sprung! (In my bedroom, anyway.)
The other day, Kendrick walked out of our garage and into our kitchen, all wide-eyed and horrified. In his hands were two (extremely cute, just saying) pillows, still all bundled up in plastic wrap.
"...Why?" he asked, holding them out at me like (electric orange, stunningly hand-stitched) sacrificial lambs.
This may just look like an Ikea daybed, but oh, it is so much more.
Remember how my friend Morgan has this magical ability to put together the actual, for-real, zero-exaggeration most comfortable bed in the world? Like, the kind of bed that I want to fall onto and then stay there forever and always because nothing has ever felt that good, ever? And remember how sometimes my children nevertheless come up with diabolical plans to stop me from sleeping anyway?
SHE DID IT AGAIN.
Look way up at the top there. See that big light fixture? Did not like.
Over the weekend my parents came to visit for an early Christmas celebration, and one night my dad and I were sitting at my dining room table talking about how unfortunately cavelike the lighting in my dining room/kitchen area is. The two primary problems: I had recently moved my dining room table from the center of the room over to one wall, and the pendant light that had previously hung over the center of the table now hung in the center of the dining room. Like, at head level.
The second problem I discovered on the day we moved in: the only light in our kitchen comes from one of those big, square 1960s-era fluorescent monstrosities. It's huge and ugly and casts a sort of sickly half-glow over the room, but I've always been nervous to pry it off because god knows what's underneath.
