deliver us from weasels

I don't want an iPhone. I have a blackberry and I barely use all the extra features. Could be because I am too cheap to upgrade to the crappy EDGE internet service.

Now I love the internets and I have a tech job, so I don't think I am a complete luddite. But I think my essential cheapness is getting in the way of this iPhone hysteria.

I can't see how it is better than what exists except that it will sync up with a Mac. I do like that -- that is part of the reason I barely use my blackberry. But I am a little unclear on the EDGE/WiFi roaming. Oh, and it's AT&T -- for the price I want something with customer service.

Just to establish my credibility, I do have an iPod and a Mac mini and I work on a Windows laptop (I go both ways). I also have a crappy digital camera (can't you tell by the photos?). Is that not enough to make me cool?

I do not have cable TV or Tivo, but I do have a Canon Rebel Film camera I love and a top-of-the-line CD player. Am I old school?

Am I going to eat my words once I see a real-live iPhone in action? Not that I would buy one, but still...I tend to dislike things that are so hyped, but once the excitement dies down and it is no longer cool to want one. Then maybe.

Yeah, this is old, but still : Announcing the Apple iProduct

Labels: tech

This was the view from the bed of the beachcabin we stayed in this weekend. It had been exactly a year since out last vacation.

We needed some downtime, even if only for a weekend. Highly recommend it.

We got the last panel in last night. Yay! The kitchen is nowhere near finished, but damn, that looks good. Clean and uniform and not full of toxic chemicals. What more could you want in a floor?



And one more "before" picture for the record:

Labels: remodel

We went to not only the Parade, but the Festival, and the God-des and She show the night before. And had houseguests. And installed most of the Marm0leum. It was quite a weekend. And much fun.

On returning from Pride I had that confusing feeling where after being around queers all weekend I started thinking everyone I saw was gay and had to reorient myself. Odd feeling it is, to come back to the real world. One that is not so friendly, not so vibrant and colorful, but still a very good world. But because I feel so much free-er in Portland, Pride can only be so exciting. Not like in NC, where Pride was our one chance all year to hold hands in public. I think if mwt and I were not so out of the habit we could hold hands in many places in Portland. But how sad is that, that holding hands is something we worry about? Ah, the world has a long way to go on this.

But what is pride weekend without a partially finished project? The Marm0luem was much harder (physically and mathematically) to install than we thought and it was a bit much to undertake on Pride weekend. So I am exhausted. And sore from all the flooring. And the dog has been neglected and discovered a way to escape the yard on Sunday and went missing and mwt and I freaked out. Then he came back, but we could not figure out where he had been or how he got out.

So this morning, in my exhaustion I let Bentley out in the back-yard and starting working on a computer problem and then realized what I done. So I run outside in my bathrobe, my crazy morning hair, and mwt's bedroom slippers and start calling for him. And I think I hear my neighbor. So I go around front and there is my very nice neighbor holding my very bad dog.

Then he releases Bentley's collar and instead of coming to me he runs across the street and jumps on a little boy walking with his Dad. And I have to run after him in my bathrobe and slippers. All I was missing was curlers in my hair.

Now I feel like the trashiest person ever. Bad enough that we were outside running the table saw on flooring all weekend, and had people in and out of our house at all hours, now we have a half-dressed crazy woman running down the street after her uncontrollable dog. We are "those people."

After this weekend, if all goes as planned, we will no longer have a kitchen floor made up of a mixture of nasty 50+ year-old paint splattered vinyl, plywood, leveling compound, and various rugs covering the most nasty areas. The Marm0leum is in the house.

We were originally going to go with some cheap and easy vinyl stuff, but the blog told me there was a better way. So, hope this all works out for us. Or else I will be blaming the blog.

But it certainly will be nice to be able to tell if the floor is clean or not and not be forced to throw away or boil everything that touches the kitchen floor. And finally install the cabinet baseboard and move on with this kitchen. Maybe even paint. That would be cool.

Labels: remodel

Gay Mass. Lawmakers Reject Anti-Gay Amendment

So, I guess that means my friends in MA are still married. For now. As long as they don't leave MA. Small victories, but we have to fight for even the small ones.

Labels: politics

Here is the downside to living in a city with public transportation. Everyone wants to visit and no one wants to rent a freaking car. Even though we tell people when they are making their reservations at Hotel Portland (that would be our tiny 1100 sq ft, one bathroom, mid-renovation home) that we only have one car and they should rent one, they think it would be fun to not have one. Which means schedules need to be rearranged around me taking mwt to work or else I end up taking multiple people on guided bus tours of Portland (not as fun to project manage as you might think).

See, the cool thing about people renting a car is they can drive their own damn selves around. But no one wants to do that. A free place to stay is so much more fun with a chauffeur service included. So my mother is planning this trip here in July to Portland, and then up to Seattle so she can visit my stepfather's son, and then Vancouver, BC. Well, my stepfather's son is obviously already onto the horror that is a visit from my mother and says they cannot come up during the week and must wait until the weekend. So my mother is reorganizing her vacation plans and now has decided she will not rent a car, but instead take buses and trains and such to have her vacation. And she will be here longer, of course. And she needs my help making all her decisions and she hopes we won't mind driving her around, but it would save her money, etc, etc. OK, my mother has boundary issues to say the least. And she is also emotionally unstable and an alcoholic, so that it makes even that much more fun. Wheee!

And people wonder why I moved to the opposite end of the country. Already, mwt and I are creating a strategy to keep my mother's drinking to a manageable level while she is here.

I am so not cool with this. I don't want to help her plan her trip, much less cart her around because I don't want her to visit. It's terrible, but I have 10+ years of therapy that supports me in this belief.

But she already booked her flight and we are stuck with this visit. And she just sent me her train schedule, so that is all set up as well. Maybe I will save her some money and rent her the damn car, and hotel rooms, and maybe pay for her meals away from me.

I hate family visits. It's true. My family and mwt's family. I actually like mwt's family, but they also have boundary issues -- boundaries are very important to me (is it obvious?). But I need my alone time and I also need to keep to a certain schedule of eating and caring for the animals, etc. It seems so simple, but family visitors do not really understand that.

I like friends visiting though because I like my friends -- my chosen family is chosen for a reason. We have a friend tentatively coming for Pride weekend -- and that is fabulous. So I am not the complete anti-host, I just really hate how this whole family visit thing is going. I feel like I have no control and I am so dreading it. And it will pretty much eat up July and August and mwt and I haven't really had a chance to enjoy living in Portland since we got here. So I am a little bit jealous that other people are using our house for that purpose before we have a chance to ourselves.

So there it is all out in the open. Maybe I feel a little better writing it all out? Nah, still pissed. I swear, this hotel will be closed next summer. People want to come visit, they can come in February.

Labels: whine

We reached renovation saturation after we finished tiling/rebuilding/repiping the tub, so we took a break from the big projects. This means we have been living with just about everything in a state of partial doneness for the past few months. But we have tackled some random projects and had some other breakthroughs recently.

For example:

• We finished the kitty dungeon path. We built a safe and restricted path for the kitties to go up and down to their litter. Now we can actually leave them loose in the house without having to make the decision to put them in the kitty prison or trap them upstairs without a litter box. This is a major improvement for everyone in the witchtrivets household.


• Speaking of leaving the house, now that the kitty situation is improved, we are interviewing a catsitter and planning a weekend away. This will be the first vacation we have had since moving to Portland last fall. We might finally see the Pacific Ocean.


• We can now open the back door. Six months in, we finally hacked away at enough of the back door that the damn thing will open. Of course, now we have a rat-sized hole at the bottom of the door, but whatever.


• Speaking of doors, mwt was able to repair the garage door so that it will actually latch and lock. Now we can put our garden things in there -- it will keep the old kitchen cabinets and the carpet we pulled up company. Unfortunately, while the door was not latched, no one wanted to steal the musty old carpet and 50+ years old cabinets.


• The blinds arrived! Not on time, but still. They rock! They were spendy, but completely worth it. Every day either mwt or I remark how happy these blinds make us. And then admit to our essential lameness in that blinds can thrill us. But they work -- and in this house, that is a big deal. Yay for blinds!


• On the family front, my father sent an e-mail to me AND addressed mwt. Despite his hateful e-mail to me last fall, I could not let his birthday go unacknowledged. So I sent him a goat. Well mwt and I gave a goat to Heifer in his name. I sent him an e-card from Heifer about the goat and he sent us an e-mail thanking us both. Shocking. Is it a breakthrough? I don't know. But I am hopeful. I'd rather have a distant superficial relationship with my father than none at all. It's less stressful for me.


• And mwt and I have both had some recent successes in our careers. so that is good too (not really a breakthrough, but having good jobs is always worth calling out.)

There are probably more. Right now we are trying to figure out what's next on the house. We have a lot of things to do (mwt has spreadsheeted it all), all are big projects and all are expensive.

So, if you were living in a partially remodeled house, would you try and finish one entire room at a time? Or an entire system?

For example, finish the kitchen (floor/walls/bar/lighting/etc.) or the bath(same as kitchen with a sink to replumb), or finish repiping the house (we have galvanized and it needs replacing)?

We are also living without functional furniture (except the beds, we like our bed). Would you buy furniture before the house was painted and the walls repaired (let's not even talk about the floors)?

I am an animal person far more than I am a people person. For goodness sake, I catch and rescue spiders when mwt runs screeching out of the bathroom (it's a secret, but I am the bug dispatcher in this relationship). Would I perform a catch-and-release if I found a toddler building a web in the corner of the shower? I don't know, but my instinct says no.

But our house is in a state. Especially the outside. We had a huge family of squirrels in the eaves out front until we removed the hideous awnings that made it so easy for the babies to crawl in and out (yes, we are living in "that house"). After a complicated squirrel baby season -- although it was pretty cute when the daddy squirrel had to come and rescue the baby squirrels who could not make it up to the eaves again -- the squirrels moved along to a more accessible area. It was a painless event -- we made it a little harder for them and they decided that it might be better to not live in our house.

But now we have birds living in the eaves in the back of the house. And not just any birds -- starlings. Not cool. I know how they are. We aren't putting out the birdfeeders because we don't want other birds in the yard with the starlings here. The babies have hatched -- we hear them. The nest is basically reachable from our deck. And that is the thing. I love birds, but I am picky. Starlings are not nice birds. And yes I know I should have closed up the holes to keep the wildlife out, but we are doing as much as we can just to live in the inside of this house -- and it is too late now.

I want to appreciate these birds and feel happy in my animal-loving way, but I don't. I want those starlings out. I have read posts on the internet (so they must be true) from people who actually exterminate starlings who nest in or near their homes. I am not that hard-core.

But does wanting those starlings out make me less of animal person? hard to say. I guess I will just have to wait them out. Sounds like 3-20 birdlings from the noise. I'll just hope they grow quickly and move onto their next stage as soon as possible -- the next stage being breaking into the neighbors' cars and tagging concrete walls. That is the kind of birds starlings are.