Home-Owning Librarian Extraordinaire

A few weeks back unLibrarian invited me over for a trade: she made sushi and I took a look at the irksome HTML messing with her blog. In between the two, she gave me a tour of her garden.

For starters, she put in her backyard fence herself. Let me repeat that. She put in the fence herself. A privacy fence. Oh yeah, she says, I put that up. A fence. My fence skills are such that I am already fretting over having to weatherproof my fence in two years.

Then she shows me her garden. She has both a vegetable and a flower garden. In her vegetable garden she grew corn, beans, tomatoes, carrots, rhubarb and some other things. I tasted one of the tomatoes. Edible produce. And she grew it. Hubby has been trying to get me to grow tomatoes in a bucket and I always manage to slide out of it. The idea that edible produce would proceed from me is laughable.

But it was the flower garden that blew me away. It is a bright, lush, cacaphonous square of flowers of all dimensions and heights. Oh yeah, she says, I bought some 99 cent flower packets from Wal-Mart, mixed them together, raked, and watered them every day for a week. That’s all there is to it.

I stare at her. Stare at the flowers. My mom bought me a hanging basket of annuals which I promptly killed with over-watering when we first moved in (“But you can be assured they didn’t die from lack of attention!” I told her). unLibrarian repeated that there was nothing to it.

We go back inside for dinner. I tell the woeful tale of the dead refrigerator. unLibrarian laughs kindly. She had, like, 6 major appliances die in the first year in including the stove, the fridge and the hot water heater. But she still found time to lay a new floor in her master bedroom.

All hail unLibrarian, master homeowner extraordinaire.

Of Patience and Refrigeration

When we bought the New House, all of the appliances except the furnace were at least ten years old. We prepared ourselves to buy on or about one appliance a year for the next five to eight years.

“But we’ll ride the gravy train for now,” we decided. We would coast on the gravy of the existing appliances until they died, scraping the last bit of usefulness out of each and every one of them.

When we’d been in the house three weeks the fridge died. Dead. Gone. All over. It was cranked at full capacity and running practically all day and night to maintain itself and Scott figured if he cleaned out the dust around the motors, it wouldn’t have to run as hard. So, he cleaned out the dust and it promptly stopped working. Murdered by lack of dust.

After two trips to Sears and one to Best Buy and two to Lowes just be SURE WE WERE GETTING A GOOD DEAL, we bought a Consumer’s Report recommended jobbie that had a water dispenser not in the door but inside the door (you open the door, there’s the dispenser).

Now I know how the other half lives. To me, having water in your refrigerator door – inside or out – is definitely a sign that YOU HAVE ARRIVED. From this moment on I shall be able to engage with my world from a new social standing. The standing of those who have ice makers and water dispensers in their refrigerators.

But there is one thing I don’t understand: if ONE: Having a water dispenser means you are better than human beings who do not have one and TWO: People who have water dispensers are therefore part of the “Better Half” and THREE: the “Better Half” generally runs things and FOUR: the “Better Half” spends a long time standing in front of their refrigerators waiting for painfully slow water dispensers to get them a glass of water, then WHY haven’t they learned a Zen-like patience that they can translate into their work at the White House and across the major business establishments of this nation?

They’ve had water dispensers for years and I see NO EVIDENCE that they have translated the Zen-like patience one learns from waiting on a water dispenser into running the politics and economy of this nation.

I fear there is something in my premises that needs to be revisited.

Of Fences, Bethesda, Biscuits, and Hastas

When we moved into the New House, Hubby and I decided to put in a new fence and deck. The existing fence was being propped up with metal stakes and the deck had about a year of safe use left. Plus, they were both eyesores. We were also making up for the two years we’d just spent sharing a tiny apartment deck with our oversized grill and a fabulous view of the parking lot. We wanted a nice place to sit outside.

I feel a great need to justify the new fence, mostly because of the expense. Looking to get a new fence? Watch out! Jesus H. Christ they’re expensive!

In any event, we had this little fantasy about the New Fence. We would get a new privacy fence and our cat, Bethesda, would enjoy the wild, wild, west of the backyard in blissful ignorance of the rest of the outside world, never showing the slightest interest in climbing or jumping the fence, simply enjoying the ease of her dominion. And I’ll be damned if we didn’t get it. She even comes back in 90% of the time when we open the door and call her. It’s perfect.

Except. Except that she has shown no interest whatsoever in protecting her domain. I have always thought of her, rather proudly, as my Alpha Cat. Numero Uno. The Cool One. The Top Dog. And yet, she has been bested by a surly squirrel who has the nerve to come down into our yard for snacks while she’s out there! And she does nothing about it! He screeches and cries and makes all the fuss you can imagine and she just stares at him and he gets bolder and bolder until he’s finally IN THE YARD.

“Biscuits!” I yelled at him last night. “I’m going to cook you into a stew and eat you with Biscuits you surly squirrel!”

And Bethesda just sat there – in our beautiful backyard with the picture-perfect fence and deck, the rose bushes and the restrained hastas, the birdbath and the burning bush. There’s just something about our backyard. We gravitate there. “Wanna go sit on the deck?” Hubby will ask. “Sure,” I’ll say, and we’ll just sit and chat, feeling good in our lovely little corner of the world.

I think this is what home ownership is about.

Librarian Busted

Today I received a bill for $100.01 from a library that shall remain unnamed. I have one of their interlibrary loan books. I remembered consistently that I HAD the book, I just didn’t feel like returning it. And then I didn’t feel like returning it some more so I renewed it. That worked pretty well, for a while. Then they suspended my borrowing privileges and sent me a bill. Ho-hum.

I want to call and say. “Don’t you think it sends a poor customer service message to send inflated bills for books overdue by barely a month? Perhaps your public services staff should consider reminder emails instead to enhance rather than detract from the public image of your library.” Snarl.

Surprised? Librarians have notoriously bad borrowing habits. I’ve known librarians respected state-wide for their exceptional skills who routinely run more than double over their book limit and often keep favorite titles for years on end, all with a good-natured giggle.

But don’t tell that to the patrons!

Yard Care

When we bought the New House we also went shopping for a lawnmower. Being the types of people that Hubby and I are, we bought a top of the line lawnmower as well as a weed wacker.

Now, I had never mown a lawn in my life to that point. Hubby’s best friend Stud Boy had shown me how to operate a lawn mower and weed wacker the month before the buy so I at least knew where the starter would be found, but that was the full extent of my lawn mowing experience.

The first time the lawn needed to be mown my mom was up helping out and she mowed it. Good enough.

The next week there was no one to save me and I bucked up and did it. I didn’t care for it very much.

The next week it needed to be mown AGAIN and I found this fact not only unwelcome but downright objectionable. I decided then that the lawn really only needed to be mown every other week.

As the second week came to a close I had to face reality: I was never going to mow the lawn again for as long as I lived. It was that simple.

I accepted this fact rather more easily and with rather more grace than did Hubby, whose moaning over what we were going to lose selling a used lawnmower that had 3 hours on it was most unbecoming. And pointless (refer to previous paragraph).

We now have a lawn service. They come every other week. Sometimes my grass is long. Sometimes my grass is short. Once a month there’s a bill in my mailbox. And all’s right with the world.

Bathrooms (Three)

Hubby and I recently bought our first home and we have this groovy tour you can take.

It’s my first house ever and it’s his first in over ten years. We’re thrilled with it. A big ranch with 3 bedrooms and 3 bathrooms. Three!

It’s taking me some time to get used to the concept of having three bathrooms. I – me, myself and I – have three bathrooms. I can’t tell whether to be proud, or to hide my glee as misplaced, bordering on bizarre. Let’s take a tour instead!

Let us begin our tour with the main bathroom. It’s huge and 1950s pink. A pink tiled floor with pink tiled wainscoating topped by granny-style flowering roses wallpaper. It’s very, very pink. I’m coming to appreciate the tile for its inherent pink-ness but I can’t groove on the wallpaper. I’d like to steam it off and replace it with a cinnamon stripe at some point. In any event, this bathroom has a long, lovely (pink tiled) vanity and an over-sized bathtub as well. The first time I sunk down in that bathtub filled with lavender-scented bubbles I nearly growled with pleasure.

Then there is the master bedroom bathroom. It is tiny, compact, with yellow tile to chest height and matching yellow curtains. I even have yellow hand-towels from the old apartment so I’m all cha-ching in the matching department.

The third bathroom is what hubby calls “The Men’s Room.” He calls it this because it is off of his workshop in the basement and when we first moved in it looked suspiciously like a gas station bathroom, picked up and dropped into my new home, mostly because of the aluminum sink and faucet. Well, Hubby replaced the sink, the faucet, and the toilet seat, and now the room looks like a normal bathroom except for the fact that it is brown with brown and cream tiling and I’ve never known a woman to paint a bathoom brown in all my days, so I suppose he can keep calling it The Men’s Room after all.

The fact behind the fabulous is that Lansing has a soft, affordable housing market. Without children to worry about the school district over, we bought the best house in the best Lansing neighborhood we could afford, and got three bathrooms for our buck.

And that’s the amazing tale of the snakeladylibrarian’s three bathrooms.

Beginning with a confession

Allow me to restart my blogging career with an admission.

I am a Trekkie.

I watch Star Trek most days of my life.

I believe that our humanity is our greatest asset.

I am the proud ancestor of a Star Fleet Academy honor roll student.

And I read an editorial yesterday by a man who was talking about what’s right about Captian Kirk’s leadership. He said that Kirk beat up plenty of aliens, but you could never imagine him torturing one of them.

Does that sum up what’s wrong with our nation’s leadership or what??

Star Trek: Still right after all these years.