The Gurly Life

New AC -- Report

Now that we've had a couple of days of stifling heat, I can report that the new AC works beautifully. It is a 10,000 BTU unit (I couldn't go higher because I only have a 115V socket), and all I need is for it to be on the lowest fan setting and it cools the whole place. Natch, I have it set for 77F so as to conserve energy.

Point is, the thing is fabulous! Thanks again, dad!

More good things

This is not quite of global proportions: I'm refinancing my mortgage. Well, that's not that monumental, you say, and why did you wait this long, the rates have been low for a while. However, we had an open lawsuit in our building against the developer who converted our building to condos for construction defects. Said developer had the bad manners to die in a plane crash soon after the lawsuit was initiated (and I immediately thought, and continue to think, that he faked his death -- not surprisingly, our HOA was not the only entity suing him for shoddy work).

Once the man "died," the lawsuit basically fizzled away, and we had to fix the construction defects ourselves. And finally, we decided to dismiss the suit, as it was apparent that there was no restitution to be had. In short, the lawsuit is finally over. And finally, refinancing became possible.

The upshot of this is that I now get to save about $3,600 a year, which is about the amount of my annual property taxes. Thing about property taxes is that even though I know they're coming, and I budget for them, and I'm happy to pay my bit, it always still feels like getting punched in the gut. You property owners know what I mean.

ABUNDANCE NOW!

Urban gardening

If this isn’t city gardening, I don’t know what is.

About three weeks ago, I went to a nursery to get a new pot and potting soil for my money tree (and by the way, it doesn’t really work, and it looks a bit like a pot plant, but it occurs to me that it might have been more a more effective money tree if it had, in fact, been a marijuana plant). I was inspired to purchase a couple of plants for my condo. As I mentioned, I am not very domestically inspired, but every now and again I have an impulse. As it is so rare, I try not to resist this impulse, you never know when I might get on a domestic roll and before you know it, shazam! I’m transformed.

What?! It could happen. After all, I’m unpredictable, remember?

But, as almost always happens, I digress.

Usually when I need assistance in certain domestic endeavors, such as hanging things on walls, fixing stuff, or repotting plants, I enlist the help of friends. Ok, usually, it’s my friend Kirke, bless his heart.

This time, however, Kirke was of less help than usual. However, I didn’t need to look far for repotting help, as his wife, Gail, is an expert gardener.

Granted, repotting plants is not the most complicated thing to do, but when you are not domestically inclined, the issue is not the difficulty, the issue is that there is always something else you’d rather be doing. So, to ensure that I would do it, I made a date with Kirke and Gail for lunch and repotting. We went to The Palace, a favorite Chinese restaurant in the neighborhood, and on our way back we spotted this fantastic tiny urban garden. There was a plant with a tiny bell pepper, and various little tags, including broccoli. In the planter before, there is what looks like fennel, and in the following, green onions and some other stuff we couldn’t identify. I wonder if it’s the garden of a homeless person, the apartments on this sidewalk have decks and balconies so they have the space to have pots with plants. 

If you look carefully, you can see one tag towards the left. And here you can see a couple of these tiny urban gardens, the one in the back seems to be sprouting fennel.

Just how fabulous is this?? Kudos to Gail's sharp gardening eye for this little treasure.

Anyway, then we got home and Gail and I repotted the plants. Here are a few action shots. Note how dignified she is, and how not dignified I am. I swear, I look like I'm trying to plug the oil leak off the coast of Louisiana. Come to think of it, maybe I should go over there next, and take care of it.

But in the end, the plants were repotted and, as my t-shirt prophesied, I was able to blog about it.

A shopping spree

When my mom comes to visit, we take on big domestic projects. By "we," I mean that my mom does the thinking, which includes hours of catalog and website perusal, decides what will work where, and then we do it. This time around we have a couple of big projects. One is to go through every drawer, closet, box, and pile, and get rid of anything and everything I don't need. We've only just begun, and my hallway is already full of stuff that we'll be carting off to Goodwill, and stuff that will be thrown out.

The other big project is taking on the furniture. There are several things I have been wanting to do for a while, but they always take a back seat to, say, writing classes and trips to Hawaii. Today we went to Ikea and got some stuff: a bed, a table, and chest of drawers. The bed will go in the bedroom, under the mattress which is now on the floor. The table will go in the kitchen, and the round table I have there now (as well as the cat table by the window) will have to find a new home, somewhere somehow. The chest of drawers will replace the shipping trunks I currently have sitting under the tv. We ended up w/ drawers because space is limited and this way a guest has a place to put their things. Not exactly an entertainment center, but all things in good time.

Because my mom had so painstakingly looked through the entire catalog many many times and we measured things and consulted before going to the store, the trip only took three and a half hours. For me, that's a record, normally I start freaking out after about an hour of shopping.

Here's what we got, though of course the pictures are a bit meh. You'll just have to wait for them to be assembled and all to see the full effect (and yes, we're paying someone to do the assembling, these things are too heavy to do ourselves).

 
 

The table below has two extra leaves that can be inserted in the middle to make it longer, as you can see. Except the pictures just make the table look smaller, but I gotta work with what I got.


 

By the time I move to Colorado, the place will be perfect.

Sigh...

Today the new dresser was safely delivered. I'll start off by saying that the dresser is gorgeous. Solid, dark wood, nice detail without being floofy, with a slight rustic look but only very slight. Perfect.

And it so does not fit. Ok, wrong, it's not that it doesn't fit, it's that now everything else I have, which is mostly cheap crap that was intended only as temporary furniture but which later was not replaced because I would rather travel to Europe and Hawaii and get laser hair removal treatments than buy furniture, looks very much like the cheap crap that it is.

I put my little tv on it, my very respectable and excellent little tv, and it just looks so sad and so puny. The dresser demands a large, flat screen plasma tv hung on the wall above it. And I'm all, sorry, dude. Shucks, I think I'm underdressed.

Crapola

I have known that my AC unit, which is a cheap-ass piece of crap that the developer installed when he converted the building from apartments to condos, would need to be replaced. I think it is now time to do that. Sigh. It ain't gonna be cheap, and I'm kinda dreading dealing with the car repairs, even though I know that the insurance company will be covering the cost.

I'm a vacuuming FIEND!

I am determined to determine whether my new vacuum is worth the money I paid for it ($400!!!). Besides, I want a vacuum that is easy enough to use that I can suck up dirt every 2 or 3 days instead of waiting until the cleaning lady every 2 weeks. A lot of cat hair and dirt accumulate in 2 weeks.

Today it passed a key test: the kitty litter catcher mat. It looks kinda like this:

I have it outside the bathroom door, and it's supposed to catch the litter from the cats' feet so it doesn't get everywhere in my place. It works when they actually walk on it. Mostly, they walk around it or leap over it. Whatever. What's annoying about this little mat is that it catches hair something beautiful. My hair, that is, from my head. Any hair I lose ends up caught in this thing. Every so often I have to clean it, and doing it manually is a real pain. Today I grabbed my little vacuum and ran it over the mat to see if it was strong enough to pull the hair off it. Mind you, pulling the hair out of this thing requires grabbing it with some force and pulling. I am very pleased to report that the new vacuum actually pulled about 90% of the hair off the mat.

Now I know that these vacuum posts are extraordinarily boring. But in my defense, I don't care.

Edited to add: I vacuumed the living room rug and the bedroom again today. Just for shits and giggles. You would be shocked at the amount of cat hair that accumulated since just yesterday, and that collected itself in my new little vacuum's basket. Shocked.

I caved and bought a new vacuum

When I moved to my place in Hollywood, I bought myself a vacuum cleaner. I lived in Hollywood 7 years, and when I moved, I bought a new vacuum cleaner. With cats, with all that pet hair, they just don't last very long. The one I have now is about 4 years old, and frankly, it's a pain to maintain, it's heavy, and it doesn't really work that well. Not anymore.

I've been curious about the Dyson vacuum cleaners for a while. Plus since my mom visited, I realized that I needed a lightweight but powerful vacuum. After all, my place is small, but I have lots of cat hair to contend with. Dyson recently started advertising a new line of upright vacuums that pivot on a ball, thereby making it easier to maneuver. Good idea, but does it work?

I went to Target and snatched up this little pumpkin of a vacuum cleaner, the Dyson DC24.

I'm happy to report that it's small and lightweight, it assembles and disassembles easily, the basket comes apart in a snap and gets washed out, and the filters are lifetime filters - you just wash them once a month. The brush thingy in the front slides out so you can unwind hair or loose pieces of string. If you've ever tried to clear the brush thingy of a vacuum from hair, you'll know what a pain in the butt that is. It handles great.

But the question is, does it work?

The rug in the living room was covered in car hair, despite a visit by my very good cleaning lady. In 3 minutes, I cleaned it completely. So far, so good.