Is that laughter I heard from the heavens?

As I have mentioned before, a certain subset of my extended family believes in appeasing the Magical Unicorn Pony Travel God. I am headed out for a long-planned trip to the Dominican Republic with my mother tomorrow, so the MUPTG has been on my mind. Alas, I think that I have already been deemed unworthy, as our pre-trip has been sullied by a few difficulties:

I had pictured drinking coffee on our apartment balcony and then strolling through sun-baked squares and museums. The most recent weather report shows about a 90% chance of rain every day, so I'm trying to re-imagine drinking coffee snugly inside the kitchen, and then hiking through showers to get to a museum.
More seriously, my mother sustained an injury. We were walking Ada the dog yesterday when a different dog broke through a unsecured gate and attacked. It bit my mother's hand and we spent the evening in urgent care. The good news is that she didn't need stitches and they are not worried about rabies. The bad news is she was a bit shook up, her hand is quite swollen, and she'll be sporting a big bandage in all the vacation photos.
Because of all the injury, neither of us are as on top of things as usual, and we forgot to check in early. Since we are flying Southwest, that means we won't be sitting together. I would normally take this opportunity to complain about Southwest, because unassigned seating drives me crazy. But my mother is treating me to this entire vacation as a birthday gift so I will firmly hold my tongue and enjoy the flight.

Luckily, my mother and I are people who try to see the positive. For example, when I served a rather unappetizing dinner tonight, she pointed out how nice it was to have food that was quickly prepared and filling. So we will make good travel companions for each other, and hopefully MUPTG will realize that we are not so easily defeated and will bestow upon us an eventful journey.

Changing it or living with it

Here's my proposed home renovation plan, even though some seasoned homeowners laughed when I proposed it: in the first year of living here, I want to renovate (pretty much) everything I want to renovate. The corollary, of course, is that if it isn't fixed, I'll live with it.

I've got two motivations here: I don't want to move away in ten years and still hate my bathroom walls. I have a friend who is spending this coming week replacing the linoleum in his kitchen that he has hated for 25 years, so that he can rent out his house. That means he's finally fixing something that he hated, but he won't get to enjoy the results, and he had to put up with ugly linoleum for two and a half decades. Also, I don't want to spend every day of the next decade working on this house. I'm enjoying the painting and I don't mind the electrical repairs, but at some point I'd like to get back to all my other hobbies.

There are a couple of caveats. (1) I expect that repairs and upkeep will keep happening. Houses occasionally need new water heaters and repainted windowsills  and the house doesn't care whether or not I feel like doing that. (2) I don't expect to change how I use the house. Right now, I only plan to live here for about ten years. If you stay anywhere for decades, your life changes and you naturally remodel the playroom into a teenager hangout or put in a wheelchair ramp.

Now that I've made this public, we can all check back in five years. If I'm still replacing walls or laying down new carpet, you have my permission to laugh at my foolishly optimistic plan.

The joys of home ownership

Almost always, when people talk about the joys of home ownership, they say the phrase with cynicism. It is almost always followed by a list of problems with said house. Today I am using that phrase truthfully. I've owned my house for almost six months, and here's what I appreciate about it.

1. The time I spend doing dishes is almost zero. Every other day, the magical box turns my dirty dishes into clean ones. And I put my dishes in the dishwasher immediately, so the dishwasher serves as a dirty plate storage device, and the whole kitchen always looks tidy.
2. In the next few years I will have raspberries, figs, and asparagus and I will probably be able to harvest for twenty years. One of the main reasons I bought a house was to have more gardens and to have long-term plantings like fruit trees. A free tip to my friends: starting in 2018, the best time to visit me will be in April and May during Spargelzeit. (The Germans love asparagus so much they have a name for asparagus season.)
3. I'm saving more money every month. Buying a house is not automatically cheaper than renting. I've been careful to not overspend on furnishings and home repair supplies, and my mortgage plus maintenance costs is roughly equivalent to my previous rent. But owning a house meant that I could get a roommate. I've had my first short-term roommate in the house for two months, and so far I love it. The ability to have a roommate and save on housing costs is the other big reason I wanted a house.
4. I have a basement workshop. I hadn't planned on this, but having all the tools arranged on shelves, instead of packed in boxes in my bedroom, makes small repair jobs so much easier. I used to schlep a saw, clamps, wood, and extension cord outside every time I needed to cut something. Now I just hop downstairs to the miter saw and in 30 seconds the job is done.
5. I use the Metro more. Again, proximity to a Metro stop (subway, for those of you not from DC) wasn't a priority for me, since I commute by bike or car. The difference between the 30-minute walk to the stop and my new 10-minute walk means I'm much more willing to take the Metro than a car when going into DC. This is probably a wash financially, but it gives me more flexibility and means that I arrive downtown relaxed from catching up on reading instead of stressed from fighting DC traffic.

The final frontier

     Long ago, in graduate school, I started watching repeats of old Star Trek episodes. Back in those olden days, before Netflix and Amazon Prime, the only way to see television shows was to pay ungodly sums of money for entire seasons on VHS tapes. Unless you had a brother, like I did, who could *ahem* procure the shows for you through more nefarious means. Ah, the good old days of BitTorrent.
     Since I had all these great episodes burned on CDs, I started sharing them with a few people, who also became enamored of Star Trek. (This is, in fact, how I gained a reputation among a select audience as a dealer, as I pushed my addictive product). A few of us came up with the idea of meeting together weekly, to watch a few episodes and drink beer.
     After a few years, I moved away and started attending virtually, through video chats. Since academia requires a lot of moving, this weekly connection was an important chance to see old friends, as we moved for post-docs, temporarily lived apart from spouses, and moved again for yet another position.
     Time passed. One couple joined the group, and one left. Babies were born, and people died. We bought houses, took permanent jobs, and still kept coming back every Tuesday night to chat with friends about our lives, watch one episode of Star Trek, and then carefully ignore every law of physics that was violated.
     This year marked our tenth anniversary. Because I'm a complete dork who convenes committees and writes press releases and white papers for a living, I wrote up a tenth anniversary report detailing the history of the group. Because my friend T is equally dorky, he drafted a timeline, complete with Star Trek references, and soon there will be a commemorative t-shirt. It's hard to describe what this group has meant to me through the years. They've provided companionship when I moved to a new city, alone as a post-doc, and they've provided comfort after my husband died. It just goes to show that you can find community almost anywhere, even around the nucleus of illegally obtained sci-fi television shows from the 90's.
   

Beware the cavorting capsule

This cheerful, dancing capsule adorns the informational brochure that came with my oral typhoid vaccine. When the doctor told met that the oral vaccine gave me twice as many years' protection, and didn't involve a shot, I was sold. But it's a live vaccine, I have to take it for a week, and it has more frequent side effects. So far I've had fever, chills, and what is delicately referred to as gastrointestinal distress.
I'll definitely grant that this is better than typhoid, but at the same time I'd have to point out that this vaccine has a 75% effectiveness rate. I wish I had approached this smiling guy with a little more caution. Hopefully the next four days will go more smoothly than the last two.

Project Day, yet again

Saturday was once again a Project Day, and this time it was at my house. This was great timing, in that I wanted to put in garden beds before too much of spring was gone. This was also terrible timing, in that I had just worked twelve days straight and the weather didn't cooperate.

My plucky friends and I were undaunted, of course. I had counted on my (strong) friend N helping me to rent the tiller and to lift it into my car for transport home, and I was worried when he got sick and couldn't come. Instead, a female friend helped me pick up and load the 125-pound tiller. I had worried needlessly; these two friends are mothers who pick up heavy children every day and they are bigger and stronger than me. 

What you can't see in the pictures below is that it was in the low 50's F (low teens C) and raining. So please dump a cup of cold water over your head, carry a 40 pound bucket 100 feet and dump it, and repeat. Then you'll get a better feel for our day.

 It was hard work holding the tiller back so that it could churn up the clay soil and grass.

Four adults and three small children hauled topsoil and compost* from the front yard to the new garden beds in the back yard.

The new beds are beautiful. The very next day, I ordered asparagus, a fig tree, and raspberry bushes to plant in the new gardens. This was a perfect way to celebrate the new gardens, as these are all plants I couldn't have in my old place (since they take so long to establish) and I could order the plants without moving from my bed, where I spent most of Sunday recovering.

*Many thanks to my in-laws, who bought me 5 cubic yards of dirt as a housewarming gift.

Great Material Continuum

On Sunday I was planning to go to Home Depot and purchase supplies for the garden, but instead I got a new couch. I wasn't intending to get a couch; I have a perfectly acceptable one. It's originally from IKEA, pulls out into a double bed, and has only a half a dozen stains on it. I can blame some of those on the pets, but not all. (Tip: when a friend says, "I'm sure we'll be fine using super glue while sitting on the couch," don't believe her. Super glue stains are forever.)

However, on Saturday night I saw that someone on the neighborhood listserv had an old couch that needed a new home. It was from the 1930's, and it was the two things I can't resist- old, and free. I went to look at it the next morning and was smitten. In fact, I didn't even think to sit down on it until after it was in my house. Luckily, it's pretty comfy for an eighty-year-old sofa. As far as I can tell, the cushions are stuffed with cloth, instead of foam rubber (which would make sense, because I've read that foam rubber didn't become widespread until the 40's). It's very different than sitting on the boxy IKEA couch, which was snapped up by a Craigslist buyer this evening. 

As my friend N said, this is all part of the Great Material Continuum*, whereby some material goods are in excess in some places, but lacking in others. The Continuum has taken away a less optimal seating option and given a more styling option.

*Nerdy Star Trek reference. Read more here.