Meme

Today, I was perusing a list of words you're pronouncing wrong—I like to read things like this because they make me feel intellectually superior (though I did miss one word on this particular list: "mauve"), and I found the word "meme" on it.

I remember the first time I encountered the word "meme." It was probably around 2010. One of my friends kept saying it on Facebook, using it to refer to those once-ubiquitous surveys where you answer random questions about your yourself and post them on social media.

I puzzled over the meaning of the word but didn't look it up (because needing a dictionary is a sign of weakness!) and so came to the conclusion that "meme" was a survey one shares about oneself. And it was pronounced "Me me" because it was all about me!

Well, after some time passed, and I read of other things being referred to as memes (things that were far from personal surveys—LOLCats come to mind), I eventually had to admit my weakness and consult a dictionary.

Dictionary.com defines meme as 

1. a cultural item that is transmitted by repetition and replication in a manner analogous to the biological transmission of genes.
2. a cultural item in the form of an image, video, phrase, etc., that is spread via the Internet and often altered in a creative or humorous way.

Once I looked up the definition, it became clear that any resemblance it had to the word "me" and any narcissistic implications of such were completely coincidental. 

At this point, I also learned that the word is pronounced "Meem," and I never looked back.

Until I read that list today and was reminded of my past stupidity. My misunderstanding of the word meme is probably one of the more amusing linguistic mistakes I've made in my life, but I'm glad that chapter is over. Here's celebrating 6 years of knowing the meaning and pronunciation of meme!

The Plan

Since yesterday's rant about my struggles with housing, I have had some time to settle my thoughts and come to some conclusions.

Fact 1: Much as I would like my boyfriend to contribute to the rent, I don't think it would be the best course of action for either of us. He does, after all, pay all the utilities (I asked him to take on that responsibility when we moved to the apartment, since he's so fond of running electronic devices 24/7), so it's not like he's just dead weight. He also finances most of our entertainment and food budget. I'm slightly peeved that he would rather spend his money improving a house he doesn't live in than on helping the two of us live more comfortably, but, I don't feel it's an important enough issue that I have to pick a fight about it. Our current situation is working for us, and we might as well keep it that way. 

Fact 2: I'm actually in a very good situation now, as far as it comes to being choosy. I have a place to live, a roommate to help with the rent, and, as of the end of this month, a month-to-month lease (that may come back to bite me as it did with my last place, should my landlord decides he wants his condo back...but probably won't because most landlords don't want to go through the bother of finding a new tenant when the current one pays their rent on time). So I can afford to bide my time.

Fact 3: I have been reluctant to commit to renting a new place, since my first priority is to buy one and be done with it. However, I've come to realize that just as bringing an umbrella ensures that it won't rain, committing to a year-long lease and going through the hassle of a move is probably the surest way to make buyable homes pop up like mushrooms. If I lose a month's rent because I have to break my lease, that would still be preferable to living forever in a place I hate.

These three facts have led me to a solution, an eminently promising one. Here's what I'm going to do about my miserable living situation.

Step 1: I will hold out for an affordable and convenient freestanding house, either to purchase or to rent, until the end of May/early June. At that time, college students will be moving out, and the options may be more plentiful. 

Step 2: If I haven't found the house of my dreams by the beginning of May, I will put in my application for Belcrest Plaza. This is an older apartment complex in Hyattsville, a far cry from the luxury apartments that are popping up all around the area. It is probably infested with roaches, but it has 3 things going for it: 1) It's within walking distance of a Metro station, 2) It has doors that open right out onto the sidewalk, making it easy to bring a bike in and out, and 3) It is cheap. I could get a 1-bedroom unit for under a thousand dollars, and a 2-bedroom for under 1400, which means I won't have any trouble affording a unit that's big enough for two humans and two dogs. 

And those two simple steps are the plan! I always feel better when I have a plan.

Houses and the lack thereof

In case you missed the memo, in the fall I was kicked out of my rental house and obliged to take up residence in a condo, which I hate. I keep shopping for alternative abodes, but it seems I either have to choose between living at an apartment complex and all the trials that come with that, or paying 1800+ a month for the privilege of living in a house. Since the majority of my readers live in Ohio, where rents this high are still inconceivable, let me assure you that this is standard for the DC suburbs, but still about 500-900 dollars a month more than living in a 1-bedroom apartment. Financially, the choice between the two is an obvious one, but I really, really, really can't stand the inconvenience of a communal laundry machine. I go back and forth with myself about the equally undesirable options pretty much constantly...so yes, I'm a little bit irritable about my housing prospects.

In case you missed the other memo, for approximately the last year of my life, I've been trying and failing to buy a house. I started out around this time last year sort of casually poking around the housing market, thinking "well, I've been half-heartedly shopping for houses for the past 6 years; I can wait another 6 until I find the perfect place." And over the next 12 months, graduated from patient disinterest to extreme desperation. Now, when my bids get rejected or a house fails inspection, it means hours of crying and days of depression.

It doesn't help that somehow I have landed myself in a social circle where everyone already owns a home. Among the people I talk to most often, 3 out of 4 are homeowners. My boyfriend, who lives with me but owns the house his parents occupy, is obsessively formulating a plan for remodeling said house. On an eerily similar note, the 4th of the four aforementioned friends lives in an apartment but is inexplicably interested in demolishing his parents' home and rebuilding it.

It's nearly impossible for me to escape the talk of home maintenance and remodeling. And while I can't begrudge any of these people their interest in their homes, I simply can't understand it. Why would you want to remodel a house you don't even live in? Why not take all the money you're throwing away on fixing up someone else's home, and instead invest it in making your own living situation a little less crappy? Why are you making your girlfriend pay all the rent for the two of you and your two dogs (who incidentally make your housing options a lot fewer and more expensive) while you fritter away your own money on vaulted ceilings for your parents who clearly couldn't care less whether or not they have vaulted ceilings, or they would have added them themselves? Hmmm... perhaps my boyfriend and I need to have a conversation about our fiscal priorities, but in the meantime, back to the subject of home-talk.

Being the only person who doesn't have a house (whilst being a person who arguably needs to live in a house more than anyone else!) means you get stuck listening to a lot of conversations that make you jealous. (You also, somehow, got a free subscription to Traditional Home, which is like a kick in the butt every time you receive an issue.)

And so I've realized, after several years of finally not being single, that Love and the Lack Thereof has been supplanted as the single most distressing issue in my life. It's now housing (so much so that I'm creating a new tag for the blog)! I think Public Display of Homeownership (PDH) is my new Public Display of Happiness in a Relationship. It doesn't matter if you're boasting about your newest addition or complaining about your plumbing—you have what I've been struggling to attain, and that ticks me off.

This might sound like complaining. It is complaining. But in the midst of my frustration, jealousy, despair, self-loathing, anger, and the rest of the negatives, there is one thing that makes me smile.

I didn't really need to write this blog post, because blatant PDH is not something I often have to face.

Most of my friends got both of the aforementioned memos. Most of them now preface any kind of discussion about housing with an apology. They understand it's a sensitive issue for me and don't want to remind me. Unlike before, when it seemed like the whole world was trying to rub my relationship non-status in my face, I feel like my failings in this matter (admittedly trifling compared to world hunger and true homelessness, etc.) are being treated with compassion. So while I will never go so far as to say I've been lucky, I can at least say that I have some pretty cool friends.

Saturday, Sunday, and Monday Night Fever

Last week, I was on a vacation to Mexico to visit the overwintering monarch butterflies. I'll be sure to tell you all about it, but you'll have to wait until I have recovered from my cold. 

I knew, even before I left, that I was destined to catch a cold on this trip, since I had miraculously escaped any type of respiratory infection all winter, and I tend to get sick disproportionately often when I'm traveling. Sure enough, on the flight back home on Friday night, I noticed a faint pain in my throat. I chalked it up to having choked on my spit earlier in the flight, but in retrospect, I probably choked because my throat was already irritated from being ill. 

Saturday morning, I woke up with a fever and a steadily increasing sore throat, and I knew it was for real. My healthy streak was at an end.

Colds are no uncommon occurrence for me—I usually get one every season, almost like clockwork, and my illness is usually relatively violent for what should be "just a little" cold, but this one might have been my worst cold yet.

From the moment I woke up on Saturday morning, I was in terrible pain. I don't know for a fact that I had a fever, since I don't have a thermometer, but I do know that I was racked by chills, and every joint and muscle from my lower abdomen to my calves ached mercilessly.

Normally I prefer to leave a fever alone, since the elevation in body temperature is supposed to help you fight the infection. But I was in so much pain, I seriously considered taking some anti-inflammatory drugs. I consulted Dr. Google about whether it really is harmful to do that, and naturally got mixed messages. But by the numbers, consensus seemed to be that people who did not treat their fevers recovered faster than those who did. I took this statistic into deep consideration and then chose to disregard it. I decided that a week or more of sniffing and coughing would be better than even a few more hours of this terrible torture chamber that my body had become. 

So I popped 2 ibuprofens and soon felt well enough to sit up and (with lots of breaks) unpack my luggage from Mexico.

Ever before when I've had a fever, the discomfort has lasted for a few hours at most until I could succumb to an exhausted sleep, and then it would be gone. But not this time. This time, every time the ibuprofen wore off, I was back to writhing in pain and shivering with the chill of a lifetime. For three straight days this went on, with me trying varying doses of aspirin and ibuprofen, until finally I woke up on Tuesday morning not feeling like death. I took an aspirin anyway, just in case, and went to work, popping a single aspirin every 3-4 hours, because I felt a little sickly in between doses.

Unfortunately, I have also developed a stuffy nose, and I forgot to bring my Benzedrex inhaler, which is my nasal remedy of choice for daytime. I usually take a few hits before a meal and then suffer through the rest of the day with my congestion.

So at lunchtime, I had to decide whether to choke down my food without being able to taste it or breathe (when I say "choke," I mean that literally) or to walk to the shopping center just off campus and hope to find a suitable replacement drug. There was a risk that the latter might be a futile undertaking, but I opted to do it anyway.

In a frustrating catch-22, the walk there conveniently cleared up my nose, but also made my throat burn like fire.

CVS was out of Benzedrex, so I was left to choose between 12-hour oxymetazoline sprays (quite effective, but too powerful and risky to overuse) or the CVS brand inhaler with levmetamfetamine as the active ingredient. The word didn't sound familiar to me, so I wasn't sure if this was a generic version of the Vicks inhaler, which I had already established to be ineffective, or if it was some new product I had never tried. It was half the price of the out-of-stock Benzedrex, which wasn't a good sign, but lacking any better options, I decided to try it. Only after I had checked out, walked back to work (almost crying from my aggravated sore throat, I'll add), and taken several more sniffs of it than the recommended 2, to absolute zero effect, did I notice the words on the package: "Compare to the active ingredients in Vicks VapoInhaler." Sigh.

However, in the interest of always looking on the bright side, at least I learned something—two things actually. I can now say for sure that I'd rather endure a longer illness than a longer fever, and I can now add Levmetamfetamine to my list of worthless stuffy nose remedies.

And so the struggle continues. My sore throat is slowly, in its very leisurely way, getting better. The stuffy nose is probably at its worst today. I am already starting to feel the incessant tickle in my throat and uncontrollable coughing spasms that will probably last for a week. Then maybe, just maybe, I'll be free. After an ordeal like this, I feel like I should be exempt from any more respiratory infections for at least a year!

7-11 Chocolate candy cookie

What happens when your boyfriend suddenly develops a passion for buying lottery tickets?

You spend a lot of time staring down giant cookies at the gas station.

Frequently, you are tempted to buy them because you are just so bored! 

I got this two-pack of cookies for 99¢ at 7-11 during a lottery ticket run. Four ounces for under a dollar makes these cookies only 87 cents a gram! But of course, you get what you pay for, and these cheap cookies were possibly the worst I have ever consumed.

They were dry, so dry! Although I have heard people say food tastes like cardboard so often, it's basically a throw-away, this cardboard taste was literal. There was this horrible bitterness with every bite, which adhered to my mouth in a gummy, starchy coating that I couldn't scrape off my teeth even after I brushed them.

The texture was similarly disappointing. Crumbs scattered everywhere with every bite. There was no chewiness or variety or airiness — really any texture that anyone enjoys about food — to be found.

The cookie's one saving grace was the chocolate candies sprinkled liberally on top. Given the price of the cookie, I was rather astonished that they were real mini M&M's (not just a generic knockoff).

There were 2 good-sized cookies in this package, but after finishing one of them, I was sure I'd had enough, and I left the other one to languish. In the end, I scraped the M&M's off the top and ate them, leaving the rest of the cookie for the birds..

The Bottom Line 

While the price was pretty much the best I've ever encountered for a single pack of giant cookies, I had to reduce it to just 4 stars, because the value relative to the (disgusting) cookie was not worthy of 5 stars. Similarly, the two stars for taste are very reluctant and only because I enjoyed the M&M's.

Taste:
Texture:
Price:

A noise Annoys: An interesting homophone that doesn't quite make sense in context.

In keeping with the spirit of my last post, I'm going to have a positive attitude and talk about something that could annoy me, but doesn't! 

It always kind of puzzles me when a coworker stomps up to my office, frown imprinted on their face, and grumbles, "Could that sound be any more annoying?" I'll be thrown for a fraction of a second, thinking, "What sound?"

Until I hear it. It's usually some repetitive pounding noise. They are doing a lot of construction outside our building, and the building itself is usually falling apart in some way or another, so industrial noises are a common occurrence around my office. And apparently I'm very good at tuning them out, because I never notice them until someone else complains!

This is odd, because other kinds of noises can easily drive me bonkers. Any amount of speech, even low or foreign enough that I can't make out the words, distracts me to no end. I can't sleep when the TV is on, no matter how tired I am, and there have been entire mornings I've been unable to work because of a conversation going on in a nearby office. But as long as the sound is not too deafening and relatively meaningless, it doesn't bother me at all.

I don't really have any more to say on this subject. I'm not trying to boast, and I certainly don't have any advice for those who do find these sounds annoying. (Maybe this is why I rarely write about positive topics: they just kind of peter out anticlimactically.) I guess it's just nice to realize that (since I sometimes worry that my innate irritability is downright pathological), there are still a few things about which I can be easygoing!

Little Miss Sunshine peeks out

Sometimes, when reading over my blog, I get the feeling that a better name for it would be "Valerie Complains About Things." 

While I admit it's easier for me to see the cloud than the silver lining (besides – duh! – If clouds actually had silver linings, people would have ravaged the sky long ago to mine them!), I'm really not on a grinch-like mission to spread pessimism and bad cheer throughout the world!

It's just that I think writing is more interesting when it has a bit of bite. No one really wants to hear about how I followed a recipe to the letter and it turned out fine. There's no reason to write about a decision I didn't have any trouble making. Nobody is entertained by the tale of a good date that turned into a long-term relationship. At least I don't think so. Those aren't the things I like to read, so I don't bother to write about them.

But in case there are people out there who have been disheartened by the sheer number of gripey posts in my blog as of late, let me remind you that I'm not all bad moods and sarcastic observations. [Disclaimer: This post was started several weeks ago, so the good things mentioned in it are old news by now] I have, in fact, recently cooked something (not to a recipe, just with the dump-it-and-tweak-it method) that came out edible and almost delicious! Yesterday, I spontaneously chose to pick up and throw out this plastic bag that had been sitting on the lawn outside my apartment complex for days on end. That decision only took me a second, and it felt pretty good! I am, in fact, rounding out Year 3 of my relationship with my boyfriend (my longest streak ever!), which just goes to show (in spite of his taste in dogs), we are a happy couple.

Speaking of dogs and good things, last weekend, I organized all of the dog supplies into a new drawer unit that I got for free out of the garbage, which felt immensely satisfying. I had a really great yoga session. The Slime company sent me a new inner tube for free to replace one I'd gotten that was defective! I'm working my way up to 30 push-ups at a time (this time I'm doing it for real, all the way from the floor and back) and I'm in the home stretch! There is this melted candle in my craft supplies that smells so good, I can't help but smile every time I open the drawer! My boyfriend's mom says I take good care of him.* My landlord wrote me an email to tell me thanks for being a good tenant!

There are plenty of things to be happy about; I just don't necessarily think they are fascinating things to read about. But I wrote about them anyway. So there. I hope that makes you happy.

*My boyfriend, on the other hand, was offended that she thinks he can't take care of himself.

My least favorite way to dry my hands

It is time for an important discussion. A discussion about a matter that affects us all—the hand driers in public restrooms.

As you all know, there are certain kinds of faucets that are surely the devil's own invention (also, the ones that are so short that your hands bump the back of the sink when using them—ugh!) But not much discussion has been given to the topic of hand dryers.

The environmental community is pretty much of a consensus that electrical hand dryers are more eco-friendly than paper towels, (although I will remind you that it's more eco-friendly to use neither, if you can stand to go around with wet, frozen hands for a few minutes after washing, which I personally, environmental advocate though I am, cannot), so when I'm at a public restroom that gives me a choice, I always go for the electric dryer. Even when it's a ... [insert ominous music here] ... Dip-style dryer! (I was going to use a specific brand name here, but I decided since this is a highly critical post, other brands are also producing the same style of dryers, and the brand in question has since come out with other styles of dryers, I would cut them a break.)

There are many kinds of electric dryers out there, from the ancient wheezers that aren't worth the bother, to the supersonic wind tunnels. But the dippers take the cake. The brand I'm not naming calls its product the "fastest, most hygienic" hand dryer. What it doesn't mention is it's also the most uncomfortable. It's the only electric hand dryer I've found so difficult to use that I've actually stopped to note their name.

In case you're not familiar with these torture devices, they look like this:

 

 

You're supposed to turn your hands parallel to the wall, then dip them down into the dryer and back up until they are dry. Has the designer actually ever tried this motion? It is awkward and clumsy, and since there's very little clearance between the front and back of the cavity, you're almost guaranteed to bump your still-wet hand into it—somewhat belying the "most hygienic" claim. 

Ah, well, what is a poor public-restroom-user to do? Start using paper towels? Perish the thought! Or maybe just complain about it in her blog, and hope that hand dryer manufacturers read it and learn of their folly.... Now there's an idea!

Handcrafted liquor bottle

Anyone who knows my boyfriend knows he loooooves his liquor.

When we were snowed in for four days last month, his favorite pastime rapidly became inventing new mixed drinks and forcing me to take a shot of each one. His goal (yes, a thing he actually anticipated eagerly) for his last birthday party was to drink until he puked (fortunately for all of us, he didn't succeed).

But anyway, if it involves alcohol, it's pretty much guaranteed to be a winner with him.

So when I found this gift box of a hip flask and two steel shot glasses on Choxi, I knew that was a Valentine's Day gift with his name on it. Except, it didn't actually have his name on it!

 

Having seen plenty of decorative flasks in the world, I knew this plain steel one wasn't quite enough. So I decided to monogram it for him with my Dremel! 

 

Fortunately, a week before V-Day, I came to my senses and realized that I've never engraved metal before, and my first attempt probably shouldn't be on someone else's gift.

So what could I do to personalize the bottle? Some of the flasks I've seen have been wrapped in little sleeves (like the one to the left, except, camouflage? Really?), so I decided I'd make one of those and put the monogram on that! That way if I messed up, the bottle would still be unscathed.

To make the sleeve, I used an old suede coat that was gifted to us by a former housemate. It was too big for Al, and a little worn and stained, so I didn't feel too bad cutting off the end of one sleeve.

I thought the buttons at the end of the sleeve would make a great accent!

I was just not sure how I was going to make this soft leather conform to the concave side of the bottle without gluing it on (and I didn't want to do that because it would make washing the bottle nearly impossible), so finally I decided I'd give the sleeve a bottom, which would help it keep its convex shape down there, and then just allow the top to take whatever shape it will.

Lots of measuring ensued. I measured and drew and wrapped and re-wrapped, and tried to get the slightly angled scrap of leather to line up parallel to the top of the bottle, and...I don't even want to describe how much work that was.

Creating the bottom was relatively easy, as I just traced around the bottom of the bottle. But then attaching the bottom to the rest of the sleeve was torture! The leather was too thick for me to push a needle through, so I had to run it through the sewing machine, laboriously hand-cranking it stitch by stitch and then repositioning everything to ensure the curve was sewn right. At first, I attached the wrong sides together, so the seam would be on the outside, so I had to take it all apart and re-sew. Then, even after carefully examining the pieces and putting them back together, I made the same mistake! 

The third time, I finally attached the pieces the right way, but there was so much curvature and so much leather bunched up under my machine, I couldn't quite sew the short sides neatly at all. In the end, I got a rather sloppy looking sewn seam at one edge, and glued the remaining pieces together at the other.

 

<--Don't try this at home, kids!

Things got a little hairy at this point, since it was approximately the day before Valentine's Day. I am absolutely certain I took some photos at this point, but I can't find them now. Anyway...

 

I had positioned the top layer of leather so I could use the original buttonholes, but I needed to move the actual buttons. More slow hand-cranking of the sewing machine got this accomplished. Since the leather around the buttonholes is so thick, I used a toothpick to separate the button from the leather below it and create shank. The buttons are sewn with love and actually functional; however, it's easier just to slide the sleeve on and off the flask without touching the buttons.

The last steps were just a few strategically placed drops of glue to keep the whole thing together!

I finished the whole project the day before Valentine's Day, boxed it up in the original packaging, and wrote some sappy notes on it (fortunately I forgot to take pictures of those!) On the weekend of its arrival, my boyfriend proceeded to carry the flask with him to get his taxes done and drank from it every night whilst watching TV, which I guess means he likes it. One of my rare (these days) non-clothing crafting projects, and it was a success! Phew!

 

Here it is in its place of honor on our liquor shelf

Our crappy apartment

To begin this post with full disclosure, our apartment could be a lot more crappy. The location is good, the building is clean, and we haven't suffered any major problems with the utilities, the neighbors, or pests. 

It's aesthetically pleasing, with its shiny (faux) wood floors and pristine bone-white seating. The brick wall in the living room adds an ambience you don't get in most rentals, and the choice of wall colors, while a bit too dark for my tastes, certainly show an elevated style over the usual institutional white.

But the beauty of this apartment is the very definition of skin deep. It was pretty clear from the moment we moved in that the owner hadn't exactly gone to great lengths to make the property livable.

One of the first things I discovered when moving in my possessions was that the kitchen cabinets were overflowing with dishes. When I asked the landlord whether it was OK if I got rid of some of them, he admitted he had no idea they were even there. Which just goes to show where his attention to detail is. When we moved in, the walls were covered with dust bunnies and the kitchen cabinets coated with years' worth of sticky grease. (He did offer to have cleaners come in to finish their job, because apparently there were still things they were planning to do, but I think they mostly planned to clear out some clutter, which I preferred to keep—if you move into a messy apartment, at least you should get some free stuff in the bargain!).

As far as I can tell, only one burner on the stove actually lights. And the bathtub faucet spews water when the shower is running, which troubles my conservationist heart. However, I am in charge of paying the 50-dollar copay for any repairs, so I've decided to live with both of these issues. It helps that I'm not a cooking person, and the management company pays the water bill.

Whoever installed the shower curtain rod was far from a tradesman. The screws they put into the drywall were never adequate to hold the rod in the first place, since the door frame prevents it from touching the wall, so the shower curtain was falling down on a regular basis. I finally took the initiative and reinstalled the shower curtain by screwing it into the doorframe.

The day that we came to sign the lease, we nearly suffered a catastrophe when one of the dining chairs collapsed when it was sat upon. The landlord kindly offered to throw away the wobbly table and iffy chairs, but I decided I'd keep them and fix them up. I bought bolts with my own cash to convert the table from a health hazard to a usable piece of furniture.

As time went on and fall crept into winter, we learned that the apartment's insulation is in dire need of improvement. The big glass doors that are pretty much the only light source are also, it turns out, all off-kilter, leaving open spaces for air and even insects to get through. I already added weatherstripping to the place where the sliding door meets the frame next to it, but the misalignment is so bad that that's not even enough to actually seal the crack. On a chilly day, you could feel the cold pouring in from the myriad gaps all around the frame that remain unsealed. Again, I had to take the initiative and purchase a can of foam insulation to stop up most of it.

But that doesn't fix the worst problem yet! The bedroom, the place where I would prefer to spend most of my time, is the coldest room in the unit. Even with the living room being so drafty, even when I've closed all the heat vents elsewhere in the apartment, the bedroom is still a good 4 degrees colder than the rest of the apartment.

Oh, and those shiny floors that drew me in at first sight? They show every drop of water that ever spills on them, and every footprint that ever steps on them, and they streak when you try to clean them!

Yesterday, the in-unit washing machine (one of the pluses of living here) backed up into the kitchen sink, and no amount of plunging could get it to drain. The one thing that helped: running the disposal. Internet sources indicate there might be a clogged vent somewhere, which will surely necessitate the calling of a plumber at my expense, and possibly getting the building management involved.

Every day we live here, I find more things to hate about it, and the worst thing is that I'm entirely at someone else's mercy for getting any problem repaired. But for now I'm going to take a few deep breaths and hope the drain fixes itself.

Sewing ability: A blessing or a curse?

A few days ago, I took inventory of my closet and realized that probably a good third of what I own has been considerably handcrafted by me. From mending to subtle resizing to restoration of pills and fading to removal of stains to converting to something entirely new, I've done it all. But what I do the most, is sewing.

It's kind of ironic how much I sew, considering that I don't actually like to sew. I like to have clothes that fit well. I like to not let good garments go to waste because of a small flaw. I like being able to buy clothing online with confidence,  knowing that even if what I buy isn't quite right, I have the skills to fix it. But no, I don't actually like the process of sewing. 

Tangling blobs of thread, fabric refusing to advance in the machine, breaking needles, and snapping thread are regular occurrences. And, how many times have I sewn an entire seam before realizing it's inside-out! And then there's the pain! My boyfriend knows me well enough to know that when I bust out with an "OW!" while crafting, the next thing he should say is, "Did you stab yourself with a pin?" because 9 times out of 10, the answer is yes. The other 1 time is when it's with a needle. I love creating new things, but I sure hate putting them together.

But for all that it distresses me, making new things to wear is kind of my raison d'être. And sewing is kind of a lost art—one that I'm proud to practice. Being able to sew is what gives me the confidence to embark on these massive tailoring projects and enables me to create works of art (if I may indulge my self-important side) from my old clothes and those of others. But at the same time, it's given me a huge amount of work that I'll never quite be done with! 

 

Obviously I vacillate a lot between opinions on my hobby. Sometimes I think my life would be so much easier if I just gave up my refashion habit and stuck to buying new clothes. But then I look over at the tantalizing bit of floral chiffon hanging out the top of my Projects Box, and I'm like naaaaahhh. I'll never be able to resist a pretty fabric.

Super Blah

By some miracle, in 32-and-a-half years of living, I have never once done anything for the Super Bowl. I've never once gone to a Super Bowl party; I've never once watched the game at home; I've never once watched it in a bar. I've never watched the Puppy Bowl, nor the Kitten Bowl, nor the ads, nor the halftime show. I've never once watched any of it at all.

This year, though—this was the year my streak ended.

I'd like to say I went out with a bang – much like Peyton Manning is about to do (do you like how I'm working my vast knowledge of football into my prose?) – but alas, my ejection from the non-Super-Bowl-watching elite was sadly anticlimactic – much like the end of the Super Bowl was.

My big turning point was doomed to failure from the beginning. My boyfriend wanted to watch with his best friend Chris, neither of whom had any real interest in the two teams playing. The atmosphere leading up to the game was decidedly apathetic, and – to make it more difficult for me to mentally prepare myself – the plans were not solidified until about an hour before kickoff, .

They were as follows: We would go to Chris's condo, where we would watch the game in relative quiet with him and his girlfriend. Thusly, my initiation into Super Bowl culture would hardly even qualify as a proper party. At the last minute, I learned that Al's 12-year-old nephew was also joining us, effectively nixing any plans I might have had for drinking myself silly and practicing my own special touchdown dances.

The next thing that happened to ratchet down my already negligible enthusiasm was a stomach ache. In retrospect, this would have been the perfect excuse for me to avoid a lukewarm party, skip out on a boring game, and keep my 32-year record intact – and it probably was a subconscious last-ditch effort by my body to do just that – but unfortunately, it was too last-ditch, and the stomach ache didn't hit its stride until we were halfway to DC—too late to turn the car around and dump me back at home. So I instead spent the entire evening in varying degrees of abdominal pain.

On the way there, Al wanted to pick up chicken wings. That proved impossible, as the first place he stopped at was closed early for the game. The second place he stopped at was sold out of wings. He finally settled for pizza and sushi. All the wondering around made us late, so we ended up missing the start of the game. That meant I did not get to witness the national anthem as performed by one of my favorite singers: Lady Gaga—one of very few highlights of the Super Bowl, and I missed out on it! Of course, arriving late also meant less total time spent watching football, so I'm not going to complain too much.

The game itself was everything I could have dreamed—that is to say, completely uninteresting. I spent the first half of it paying no attention, meticulously feeding calzones and salad into my cramping stomach (the eating neither made it better nor worse, but did help to pass the time). Chris' girlfriend and her friend were there, both professing a similar lack of interest in the game, so we made conversation by talking about how quickly the time was passing. 

Perched on a bar stool in a remote area of the living room, I didn't have a great view of the screen, but what I could see of the 6-million-dollar ads – the ones that are supposed to be the saving grace of the Super Bowl for people who don't care about football – were solidly lackluster. I did pay attention to the halftime show, which instilled in me a new appreciation for Coldplay (I didn't actually realize all those songs were theirs until now), and then sat through half of the third quarter, which was dominated by a chat about our upcoming vacation plans.

At this point, Al's nephew suddenly took a rabid interest in getting to bed early for school the next day. I've never seen a kid so eager for school before, and I suspect his passion was more aligned towards getting away from the room full of boring adults and a boring football game (he likes soccer). But who am I to question his motives when they seem so responsible (and so beneficial to me!), so I agreeably packed up and shipped out. In the car ride back to his home, he and Al got into an argument about whether or not we could stop at our apartment first to pick up a ring he had left there. It was turning into quite the riot, so I quashed it with my patent Al's-scary-girlfriend sternness. Then felt guilty about it for the rest of the ride.

After we had finally dropped him off at his house (without his preciousssss) and he had stalked off without a word to his uncle, we headed for home in morose silence. Insert, for the sake of adding some kind of levity to this stretch of the tale, some joke about someone not getting a Super Bowl ring.

We did make it home in time to watch the end of the game, which I did at my boyfriend's urging, and it was everything I could have imagined. See above.

Long story short, Super Bowl 50 ended in a crushing defeat. No, I'm not talking about the Panthers. I'm talking about my 32 years of carefully cultivated disinterest, tossed to the wind in one evening of niggling failures, minor squabbles, and sweeping mediocrity.

The vegetarian's plight

It has been over 14 years since I stopped eating meat. You'd think by now, I'd have figured out a suitably concise way to describe my eating habits to others, but no. After all this time, I still struggle to find the correct word for me when it comes to what I eat.

Usually I just call myself a vegetarian, but that term has so many meanings for different people that it really doesn't explain anything at all. When I introduce myself as a vegetarian, it inevitably launches a game of 20 Questions. "Do you eat fish?" No. "Do you eat eggs?" Yes. "Do you drink milk?" No, but that's a personal preference, and I do eat foods that contain dairy products. And for some reason, because being vegetarian apparently implies a whole lifestyle of rigorous healthy choices, I almost always get asked "Do you eat gluten?" The answer is yes. You can pry my gluten from my cold dead hands.

But back to the point. It has always bothered me a little to say I'm vegetarian when my diet, in fact, includes some items that are not strictly vegetative. Ovo-lacto-vegetarian is the most technically correct term for someone of my dietary persuasion...but just try using that word in a crowd of loutish meat-eaters and see how far you get.

I have tried sometimes, instead of trying to find a word that describes everything I do eat, to simply describe what I don't eat: meat. But then inevitably someone will assume that fish isn't meat. I blame Catholic Lenten practices for this ludicrous distinction. According to Webster, meat is "The flesh of an animal used as food" – clearly including fish – but nonetheless, to many people, being vegetarian is synonymous with being pescatarian. 

So sometimes, in an attempt to take into account this non-standard but common definition of meat, I say, "I don't eat animals." I'd think that would be pretty cut-and-dried, but, believe it or not, one time I told this to a woman in the seafood line at the state fair, and she exclaimed (with equal parts revulsion and bafflement, in the manner of someone who thinks you're a complete idiot), "Fish aren't animals!"

Allow me to be a tad condescending while I remark that that the state fair is probably not the best place to go looking for a highly evolved stance on interspecies justice, but one could at least expect a rudimentary knowledge of taxonomy.

Although I am sure that none of my enlightened regular readers need this lesson, for the sake of this self-righteous nincompoop, to whom the following paragraph is addressed, allow me to set the record straight.

All living things can be divided into categories. There have been many different classification systems over the ages, but never, in any of them, have fish been classified outside of the Animals group. Here's a chart that pretty much lays it out for you. If you are unable to read a flowchart, then you really are a hopeless case.

Phew, that feels good! By the way, this exchange at the state fair happened over a year ago, in August of 2014. I had to walk away because I didn't have time to school the woman in question on phylogeny, nor did I think she would listen. But it's been weighing on me ever since. I am glad I posted this, so the next time someone dares to tell me a fish isn't an animal, I'll give 'em a piece of my taxonomic tree!

Also, by venting all my frustrations into this (yet another excessively long) blog post, I've learned something valuable: No matter how clearly you express something, your efforts are wasted if your audience has the education of a toddler ... a different frame of reference. In other words, you can't please everyone.

But you can please yourself! And for me, after considering all the alternatives, I realize that the simplest and most accurate way to describe my eating habits is to say I'm an ovo-lacto-vegetarian. Sure, it will probably confuse 80% of the people who hear it, but at least it can be explained without getting into arguments that can only be resolved with a dictionary or a flowchart. Bring on the loutish meat-eaters!

The perils of being indecisive

In Monty Python and the Holy Grail, there is a scene in which the heroes must, as the gnarly old bridgekeeper puts it, "Answer me these questions three," before they may be permitted to cross a certain gorge.

The questions are, for the most part, absurdly easy: "What is your name?" "What is your quest?" and "What is your favorite color?" Which is why it's funny when one of the heroes changes his mind about his favorite color mid-answer, and consequently gets tossed unceremoniously into the abyss by an invisible hand.

Funny to anyone but me. Were I to be the one crossing the misty chasm in that film, and assuming I were not asked a question about the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow (the answer is to confuse the asker with more questions!), I would be the one to utter the dreaded "I don't know that!" and thusly meet my demise.

I am deathly indecisive about my favorite color. It has changed 6 times over the course of my life—currently it's usually green, but even that can vary depending on my mood and the context.

When you get right down to it, I'm dangerously unopinionated about pretty much everything—which is a cause of great anxiety when it comes to me and the Internet. I won't even begin to talk about my struggles to complete online personality tests (which I adore in spite of my fickle personality traits); I will jump right into a matter of much greater import: login credentials.

 

When websites ask you to create a couple of security questions in case you forget your password, I am often at a loss, because all the questions want to know your favorites. What is your favorite book? Don't have one. What is your favorite movie? Don't have one. What is the name of your best friend? Well, that, like my favorite color, has changed at least 6 times over the course of my life, too. What if it changes again between now and the next time I have to answer this question?

There is only one thing permanent in this life, and that is the past. When I am allowed to write my own custom question, I use the past shamelessly. I frequently refer to one of the many nicknames of my childhood pets, because – even though I'm linking you right to a post about them (surely security at its worst), there are so many more that no one (except maybe my brother) could possibly guess the correct answer!

So maybe, if websites were to start writing security questions like, "What was your favorite color the week that you started college?" (The answer is lavender), then I could feel secure in my security question. But until then, the best answer I can usually manage is "I don't know that!"

Savory Sweets white macadamia nut cookie

Before heading home from my Christmas visit to Ohio, I stopped at the Meijer gas station convenience store to gather provisions for my journey. I bought cashews and a Diet Doctor Pepper because they'd be easy to consume while driving, and a Giant Cookie because that's what I do.

It was very soft, I confirmed before I even left the store. And when I ate it, it kind of crumbled apart in my mouth...but not in my hand, so its texture was pleasant overall. The white chocolate bit was good and firm (unlike the chocolate chunks of the La Madeleine cookie), so I was quite pleased by the mouth feel of the cookie.

Likewise, the flavor was enjoyable, kind of rich, with a nice mix of salty and sweet

Actually, I was surprised to note that this lowly shrink-wrapped gas station cookie was quite comparable to a Cosi white chocolate cookie, except that this one actually had macadamia nuts. Which, if you don't recall, are an ingredient that used to be in Cosi's white chocolate cookies until they rudely switched to walnut and lost a good deal of my love in the process.

Sadly, I lost or never received the receipt for this purchase, so I'll never know how this gas station cookie compares in value, but I enjoyed it enough to be quite enthusiastic about giving it another try.

The Bottom Line

Taste:
Texture:

La Madeleine chocolate chunk cookie

Although I brought this cookie on vacation with me, I actually purchased it a few days before vacation, while breakfasting at La Madeleine. I wasn't sure if I even really wanted a Giant Cookie, but I was drawn to its lopsided shape (the others for sale were not so deformed; this little guy was a special anomaly), so I bought it and packed it in case of a dessert shortage while traveling.

I ate it the day after I returned home, and concluded it would have been much better as emergency rations.

It felt kind of dry and cakey, and possessed little flavor.

The soft center was good, and there were plenty of chocolate chunks, but they were a bit too soft. There wasn't enough variation between them and the rest of the cookie to appease my palate.

For this mediocre-in-every-way cookie, I paid 1.99$, or 1.76¢ per gram—an average price for an average cookie.

The Bottom Line

Taste:
Texture:
Price:

Down Thyme Café Monster cookie

I got a little carried away and started eating the cookie
before I started photographing it.

Vacation time is typically, for me, also Giant Cookie time. I'm always on the lookout for new Giant Cookies I haven't tried yet, and where better to do that than far away from home? But also, vacation is a time when I never know what or when I will be eating, and Giant Cookies are the perfect (nonperishable, usually durable, and delicious) treat to keep in reserve for a moment of need. Of course, vacation time is also a time when I get fed a lot of desserts, so the moment of need rarely arises.

My last trip to Ohio for Christmas yielded 3 Giant Cookies, the first of which I shall now review: the monster cookie from Down Thyme Café in Fremont. At Down Thyme Café, my boyfriend outdid himself, buying 3 desserts for the whole table, so the Giant Cookie that I espied and hoarded for myself went uneaten until the night we returned to Maryland.

The inside was exceptionally hollow, consisting of basically air, chocolate chips, and M&Ms, making for a quite candy-heavy cookie. Which I don't object to in the least. Between the multitudinous M&M's were plenty of oats and still-doughy dough, which I'm pretty sure had a peanut butter flavor.

In short, this cookie contained all my favorite ingredients in great abundance, making me quite a happy cookie reviewer!

I give the cookie five stars all around, except, of course, in price, which, at 2.08¢ a gram, was just a bit above average.

The Bottom Line

Taste:
Texture:
Price:

NuVegan Café Macaroni and "Cheese"

 

I know I swore off macaroni reviewing, but today I want to break my silence and give a shout-out to my neighborhood NuVegan Café for really doing vegan macaroni right.

If you've ever eaten vegan cheese, you know it's a poor substitute for dairy-based cheese—usually squishy, slimy, and relatively flavorless. If given the choice of never eating cheese again or substituting vegan cheese for the rest of my life, I would choose to give cheese up. 

However, the vegan macaroni from NuVegan does not gross me out the way most vegan cheesy dishes do (in spite of its somewhat questionable appearance). The cheese, instead of being a stringy ooze, is crumbly and subtle. There's even a browned top layer with bits of parsley!

Another problem I have with vegan food is it is disproportionately high in onion content (onions being top on the list of foods I don't eat). For some reason, chefs seem to think, "If we can't have meat, and we can't have cheese, we must make up for it with more flavor! What's the most flavorful vegetable I can add to this dish? Onion!" However, in the case of the NuVegan macaroni, the extra flavor seems to come in the form of some kind of spice (maybe paprika?). Which is both interesting and not too painful (a common problem with spices).

I have been wrong about onion content before. I usually learn of my error a few minutes later when I start to feel really yucky after eating), but so far I have not had any adverse reaction to the NuVegan macaroni. It was a little mushy and I probably ate too much, but on the whole, it is hands-down the best vegan "cheese" dish I've ever eaten.

Cheese and onions are the two biggest obstacles between me and a vegan lifestyle. I'm not saying I'm about to jump on the vegan bandwagon, but if I'm ever ready to take a step in a more compassionate direction, I think I would start by removing mac & (dairy) cheese from my diet and replacing it with the dish from NuVegan Café!

I rate this macaroni...
One happy noodle for being the only vegan macaroni that every made me a happy noodle!

The Mood Noodle rating system is not based on a fixed scale, but is a much more subjective system based on what makes me happy and what makes me sad.
Any number of happy noodles and comparatively few sad noodles constitute a good rating.

Bad Dog x 2

Behind that endearing face...

My boyfriend doesn't have a great track record of pleasing me when it comes to dogs. This time, he (bless his heart, don't strangle him, don't strangle him!) decided to adopt a rescue dog just a few weeks after we moved into our apartment. I had strong objections and tried to encourage him to wait until we were settled in a house again, but he ignored me.

Actually, it was a little amusing, because he kept trying to go to shelters to look at potential adoptees without me catching on. We were out on a shopping trip with a couple of friends when he started driving to this unknown location. "Where are we going?" we asked him. "Oh, there's just this thing I want to see." Turns out it was a pet store holding a dog adoption event. A week later, it was...He: "I have to go somewhere." Me: "Where?" He:"Just going somewhere with my mom." Me:"You're going to the animal shelter again, aren't you!" He:"..."

Well, despite my disapproval, he went anyway. And despite being told by the adoption agency that the dog in question (which he found online, making this into one of those bad Internet dating stories) doesn't like being alone, he decided it would be the perfect pet to spend 8 hours every day in an empty home. And despite knowing that the dog was used to being kept outdoors and wasn't well house trained, he was confident that he could teach the old dog new tricks...in my home. Are we having deja vu yet?.

He planned to give the dog to his mom eventually, but our shared apartment was to be the training grounds where the beast (we'll call him Bubalou, because that's his name, as given by his previous owner) was to learn basic social skills (in the meantime, Jack Jack was relinquished to his mom temporarily since I did draw the line at one dog per household).

When he first arrived in our apartment, I had to admit he was cute. He was a puffball of fur and energy, and he had an adorable face with a wide-open smile.

Bubalou in his favorite position: Standing behind his favorite person. You can catch a glimpse of our housemate's dog hiding back there as well.

As soon as he was set loose, he began running around the place, panting, sniffing everything...and trotting into the kitchen to pee on the washing machine.

This uncivil first impression would have been bad enough on its own, but the substance that the dog emitted was like no urine I'd ever seen. It was brown. And it reeked to high heaven of something resembling mushrooms. I was so confused, I wasn't even sure he'd actually peed. But within a few minutes, he had done it again on the door to my bedroom. And within a few minutes more, he had vomited on the floor from overexcitement.

If I hadn't been certain before, I knew now that getting this dog had been a very bad idea.

The next day, while I went to work, Al stayed home to help the dog acclimate to his new environment, during which time he apparently imprinted on Al, becoming so attached that from that point on, he could not be out of Al's presence.

Staring adoringly at his true love

The next few days, we kept him in Jack Jack's crate (too small for him), from which he sprayed his urine all over the surrounding floor. After that, Al put an old shower curtain under the crate to protect the floor. Bubalou, in his fierce anxiety, managed to claw the shower curtain into the crate, and proceeded to chew it to pieces. Then Al purchased a heavy-duty tarp, which met the same fate. The neighbors left a note on our door claiming that our dog had been barking for hours, and could we please do something about it. I began to fear we would be evicted.

Meanwhile, Al took Bubalou to the vet, where we learned that he had a stone in his bladder the size of a marble, which explained the constant urination and brown color (old blood). To treat the urinary stone, Bubalou would have to be on a special, acidifying, diuretic dog food and not allowed to eat anything else until the stone had dissolved, which could take months. Let's read that again. Months. On a diuretic. This dog was destined to be peeing on an hourly basis for the foreseeable future.

Fortunately for me, when I first had the inkling that we might have to be moving into an apartment, I had made a deal with my boyfriend that if he wanted to bring his problem dog Jack Jack (who's actually a little angel compared to Bubalou) with us, instead of making him stay with his parents, he would have to be solely responsible for taking the dog out to go to the bathroom. And the same rules would apply regardless of who the dog was. So when Bubalou gets his midnight urges to empty his bladder, guess who has to crawl out of bed, put on his shoes and coat, grab his keys, and walk out to relieve the dog? Not me! That doesn't mean I enjoy getting woken up in the middle of every night (because I still do; it's kind of hard to ignore a frantic dog walking all over you); it's just a small consolation that things could be worse.

And at least I'm not bearing the financial burden of this dog. As soon as I learned about the bladder stone, I told Al this dog was way more than he had signed up for, and there would be no shame in returning him to the rescue home. After all, I had already decided that an apartment was no place even for a rabbit (let alone an incontinent anxiety-prone dog) and I had given Hansel up to a rescue family (that's right; the rabbit is gone).

But Al was more stubborn; he felt a sense of duty; and he has not yet learned the joys of spending a whole month's income on an ungrateful pet. But he will. The initial vet bill, even after pet insurance, was over 500 dollars.  His teeth need a deep cleaning, which will require anesthesia and big bucks. After the note from the neighbors, Al was forced to put Bubalou into doggy day care, for 35 dollars a day. The prescription dog food is 40 dollars a bag and lasts about 3 weeks. To help Bubalou overcome his separation anxiety and get properly toilet trained, Al had to hire a dog behaviorist at a cost of over a thousand dollars.

Al also invested in some stylish doggy diapers to keep Bubalou from flooding the condo and the office
(where he gets to spend the day when the boss is gone).

I will stop now, but I'm sure this story is far from over. Prepare yourselves now. In the book of Badly Behaved Dogs, Bubalou's chapter has just begun.

 

'Ment to be apart

This weekend, I renewed my lease for another 3 months. Much to my disappointment. 

 

I so wanted to have found a permanent home by the end of December, but now it seems I'm stuck in my apartment until March at the earliest. Although I have definitely lived in worse places, I have come to realize that I never had it better than when I was living in a house. Apartment living is just not for me. 

Apartment living turns pet ownership from a pleasure to a major hassle. I actually relinquished my rabbit to a rescue home within the first few weeks of living in my apartment, because it was too difficult to feed him, exercise him, and especially keep his cage clean without convenient access to the outdoors and a good strong water hose. And that was just a caged rabbit! Can you imagine the trials of living in an apartment with a dog? Especially a neurotic dog? Well, if you can't imagine, I am about to tell you...in a future post. For now, just suffice it to say that keeping a crazy, needy dog in an apartment is a tribulation of great proportions.

You know what else is a tribulation in an apartment? Keys. Want to get into your home? Be sure to grab your keys—first the keys that get you into the building, then the keys that get you into your unit. Want to get your mail? Be sure to grab your other keys, then wrestle your letters, wrinkled and crumpled, out of the tiny steel box they place them inside. Want to take out your garbage? Be ready to walk down several flights of stairs and out to the dumpsters...and don't forget to bring your keys! Forgot your keys? Got locked out because your door shut itself behind you when you ran out to catch your dog who was running away? Well, there's no hope of hiding a spare on the premises, so you'll have to call your boyfriend from a neighbor's phone and have him bring his key home from work.

Apartments are no place for a solar-powered being such as myself, because they only get 1/4 the natural light of a freestanding house! I never considered how much this would bother me until I moved in, but basically we get full sun for about 3 hours every morning. Even during those 3 hours, because the sun is only coming in one window, it doesn't even reach the back wall of the rooms. We have a triple-wide glass patio door, which keeps the living room acceptably well lit for most of the day, but even that patio is shaded by the patio above it, so we get half as much light in there as we might if we were on a top floor. Altogether this equals less happiness and higher electricity bills.

Apartment living also means that washing... anything other than yourself... is a major undertaking. In many apartments, doing laundry would mean paying several dollars for the privilege of using one of 3 machines that are shared among dozens of units. In our apartment, we're lucky enough to have our own washer and dryer...which are so tiny and inefficient at drying that one load of laundry (or what would have been one load at my old abode) takes 3-4 hours. Bonus! We do have a dishwasher, about which I have no complaints. But as for washing your car (something I've always done at home), you have no alternative but to pay for an automatic car wash to do a sub-par job, and if you want to vacuum, your only option is the gas station vacuum, with nozzles so big you can't get into any of the cracks.

Living in an apartment is also a terrible struggle for those who like to travel by bike. Most apartments do not have bike parking, so you must keep your bike in your unit. This chews up your available storage space like nothing else, and heaven help you if you live in a walk-up. You'll be getting plenty of exercise lugging your bike up the stairs, but you'll also be getting plenty of chain grease on your clothes and plenty of injuries wrestling it through all those doors (that require all those keys!)

Apartment living means you're never truly alone. Of course, we've taken on a roommate to help pay the bills, but even if we were alone in our unit, we'd have our neighbors upstairs and downstairs. The ceilings in our building are what I believe is commonly referred to in the construction industry as "weaksauce." I'm afraid to work out because 1) The floor is suspiciously springy and 2) I worry I'll be thundering on the tenants below us. The ceiling certainly transmits every footstep from the unit above. And I have actually heard conversations through the floor in my closet (though I could only make out a word or two).

Because moving forced me to re-evaluate my priorities, get rid of a lot of junk, and organize the junk that remained, having enough space really isn't as much of an issue as I thought it would be. But I still do miss my space-hogging collections—especially the extensive array of shipping supplies and things I planned to sell on eBay (and the extra income it brought in) and my eclectic collection of odds and ends for crafting. Whatever am I going to give people for Christmas if I can't make something from scratch?

Woe is me, to have sacrificed so much! But the one thing that I'm grateful for, in the midst of this less than delightful living situation of mine, is that I have finally answered a question that was weighing on me. Should I consider the possibility of buying a condo? Finally, I can say with confidence that I should not.