On our way to Scott and Jaye’s for Thanksgiving dinner, we dropped by the house to take a look at the floors. Petr had sanded them yesterday and we wanted to see the color.
(Last night I misplaced our camera, so no pix today, sorry.)
To our surprise, we found Petr hard at work, puttying the floors in preparation for final sanding. I told him three times that he should go home and be with his family, but he wouldn’t hear of it!
watching tonight’s PBS Katrina doublheader has me thinking about a miscellany of things I need to do to the outside of the house, such as assessing the soundness of some weathered boards up on the roof and replacing some wood that’s gotten turned to mud by poor gutter placement.
On the phone the other night, Mom mentioned that my current bedside tome, Bill Vollmann’s Europe Central, won the National Book Award for fiction. It clearly deserves it, as thus far I find it to be the most accessible thing of his I’ve yet read. It may be a tad too accessible in a way, as I so enjoyed puzzling out the secrets of The Jamestown Booke, but on the other hand I have had, cumulatively, nearly an hour or so over about three months to read the damn thing as I drop off, so perhaps it’s for the best.
I am quite enjoying it, honestly. Congratulations, Mr. Vollmann! This is but the first oof many valuable celebratory bestowments! Unless, of course, it’s not.
Our credit union sold our mortgage as soon as we closed; I was not unprepared for this but I had a self-deluding hope that I would still be accessing Alaska USA customer service personnel instead of EvilBankAmeristates. The real pisser for me is that I can’t just transfer money from my main account ot my loan account.
I can’t possibly describe my anger. God, this pisses me off. I did, I acknowledge, sign the paperwork. I hate. I hate. I hate. Oh, I hate.
You know, looking at the postmark on the old Russian stamp and comparing it to the Hungarian one leads me to believe that the stamp must have been postmarked in 1901, possibly in October. THis is because the Russian postmark reads “1 X 07.6” while the Hungarian one reads “68 VII. 1…” and I immediately read it as July, 1968; this was influenced by the fact that the room it was found in was built sometime in 1968, presumably during the summer.
We found the Hungarian stamp first, before we realized that a stamp collector must have lived in the house.
It occurs to me that I could easily find out more about the history of our home, as the house directly behind us was just sold by the only tenant it ever had up to today, and our neighbor spoke to her at some length.
Our contractors gave us a finish date of next Tuesday. Viv and I have finally begun to pack. Alas, the apartment is too messy for me to shoot QTVR panoramas, a fault I will no doubt woe and rue as the century unspools about my feet.
I am excited about the new house, but this apartment is the only place I have ever lived that I truly loved for its’ architecture. It is more or less the exact place I visualized living in as a grown-up when I was a teenager, and it’s just killing me to go.
What’s different about the apartment from the place I imagined?
Well, there’s no sun in the place, at all, year round.
It’s an apartment, not a house, and the upstairs, when rented, is nearly always rented by loud persons with enough money that they tend to be somewhat careless as neighbors.
The walls of the space lack sound insulation, which means we hear much too much of our neighbors’ lives.
The single-pane lead glass leaks heat like a sieve, and the consequence of this and oddball ventilation is a constant battle with mold.
There’s no real fireplace, just a really neat model of one.
The neighborhood is currently subject to urban woes, and is loud and stress-inducing all year ’round.
Still, a year from now, I will miss this place like a dead friend.
Well, using Uploadr, I was able to upload a bunch of pictures to Flickr. For some reason, FlickrExport is still uncooperative.
Here are some of the pix you can see over at my Flickr page:
After repeated rounds of yelling, begging, emailing, and so forth, my ISP went right ahead and sent out a second router of the exact same model. I’m unimpressed, and still lack parity with pre-move services.
We found and hauled a clawfoot tub Saturday around noon. Thanks to Greg and Stacey for the loan of the truck!
Saturday evening, Petr began to lay the floor.
A Nationalist Chinese stamp, I think. Pre-forties?
This is the most interesting of the stamps we found in the house. It appears to be a Russian 20-kopek stamp from 1899 or thereabouts. The cancellation reads “Nikolais” and “1 X 07.6.”
This lovely one is Hungarian, and the cancellation is from 1968.
sorry, folks, something’s awry between iPhoto and flickrexport this evening, so no photo updates on flickr for a while.
It’s too bad, really. We found some stamps in the house, one of which appears to be a russian 20-kopek stamp dating to 1889.
Well, I think I found my first Tiger app incompatibility: The Missing Sync. I’ve downloaded the last version 4 update and have a $25 upgrade coupon for 5, so I might just spend the dough.
The interior painting on the house is basically done. That leaves the laying of the new floor, refinishing the old one, and retrimming the rooms. They’ll definitely be done by the end of the month. Looks like renting a sanding suite for the old floors will run about $100 a day; the provisioners both speculated that the sanding should only take a day. Here’s hoping.
On the way up to the house this morning, we drove by a house which we’d looked at in Wallingford, a beat-up but still handsome craftsman. On the median by the sidewalk was a de-footed claw-foot tub, clearly set out for hauling. We pulled into a neighboring drive to ask if we could haul it away, and the new homeowner was happy to let us do so. Viv didn’t think she could lift it with me, so I called a few friends to see if I could borrow them for a few moments. I struck out, but Greg and Stacey were kind enough to loan us their truck.
As it turned out, Viv was able to assist sufficiently that we were able to get it into the truck with no problem. From haunting salvage stores lately, we were well-versed in the going rates for claw-foot tubs, and nothing warms the cockles of my heart more than a good dumpster find.
macosxhints – 10.4: Enable postfix without inducing insomnia. Noted for reference.
Several months ago in Now Playing I published a long piece about Star Trek fan films, for which I spoke with several persons from various Trek fan projects. Today, when Wired arrived, I was amused to note a cover-featured story about one of these projects in particular, the East Coast-based New Voyages.