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the grind

01-autumn-leaves

02-bed-bench
We’ve been looking for a storage bench to put at the end of our bed for LITERALLY YEARS and the other week Taylor found this one on the Best Buy website of all places? Weird. Anyway it’s pretty much exactly what I wanted and when we ordered it it was on sale & therefore cheaper than all the not-quite-perfect ones I’ve seen so it’s a win.

03-mark-fluffalo

04-sleeping-nicky

05-nickys-boots
On the weekend I was feeling a little ~inspired and made these tiny grey suede boots for Nicky. I need to adjust the pattern a little to get a better fit but I just love them, and the little appliquéd evergreen trees on the soles are so cute.

This is my first week back at work and it has been… busy? complicated? hard? chaotic? Our original plan (Taylor works nights from home & looks after the baby while I sleep, I work days from home and look after the baby while Taylor sleeps, ugh this was such a good plan!) went out the window with my emergency c section. Why? Well, if you’re not familiar, one of the ~rules~ for looking after yourself after a c section is that you aren’t supposed to lift anything that weighs more than your newborn baby for 6-8 weeks after the delivery. You know what weighs more than my newborn baby? The daycare kids! As I mentioned previously I can do almost all of our regular activities, but I can’t pick them up, and sometimes they need picking up.

This means I need to have someone here to help me for almost the entire day. I can’t afford to hire a full-time assistant so the task falls to Taylor in the morning/early afternoon and Sym in the late afternoon. Since Taylor is awake for the first half of the day it’s not possible for him to work his regular midnight to 8am shift, so instead he’s working 4am to noon, which means I’m tasked with getting up with the kids if they wake up between midnight and 4. This makes waking up at 7 to get ready for work pretty difficult. Taylor’s sleeping hours are split completely in half: he sleeps from about 1 until 5pm, and then midnight until 4. As a result we are BOTH tired and irritable, which is kind of the opposite of what we’d hoped for, and yet another reason to hate my c section. We are still working out the scheduling kinks, so hopefully over the next few weeks we’ll get our routines down a bit better and stop being so crabby with one another. And hey, it’s only for three to five more weeks, how hard can it be? (DON’T ANSWER THAT, UNIVERSE.)

The upside of this fairly cruddy situation is the kids themselves, which I guess is the part that makes it all worthwhile. Nicky is a pretty chill & easy-going baby, Gwen has mostly been well-behaved and helpful, and Sym has ALSO been well-behaved and helpful (almost more amazing in a teen than a preschooler). They really are the bright spot in this frustrating time.

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how many, how much

2 Gwens

I absolutely cannot keep track of how pregnant I am. Last Thursday I posted on instagram that I was 33 weeks pregnant, but yesterday I saw the doctor (the baby is “growing beautifully” and I gained almost a pound, lol) and she was like “so you’re almost 35 weeks!” and I recalculated and she was right, tomorrow I am 35 weeks pregnant, not 34. This is not the first time this has happened, either, but at least I’m always miscalculating in my favour? Like I’m never “woo, I’m 25 weeks preg!” when really I’m only 23 or 24. I’m very eager to not be pregnant anymore so learning I only have five weeks left instead of six is a bit of a gift.

Of course, this also makes me a little stressed out because I haven’t exactly finished setting up the baby’s side of the bedroom yet. The crib is still in pieces and I JUST ordered the shelf that’s going to go on the wall between it and Gwen’s bed, and the estimated delivery date isn’t for three weeks! It’s mostly meant to hold Gwen’s toys but without it the toys are all over the place and I until I put them away I feel like I can’t get anything else done in that room, like hang all the art and idk, wash & put away all the baby clothes??? They are still all folded up in bins in my hallway, where they’ve been since I sorted everything out back in January (when I thought I was getting rid of it all). I just have so much to do!

Adding to the discombobulation of this week, Taylor has been away since Sunday, at a work conference in Las Vegas. He’s gone to conferences without me the last two years but BOY OH BOY does my being pregnant make it different. I made Sym stay home with me all week to help with Gwen/the dogs/around the house and I have been relying on her so much more than I thought I would. Doing anything is just so exhausting! Like doing the dishes AND going to the grocery store in the same day? Only if I’m going to bed at 6pm. It has definitely not been easy but thankfully Taylor is back tomorrow afternoon? evening? at some point anyway, and I can let Sym get back to enjoying her last few days of summer vacation.

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enough

blame_simian-1470250707736
The Fantastic Summer Fox by Taylor

Tomorrow I am 31 weeks pregnant and I’m pretty much at the point of feeling like YEP THAT’S IT THAT’S ENOUGH PREGNANCY I’M DONE. I think with Gwen I was like 37 weeks before I reached that point but this pregnancy has been so physically awful 🙁 Like I could deal with the exhaustion, the shortness of breath, the pelvic girdle pain, the heartburn so bad I can feel it in my ears… IF I DIDN’T FEEL NAUSEOUS ALL THE DAMN TIME. My morning sickness went away at like 28 weeks (I think?) and then last Thursday when I was 30 weeks it was back with a vengeance. It is just so hard to do anything when I’m constantly feeling like I’m going to hurl and have this sick taste in my mouth. It is very tedious and I am over it. But hey only NINE MORE WEEKS of feeling terrible, right? lmaooooooo

Because I’ve felt so crummy it’s been super difficult to the girls’ bedroom switch finished. Thankfully this past weekend was a long one and with Taylor’s help I was able to finish clearing out Gwen’s old room and start moving Sym in. First I had to fix all the holes in the walls and touch up the paint (which, btw, was NOT an exact match due to the different paint base), and once that was done we put up the curtains, installed the closet system and set up her new bedframe. That is pretty much it, and it took me/us the whole weekend. The closet system (1 shelving unit + 3 clothes rails) took FOUR HOURS to do because I had to take so many breaks! Yesterday during nap time Sym and I built her new desk and today we might put up one of her new bookshelves- she has an appointment with her ear doctor during naptime and LORD KNOWS I can’t do it myself so it might have to wait. It’s been really frustrating to be so enfeebled and I can’t help but think about when I was pregnant with Gwen and built her changing table/bookshelf and crib when I SWEAR I was more pregnant than I am now.

One good thing about the bedroom switch is now that Sym’s room is closer to the main living area it’s easier for the rest of us to annoy visit with her. Gwen is always going to knock on her door to ask for “more hugs” which is very cute. She loves hanging out with her big sister; she told us yesterday she wasn’t going to share the big bedroom with the baby after all, she was going to share the little one with Sym, haha.

On her first night in her new room Gwen opened her window (SCARY), so the next day I talked to her about how it wasn’t safe to open it by herself and installed a hook at the top of the window frame to loop the blind cord up out of her reach. So far it seems to be enough of a deterrent and she hasn’t opened the window since. Once the screens are in (soon, hopefully) if necessary we’ll get a mesh window guard to make it properly inaccessible. In the meantime we dug out the old baby monitor so we can hear what she’s up to in there, which has also enabled me to hear her weird sleepy mumblings.

Other good things (to counteract the misery in the first half of this post)…

Sym got her braces off last Wednesday and her teeth are AMAZING. They look perfect, and she is SO HAPPY. She got her retainers on Thursday and apparently had some difficulty with them at first (drooling, being unable to speak intelligibly, etc) but she says she’s used to them now. I think she’s really enjoying being able to eat any food she wants and also just brush her teeth with ease.

The past two Saturdays Taylor and I took Gwen to the Celebration of Light fireworks competition and she loved it! She asks to go to the fireworks all the time now, which is unfortunate since they’re over.

Sunday was the Vancouver Pride Parade and I was kind of thinking of going and then I remembered how sick and feeble and pregnant I am and I was like LOL NO, however that morning I was walking Georgie in the park across the street from my house and I saw Justin Trudeau, our Prime Minister! He and his family were marching in the parade and Nelson Park was the staging area for a few different groups, including the Liberal party. It was funny; I was about to head back up the street to my house and all these cops were like NOPE SORRY SIDEWALK IS CLOSED so I waited and two minutes later all these motorcycle cops and big black SUVs with lights flashing came roaring up my street. I got a few pics, all terrible, before giving up because he basically got swarmed and I was carrying my small dog & baby bump in a very excited and jostle-y crowd, but it was still pretty cool.

CotrAqZUMAA8vZx
Justin Trudeau is in the white pants & aqua shirt; the woman on the left in the denim jacket and aqua pants (actually a jumpsuit) pushing the stroller is his wife Sophie Grégoire Trudeau.

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the VOC is me

IMG_20160724_110935

After a couple of weeks (or maybe just one week? What even is the passage of time tbh) it’s very very summery outside, which means that inside it is a stuffy sauna. Yesterday it was so muggy in here, usually Mondays aren’t that bad because Taylor works from home on Sunday nights and keeps the windows in the office & kitchen open, but there was a massive skunk spray right outside so we had to close everything because it was TOO GROSS. This morning I got up early to open all the windows I could (ie the four that have screens in them) and turn on all the fans so hopefully it won’t be as hot, and blessing of blessings, last Friday the property manager & handyman came by to measure a bunch of my casement windows for screens! (In case you don’t know casement windows are the ones that open outwards and need custom-fitted screens on the inside of the frame). They are only doing screens for five of the seven casement windows (two in the living room, one in the dining room and one each in two of the three bedrooms) but GOOD ENOUGH. I just can’t wait to get a goddamn cross-breeze in this place!

In more home news, over the weekend Taylor and I (and a very helpful Gwen) were able to finish painting Gwen & The Dreaded Laramie’s new room! Friday I had a surprise day off so after we finished moving the last of Sym’s furniture out I filled all the holes in the walls to get ready for priming. We hit a small snag when I was buying spackle and discovered the hardware store by our house is… not really a hardware store anymore? It was taken over by an older woman a few years ago and she seems less into selling hardware than refinishing antique furniture and setting up displays of old china and vintage jewellery. I DON’T EVEN KNOW YOU GUYS. Over half the shelves are just empty but luckily there was one thing of spackle left. I did notice there were basically no painting supplies (although they still seem to carry paint), so on Saturday morning we decided to walk down to a different small hardware store at the bottom of the hill to get all the rollers, edgers, tape, dropcloths and trays we needed.

Taylor offered to go by himself but I was like “no, you’ll get the wrong stuff (more on this later…) and if we take this different walking route that is just barely out of our way we can play Pokémon Go!” So that’s what we did, and in the end it wasn’t BARELY out of our way it was SEVEN BLOCKS out of our way and we didn’t get back home until mid-afternoon. OOPS. We did catch a lot of Pokémons though, so obviously it was worth it. I actually noticed on the weekend that I’ve lost a lot of the fatness I gained in my face at the start of this pregnancy, and I’m still eating fries basically all the time so I’m definitely crediting it to the 25 extra kilometers I’ve walked in the past week playing this game. Thanks, Pokémon!

Anyway we still had to tape everything so we did that and then threw this half-a-can of ancient primer I had (I think from when I made my mushroom table? so like YEARS ago) up on the walls. We were able to do almost a full coat on every wall. Now, at this point we still didn’t have the actual paint yet so once the priming was done I sent Taylor over to the antique-filled hardware store to get a can, because they still had paint, right? NOPE. They were actually out of the pastel base needed to make the off-white colour we were using! Perfect. I looked online and there was only one other store downtown that carried that brand and it had already closed for the day AND was closed all day on Sundays. The next closest store was over the bridge on West Broadway and was closing in just 20 minutes, so I quickly called to confirm they had the right base (they had 50 gallons in stock so no worries there) and figured Taylor could go in a Car To Go the next morning to pick it up.

Just to make sure there were no mistakes I texted him the name & number of the paint colour, as well as the name, number and finish of the paint base. I really wanted to be sure he got the right one since we will also be using it to do touch ups in Sym’s new room, which is of course already painted the same colour. The one I wanted was a non-toxic zero VOC (volatile organic compound) paint with built-in primer, which I figured would take less coats and allow us to move Gwen into the room more quickly, as well as definitely for sure being an exact match with the other room. And I texted him LITERALLY every piece of information he needed, so like what could go wrong? Well I will tell you what could go wrong is HE WOULD JUST GET THE WRONG DAMN PAINT. The colour and finish were right but it was in a different base with NO built-in primer. Normally I don’t like to complain about husband stuff on here but this was SO FRUSTRATING, especially because when I said “This isn’t the right one” he just basically shrugged his shoulders and was like “idk this is what the guy sold me when I asked for this colour in eggshell.” UM I TEXTED YOU MORE INFORMATION THAN THAT WHY DIDN’T YOU JUST SHOW THE GUY THE TEXT STOP ACTING LIKE YOU WERE POWERLESS IN THIS PAINT BUYING SITUATION. We actually had a kind-of real fight about it which seems silly but I can excuse myself by reason of being pregnant.

I was also worried that one gallon of this primerless paint wouldn’t be enough to cover the existing green paint (it was a light green but still darker than the off white we were putting over it), and he’d have to go back for more, so REALLY I was looking out for him. Thankfully the half-assed coat of old primer we’d done the day before actually did the trick and we were able to get full coverage over the green, although it did take three coats (four for the edging). But it’s all done now, with about 1/5 of the can left for touch-ups (still hopeful it will match the existing paint well enough), and today I’m going to pull off the tape and we can start moving Gwen into her new space! She has been very excited about this whole process, “helping” with the painting until she got bored and choosing which side of the room she wants her bed on and which side is for the baby’s crib. I was a little worried she’d be flipped out about moving rooms but I think it’s going to be just fine.

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switcheroo

sisters

fluffalo

messy bed

Later this summer the girls are switching bedrooms. Right now Sym has the bigger room and Gwen’s is quite small. Gwen will be sharing a room with the baby so Sym has very graciously accepted the smaller room. It’s kind of a huge production because Sym’s room is full of STUFF that all needs sorting out, and both rooms need to have all the wall-holes fixed and be repainted. Right now the plan is for Sym to slowly pack up everything over the next month, and then right before she goes to her dad’s for the last week of July we’ll move everything out, fix the walls and paint. Then we move Gwen into Sym’s old room, fix the walls and paint in Gwen’s old room, move Sym into it and there you have it! It would be easier if Taylor or I had that time off but OH WELL, we’ll figure it out.

Because Sym’s current room is so large she has a big desk, wide dresser and wide bookcase, and NONE of it will fit into the new space, so I have to get her new furniture. I was kind of dreading it because $$$, but what’re you gonna do? I’m still counting my lucky stars that we didn’t get rid of all Gwen’s baby stuff in January! Originally I’d planned to get Sym a daybed with drawers underneath to replace her dresser, but she didn’t really like any of the options so instead we’re just getting a simple underbed frame to use with her old headboard and installing a storage system in the closet with extra clothes rails and shelves. This is actually great because the simple frame & storage system are a lot less expensive than the daybed, so it’s cut my estimated cost by about 60%. To add to the savings Gwen and the baby will be inheriting Sym’s old wide dresser, and Gwen’s current small dresser is on the Ikea recall list so BACK IT GOES FOR A FULL REFUND. We’re also getting Sym a tall bookcase (to replace the wide one) and a small desk (to replace the large one) and the cost of these will be partially offset by the returned dresser, so everything’s coming up Milhouse!

In other good news, Sym is getting her braces off in just FOUR WEEKS! She is really looking forward to eating popcorn and caramel again, and I am looking forward to not having to remind her to put her elastics in. Also, she’s getting a new phone in July (I used her upgrade on my phone so she gets my upgrade) and I recently introduced her to the wonder that is cheap-ass iphone cases on ebay and she has a short list of about ten she wants to get. And in August she gets to take this great week-long course for teens at the art school! Truly, this will be the summer of Sym.

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twenty-four

Sooooo city hall passed the motion to look into giving my block a heritage conservation designation! I’m so excited, like nothing’s done for sure yet (I guess the next step is research) BUT it’s one step closer to our goal. My friend emailed me a link to a local newspaper article about it and the reporter called it “a contentious decision” but like… there are like half a dozen privately owned buildings in the whole block so exactly who is it contentious to? A few rich dicks? Putting stronger restrictions on redevelopment in the neighborhood would affect almost zero people. ANYWAY. We won this fight and we’re gonna win the whole battle.

sleeping gwen

hydrangeas

animal hood gwen

Today I am 24 weeks pregnant. I’m celebrating by eating a lot of fudgesicles (the only food in the house right now) and wearing this truly absurd pentagonal jumpsuit I got in the mail yesterday. It’s not even maternity wear (I’m having trouble finding much in the way of maternity wear I can stand, ONCE AGAIN) but the loose & flowy and did I mention loose? like there is an abundance of fabric! design means I’ll be able to float around in this thing all summer, no matter how preg I get. I bought it in the black but I honestly might get the red as well? I wish I could get it in every colour of the rainbow.

Overall I am still doing well this pregnancy. I do still have to take Diclectin for my nausea; I fell asleep before taking it on Sunday night and all day Monday I was suffering. I wish it would just go away like this is first trimester stuff! What gives?! I’m also having a lot of pelvic girdle pain which is a drag because it make sit difficult to stand, or walk, or sit down, or lie down, or move between any of these states of being. After all the standing and walking I did on Saturday that night was truly miserable, so I’ve been taking it a lot easier since then. Unfortunately it’s also quite painful to sit on the floor, especially sitting on the floor cross-legged, especially sitting on the floor cross-legged with a small child in my lap, which is often my natural state. But other than those two things, the endless nausea and crippling pain, everything is going great! The baby is moving and kicking a lot, and I’ve even been able to see my belly push out in a weird lump from baby stretches. It’s always the creepiest thing and I can’t wait for it to happen more often so I can force everyone else to witness it, haha.

Oh and! I added a new item to my shop, the first of the suede & leather appliquéd skull patches I made in the spring! I wanted to put up more but I needed to photograph them all and my camera was acting weird, there was a huge delay when I pressed the shutter button and I couldn’t figure why. Then I saw there were dozens of extremely close up pics of a pair of dirty socks on my desk and I realized… a toddler must have been here, and set a 10-second timer. Anyway, you can see the listing here.

GPW SL SF Patch

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fresh

wisteria

On Friday morning I went out with Gwen and the daycare baby to go buy some window screens. Every year I mean to do this and every year I forget-slash-put it off until high summer when they’ve sold out and then I’m screwed. Last year I tried making my own, which was semi-successful but a huge pain and I never finished them. I was actually supposed to have ALL the windows screened before I adopted Mark Fluffalo but like… that didn’t happen. It wasn’t an issue last year because as you may recall he spent his life under the bed, but now he is very sociable and friendly (haha not really) and enjoys sitting on windowsills, and I don’t want him getting out. I’ve also been having trouble with animals coming IN my open windows; sometimes raccoons and squirrels, who tend to run away quickly, but most annoying is other people’s pet cats. They will come right into the apartment, they get Georgie all riled up, I’m worried about Mark fighting with them, and they aren’t always the most friendly with kids so I’m also concerned about Gwen getting scratched.

I’m trying to get the landlord to pay for some of the screens. There are 14 windows in my apartment that open; seven are single-hung windows (the kind that slide up) and the other seven are casement windows (the hinged kind that open outwards). The former are easy, you can get extendable screens from hardware stores (or amazon) that you can attach to the outside of the window frame or just set under the raised sash so the window’s own weight holds the screen in place. Casements are a different matter; screen installation is on the inside of the window and have a little opening in them to reach through to access the window lock/handle. Casement screens are custom-made, and last year when I was calling around to different companies they quoted $50 per window MINIMUM, so AT LEAST $350 if not more. For screens that would be custom fitted to this apartment’s windows, so if we were to ever move (not likely but u never know) I would have to leave them behind. Anyway I know when one of my neighbors was having trouble with raccoons coming into her apartment last summer the landlord offered HER screens so why not me?

So back to the screens I bought on Friday. I immediately put two in the windows at the end of the living room where Taylor and I have our shared office space and it was SO NICE. I’ve only been able to keep those windows open a tiny crack since Mark decided to no longer be an underbed cat, and being able to throw up the sash and get fresh air was amazing. Not long after we got home it started raining and the sound & smell of rain on my terrible garden was somehow soothing and refreshing at the same time. Mark also enjoyed it, at least I think he did. He spent a good long while on the sill peering out through the screens with his eyes bugged halfway out of his head, before becoming overwhelmed and retiring to the dark bedroom.

ALSO I discovered a few months ago that the garden store downtown has closed (in a shocking Vancouver twist some developers are tearing down the building that housed it to make way for some overpriced condos). I like to buy a couple of plants in the spring for my garden and home which I then kill almost immediately, so while I was getting the screens I also picked up a new little tropical desk friend. Place your bets on his longevity now.

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short pants

01 blossoms

02 gwen at the waterfront

03 north shore & clouds

04 deskie

05 white hearts

06 baby stack

07 waiting at the window

Gwen is talking more and more all the time, and it’s very funny to me (and probably only me but what can you do, it’s my blog) the way she will put words together to describe things she doesn’t know the name of. Like it’s spring so I got out some of her shorts from last year that still fit, and bought her a couple new pairs. One of them is actually a skirt with built-in shorts, but she calls them all the same thing: “short pants.” OBVIOUSLY they are short pants, that’s where the name shorts even comes from, but now she feels she needs to put a modifier on non-short pants so she calls them “big pants.”

Today I am fifteen weeks pregnant and yesterday I had my second appointment with my new OB-GYN and I got to hear the baby’s heartbeat for the first time! I always love that sound, and I didn’t get to hear it at my last appointment because they* literally wouldn’t hold still long enough. Even yesterday it took the doctor several tries to listen for long enough to measure the heart because this baby has things to do and those things are CONSTANT FLIPS. I don’t feel any baby movement myself but anytime anyone tries to listen to or look at them it’s time to party, apparently.

My nausea levels have continued to decrease. Last Friday night/Saturday morning I actually forgot to take my medication, but I felt fine all day Saturday so I decided to try going without. I was okay until Sunday, when I started to feel ill again. I’m going to try quitting them again this week; I don’t want to try during the week because of work but I have been able to get a lot more stuff done during the day, like dishes and laundry and even on one triumphant occasion, taking out the food scraps to the smelly bin in the smelly garbage room without getting sick.

I think I’m starting to nest already, because I am more obsessed than ever with painting my apartment. Some rooms need repainting; some have never been painted at all. I need to wait until the summer to do most of the bigger jobs like repainting Sym’s room for Gwen & baby to move into, and finally painting my bedroom after being in this apartment for TEN YEARS. I will definitely require Taylor’s help for these projects as my bump will be very bumpy by then. There are a couple of things I can start before my bump gets too big, like repainting the BRIGHT ORANGE half bath and BRIGHT YELLOW hallway, and finishing painting the full bath (thankfully pale grey). I could probably even paint the whole kitchen since open plan apartment = the only walls in that room are between the top of the counter and the bottom of the cupboard (realistically a tiled backsplash would be better but I rent so NOPE). This is a good idea; I should start filling all the holes in all the rooms I can paint. And buy tape! Filling holes and taping is like 90% of painting anyway.

*I’ve been using the singular “they” as the baby’s pronoun but yesterday I started using male pronouns which is WEIRD. I never did it will either of my previous pregnancies so maybe my body is trying to tell me something?

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o gwennenbaum

ornaments

bw tree

advent house

business baby

macaroni

lighted birds

Gwen has a new obsession with lip balm, only she pronounces it like “baum.” Last week I gave her a zerbert and she christened it a bart(fart)-kiss and now she gives us bart-kisses all the time. Only she doesn’t know how to do it so they are just loud smacky kisses.

We put all the decorations on our tree and so far it hasn’t been a disaster. Last year Gwen spent the month of December undecorating the tree & breaking ornaments; this year she has mostly ignored it. Except for the lights! Turning them on every day is her job exclusively. She has been kind of reckless with our holiday Legos, but they are new this year and also toys so what else did we expect?

Since I’ve been taking a semi-blogging hiatus I obviously haven’t been posting my meal plans, but I’ve been keeping up with them… sort of. Maybe I don’t plan the whole week at once but I have been making some good meals. The other week I made some ameezing sweet & sour pork with using fresh meat (instead of frozen pre-battered bits) (just never mind that I used sauce from a jar, haha).

I’ve instituted a new rule that on Wednesdays Symphony cooks dinner, which is kind of perilous and also tedious. The point is that her cooking means less work for me, but she makes such a fuss it’s kind of the same amount of work IF NOT MORE. Last night I taught/helped her to make macaroni & cheese from scratch and she nailed it, the sauce was literal perfection. She also got to experience some very real frustration when Gwen, who loves cheese and loves macaroni and loves macaroni & cheese just straight up REFUSED to eat it, for no reason. I would say Sym now has a deeper appreciation for some of what I do around here but like… teens.

I think I am mostly finished with my holiday gift shopping, although I am VERY behind on my gift-making, oops. I am pretty caught up on etsy orders but I thought it would be a good idea to do some last-minute gift & ornament exchanges which was not my brightest move ever. Today I am going to get started on painting some things, partly because painting is easier on my wrists and my carpal tunnel has been pretty terrible lately. I got new wrist braces and I am being more diligent about wearing them, especially during the day, but ughhhh it’s sooooooooo annoyinggggggggggggggggg. First though, I made a new set of stickers! As in, I’m making them right now: I designed & printed the first sheet but haven’t cut them out yet. You can get them here.

watercolour crystal stickers small watermark

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it’s whaley not meant to be

lord kichoumort

So I mentioned I made a list of projects I need to finish around the house before I can put up any(more) Christmas decorations. This is the list:

• put up bedside lights in bedroom

• make pee pad pan for front bathroom

• sand & paint baseboard in front bathroom

• take all Halloween decorations to storage

• put insulating plastic on at least 6 windows

• install whale bath toy scoop

I feel like some of these need explaining: The pee pad pan & painting the baseboard are part of the same thing: back when Taylor was a single dog parent to Kichou, he worked long hours and Kichou would be at home alone so he learned to do his dog business on papers in the bathroom, a practice that continued when they moved in with me. Now he’s old and incapable of learning new tricks so he’ll still peeing on papers (or rather, pee pads) in the night. We actually got reusable, washable fabric pee pads for him to save money (and the environment) but the problem is he is a boy dog and he lifts his leg to pee every. time. So he was peeing on the baseboard and even if we sort of propped the pee pad against it, it would often fall over or slide down and as a result, the baseboard in that part of the front bathroom is STRAIGHT UP NASTY. We’ve tried cleaning it with vinegar and with bleach and it’s just beyond cleaning and as a result the room smells not great. We got some Kilz stain/odour sealing primer to use when we repaint it, but I was like “what is the point of repainting this when it’s just gonna get peed on again?” We needed some kinda litter tray to put the pee pad in to keep the pee area away from the baseboard but like… that is not a thing that is available commercially. Kichou won’t go in something that he has to jump into, so a regular, cat-style litterbox is out of the question, and while they do make 2-sided triangular corner litter trays for bunnies and ferrets, they aren’t big enough for a dog. SO HERE’S WHAT I DID: I bought a medium large Sterilite storage bin and I hacked it up with a saw. Those things are a lot harder to cut that you think they’ll be, but I had this little handsaw that did a pretty decent job. I cut off two sides so it’s still rectangular, and the sides are higher than the baseboard and higher than such a little dog can pee. It needs a little work still, I want to cut off the wide top edge so I can clip the pee pad in place, but so far it seems like it’s working and we can go ahead and sand/repaint now.

Wow, that was a lot of dog pee talk, and I apologize. That isn’t even the point of this post! The main story is the GODDAMN WHALE BATH TOY SCOOP. Gwen is a small child and has bath toys, and ever since she was little we’ve used one of those suction cup net bags to store them. The suction cups are pretty fried tho, and no longer stick to the tile. It’s also annoying fishing all her billions of toys out of the tub. I suggested to Taylor we get a scoop-style one, and a few weeks ago he ordered this Boon Whale Scoop. It’s a three-piece item: the scoop, a shelf the scoop hooks on to, and a bracket to hang the shelf on. There are two options for installing the bracket: you can either screw it into the tile OR it has adhesive tabs on the back to just stick it up. I’m not about to start drilling holes in tile so I decided to go the adhesive tab route, but I’d read some reviews that said the adhesive wasn’t great and people’s whales had noisily fallen down in the middle of the night and broken. To help it stay in place I decided to reinforce the adhesive tabs with some Sugru (an amazing product which I love); I had one pack of it left over from a different project.

It wasn’t just as simple as sticking the whale on the wall though; I had to clean the tiles thoroughly, then clean them again with rubbing alcohol, and after sticking the bracket up I wasn’t supposed to let it get wet for 24 hours so the adhesive could cure. Not so easy in a house full of people having showers all the time, but on Monday evening I was finally able to berate Symphony and Taylor to both have their showers early so I could get it done. So I was all ready to clean the wall when I realized… I’d put the box with the whale scoop in Gwen’s bedroom closet, and she was already asleep. There was no way I was going to risk waking her up so I resigned myself to having to wait another day when Mark Fluffalo, doing his Scary Cat Abandoned Psychiatric Hospital routine, jumped out and scared Sym in the hallway. She screamed right outside Gwen’s door, waking her up. I was able to soothe her back to sleep fairly quickly, and also get the whale out of the closet! I went ahead and cleaned the tile, applied all the extra adhesive, and stuck the bracket to the wall.

24 hours later the adhesive was finally cured and I went to hang the shelf on the bracket, but I couldn’t get it to fit. I was trying so hard to jam the dang thing over the bracket and suddenly I was like… wait a minute, and tried putting the shelf on the bottom of the bracket, where it fit perfectly, because I’d stuck the bracket to the wall upside down. ALL THAT FRICKIN HASSLE AND I PUT IT THE WRONG WAY UP LIKE R U KIDDING ME??? I had to pry it off the wall with a butter knife which took FOREVER because of all the extra adhesive, and now guess what? I don’t have anymore adhesive to put it back up with! I had to order more and now I’m waiting for it to arrive so I can try again, and in the meantime I still have to clean all the old adhesive bits off the tile. RIDICULOUS and FRUSTRATING as I’d crossed this item off my list and I had to UNcross it.

I do have one super success story though: yesterday I put that not-at-all-tacky shrink-fit insulating plastic on more than six windows. I actually had this up before but the property manager made me take it down because he said it could “damage the paint” on the window frames. In my opinion it’s a lot more damaging to have the painted window frames constantly wet from condensation and growing a gross biofilm all over them, and if they didn’t want the frames damaged MAYBE they should have sprung for double-paned windows instead of these cheap single panes BUT WHAT DO I KNOW. He actually sent me a registered letter with a list of suggestions on how to avoid window condensation (which he came in person to tell me he’d sent because the property management office is like 50 feet from my door?) and they were all total nonsense, like “turn on the heat lamp in your bathroom” when I don’t have a heat lamp in my bathroom, “open the window in your bathroom” when I don’t have a window in my bathroom, and “leave a window open in every room all the time day and night all winter long” when I’m not looking to freeze and also I live in a basement apartment and I’m not looking to get home invaded, raped and murdered either. Weird how a guy who lives in a big house in the suburbs and drives a Mercedes has NO IDEA what it’s like living in my rickety basement apartment, but ANYWAY, I had to take all the plastic down. So annoying and I had to spend a significant portion of last winter drying off all my windows multiple times a day. HOWEVER I recently learned that he quit or got fired or idek, but who cares HE’S GONE and I’ve insulated (most of) my windows again.