Heat

Is this going to become a Crazy Cat Blog? Perhaps. The kittens are awfully easy targets.

Kitty thermometer: they start lolling on the hardwood at around 85°

So you may have heard that it's been hot here in the Midwest! It's been hot approximately everywhere, though, so you may not have cared. Anyway, on the Fourth, Mpls cleared 101°, setting a record (and feeling super-tropical with a 72° dew point). David and I were both at home for the holiday, trying to stay cool in front of our portable A/C unit (which was struggling to keep it to an almost-comfortable 87°), when we lost power.* 


We lasted about 10 minutes upstairs before picking up the kitties and heading down to the basement, where it was nice and cool--probably in the 70s. Pobbes and Icy were very excited to explore; they'd had baths that morning in an effort to cool them down (panting kitties are a terribly pathetic sight!), but soon had cobwebs in their whiskers (and everywhere else). David and I were somewhat less excited, but with a book for me, his smartphone for him, and cold drinks for both of us, we were able to outlast the hour-long outage. Actually, it was much hotter when we returned upstairs--but the views and furniture were better and the space much cleaner!


Thankfully, it has cooled and dried off over the past few days; we've had highs in the upper eighties and lower nineties, but more importantly it's dipped to around 70 and below at night, meaning it's completely bearable. Actually, it's been beautiful. Nothing makes you appreciate a nice dry 87 quite like a muggy 100.


Later, I'll write about the epic fireworks display(s) we caught later on the Fourth!


*I was going to put that in all caps, but then I remembered that there are people in the South/East who were out of power for days. Now I feel like a pansy.

Pests

Brian posted today about a close encounter with a mouse, one closer--and funnier!--than many of my tales of the historic Mouse Wars. As I was looking through a few of those stories earlier today, I found some that I could definitely laugh at, and others that still seriously creeped me out. Of all the things I don't miss about the old place, the vermin are high on the list.

However, last night we came home to another horrifying pest: a house centipede. Seriously, these things are awful. According to Wikipedia, they can have up to fifteen pairs of legs. (Wikipedia also includes this charming quote of 1902, credited to entomologist C.L. Marlatt):

It may often be seen darting across floors with very great speed, occasionally stopping suddenly and remaining absolutely motionless, presently to resume its rapid movements, often darting directly at inmates of the house, particularly women, evidently with a desire to conceal itself beneath their dresses, and thus creating much consternation.

I'm pretty sure they're the grossest bug I've ever seen, and that's counting Louisiana cockroaches and Borneo cicadas. We were indeed consternated to find one waiting for us on our dining room wall when we returned from an evening out with friends.

I'm sparing you the close-up of the house centipede;
you can just see it as a dark blur here.

This is the second one we've encountered in this apartment; the last one so disturbed us that we used the vacuum to avoid having to touch it. Because we have one of those lightweight models, without a hose, David lifted the whole thing up above his head to aspirate the foul creature--which, thankfully, worked.

Last night, though, David just smashed it with a paper towel, and I Windexed the wall afterward. Ewwww.

Thinking about that as I read Brian's post and some of my old ones, I wondered whether I'd rather have house centipedes or mice. No question, really: as gross as they are, I'll take the arthropods any day--though I really, really, really hope I don't have to.

Chair

Things about which I should have blogged by now:

• Wedding On A Boat
• The Move
• Moving in
  
• Housewarming party

That should about cover the flybys, right?

For now, here's a chair, to match my new writing desk. I found it at Saver's with a $7.99 price tag, but it rang up at $4.31. Score! The cashier told me it would be .99 if I waited until the next day, but I figured the extra $3 was worth it to have it in my possession immediately.

I took off the seat, lightly sanded it, spray-painted with two light coats of semi-gloss black spray paint (enough so that the brown of the wood barely shows through), recovered the seat with upholstery fabric I found yesterday at my favorite fabric warehouse, and put it back together. David helped.

I got enough fabric to reupholster the seats of the dining set that we don't yet have, but which I am hoping to find--one cheap, but with potential! I saw a contender at the St. Vincent De Paul this weekend, and am sort of monitoring the situation.

Anyway, the chair is not a super-dramatic update, but I'm pretty pleased with how it turned out. I'd been looking for a bolder, more geometric upholstery pattern, but fell in love with the tiny bubbles on this one. When I got it home, I realized it might be simultaneously too posh and too boring... but for the present I think it works fine.

Watery

The ceiling started leaking again on Tuesday, and then again today. Tuesday my landlord had sent me an e-mail to warn me that they were clearing snow in preparation for the mythical re-tarring to occur sometime later in the week and that the dripping might start again--though for the last time. Today, my only warning was an ominous dripping sound (and these days anything that slightly resembles that noise sends me into spasms, much like anything evoking a scritch or scrabble did during the height of the Mouse Wars) and some damp clothing in the closet. The Tuesday before that, the dripping had actually awakened us, at 5:40 a.m. We heard the drops splashing on the closet floor, but it turns out the pantry was flooding far worse. There's nothing quite like spending one's first hour of wakefulness removing all the contents of one's pantry onto the already meager surfaces remaining in the kitchen.

That day I started searching for apartments in earnest.

The good news is, we found one! We're planning to move weekend after next.

This weekend, we're going to be On A Boat! My dear friend M is getting married, and I'm thrilled to be heading out there to celebrate with her. Especially thrilling? 50 degree temperature gain. Oh, yes. I can't even communicate how ready I am to trade in views of endless snowbanks for ones of water and sand. Minneapolis has been more or less monochrome for the past two months, at least, so I am SO ready for some color (though not, of course, on my own skin!).

I can't wait!

Leak-y

Here is the quick version of this winter's installation of the Leak Saga, in bullets!

• Wednesday night (12/22), having attended an ill-advised but nonetheless enjoyable showing of Billy Elliot The Musical with a friend, and having found walking home from downtown to be quicker than waiting for a bus, I was beginning, at approximately midnight, to pack for the next morning's 6:30 flight when I noticed that the leak in my closet had gotten worse, soaking a section of clothing--including ones I'd wanted to take.

• It had started earlier in the afternoon, at which point I had called my landlord, who is used to me--and presumably every other tenant of his older properties--calling about this at least twice a year, generally around the time the precipitation changes forms (rain to snow to rain, etc.). I put down buckets and he said he'd send someone over.
• I flew to Seattle Thursday morning, with the unexpected drama of the terrifyingly long security line and attendant close call on making my flight erasing any thoughts of flooding.
• David flew in the next morning, Christmas Eve, and we had a fantastic holiday weekend with my family!
• David flew back on the red-eye Sunday night/Monday morning, and as he tells it, made it to the far corner of the bed, about to turn on the light (a pull-cord model in the middle of the room) when he felt the water through his socks.
• Apparently, the leak had worsened, overflowed the receptacles, and flooded the bedroom floor.
• He had planned to go into work that day, but instead found himself calling in, mopping up the mess, and moving all of the furniture except the bed frame (but including the mattress) into the next rooms.
• The leak had spread from the closet threshold and was apparently dripping into nearly the middle of the room.
• Thankfully, it didn't get the mattress at all. It also barely touched my books, thanks mostly to a watercolor pad sitting atop the bookshelf in that room, which acted as a sponge. We'd already moved a lot of the stuff in the closet out, and since the floor is so uneven, the under-bed storage was also spared.
• The floor, sadly, was pretty warped; each board now bows in the center, so although it's not visible except to close inspection, you can clearly feel the ridges when you walk on it.
• David camped out in the living room for the next few days, sleeping on the couch.
• At one point while I was in Walla Walla, the neighbor whose apartment is directly below mine texted me to mention that the flooding in his apartment had gotten worse, wondering about ours.
• When I called David, he was already at the apartment cleaning up again, having received the same message.
• The renewed flooding was apparently due to a thaw that swept the city, warming it up to a balmy 36 and causing a plague of ice dams.
• The flooding stopped due to a combination of the workmen clearing the ~2' of snow off the roof, breaking up the ice dams, putting down some tarps, and the weather cooling off again.
• When I got home a few days later, the mattress was propped against the living room windows, the bookshelf and two dressers were in the middle room, and my clothes were hanging all over the apartment.
• I spent the next week cleaning, organizing, moving the furniture back in, doing massive loads of laundry at the laundromat, and sorting through piles of papers that had either gotten wet or just turned up in the shuffle.
• Now everything feels pretty good!
• I saw my landlord today (we're on the third day of a new, and relatively very minor, saga of him replacing the light fixture in the bathroom [yet another pull-cord model, but this one mounted on a vertical surface, and the cord of which pulls out every 1.5 years and requires complete replacement]), and he assured me that hot tar in the spring would fix the problem for at least another year.
• I hope so, because even though David was sending me renters' applications to the complex down the street, I'd really rather not move before I leave town.*
• Here's hoping!

*Though it would be soooo nice to have more than three square feet of kitchen counter space... on-site laundry... a nice, reliable management company...