House!: March 2006 Archives

The internet is for porn, they say, and blogs exist solely for the dissemination of information about the adorablee things cats do. Well, this is different. See, one of my cats is doing something that is decidedly not cute or adorable in any way. He's recently reached maturity, and we hadn't taken him to get neutered yet, so he's been spraying. Everywhere. I can tell this isn't just what they call inappropriate elimination (indicating displeasure with litter box arrangements, though in fairness we could probably clean their box a bit more frequently) because it just started with spring, approximately when the kitten (Kolya or Nikola, depending what he peed on) reached maturity, and he only sprays on vertical surfaces. It's a territorial marking behavior. So we've been having to keep him down in the basement where the litter box and the food is, which means we've also had to keep Neal and Five down there as well. We had an appointment set up for March 29 to have Kolya neutered. But see, this also isn't just a rant. I miss my kitties. They're all downstairs, and I hear them at the door, scratching and head-butting it and meowing. I checked all their necessaries - food, water, litter - and it's all there. But they still want to come upstairs, and when I let them out, they might explore for a minute or two, but then they're all over me again, headbutting me and demanding attention. It's why it's so hard to leave them down there. I feel like they love me.

I'll be crossing stuff off as I get it done. I have... nine days, and a total of eighteen items. I think I can do all of what I have to do, and a good deal of what I want to do, so yay!. First, the have-to-do's, in order of have-to-do-it-ness:

• HOMEWORK: Write up four labs. Three of them were technically due last week, but they're really lenient about due dates for these.
• TEACHING: Grade labs - four classes worth.
• HOMEWORK: Optics, due 3/22.
• HOMEWORK: Math Methods, due 3/24.
• HOUSE STUFF: Fridge overhaul. Remove anything expired, green (as in, moldy) or unidentifiable.
• HOMEWORK: Decide on a topic for my Optics term paper.
• HOMEWORK: Start working on my Economics honors paper. Due 4/24, but I have a sneaking suspicion that I'm going to get less and less time to write stuff like this as the semester progresses, rather than more.

Then the want-to-do's, in order of want-to-do-it-ness:

• PERSONAL: Neglect friends less. (You know who you are.) (Not that this can really be crossed off as "done", but I'm making good progress. It's not a particularly well-defined task or goal.)
• PERSONAL: Work on the Protest Signs project. (Bought supplies and started on slogans for this. I'm satisfied that I can work on this in small spurts while in school, with this much out of the way.)
• PERSONAL: Read Mark Haddon's "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time". (Review forthcoming.)
• PERSONAL: Newestart design.
• PERSONAL: Talk to Eric about photography for Mythos.
• PERSONAL: Writing-foo.
• HOUSE STUFF: Plan garden. Begin execution. (Sunday. Mom's coming over to lend her gardening brain.)
• PERSONAL: Start reading Robert Nozick's "Anarchy, State, and Utopia". (Nozick's smart. I believe this may mark the first time I've gotten a book from a professor that I enjoyed. I'm working on the second chapter now, which is enough momentum to keep me going, I think.)
• PERSONAL: Braindump at Sam about OpenNotes.
• PERSONAL: Braindump at Tyler about Guilt.
• PERSONAL: Sleep. Sleep as much as the rest will allow. (Sleep GOOD!)

I didn't post Thursday, and technically I didn't Friday either, though I post late usually so rolling into the next day isn't a huge hairy deal. Negligence, not laziness, is my excuse. I just simply forgot to blog. I apparently did wind up acing that ethics test. I called the professor this afternoon and asked, so yay. I had two classes this morning, then I came home, but not before I managed to plan a semi-impromptu barbeque at our place and invited most of the office. So then I came home and read while I waited for the gas guy to install a gas hookup for our new grill, and I read some of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time. Ran some errands when I went to pick up Sam, then came home, cleaned a bit, prepped for dinner, and we had our little shindig. It was a blast. We had tons of awesome steak and good drinks and played charades and acted ridiculously. Pictures to come. Spring break, ahoy!

We now have a grill. You know Sam wants to cook real bad.

Our bed (headboard, footboard and rails) was delivered today. It's gorgeous! I submit to you: I'm deeply, deeply in love with this bed (and the other furniture - some of which is partly viewable in this photo). In fact, it inspired the oft-skipped (or rather always-skipped) making of the bed, and a lot more cleaning than I usually do. It's funny, but the bedroom stuff is really inspiriing us to keep things cleaner. (We've had some of the set for about a month, some more of it for a week.) I want the pretty wood to show. I don't want the nifty little embellishments piled under a stack of junk. Look at it - it's beautiful! The gorgeousness of the bed greatly reduced the pouting when the bed that matched the rest of the set wouldn't fit up our staircase - a tight squeeze: Anyway, photographic digression aside, it's pretty stuff. And rather than thinking that's frivolous (as I used to), I'm starting to appreciate the psychology of nice things. We invested almost two thousand dollars, after all was said and done, in that bedroom set. Our previous expenditures on furniture have been pretty modest - we have a Sleep Number bed that goes for about that much, but I got it on employee discount back when I was a sales professional for them back in Colorado, which was... a ridiculously substantial discount. Close behind that was our $400 couch. All of the rest has been $10-$80 stuff from Walmart, Target and thrift stores. Now, the stuff from thrift stores looks pretty good - I wouldn't have dropped money on used furniture unless it looked nicer than new stuff at that price point. But the basic white or black or (gag) brown pressboard assemble-at-home shelving units and cabinets and stuff? It's just... ugly. It's uninspiring. It invites clutter, because there's nothing to make you care about it. We're not the tidyest people in the world. Sue us. Life happens and we don't always have the time to pick up after it. Our studio apartment was atrocious. No, make that disgusting. That apartment was basically the equivalent of pressboard assemble-at-home furniture, besides being too small; there was no inherent beauty to it, inspiring us to keep it clean. We still don't have a perfectly clean house, but we do ever-so-much better than we ever have anywhere else. The house is gorgeous. Our stuff is starting to match. And it seems like the more we fill it up with stuff we actually care about, the easier it gets to keep it all nice.