splinters

In the past two days, we’ve managed to kill off three appliances. I’m wondering if we’re cursed.

Friday the coffeemaker started failing to brew the entire pot, and by Tuesday morning it was just sitting there and hissing at us and failing to produce coffee at all, joy. So we replaced it. Kind of annoying but not the end of the world.

Yesterday evening, Loki was shredding some of our massive pile of credit card invitations when the shredder started producing a warm-electric-thing sort of smell, and failing to fulfill its only mission in life, to shred things.

Ten minutes after that, our 16-year-old TV, which had been putting out a green-tinged picture for ages, went for the full-on, sea-green picture with lovely white diagonal stripes.

We’d been planning on replacing the TV after we moved (thank you, economic stimulus check), and move the Green Machine to the office, but we didn’t think we could make it the six weeks or so until that arrived, so we replaced it with a small LCD, picked up an industrial-strength shredder at the same time, and moved back our plans for the big LCD until probably Christmas.

Note to the rest of our electric and electronic possessions: YOU ARE NOT TO DIE YET. We can’t afford to replace you.

A conversation:

Loki: “I would not have thought you’d want to do a spreadsheet for list of new house things. How strange and unexpected of you to whip out the spreadsheet.”
Me: “I believe I detect a note of sarcasm …”

Another conversation:

Random woman calling my mobile phone: “Selena? Is Selena there?”
Me: “No, and she hasn’t been here the last eighty-seven hundred times y’all have called me. For serious, I’ve had this phone number for, what? Five years? And I’ve never, ever been Selena!”

She hung up about halfway through, but it was still satisfying to say it.

A discovery:

We may not get to pick our closing date. It’s been hinted that this may, in fact, take place on the very weekend I did not want the closing to take place, but Loki has wisely pointed out that we are not required to move in an hour after they hand us the keys. I’m so glad he’s here to be the voice of reason.

I think it’s pretty well established that I’m a total dork, but really? You have no idea.

So I’m watching Top Gear the other night, an older episode in which Jeremy is testing the Koenigsegg CCX, right? And I start thinking, “Damn, that reminds me of something …”

Eventually, I got it:

I believe this firmly establishes my world-class dork-cred.

They’ve just posted the schedules for this year’s Wave-Gotik-Treffen.

We’re not going, of course, but if we were, I can only see one conflict: Friday night, Das Ich & Solar Fake are playing at the same time. Really glad I don’t have to decide between them!

Just one of the weird ways in which this whole housebuying lark is affecting our lives:

Our Black Rain labelmates, Dandelion Wine, have a new album, Selected Anachronisms, coming out on May 20. I would love to pre-order it, but I have no idea how long shipping will take, and therefore no idea where we’ll be living when it arrives.

Well, I’ll figure it out. I keep forgetting to check out Black Rain’s MySpace page, which has samples, but I hear it’s even groovier than ~An Inexact Science~, which is impressive, as I love that album.

You, on the other hand, are not moving, and therefore can and should pre-order it at once!

I never meant this to turn into The Trials and Tribulations of Buying a Damn House, but since that’s been occupying quite a lot of my brain-cycles, that’s what comes spewing out. And today? Today is a milestone.

We’re opening escrow on the Mesa house!

Ok, before you squee yourself to death (like I nearly did on the phone with our awesome realtor), the bank hasn’t accepted our offer — yet. We’ve been getting positive noises from the listing agent, though, and it’s just a matter of days before we get the final response, so we’re preemptively opening escrow so we’ll have started the process when the bank says “You can has house.”

Yay, forward progress! After weeks and weeks of stagnating, I feel like we’ve left the calm but boring Tidepool of Waiting and are heading out into the uncharted, dark and scary Seas of Escrow. I expect there are sharks. Are there sharks? Are we allowed to punch them?

So yesterday was Loki’s and my wedding anniversary, yay! Fourteen years, bitches*.

We didn’t do anything special or buy each other presents because (a) Loki had to work until 10:30, and (b) we’re giving each other a house. Y’know, eventually**.

Anyway. My plan last night was to do some ultra-romantic painting and possibly packing, but first, I thought I’d make a chopped salad with some toasted walnuts, so I quickly blanched the walnuts to kill the bitterness (all three pounds of them. Costco, you’re killing me) and as I was draining them, the pot slipped and spewed near-boiling water all over my hand.

OW. OW. OW.

So instead of Getting Things Done, I pretty much sat on the couch with a bag of frozen peas on my hand, whimpering occasionally. So much fun. You’ve no idea.

I did eventually toast the walnuts, but the fun had gone out of the production, and it hurt so much to put on the oven mitts that I didn’t toss them around as much as I should have, so some of them were extra-well-toasted while some of them were still pale. ARGH.

And today my hand, while much less red and puffy, is still pretty painful because not moving one’s fingers a lot leads to cramps. YAY.

So let that be a lesson to you: Plan a nice anniversary celebration, or you will burn yourself. You’ve been warned.

* Those of you keeping score at home will likely have something to say along the lines of “still claiming to be 23, eh? You realize that made you nine when you got married, right?” To you I say, shut the fuck up. I am 23 … in my mind.

** Nope, still haven’t heard. I thought it’d've been a great anniversary present (”Your offer was accepted!”), but alas.

I spackled today! I’m a spackler!

It all started on Tuesday when our realtor emailed us to say we’d probably hear back on the Mesa house in the next day or so. Panic! Consternation! We’d slacked on the packing and now we could be coming down to the wire. So we packed like maniacs for three nights, and got maybe 20% done — and that’s mainly books.

Thirty-eight boxes of books, y’all. And that doesn’t count the cookbooks.

I know! It’s madness. Happily, both houses have a room for L-space. Yay.

So then we pulled down the shelves in the office, the ones on the wall we put in before we realized what a think of beauty IKEA’s bookshelves are, but that left dozens of holes in the wall. So we picked up a tub of spackle, some primer and a gallon of color-matched paint thanks to my new best friend, Juan in the paint department of Home Depot.

And I spackled! And it looks fantastic. I wish I’d taken before and after pictures, for it is mightily impressive.

Weird thing: the spackle texture in the tub was not entirely unlike whipped butter. Mmm, butter.

Of course, after all that, we’ve still not heard back on the Mesa house, but at least we’re more prepared, go us.

Next up: more packing, and de-red-ifying the living room. Whee!

I’m finally recovered from Loki’s Birthday Weekend of Much Awesomeness, thank the gods. It was touch-and-go there for a while.

Friday night we had some pretty good Thai at the Thai Elephant downtown, then saw Margaret Cho, who was filthy. Also hilarious. Also, Dot, Tom, Loki and I were, like, two of four hetero couples in the audience. Pretty amusing.

After, we dashed back to Tempe for the Ego Likeness/Voltaire show, which was pretty good. I wish we’d seen more Ego Likeness, though; it was my first time seeing them live, and I thought they pulled off the two-people-onstage thing pretty well.

Saturday I did a couple hours of prep for Loki’s shared birthday party with Ryan, then we went to Home Depot, where I took Loki to the tool department and said “Choose!” He picked a table saw and a compound miter saw, and now wants to build everything. Totally can’t wait to get into the new house* and start some serious woodworking.

We also got Ryan a ladder, which caused a sensation during the Presents portion of the night’s festivities. Note to world: gift-wrapped six-foot stepladders are a recipe for much hilarity. Highly recommended.

So in the fullness of time, people started turning up for the party, and soon we had a houseful, which was nice. If you somehow missed your invitation, that’s my fault. My address book is borked. I’ll make it up to you, promise.

Anyway. It was a party. Silly things were said, drinks were had, food was eaten. As usual, we had too much, but that always disturbs me much less than not having enough.

Sunday we spent doing some halfhearted cleaning, but mostly we lazed around. It was lovely.

And so ends the Ridiculously Long Update. I swear I’m going to start posting more so I don’t feel compelled to do several days’ worth of entries in one go. One more resolution to break!

* Whichever one it turns out to be. Nope, we still don’t know. Another week or so to go!

I seem to have lost my mobile phone. ARGH. I recommend calling Loki’s phone until I (a) find it, or (b) replace it.

So I totally chickened out last night — after the three-hour dance of pain that was the splinters back-end de-cruftification and archives recovery, I couldn’t face doing the Reliquary site as well. It suffers from the same “what the hell was I thinking?” back-end wonkiness, which can only be fixed with the aforementioned orbital nuke.

Happily, I now know what I need to do to stop the ugliness, the Reliquary upgrade shouldn’t take nearly as long.

The reason for all this pain is a rather annoying vulnerability in WordPress versions prior to 2.5. On the plus side, the nuking will allow me to automagically update all my previously-wonky WordPress installs. YAY.

In other news, it’s occurred to me that random visitors to the site must think no one ever comments here. It’s nearly true; thanks to a nifty LiveJournal crossposting plugin, most comments happen over there. I swear to you I’m not just talking to myself here =)

I think I’ve sorted everything … all the entries are here, most of the images made it back, and now there’s just one final test … the LJ-crosspost.

  vs.  

So last night, because we can’t leave well enough alone, apparently, we put in an offer on yet another house.

This one’s in Gilbert, which is, as far as I can tell, the only drawback, and that’s mainly from a fuel-bill point of view. It has a killer kitchen (above, right), a near-perfect downstairs studio, and a bunch of other really nice features.

Still, we want the Mesa house more, but as they’re both short (hah!) sales, and we’ve got 3 weeks to go before we hear on the Mesa house, we thought, what the hell.

Either way, we will win a fabulous studio, and a really nice kitchen — both have granite countertops, which makes me happy. Mmmm, granite.

In other news, both splinters and the Reliquary site will be briefly unavailable tonight, as I nuke both of them from orbit and start again (it’s the only way to be sure).

In these past hellish few days, there have been a few bright spots that have allowed me to cling to some semblance of sanity or normalcy. Of course, the biggest part of that is my belovedest. Shared grief, shared help.

But there’s also:

Soundtracks. The Amelie one, of course, is a perennial favorite, but I’ve also been listening to the Lord of the Rings and Battlestar Galactica soundtracks. Yes, I’m a total dork, but the beautiful instrumentals are a nice background noise. Battlestar Galactica’s Season 3 soundtrack has some great taiko drums, bass lines & strings. Don’t look at me like that.

Art. I’ve found some wonderful things on Etsy lately, ordered before the Bad Times and arriving just when I needed a small smile. I can’t wait to get into the new house (wherever, and whenever, that may be) and start hanging it.

From Eliza Gauger, I got a print of her adorable Bat Smax (top), and a print of Afterglow, A Stroll (middle), which has a nice story attached to it, but I persist in thinking that it’s her vision of the frozen head of Peter Murphy, saved for 400 years then attached to a cyborg body.

I also picked up four 5×7s from Obsolete World, who does these surreal images in soft colors and swirly lines. I can’t pick a favorite, but If We Wait (bottom) is pretty awesome. I also got Evening Departure, Away From the Order of Days and In a Place That Seems to Matter.

One day we’ll be able to afford originals, but in the meantime, these prints are nice. I do have that lovely pair of paintings from Neenie that I’ve still not hung, but you can’t rush these things.

So … we survived the first, awful weekend, not wholly intact but no longer crumbling at the slightest thought of our lost pal.

Thank you to everyone who commented and emailed. (Feels like I just said that …) You made an incredibly rough time that little bit less painful, and we appreciate it.

One sad casualty of my inability to be out in public for any length of time: Michelle’s birthday celebration. The noise and crowds felt like a grater rasping across my skin, and it was a fight to stay focused. Eventually, I lost the fight, and we made our apologies and went home.

I continue to be amazed and gratified that we seem to have surrounded ourselves with friends who completely understand how devastating the loss of a pet can be. Not having to deal with people saying “… just a cat”? AWESOME. Because he wasn’t just a pet, or just a cat. He was family.