wednesday cat blogging [photo post]

On the 4th of July we had steady rain for over twenty-four hours, and I took the opportunity to catch up on some computer work while Hanna napped. The cats were super helpful as they always are.

Gerry likes to make sure my notebook doesn't go anywhere while I'm not looking.

This is my desk-in-progress (the other work space is Hanna's, usually); I still need a chair that fits the higher table -- it was a curbside rescue, I suspect designed originally as a kitchen island. Gerry needs to keep an eye on that one as well.

Being a cat is SUPER HARD WORK and requires lots of sleeping in order to be prepared for napping.

Teazle's real dream is to steal our two little grey mice from IKEA (named John and Sherlock), but since we keep those out of sight she carries the white mouse around instead. It is shaped less like an anatomically correct mouse and therefore seems to evince less interest than the others.

As you can see, they are enjoying the vantage point of our kitchen window which opens onto the back porch; on Friday they'll get their shots updated and then be allowed to visit with Jelly the curious neighbor cat who shares our balcony ... with no screen in between! To date there has been a lot of sniffing and watching and pawing at the window screens and occasional hissing and pleading to be allowed to plaaay!!

I hope the week is treating all of you well!

holiday weekend post about curtains [some photos & well-wishes]

As the weather gets steamy here in Boston (who was the bright spark who said, "Let's build on a tidal swamp!") I'm taking comfort in our airy bedroom with its new IKEA curtains -- Hanna and I picked them out because they reminded us of Anne of Green Gables.

I'm also rather fond of my new IKEA lamp...

... as is Hanna of hers.

May your weekend, whatever the temperatures, be as spacious and lazy as ours.

one month later ... [#move2014]

It's been a month you guys!

We can still see the rug on our bedroom floor, and the only thing under the bed are dust bunnies and the occasional cat.

I don't have anything super-noteworthy to say, I just wanted to mark the day. It really is hard to believe we've been living a month in our new place. Some eclectic observations:

• I don't miss our old neighborhood as much as I thought I would. Is that disloyal? I'm not sure yet. Part of the reason is that we still live in the same city and maybe 80% of our time is spent in the same spaces as before the move. Hanna and I both miss walking passed the brookline booksmith more days than not, and being near Trader Joe's, and 4A Coffee on Harvard Ave. but other than that ... I'm so actively happy to be where we are in so many ways, I don't have room to miss the old. I wonder if I ever will? Maybe I'm done with that chapter and ready to move on.
• Maple trees have a distinctive presence and sound to them; I grew up in a house surrounded by old maples and hadn't realized until moving to JP that I missed them. Now when its windy or rains and I hear the trees outside I can relax. Sleeping has been a wonderful thing because the sounds are right again.
• Having a porch expands the size of our apartment beyond its already wonderfully expansive 860 square feet.
• A ceiling fan (in our living room) is amazing as a tool for cooling the space on hot days.
• Kitchen counters! Kitchen counters! Kitchen counters!
• For some reason, Hanna and I decided to start using the dishwasher when we moved here, despite the fact we never used the "adult box" that was in our old apartment. I am really surprised at how much it lowers the stress level of our evenings and makes cooking together a pleasurable activity. Sometimes, labor-saving devices are worth the hype.
• We now live in a neighborhood with a much higher Latino/a population than Allston, and that's something else that feels like home (Michigan) to me in a way I hadn't noticed missing until we were passing neighbors on our way home with a much broader range of ethnic diversity than on our previous commute. Even the music from the car stereos that pass our front windows feels more familiar. (And yum! the Cuban restaurant up the road makes the best horchata!).
• Gentrification. It's a thing, and I've been thinking about it. I have days where I'm like, "What's so elitist and destructive about wanting to live within walking distance of where you work?" That is, after all, the way most workers have gotten to work for centuries. But I'm also aware that as early-career professionals, Hanna and I fit a profile -- one of people who are actively courted and catered to. While our neighbors here are often invisible at best and actively erased at worst. According to the Boston Globe, only about 15% of market-rate housing in JP is "affordable" ... for families making $80k per year. There's a lot of upward pressure on this already impossible market. We're working to do what we can not to contribute to that, while embracing JP as a (hopefully long-term) home for us as well.
• Did I mention how wonderful a back porch is to enjoy? 
• And neighbors that invite you to their barbecues instead of engaging in intimate partner violence on a near-nightly basis?

In other news, how did it get to be June 12th already? I hope all of you are having a fruitful beginning to whatever the nature of your summer season will be.

cats + porch [#move2014]

We continue to feel so lucky in finding this apartment, particularly on sunny Sundays in June, when our back balcony is a breezy, cozy sanctuary; a liminality between in and out, private home and neighborhood society.

We enjoyed brunch together last weekend, along with a little light reading.

Repotted some happy plants...

... and got creative drying the week's laundry in the fine weather.

The porch is a new experience for the cats, who are practicing giving their mother attacks of the nerves by exploring the top of the (second floor! far from the ground!) railing without a net. We feel they should could equipped with safety tethers.

Geraldine seems largely content to chill in the shade or sun and survey her surroundings.

The clean laundry is obviously the best place for a black cat to settle in for a nap.

Meanwhile, our next door neighbors M and J have gotten a head start over us in the gardening department, with lots of promising seedlings that spent the weekend drinking up the sun and water they were afforded.

Hope y'all are finding ways of being in this early-summer moment. Happy June.

ownership and choice [#move2014]

Annotated street map, Hyde Square, Jamaica Plain (Boston, Mass.)
Photo by author.

I started this blog post last week and somehow it failed to save automatically, erasing several full paragraphs of text. Damn you Google, the way you lull us into complacency with your automatic back-ups! Still, I've continued to think about the themes of this post in the intervening week and will write a different post now than I would have last Sunday. And I think I'm mostly okay with that.

Ownership, and choice.

Last weekend, Hanna and I had a conversation about buying furniture. Our household is currently composed of some odds and ends, a few really awesome, we've picked up through the street-side equivalent of dumpster diving and IKEA purchases, again some quite excellent. Hanna moved here following an escape from an abusive relationship and a string of insecure housing situations, neither of which lent themselves to long-lasting furniture investment; I moved here from the Midwest with everything I needed for grad school packed into the back of an "economy" car rented from Enterprise. We've been constructing our household from the ground up.

The discussion we had was about buying some non-IKEA furniture, specifically a coffee table and a couple of bedside tables (perhaps matching!) for lamps and the inevitable stack of books-to-be-read we both accumulate. It would be nice, we feel, to have bedside tables with little drawers so Teazle won't spend the hour between 2-3am every night trying to wake us up by swiping our spectacles onto the floor.

We've been thinking about L.L. Bean this time around, specifically their "Mission" or "Rustic" lines, which for us means maybe a piece or two per year depending on the size of the vet bills and how much we care about traveling to England in the next decade.

Then last weekend I got thinking, if we're going to spend $500 on a coffee table or $250/piece on a pair of end tables, maybe we could do better than give that money to Bean's. They've a good reputation as an employer, and are regional, sure. Their pieces are made here in the U.S. But what if we went a step further down this path and actually hired a local woodcrafter to do the job?

"I dunno, I guess I'm just not used to having the money to make that kind of choice," Hanna observed. "It makes me anxious. I mean, it's always the way I wanted to spend money, but Evil Ex always fought me on it. And then when I moved down to Boston I was worried about feeding myself and paying rent."

See, despite the fact that we're still renting (and yes, as we prepared to move everyone kept asking us if we were buying; there's a whole separate post in me about the unexpected pressure I feel as a married person in my thirties to buy into the real estate market -- it's seriously more pressure than we're feeling about the babies thing, maybe because we've made that decision in the negative already) this feels like our first home as a married couple. Our first purpose-"bought" space. We made our grad student digs work for eight years -- eight years? the management company rep kept repeating when I handed him the keys, eight years? whoa. that's gotta be a record. -- and while we made the move because we needed a bigger space, it was also a move that consolidated our commitment to Boston. Despite the fact we're tenants, not owners, of this lovely new home, we already have a sense of ownership.

Because we've chosen to live here -- this city, this neighborhood, this building, this space. So even though we're still writing that check every month to the landlord, not the bank, we're putting down roots. Hanna bought a sage plant. We've introduced ourselves to our next-door neighbors. We do our part wheeling the trash to the curb on Monday mornings.

We talk about hiring a local artisan to build our furniture, even if it means we'll have to wait for a year to get those matching end tables with the drawers where we can keep our eyeglasses safe from questing paws.

Jamaica Pond, May 2014
Photo by author.

Because we can afford to wait a year. We're thinking in those terms, now, more than we used to.

And it's definitely a good place to be.

new perspectives on boston [#move2014]

We almost have enough bookshelves...

We're still unpacking here in J.P. but the living room is taking approximate shape. And I think my biggest observation from this first week in a new location in the same city is how much one's understanding of a big city like Boston is filtered through the situational perspective of daily activity. I mean, "duh." But we've shifted three miles south of our old home in Allston and suddenly our daily routine moves from one set of neighborhoods and local businesses to another.

Eventually, the living room will have an office space!

My initial impression is, weirdly enough, that Boston feels a lot more like a big city living in J.P. than it did living in Allston, on the edge of Brookline. Living in Allston, most of our daily routine happened in The Fenway/Longwood/Brookline neighborhoods, and Brookline definitely feels like a self-contained village enveloped by the greater metropolitan area of Boston. Jamaica Plain, too, feels like a very distinct neighborhood -- but within the city of Boston. It feels very conscious of its status as part of Boston, and I feel woven into the fabric of big city life in new ways. No longer does my evening commute cut passed Fenway Park and up Beacon Street through Coolidge Corner ... now I cycle by Symphony Hall through Roxbury to Jackson Square along the reclaimed Southwest Corridor Park.

"Kitty TV" has a new view...

Here are some of our discoveries from week one:

• Ghazal makes (and delivers!) tasty Indian fare
• The Southwest Corridor Park offers me a safer, more peaceful bicycle commute
• Koo Koo Cafe is not a new discovery, but is now on our walk to work!
• As is Green T Coffee, on those days when our path through
• Olmstead Park is too meandering a route to Countway
• The local fabric and yarn shop, JP Knit 'n Stitch, where we picked up fabric to recover our ageing IKEA chairs

My selection...

... and Hanna's

In the coming weeks, we're looking forward to checking out:

• The Thacher Milk Delivery service we saw drive by this morning
• Jamaica Plain Historical Society's historic walking tours on summer Saturdays
• The Boston Building Resources organization, even though we're renters not owners
• The Allendale Farm garden center and more local Agricultural Hall for some herb & vegetable starts for our sunny balcony

Hope all of you are well! Those of you whom I owe emails, I haven't forgotten! The moving exacerbated my tendinitis and exhausted us generally ... last night I was mostly asleep by 7 o'clock. Little old lady hours. But I haven't forgotten you!

<3

#move2014 in photos [what it says on the tin]

So we've moved.

I'm headed back to our old place one more time today to pack up the fridge and a few left-over things so the cleaners my parents are paying for can come and do the final scrub down. Then, hopefully, new people will come along soon and find Old Number Twelve a good place to live, as we did for many years.

Meanwhile, I promised pictures -- so here they are!

This is a lot of what the last ten days have been about.

The cats liked all the piles of clothes and bedding to sleep on.

I think they were worried we would leave them behind, so kept trying to get us to pack them!

There was a lot of turning around and finding this.

How did we fit all this stuff in one 535-square-foot apartment?!

The BEST THING about the move was when the movers -- Patrick, Mike, and Damian -- arrived.

They took the things away and packed them so swiftly!

While Hanna waited with the cats at our new place, I was left to "supervise" the departure by drinking my latte and taking pictures of the emptying apartment.

The last box...

... Of serials, naturally. We're librarians after all!

Books will be our biggest logistical hurdle. Here they are stacked up in the Inner Sanctum (what will eventually be Hanna's meditation/yoga space (and our guest bedroom! ... plus books).

These bookshelves (and three more) are already filled.

This is the new living room space (with a study nook to the right of the frame).

As predicted, Teazle and Gerry LOOOOVE this long hallway for chasing one another (particularly at night). I'm standing in the living room, and the room at the end of the hall is our kitchen. Off the hall to the right are the master bedroom, bathroom, and Inner Sanctum.

The movers put our bed back together, people!! It was the first room we made usable, after the kitchen.

Our kitchen has a table for eating! And gorgeous appliances.

Hanna found this photograph in the back of one of the cupboard drawers. Worrying? Charming? You decide! It now lives on our fridge.

We share our second-floor porch with the next-door neighbors and their cat, Jelly, whom Gerry and Teazle have only met through the window so far. Our plants are very happy outside, and we can dry out laundry out there as well! There are five huge maple trees shading the back lawn (And sheltering our house from the worst of the summer sun.

And not to brag or anything, but THIS is our new walk to work...

More house-proud pictures once we've actually had a chance to settle in and Teazle has finished the unpacking and investigatin'.

see you on the flipside [#move2014]

Chez Clutterbuck-Cook 2.0

We've reached the "where did all these damn books come from?!" stage of packing/moving. It's not like we didn't know we had approximately one thousand books (not to mention serials and DVDs...) in our 535-square-foot apartment. But books shelved actually take up comparatively little space, all neatly lined up along the wall. Books in boxes, on the other hand, seem to pile up alarmingly quickly. We've boxed about 50 records center-sized plastic bins so far, and once Hanna unpacks a couple dozen this afternoon in our new home, I'll be trekking them back across town to fill them with more.

The movers come tomorrow to deal with the furniture (bookcases ... and essentials, like, you know, the bed).

Teazle continues spreading her sunny, exploratory nature everywhere. Last night while I was boxing up books from the bedroom closet (yes, we kept books in the bedroom closet), I kept turning around to find Teazle sitting jauntily in the box, whether empty, partially, or almost entirely full. Once it was filled, she climbed on top of it.

And then, when that job was done, there were the cleared shelves to scramble up upon and inspect.

Geraldine, meanwhile, has taken to huddling in our vicinity where she can keep an eye on the proceedings and emit misery vibes.

Today is the day we move them from old to new home, letting them get used to the space for a day before we have to contend with the chaos of movers. Hanna's going to set herself up as unpacker-and-cat-wrangler-in-chief this afternoon while I drive all of the oddly-shaped boxes and bins back and forth from Allston to Jamaica Plain (and the empty bins back for more packing). I anticipate one night of separate sleeping as Hanna co-sleeps with the kitties in our new home and I crash at our soon-to-be-old home to be bright-eyed and bushy-tailed for the movers at 9am tomorrow.

Hah!

Coffee. It will be our friend.

Photos to come.

teazle knievel [photo post]

Time for Wednesday cat blogging!

I had the camera out on Sunday and Teazle was very interested.

This is her EEEEVIL CAT impression! (aka the time I accidentally took a photo with the flash on)

Little Miss Flirtypants.

The Joan Crawford look.

The "why have the petting hands gone away?" look.

Gerry maintained a stolid indifference to the proceedings...

But later settled down on the top edge of the book I was attempting to read.

(You can see that the petting hand returned to scratch Teazle beneath the chin.)