divine angst

This morning I overslept for the first time in ages. I forgot to re-set the alarm to my normal wakeup time last night and didn’t get up until Mr. Angst noted that it was two hours later than I usually get up. I must have needed it, though, since I crashed hard last night around 10 (at least an hour earlier than I usually go to bed) and didn’t move, really, till this morning.

Note that when I say “overslept” I don’t mean I missed a meeting or will be late arriving somewhere. It just means I have to work a little harder and later today to get my work done. Which is OK, but the day always seems better when I can get stuff done in the MORNING.

When was the last time YOU overslept?

I just placed my first Peapod order.

I LIKE it!

First, I can shop with an eye to menu-planning, rather than going to the grocery store and trying to remember recipes and making sure I get everything I need to cook for three or four meals. Second, it’s easier to buy sale items and see how much of a difference they make on the bottom line. Finally, I don’t have to walk 3/4 of a mile in the rain to get groceries, wasting OODLES of time. BIG PLUSSES ALL AROUND.

We’ll see how I like the produce and meat. If it’s no good, I’ll do that shopping near school or near a train stop, and just walk it home in a bag. But I somehow doubt I’m ever buying milk, bottles of oil, laundry detergent (or any kind of detergent) or any paper products in a store again–at least not here!

Super duper fun. I LOVE shopping online.

I think this will be the last post about noise.

We discovered a way to reduce the outside noise by about 40%. Turns out our double-hung sash windows have been open about two inches at the top (yes, all of them) since we moved in. Since before we moved in, actually. Maybe since the other people lived there. We discovered this the other day, but had little luck closing them from the floor and neither of us felt inclined to crawl up on the window sills to get them closed.

This morning, I said “Screw it!” and climbed up on each window sill and closed each window without any problems. We thought they were slipping, but I they weren’t. The springs (or cords, not sure how new these windows are) seem to be working fine. All but two clicked nicely into place–and we were able to lock the windows for the first time since we got our keys.

I don’t know why we didn’t do this earlier; I guess it’s because neither of us has ever lived in a place with double-hung sash windows. Windows open from the top, too? So weird! Well, apparently not and, now that we know, we are reaping the benefit of reduced noise.

[And, knock on wood, our downstairs neighbors didn’t play loud music after our last request on Sunday night. This might work out well after all.]

Thanks to everyone who pitched in advice for dealing with noisy neighbors. I think I’ve decided what I’m going to do–I’ll start out polite, and play tit-for-tat depending on what sort of reaction I get. If necessary, I’ll invite them up to see what I mean when I say the floor vibrates and explain that I’m not being unreasonable. And if necessary, I’ll–nicely!–explain that I will officially complain if necessary.

I know a lot of people recommend playing nice and making friends but, given the interactions we’ve had so far, I don’t think that’s going to be all that successful. Only one of our downstairs neighbors has even bothered to say hi as we pass, when we pass, and the others seem to deliberately ignore us. So I’m not going out of my way to offer a beer or coffee to them.

And with all that, I’m going to get some more work done. It was a truly bizarre morning, and not a terribly productive one.

Advice from any quarter is welcome.

Mr. Angst and I, as you may have read, have moved into a new apartment. We are living mostly full-time in our new apartment, even though it doesn’t have much stuff in it yet. We have a TV, though, and an unpacked kitchen (though very little food here, yet).

So here’s the advice part:

Our downstairs neighbors are loud. I don’t mean generally loud, I mean My Floor Is Vibrating From The Bass In Their Music loud. Today, Mr. Angst spoke with them twice about turning the music down. I spoke with them once. As I understand it, they did not turn the music down for very long after he spoke to them; after I did–approximately 10 minutes after–they turned the music off or down and we haven’t heard it since.

What do we do when they turn the music back up? Do we continue to ask them nicely (but firmly, of course) to turn it down since our floor is vibrating? Do I pull the law student, I Am Studying For Class Right Now, card again?

I understand that we have a number of administrative recourses. We can complain in writing to them. We can complain in writing to our landlord. We can call the police (though that is certainly a futile exercise). But I am not at all convinced that any of these recourses are worth the time (and postage) spent on them. Various websites, found via a search, don’t offer much else in the way of advice. One suggests inviting your noisy neighbors in “for coffee and cake” to “chat” about the situation. Our neighbors have a drum kit in the basement and Mt. Angst thinks he saw one of them rolling a joint–and there are three of them, with a fourth who’s “just staying for a while”–so I don’t think inviting them in for coffee and a chat is going to be terribly helpful.

So does anyone have any personal advice for getting one’s neighbors to understand how loud they are? How about doing so without becoming That Neighbor, the bitchy, pestery, awful one? Please, help!

We spent our first night in our new apartment. It was a short night; we didn’t finish doing stuff until close to 1 am, and we got up at 5 am to do two more loads of stuff before we had to take our rent car back. But it was a night, and it wasn’t all bad.

OK, well, maybe it wasn’t great. We started with our brand-new IKEA sofa-bed/futon thing in the living room, but that just didn’t work. First, there was a block party in the area. Second, our neighbors had people over AFTER the block party, and they were sitting on their front porch, being loud. Third, the train runs close to our building (like, reach out and touch close) and they’re doing weekend construction on that segment, so there were chainsaw noises.

Once we moved the bed into the bedroom, though, things got better. The bedroom doors close tightly against the floor and it’s at the back of the building and the window appears to be a better window. So we slept for four hours, got up, moved some more stuff, and came back to crash for three more hours.

Right now, I think we’re both a little shellshocked. We knew our street was a lively street and there would be street noise. But we didn’t know how MUCH street noise, and we didn’t know our windows would let in so much of it. This morning, though, we discovered why the windows let in so much noise–they are open at the top. Somehow, the upper panes are sliding down in the frames, and each window appears to be open about an inch or two at the very top. So we’re going to have to do something about that. More to the point, our LANDLORD is going to have to do something about that. It will give him a chance to see our paint job…hehehe.

So the move is going…OK. We have a lot of stuff left at the old apartment, including all of our food, cleaning supplies, and a lot of cables and things that we’d like to have HERE. Oh, and all of our real furniture.

This week will be one of the least fun of my life, I think, but when it’s all over we’ll be living in a new apartment in a new neighborhood with more space and a better kitchen. Right now, looking at the old place and the new place, I feel like it’s a wash–neither wins out over the other. Hopefully I’ll feel differently about that in a couple of weeks.

They suck.

Because of a little snafu with our freight elevator (we were told it wasn’t reserved today and we could use it all day if we wanted, but it WAS reserved and that’s a PROBLEM), I went to double-check with the office about our reservation for next week.

Sure enough, they have us booked for next week, Saturday morning — ONE HOUR LATER THAN OUR MOVERS GET HERE.

So, um, this is a PROBLEM. Some OTHER guy has the elevator for one hour, at the beginning of our timeslot, and that is just NOT COOL. What did our management office offer to do upon finding out that the person who took the reservation SCREWED UP?

“Um, well, try calling your movers and see if they can move you back, OK? Oh, and we’ll go ahead and book you for the two hours before the other guy, also.”

Sure, that’s a nice offer, if our movers were going to show up at the ASS CRACK OF DAWN. But they are NOT. I am PISSED.

AND, our movers phone appears to be not working. I don’t think they’ve gone out of business or anything, because they’re a big company, but when I call, I get told that all circuits are busy–and all circuits have been busy for the last, oh, HOUR.

I hate moving.

For the next 48 hours or so, I’m going to be mostly incommunicado. We’re packing up our stuff, including the dishes and food, and tomorrow morning, we get to pick up a rental SUV with which to move all of it to the new place. Fun!

I’m sort of impressed with how quickly we’ve managed to get things boxed and ready, actually. We haven’t done much with our clothes or the bedroom, but the bookshelves are essentially emptied, the buffet is empty, and I am making serious progress in the kitchen. Tomorrow won’t exactly be FUN, but I think we’ll be able to knock enough of the moving thing out that we can live comfortably in an apartment mostly empty of furniture for a week. Oh yeah, didn’t I mention that? The movers don’t get our heavy and big stuff till NEXT weekend.

But it’s all good. We are making EXCELLENT progress and I am actually EXCITED about how things are going. Totally unlike the extreme panic I was in earlier this week over something as simple as PAINTING. Sigh. The brain of Kristine, she is not exactly rational.

We’ve been tivo-ing (oops, TiVo isn’t a VERB) DVRing episodes of Angel that air at 5 and 6 am every weekday. Currently, we have six or eight on deck, because this week has been a little crazy and we haven’t had time to watch them.

Well, we had six or eight, now we have two or three less, because we’re watching them as we pack. Anyway, that’s not really what this is about. This is about the disturbing fact that TNT has chosen the WORST possible sponsor for this particular show. I know the timeslot probably warrants it, but it’s just all kinds of wrong that Angel on TNT is brought to you by . . . wait for it . . .

Vagisil.

Seriously, ew. Just all kinds of ew.

Why can’t career services offices have CALENDARS of deadlines that need to be met? Is it THAT hard?

Why can’t career services offices have CALENDARS of deadlines that need to be met? Is it THAT hard?

Why can’t career services offices have CALENDARS of deadlines that need to be met? Is it THAT hard?

Why can’t career services offices have CALENDARS of deadlines that need to be met? Is it THAT hard?

Wow. I mean, just, wow.

Today, I went over to the new place by myself–Mr. Angst was working, and I was done for the morning–and I painted. I painted the accent wall, I painted the other side of the big wall with the big cutout, I painted one flat, straight wall, and I started on the last wall. Mr. Angst showed up just in time to finish that last wall while I went around and touched up things.

So, first, let me say that my accent wall looks KICKASS. Seriously. Second, SO DOES EVERYTHING ELSE.

We are so happy with the paint that we’re going to do the office and the bedroom. We had thought about doing the bedroom and at least one wall in the office all along; we are definitely going to do them now. The office is small and we’re only doing two walls in the bedroom, so it’ll be easy-peasy. We’ll do those NEXT week, though. Because we still have to pack boxes. So far, we have packed exactly FIVE of those. We need to do a lot more than that!

Off to finish making dinner, among other things.

1) Worked

2) Read for class and prepared for an assignment due Monday.

3) Painted the wall with the bay windows (SUCH A PAIN).

4) Painted one side of the wall with the 7-foot wide, 9-foot high “doorway,” above which is a strip of wall about 6 inches tall, in front of which is a small PIPE.

5) Painted the other three walls in the dining room–one with a window, the other two with doors in them.

6) Made eggplant parmesan for dinner.

Still to do? Um, eat? Drink? Crash? For someone working on about 5-1/2 hours of sleep, I am REMARKABLY coherent.

My suspicions were right–I am totally going to crash later. HARD. I did try to lay back down this morning for a while, but though the laying down part felt really good, the sleeping part just wasn’t going to happen. The brain is too hyper right now. She just won’t shut up. Maybe this is what it’s like to hang out with me.

I couldn’t sleep last night. First, I couldn’t fall asleep. Then I woke up before dawn and couldn’t go back to sleep. This never happens to me, so I am (a) not happy and (b) pretty sure I’m going to collapse later today.

The problem is that my brain just never quit. I had strange dreams, when I was actually sleeping; when I woke up, all I could think about was the painting, and the moving, and the fact that I have work to do for my class this week but my textbook STILL hasn’t arrived. (I hate Media Mail. Hate Hate Hate.)

So with all that going on, is it any wonder I couldn’t stay in bed? I tried, believe me. I laid there, eyes closed, doing my deep breathing, mentally repeating a mind-clearing mantra, hoping sleep would come back to me. No dice. I think I’m up for the day.

In looking over my recent posts, I’m betting you people think I forgot that today was Independence Day because I was so caught up in the Fun That Is Painting.

You’d be wrong.

Granted, all we did today was go to Home Depot and paint (and eat hamburgers and chicken wings, God, no wonder I feel so fat). But we celebrated our nation’s independence LAST night with a trip to the local big fireworks show. And let me tell you, it was a fun evening.

How do I know it was fun? Because any evening which includes (1) food on a stick, (2) catching the perfect spot to watch fireworks only half an hour before they start, (3) fireworks themselves, (4) getting offered weed by a latecomer, and (5) a three-mile walk home (necessitated by the million people trying to take public transportation home and, no, that number is NOT an exaggeration) HAS to be fun.

So happy Fourth of July, all! I hope you had a good holiday!

*This piece of music would be the 1812 Overture.

Thanks for the all the painting advice! Unfortunately, Beanie’s GREAT advice didn’t come in time…we are now the proud owners of two orange plastic pans and two shitty brushes. (But we have some good rollers, so it’s all good. We also have some edging tools–one for straight edges and one for corners. I’m not sure how I feel about those; they don’t seem to hold much paint and leave lines.)

Thus far we have taped off and primed all the walls in our living area. (Actually, we need to tape a couple more spots, that we didn’t bother with today.) Eventually, we’ll also prime two walls in the bedroom and one wall in the office. The other walls will remain as they are, since they are the non-dirty and non-spackled walls.

Tomorrow, the plan goes, we will continue to paint. We have a nice sandstone-colored paint for most of the walls and a gorgeous brick red for two accent walls. I’m pretty excited about the accent walls, actually–one is the wall facing the front door, and the other is the wall just through the office door. They always say to paint accent walls across from main entrances, so that’s what we’re doing! It’s an experiment, as LQ said, and hopefully it will be a successful one.

Sadly, I didn’t take Dave’s advice and buy latex gloves; my hands are all covered in white now. As nice as it would be not to have paint on my hands, though, I am not sure I can paint in gloves–I rely too much on the tactile to know if I have paint on a finger or something before I touch something else.

Frankly, I’m still nervous about the whole thing. I don’t know why–the priming went well, and the walls look SO MUCH NICER, even with just the clean white on them, so I shouldn’t be nervous. But I am. What if the colors look bad? What if they don’t go on smoothly and we have spotty or uneven walls? What if, what if, what if?

On the bright side, I didn’t spill anything today. I made a couple of dribbles, but that’s why we have the big plastic sheeting (thanks, Kevin!).

We took some video of our new apartment yesterday, since it’s still empty and (most of) the repairs have been done. (Our landlord has been great, filling in all the holes, recaulking the bathtub, defrosting the refrigerator, etc., so we’re not really all that irked that it’s taking a few extra days.)

One thing we noticed while filming and walking around in the early evening light is that the walls are really filthy. They’re dirtiest around the vents, which makes sense, but they’re also gross behind where the former tenants had their couch, and, for some odd reason, above the faux fireplace. The wall above the faux fireplace, in fact, looks like it was at one time even DIRTIER, and someone took to it with cleanser and sort of moved the dirt all around. There are definite scrub streaks.

So this week, I think our goal will be to clean the walls and the….dum ta da dum!…PAINT.

I’ve actually never painted an apartment. I’ve painted interiors before, but only in my own home and only when the floors weren’t installed. We renovated my childhood home when I was in high school, and I painted most of the living areas. But since the floor wasn’t down, it wasn’t a big deal when I spilled an entire gallon can of paint all over the place. We just wiped it up, let it dry, and carpeted over it later.

Unfortunately, in the 12 or so years since that happy time, I haven’t really gotten more coordinated. So I have some concerns about painting. Also, our new apartment has really high ceilings, so I think we’ll have some problems with that, too. Our landlord has a ladder which I believe is kept in the basement, so we’ll use that if we have to, but if for some reason he keeps it elsewhere, we may end up using a stepstool–or buying our own ladder, heaven forbid.

So I’m excited about the idea of painting, but am sort of dreading the actual process. I don’t know why, either. We have plenty of time–the movers won’t be moving our furniture for almost two weeks. Even though we’ll be living there in about a week (sleeping on an IKEA futon-bed we’re going to buy this weekend), we won’t have any STUFF in the place. So painting will actually be sort of easy–no need to get big dropcloths or move furniture around. But I’m still nervous about it all. Maybe part of that is because I have NO IDEA what color we’ll be using. I’m not even going to try to match the white on the baseboards and windows (and I am NOT painting those things), so we’ll have to do a color of some kind. But do we do ONE color or more than one? Do we do accent walls?

I guess at some point over the next several days, I’ll need to go by Home Depot or something and figure out the answers to those questions. And if I can’t buy paint before then, at least I can clean walls. And probably pick up some primer, since there are so many patches on the walls that I’m afraid to paint without priming.

Does anyone have any advice for me before we take on this task?

The summer is, for some of us, almost halfway over. Which means it’s time to start thinking of what classes we’ll torture ourselves with never go to sleep through register for. Here are a few subjects you might consider, courtesy of law students’ (and recent graduates’) blogs:

• Criminal Law (Negligent Use of a Dangerous Mind)
• Public Interest Practicum (and I do mean public interest) (Asian Provocateur)
• Clinic (Tort Caesar)
• Career Services (so it’s not so much a class as a persistant thorn in our sides) (Equal Process? Due Protection?)
• Feminist Legal Theory (Passionate Discourse)
• Constitutional Law (Clever WoT)
• Family Law (Witches Eat Calculators)
• Animal Law (The Great Change: Turning Cathy Into a Lawyer)
• Merchandising (Three Years of Hell to Become the Devil)
• Public Defense (the imbroglio)

And that’s it for this week’s roundup! Be sure to watch for the Roundup next week at Evan Schaeffer’s Legal Underground. As usual, the Roudup will be back here in two weeks.

Today is the first day of our new lease. So we went up there to get our keys and pay our rent. We also took one suitcase, filled with my shoes.

What we discovered when we got up there is that the boys who were living there are not fully moved out. At all, in fact. Furniture is still there, along with general “stuff.” The place was still a pit, just like it was when we saw it when we signed our lease. The cleaning ladies were there, scrubbing the kitchen at the same time as the guys were moving things out, a piece at a time.

This all makes me sigh a little bit. I mean, we hadn’t planned to move in a bunch of stuff today, but it’s sort of maddening to show up and realize that we can’t even revel in the clean-and-emptiness of the place today.

So, tomorrow, we’ll go back up there, take some video of it (for the records, you know), some pictures, and a couple more suitcases worth of stuff (probably some clothes and hangers, so we can throw things in the closet). And THEN we can revel in the clean-and-empty. And contemplate the best way to convey to the landlord that at least one wall desperately needs to be painted. Because when you let your tenants have a dartboard on a wall, little holes and chips in the paint are going to result.

And those poor cleaning ladies are going to earn their keep today. Seriously. SO GLAD it’s not me having to clean up.