So, I realized I still had a few Adderall from when my doc switched me to Vyvanse way back when. As an experiment, I decided to try taking them again and, y'know, that stuff works. I didn't take it yesterday because I have so little and day of rest, and I noticed a huge difference in my ability to focus on tasks and, like, complete some. I need to figure out how to get some sort of ADHD treatment again, I think. I'll explore Kaiser's website tomorrow, see how that works.

Faithful readers will be pleased to hear that I did, in fact, mow my lawn this morning. I still need to edge and weed and blah blah blah there's always more to do in the yard, but it's a good start and some of that stuff I can do at, like, 6am when it's nice and cool. I like mowing my lawn on Sunday, makes me feel like Henry David Thoreau.

New shower head came today. Easy install and it works! It is so good to actually feel clean. I almost can't believe the difference.

In this case, filling it up with water. That's right, I'm putting in a pond.

See, when we had out neighbor replace 2/3 of our fence, he left the wood from the old fence in a pile in the backyard. At first he said he wanted to salvage some of it to build planter boxes for another neighbor and then he'd take it away, and then it was the rainy season, and the pile ended up staying there for the better part of a year, evolving a nice little ecosystem. Walter really liked it, and burrowed under it's shade to dig himself a hideyhole. So when we took the pile away, there was Walter's hold which, given the clay that our neighborhood mostly rests on, became a wee vernal pool.

Relatedly, this is over towards the compost pile, in the area of the yard that H wanted to turn into seating area. So, when my parents landscaped their yard and gave me all their old stepping stones that they no longer needed, after I laid out the walkways to the compost bin and where the beehive will go I started cobbling together a sort of patio using the stepping stones as pavers. It came out pretty well for a half-assed job, and as I worked around Walter's hole, it struck me that that would be a nice place for a pond, so I left an empty margin around it and looked into liners.

And, lo and behold, Home Depot had a pond liner whose measurements were just a bit bigger than the hole. So, after my mom and I went to lunch and to see the Muir botany exhibit this week, we swung by Home Depot to check it out. And the pond liner was in fact an actual pond liner and not a cascade meant to go into a larger pond. So I got it. It even fit in my trunk (I considered using a flexible pond liner, but considering how seriously my backyard wants to subside and how the weed prevention plastic someone put down has completely disintegrated and is not preventing anything, I figured rigid pre-formed might hold up better).

This was Wednesday. Thursday I was wiped out from all that activity on Wednesday and yesterday I spent all my energy on grocery shopping (definitely my kryptonite. If I could only figure out what my corresponding superpower is, I'd be in business), but today I got out the shovels and trowels and implements of destruction and moved some mud around. 

I think once it settles in and I figure out some sort of aeration and add some plants, it'll be nice. Just full of hosewater and rippling in the breeze, it's not bad. I may throw some goldfish in, but I suspect that would just be feeding the raccoons.

What was happening with me yesterday? Oh, right:

• 12:11 Got body of dresser put together. Next up, drawer assemblage.
• 12:57 One drawer put together, 5 to go
• 13:44 Working on third and final full width drawer
• 13:55 Not final. Penultimate.
• 14:48 DResser fully assembled, yay! DH can move his clothes around while I indulge in some Vampire Diaries and hope my back relaxes a bit.

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DH and I have been sharing a chest of drawers since, let's see, 2002? Yeah, I think that's right. So, we finally decided to get a second one and separate our clothes - he gets the new, smaller bureau and I get to expand to fill the space left behind. Working well so far, though I haven't fully re-organized mine, yet.

The new dresser is not quite the same as our bedroom suite - we bought the bed, nightstands, and dresser at the same time from Scandinavia (a store in Metairie with, as you might guess, Scandinavian design furniture) and they are a family of furniture, all matchy-matchy - but fits in pretty well. IKEA is our friend.

What was happening with me yesterday? Oh, right:

Okay, I'm just gonna turn this into a regular journal entry, maybe with those tweets inserted if I remember they are there when I get to that part, because there is a lot of narrative to get through. Exposition. Whatever.

When we bought this house, it came with a fridge Which was nice, because while I understand many people in California have to buy fridges while they are renting, I never have, so I was fairly pleased that I still didn't have to. We went on using the free one, even though it's shelving and door arrangements were unwieldy and inconvenient, and it only had one crisper drawer that only sort of fit into its space. But free!

And then it started collecting water. Pools of water on the floor of the refrigerated compartment all the time. At first I thought it was spillage so I'd just clean it up, but more would appear. And things on the tops shelf would freeze. So I got a fridge/freezer thermometer and started adjusting the controls, trying to maintain a stable temperature. Giving each adjustment 24 hours to stabilize makes that a sloooooow process.

I've gotten hooked on Trader Joe's soy ice cream sandwiches, they are delicious and I always want to have them available in my freezer. Now, the way I learned to tell if a freezer was at the "right" temperature, was by ice cream consistency - if the ice cream is soupy, freezer should be colder; too hard to scoop, warm it up a bit. So every time the ice cream sandwiches were not quite the right firmness, which was every time I had one, I'd tweak the freezer settings appropriately.

Finally, a couple of weeks ago, the ice cream sandwiches were perfect and I rejoiced that I finally had the freezer right and decided not to mess with the fridge settings anymore because the two seemed to be interconnected somehow - like bra band and cup sizes, changing one probably necessitates a change in the other.

And then a week or so later, my ice cream sandwiches were way too soft.

And, of course, the fridge had recently filled with water from the last time I had wet-vacced it out.

So DH and I pulled out the fridge to see if we could see anything in the back that might help - if the water line was hooked up in some bizarre fashion, for example, or if coils obviously needed cleaning or something. Well, we came to no real conclusions about the fridge (except that the water line was NOT hooked up at all (which was kind of a relief) but seeing behind a fridge that had never been pulled out and cleaned behind (never by us, and judging by the accumulation possibly never by the previous owners, either) was too much for DH and he had to go lie down. Seriously.

So we decided to buy a new fridge.

We did no research - we were going to Lowes to get a small patio table I'd found online anyway, so we just hit the refrigerator section while we were there. The saleslady was very informative and checked on rebates for us (which we didn't qualify for, alas) and looked at various types and settled on one that was the price we had in mind and an Energy Star rating (I know that's kind of bullshit, but there were some for sale that DIDN'T have Energy Star ratings at all!) and would fit into the space as we had measured it just that morning. We wanted it in black, so it had to be ordered, delivered to the store, and then delivered to our house, at which point the delivery guys would take away the old one. Yay.

It was delivered yesterday morning. We emptied the old one and started steam mopping that poor neglected floor and the Lowes truck showed up and took the old fridge away. They brought in the new one, lined it up in the space and - it didn't fit.

• 09:26 Bwahaha! I *thought* I measured the space for the refrigerator correctly. Turns out, NSM. Half inch of counter trim in the way. #fb


It looked like if we just took off the trim on the edge of the counter it would fit, so we got out the Wonderbar and took care of that. Still wouldn't quite fit.

Now, I don't know if y'all know this, but I am a Measurer of Stuff. I make graph paper sketches of my living spaces so I can decide where the furniture goes. I have tape measures in every room in case I need to determine the dimensions of anything. So I was distressed that my measuring was impugned.

Of course, I did not actually measure the fridge at the store, I took their word for it. But that wasn't really the problem. Once we had the fridge line up with the space, it was clear that it would fit just fine at points, but the left wall leaned in just a bit and got in the way. This wall is part of what is clearly a later addition - someone decided that the coat closet would be better used holding an oven and microwave and built this brick facade around the whole thing, one wall of which is to the left of the fridge (my left, facing the fridge, not the fridge's left). It's kind of like really thick wallpaper, this brick facade an eighth or a quarter inch thick.


• 11:28 Turns out, I forgot that none of the lines in my house are straight. New fridge, very straight lines. New angle grinder may solve this. #fb


So, it looked a matter of millimeters and I googled how to cut bricks and the answers all seemed to come up angle grinder. So we got an angle grinder, and a mortar wheel and a wood wheel, why not? And we did some grinding and it was very slow and smelled terrible and we had forgotten to get dust masks anyway, so I went back to the hardware store and got chisels (and ventilator masks and mallets because you can never have too many mallets). The cashier recognised me from the angle grinder purchase and we chatted about how very useful mallets are, and how they seem to hide when you want them.

Got out to my car and someone had squeezed into the not-a-parking-space between me and the handicapped spot so I couldn't get to the driver's side door. Grr. I stood around for a little while hoping that whoever it was was just running into the store for a second and would pop right back out, but no. I was able to crawl in through the passenger side (I wasn't sure I"d be able to, crawling over bucket seats is fraught with peril), and the guy who was parked in the handicapped spot came out while I was waiting and chatted with me about what a drag it was but how it was no use getting mad which actually restore my equanimity quite a bit because he was right, no point in being mad, I'm sure I have inconvenienced people with my parking at times.

Picked up Double Down combos at KFC out of curiosity. Not great. Not terrible. It was odd to be eating the "sandwich" and reach with relief for the french fries because they were not quite so full of fat. Dog got the end of mine, which he was very happy about.


• 14:31 Brick-specific chisel FTW


So, with the chisel we were able to make a mostly nice clean line at the corner and rip off all the brick from where the top of the refrigerator would meet the wall down to 6 or 8 inches off the floor, where the space was actually big enough to encompass both fridge and brick. Took all day, taking turns wielding the chisel. It's a simple machine, but you have to use force. The stonemason does all the work

That was extremely satisfying. Place the chisel, tap-tap-tap, crack, brick into bucket-o-bricks. Tap-tap-tap goes on for longer, of course. Now we have two 5-gal buckets full of brick scrap that I may or may not be able to find a use for. It's, like, a quarter of an inch thick, maybe, and some stuck to drywall.

Did not, to be clear use the mallets with the chisel. Used a ball peen hammer as specified by the chisel packaging. Worked a treat. Reminds me a little of rappelling in that drawing the force diagram in my head while I do it helps my technique. As my husband said - what would we do without theta?


• 16:38 Fridge is in its nook, food is in the fridge. Whew. #fb


Now we just have to crawl under the house and turn on the water, and hook up the water line to the fridge. I hope that's simpler.

Once we got all our food back out of the coolers and into the new fridge and freezer - it's a lot more space than we used to have. 3 drawers! Easily configurable shelving! Usable door shelves! Everything is clear so I can see what's in the drawers and on the door! i'm gonna have to go grocery shopping today, fill it up a little.

And get all the magnets back on it, of course.

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What was happening with me yesterday? Oh, right:

• 11:56 Watching a Stargate Universe from back before the Saints had won the Superbowl. It was a whole different time. #fb
• 14:55 OK, looks like we are going refrigerator shopping! Whee.
• 19:22 One refrigerator bought. My first side-by-side, with some bells and whistles.

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So, this refrigerator we have now came with the house. I have no idea how old it is or anything, but it seemed to work so we kept using it. It's clearly missing parts that would make the ice maker and water dispenser functional, so we just ignored those features. However, I can't keep the freezer at an even temperature (my ice cream sandwiches fluctuate GREATLY in softness, (ice cream hardness is my measure for a freezer holding the right temperature. It's what I know) no matter how much I monkey with the temperature controls. Which is worrying when I freeze so much and expect it to, you know, stay edible.

Also, it's collected water in the bottom of the refrigerator compartment for forever. At first I thought something in there was leaking or melting or something, but I've pretty well ruled that out. Condensation seems plausible, but there's no water running down the sides or dripping off the ceiling and none of the food on the shelves is wet, which I don't know if that means it's NOT condensation, but I would expect those sorts of things if it was.

So I thought maybe the fridge was, unbeknownst to us, actually hooked up to a waterline and sine the water clearly cannot go to an ice maker and or water dispenser as it would like to, it somehow migrates to the floor of the fridge. No, I don't know how, but it was enough of a theory for us to pull the fridge away from the wall and peer behind it.

For the first time ever.

You can probably imagine the potential for lutherans back there. DH was truly disgusted and had to go lie down. He's a delicate flower in some respects.

But there was a water line. It was not, at the time of the peering, actually connected to the inlets on the fridge, but I again theorize that we could have ripped apart the coupling when we pulled it away from the wall if it was only, like, sort of connected.

Anyway, long story short (too late), new fridge bought. We got a Whirlpool side-by-side with ice maker and water dispenser (PUR filter included) and some kind of fancy technology that is supposed to let me control the temperature of both compartments without opening the doors. Exciting! We got black, as that seems like it will go with our bizarre cast-iron faux-wood-stove and wall oven the best. To be delivered next Thursday.

(1) I am all caught up in livejournal! Woo-hoo! I haven't been commenting much because I figure people don't want to be bothered by comments on posts they made a month ago, but I know what's going on with many people now.

(b) We had a car chase on our block Saturday morning, which is mostly notable because said block is a freaking cul-de-sac. Around 10 am as we were shuffling around, making coffee and whatnot, I heard sirens and went to look out the window to see which way they were heading on the streets that, you know, go somewhere and an SUV comes flying past the house! WIth what later proved to be eight (8!) police cars behind it (a mix of Suisun City, Solano County Sheriff, and CHP - one Yolo County sheriff came later to take the passenger from the fleeing car into custody, it looked like). I guess the pursuee was not familiar with the area. Luckily, when he realized his dilemma hie just stopped and surrendered rather than trying t drive through someone's fence. None of the parked cars were hit, or anything. Excitement without property damage, very nice! Ill be reading the police blotter for the write-up.

iii) After that we trekked over to Home Depot to buy a two-by-four and door knobs and such. We actually fixed the garage door on Sunday, and DH installed one of the doorknobs. We even got a fancy push-button code-locked deadbolt for the front door, which will be handy for not needing to carry a key when I am walking the dog and also for autolocking if we forget to throw the deadbolt (the other latch on the front door doesn't always hold and the door will just quietly swing open if it isn't deadbolted- unsettling!).

I got what I fervently hope will be my last ever rental security deposit back today. And it's much more than I expected - I thought our pet deposit was non-refundable and any cleaning would come out of security, but most of it was covered by the pet deposit so I feel like I'm barely out anything. Pretty cool.

No candle lighting for the first time in a while, because we used the last two last week and I forgot to get more. Whoops. Maybe we will go to service tomorrow morning to make up for it.

4 coats left, two in the bathroom and one in the spare room of many names. My shoulders are getting to the point where they're sore even when I'm not actually painting. That's new. Anyway, the living room carpet has to come up tomorrow, and we're going shopping for appliances tonight, so no painting for 24 hours, maybe not til Monday.

Today I started thinking about how much cleaning I should do at the new place before we move in and all the boxes I need to get to the old place before the movers come and the cleaning I need to do there so that packing and moving can proceed easily and I totally forgot that there was Thanksgiving this week. Gah.

I think I need a nap.

Finished installing the garage door opener on Sunday, hooray! It works. We cut corners a little, attached a bracket to drywall rather than putting in a 2x4, but it's holding so far and if it fails it won't be a disaster. The track could drop, but it would hit a spring above the garage door (which may or may not do anything - it sure looks like it's not attached to anything to me) rather than crashing through the open door or onto my car. It's so nice to be able to just pull into the lit garage and go into the kitchen.

I've picked out paint for most of my house. Many different colors, because that is my vision, dammit. Yellow kitchen, orange living room, green office, purple bedroom. The hallway will be yellow on the kitchen side and orange on the living room side, I think. I need to decide on the dressing room/guest room/sewing room and the bathroom. The bathroom will have a lot of pengion decor, which goes well with blue, but it also has pink tile around the tub. Which I don't think I want to match, anyway, but too much pink and blue could be icky. I'll figure something out.

Then it's just patching cracks and actually painting. After the wallpaper strippage, of course. Followed by pulling up the carpet in the living room and we'll be all set to move in. I should probably do something about scheduling movers, but i keep going back and forth on when I want to move. I can probably be ready by Nov 15, and then I'd be all moved and can clean up the rental before Thanksgiving, but I don't want to get close to the date and have to rush and know that it's an arbitrary deadline - we don't have to be out until Dec. 1.

Yesterday I went to the doctor for the first time in two years. I need to go get some bloodwork done, and a mammogram. I asked for a referral to an ADD specialist and I'm kind of confused as to what's supposed to happen next with that, but it's not urgent. I got a tetanus shot because I couldn't remember when I'd last gotten one and I am all the time poking myself or getting scratched, etc. they said I'd have a sore arm, and I don't, but I am soooooo tired today. Probably unrelated, random days of tiredness are pretty normal for me.