(no subject)
Yesterday's disaster: discovery that the tub/shower door we'd purchased in advance was broken during shipping. Much stressful/frantic/frustrated/etc. dealing followed. My afternoon was very stressful, including some unexpected driving-around-town buddy time with Ting, as he took me to two local hardware stores trying to find a replacement tub/shower door. We had very little time to look, since I had an appointment less than an hour after the disaster was discovered and hadn't planned this spontaneous outing, so there was a lot of running (sometimes literally) down hardware store aisles, speed-talking to salespeople, etc.
End result: we lost $343.70, contributed to the world landfill situation, and ordered a new tub door locally. It should arrive in about a week, so Ting will be coming back with his crew to finish up the work in our bathroom after that hiatus.
In the meantime, our house is empty of contractors and will remain so for at least a week. It's like heaven.
In other, tangentially-related news, I've been obsessively shopping for bath products -- tub caddy, bath pillow, bath salts, bath oils, bath beads -- because in 2 days I will be able to take my first proper bath (i.e., comfortable, luxurious, relaxing) in at least 13 years. That's almost a third of my lifetime! I will have to take a hell of a lot of incredibly wonderful baths in this new tub to make up for lost time. I'll spend the next few months constantly smelling like seaweed and cucumber and cedar and cherry blossom and citrus and Dead Sea minerals and who knows what else.
Munchkin seems to be doing better today, after completely freaking us out Saturday night. Right before we went to bed, she spent an hour trembling so hard she looked like she was going to fall over. From across the room, you could see how badly she was shaking, but if you were actually holding her and could feel her vibrating body in your hands, it was even worse. It turns out that this kind of trembling is often caused by a potassium deficiency, which we already knew was a problem for Munchkin. So the vet prescribed a potassium supplement pill, and we started Munchkin on it yesterday, and we're hoping it will work. (Poor Munchkin: the potassium pill is gigantic. We're only giving her half a pill at a time, but it's still huge. This morning, it got pretty badly stuck in her throat while she kept trying to swallow. She doesn't seem to mind the pilling, though. While I give her pills, Shannon holds her in his arms and she just purrs and purrs the whole time.)
Tomorrow starts 3 days of sporadic painters, with one guy coming each day for a brief look-see in order to give an estimate. We can't start painting until Ting & Co. are done applying the second layer of caulk and installing the sliding glass tub/shower door (presumably in a bit more than a week), but we can get things lined up in advance. To that end, I've also asked Lisa to help me transport a medicine cabinet from Home Depot soon (no rush, since we won't want to mount it until the room has been painted), since she's one of those car-driving kinds of people (unlike Shannon and myself).
Shannon and I were looking at the sink and vanity in the bathroom yesterday and agreeing that we should have replaced those, too, since we were making everything else nice and new, but it never occurred to me back then, before we started, because the vanity and sink looked fine, back before everything else looked nice. Also, the contractors had to pull out the sink and vanity during the work, due to pipe replacement issues, so it would have been easy to just swap the old one for a new one at the time. It would be a big enough pain now that I doubt it will happen anytime soon, but the vanity and sink don't look bad, really. Just not all new and shiny.
Today's disaster (which happened while I was in the midst of writing this entry): okay, not really a disaster, but it made me cry. I've been engaging in an epic battle to get a ring from a seller on Etsy. I bought the ring, it arrived on July 31, it was a little too big (I hadn't been all that sure of my ring size, so this was my fault), she offered to resize it, I put it in the mail to her on August 2, it vanished in the hands of the USPS and never arrived, we waited a while before declaring it lost on August 28, the seller got hit by a hurricane (she's in New Orleans) right at the same time, she got married and went on her honeymoon immediately after, she got home, she made me a new ring for a very discounted price, it arrived today, ... and it's even looser than the first ring that I unwisely chose to return for resizing several weeks ago. I totally love this ring. I've been looking forward to wearing it since I ordered it more than two months ago, and now it practically slides off my finger if I just let my hand hang limply by my side. It doesn't fit on any of my other fingers. I simply can't wear it at all.
I was going to try to figure out how to proceed -- give up? trust it to the USPS and try again to have it resized? some other course of action? -- and I was writing a message to the seller, and I just started crying, and I decided that I can't handle this right now. I can't handle having to make another decision and solve another problem, after all these broken tub doors and walls that aren't plumb and buckling tiles and missing shower valves and tubs that are too wide for the space and baseboards crudely torn off and pipes running where they aren't supposed to and towel bars that don't fit on the door and everything else. My life has been a vivid collage of problems and judgment calls and uncertain decisions for the past two weeks, and I simply don't have room for any more, especially ones that only affect me and only affect my happiness. It's just something I want, and it isn't something necessary, and it won't lose us money, and no one is being held up by my hesitation. When everyone else is waiting with bated breath until I come up with a solution, then I have to act. A two-week barrage of this has left me with no room at all for something as little as a personalized classic twisted vine/braid pattern silver ring.
So I told Etsy Ring Woman (a.k.a. Soo) that I will contact her as soon as I can and try to figure out what to do, but I can't do it today. And then I cried some more. I want my freaking ring! I'm sad. It's stupid and minor and not very important, but it's making me very sad. And I don't have any money to go out and by myself a pair of funky consolation socks.
Whine whine whine.
End result: we lost $343.70, contributed to the world landfill situation, and ordered a new tub door locally. It should arrive in about a week, so Ting will be coming back with his crew to finish up the work in our bathroom after that hiatus.
In the meantime, our house is empty of contractors and will remain so for at least a week. It's like heaven.
In other, tangentially-related news, I've been obsessively shopping for bath products -- tub caddy, bath pillow, bath salts, bath oils, bath beads -- because in 2 days I will be able to take my first proper bath (i.e., comfortable, luxurious, relaxing) in at least 13 years. That's almost a third of my lifetime! I will have to take a hell of a lot of incredibly wonderful baths in this new tub to make up for lost time. I'll spend the next few months constantly smelling like seaweed and cucumber and cedar and cherry blossom and citrus and Dead Sea minerals and who knows what else.
Munchkin seems to be doing better today, after completely freaking us out Saturday night. Right before we went to bed, she spent an hour trembling so hard she looked like she was going to fall over. From across the room, you could see how badly she was shaking, but if you were actually holding her and could feel her vibrating body in your hands, it was even worse. It turns out that this kind of trembling is often caused by a potassium deficiency, which we already knew was a problem for Munchkin. So the vet prescribed a potassium supplement pill, and we started Munchkin on it yesterday, and we're hoping it will work. (Poor Munchkin: the potassium pill is gigantic. We're only giving her half a pill at a time, but it's still huge. This morning, it got pretty badly stuck in her throat while she kept trying to swallow. She doesn't seem to mind the pilling, though. While I give her pills, Shannon holds her in his arms and she just purrs and purrs the whole time.)
Tomorrow starts 3 days of sporadic painters, with one guy coming each day for a brief look-see in order to give an estimate. We can't start painting until Ting & Co. are done applying the second layer of caulk and installing the sliding glass tub/shower door (presumably in a bit more than a week), but we can get things lined up in advance. To that end, I've also asked Lisa to help me transport a medicine cabinet from Home Depot soon (no rush, since we won't want to mount it until the room has been painted), since she's one of those car-driving kinds of people (unlike Shannon and myself).
Shannon and I were looking at the sink and vanity in the bathroom yesterday and agreeing that we should have replaced those, too, since we were making everything else nice and new, but it never occurred to me back then, before we started, because the vanity and sink looked fine, back before everything else looked nice. Also, the contractors had to pull out the sink and vanity during the work, due to pipe replacement issues, so it would have been easy to just swap the old one for a new one at the time. It would be a big enough pain now that I doubt it will happen anytime soon, but the vanity and sink don't look bad, really. Just not all new and shiny.
Today's disaster (which happened while I was in the midst of writing this entry): okay, not really a disaster, but it made me cry. I've been engaging in an epic battle to get a ring from a seller on Etsy. I bought the ring, it arrived on July 31, it was a little too big (I hadn't been all that sure of my ring size, so this was my fault), she offered to resize it, I put it in the mail to her on August 2, it vanished in the hands of the USPS and never arrived, we waited a while before declaring it lost on August 28, the seller got hit by a hurricane (she's in New Orleans) right at the same time, she got married and went on her honeymoon immediately after, she got home, she made me a new ring for a very discounted price, it arrived today, ... and it's even looser than the first ring that I unwisely chose to return for resizing several weeks ago. I totally love this ring. I've been looking forward to wearing it since I ordered it more than two months ago, and now it practically slides off my finger if I just let my hand hang limply by my side. It doesn't fit on any of my other fingers. I simply can't wear it at all.
I was going to try to figure out how to proceed -- give up? trust it to the USPS and try again to have it resized? some other course of action? -- and I was writing a message to the seller, and I just started crying, and I decided that I can't handle this right now. I can't handle having to make another decision and solve another problem, after all these broken tub doors and walls that aren't plumb and buckling tiles and missing shower valves and tubs that are too wide for the space and baseboards crudely torn off and pipes running where they aren't supposed to and towel bars that don't fit on the door and everything else. My life has been a vivid collage of problems and judgment calls and uncertain decisions for the past two weeks, and I simply don't have room for any more, especially ones that only affect me and only affect my happiness. It's just something I want, and it isn't something necessary, and it won't lose us money, and no one is being held up by my hesitation. When everyone else is waiting with bated breath until I come up with a solution, then I have to act. A two-week barrage of this has left me with no room at all for something as little as a personalized classic twisted vine/braid pattern silver ring.
So I told Etsy Ring Woman (a.k.a. Soo) that I will contact her as soon as I can and try to figure out what to do, but I can't do it today. And then I cried some more. I want my freaking ring! I'm sad. It's stupid and minor and not very important, but it's making me very sad. And I don't have any money to go out and by myself a pair of funky consolation socks.
Whine whine whine.