you were my husband, my wife, my heroine
So it's late June, and for most of the five years I have lived in Boston, this has meant three things:
1. Trying to figure out if it has ever in the history of time been this cold and rainy this late into June (Katie's birthday is helpful for this, I just remember all the years that her birthday party was threatened by a monsoon and conclude the world is probably not coming to an end).
2. Feeling cautiously cocky about the Red Sox chances. (Three games up with this crappy, uneven pitching & Papi still coming out of his slump, and before whatever blockbuster trade I'm sure Theo is masterminding? Yes, please.)
3. OH MY GOD I HAVE TO START PACKING SOON I CAN'T BELIEVE I'M MOVING SEPTEMBER FIRST.
Except, hooray, for the first time in three years, I am NOT moving in September, J & I will be staying right in the magical bosom of Medford. To celebrate, have some DIY porn, things about my apartment that are currently making me really happy:
adventures in apartment gardening:
Most of the action is here in the raised bed. The front is all herbs (basil, parsley, basil, sage, rosemary, cilantro, basil, basil, basil -- we, uh, really like basil), and in the back there are three kinds of lettuce and along the left-hand side there are various types of peppers.
(The raised bed is just plywood I purchased at Home Depot, assembled into a frame with an electric screw driver. When I was buying the lumber, the dude employee came up to me with "must help confused girl" face and I was like "Yeah, I see you have 2 by 10 by 8s, I'm actually looking for 2 by 10 by 10s," which is to say, bitch, I got dragged along as a child to Home Depot more often than most kids get taken grocery shopping, I know my way around plywood.)
This is, like, 1/4th of our tomato plants. These are just the ones that are on the balcony off my room, there's a bunch more scattered around downstairs. (Although the balcony hosts the only classily-repurposed kitty litter container planters.) All these tomato plants are ones that we started growing from seed in a tray under a grow light when there was still snow on the ground in March.
Like I said, sometimes you just have to have a ... lot of tomatoes. And you run out of planters. And empty kitty litter containers. So you start planting your tomatoes in recycle bins. (Hey, they already have built-in drainage!)
the much-discussed salvaged wood tv stand:
Before I visited my parents in March, I mentioned to my dad that I really wished I could build a tv stand because our current one was made of wretched particle board and also had a dangerous tendency to sway from side to side. My dad being, well, my dad, was like, "Oh, we can build one here, and disassemble it, and mail it to you!" So that's what we did. Except it's even more awesome than that: at one point during the last five or ten years, my dad built his business partner a television stand, and he built one for our old house, the one where I grew up. When both my dad and his business partner bought televisions that were too big for their current tv stands (of course they did), my dad did not put the stand on the curb or sell it on Craigslist like a normal person, he dismantled each stand and kept the wood around the garage just, you know, in case he ever needed it. So we built the whole thing using salvaged wood from the two old stands, and the only new material we had to buy was some L-shaped brackets.
So then it took my parents three months to get around to mailing it to me, and then I was out of town for three straight weekends, but then furniture assembling super-hero coquettemoves came over and we drank a six-pack and she worked her magic. Seriously, this stupid piece of furniture makes me so happy, it's embarrassing. Growing up, the house was full of stuff my dad built (including, uh, the house itself). When I left home I took the wood bedframe he built me when I was in junior high. But it wasn't meant to be disassembled and I lived in progressively narrow-stairwelled Boston apartments and eventually I had to abandon it and I was weirdly sad that there was nothing in my house that my dad had built. But now there is.
ETA: The real reason why we can never leave this apartment.
1. Trying to figure out if it has ever in the history of time been this cold and rainy this late into June (Katie's birthday is helpful for this, I just remember all the years that her birthday party was threatened by a monsoon and conclude the world is probably not coming to an end).
2. Feeling cautiously cocky about the Red Sox chances. (Three games up with this crappy, uneven pitching & Papi still coming out of his slump, and before whatever blockbuster trade I'm sure Theo is masterminding? Yes, please.)
3. OH MY GOD I HAVE TO START PACKING SOON I CAN'T BELIEVE I'M MOVING SEPTEMBER FIRST.
Except, hooray, for the first time in three years, I am NOT moving in September, J & I will be staying right in the magical bosom of Medford. To celebrate, have some DIY porn, things about my apartment that are currently making me really happy:
adventures in apartment gardening:
Most of the action is here in the raised bed. The front is all herbs (basil, parsley, basil, sage, rosemary, cilantro, basil, basil, basil -- we, uh, really like basil), and in the back there are three kinds of lettuce and along the left-hand side there are various types of peppers.
(The raised bed is just plywood I purchased at Home Depot, assembled into a frame with an electric screw driver. When I was buying the lumber, the dude employee came up to me with "must help confused girl" face and I was like "Yeah, I see you have 2 by 10 by 8s, I'm actually looking for 2 by 10 by 10s," which is to say, bitch, I got dragged along as a child to Home Depot more often than most kids get taken grocery shopping, I know my way around plywood.)
This is, like, 1/4th of our tomato plants. These are just the ones that are on the balcony off my room, there's a bunch more scattered around downstairs. (Although the balcony hosts the only classily-repurposed kitty litter container planters.) All these tomato plants are ones that we started growing from seed in a tray under a grow light when there was still snow on the ground in March.
Like I said, sometimes you just have to have a ... lot of tomatoes. And you run out of planters. And empty kitty litter containers. So you start planting your tomatoes in recycle bins. (Hey, they already have built-in drainage!)
the much-discussed salvaged wood tv stand:
Before I visited my parents in March, I mentioned to my dad that I really wished I could build a tv stand because our current one was made of wretched particle board and also had a dangerous tendency to sway from side to side. My dad being, well, my dad, was like, "Oh, we can build one here, and disassemble it, and mail it to you!" So that's what we did. Except it's even more awesome than that: at one point during the last five or ten years, my dad built his business partner a television stand, and he built one for our old house, the one where I grew up. When both my dad and his business partner bought televisions that were too big for their current tv stands (of course they did), my dad did not put the stand on the curb or sell it on Craigslist like a normal person, he dismantled each stand and kept the wood around the garage just, you know, in case he ever needed it. So we built the whole thing using salvaged wood from the two old stands, and the only new material we had to buy was some L-shaped brackets.
So then it took my parents three months to get around to mailing it to me, and then I was out of town for three straight weekends, but then furniture assembling super-hero coquettemoves came over and we drank a six-pack and she worked her magic. Seriously, this stupid piece of furniture makes me so happy, it's embarrassing. Growing up, the house was full of stuff my dad built (including, uh, the house itself). When I left home I took the wood bedframe he built me when I was in junior high. But it wasn't meant to be disassembled and I lived in progressively narrow-stairwelled Boston apartments and eventually I had to abandon it and I was weirdly sad that there was nothing in my house that my dad had built. But now there is.
ETA: The real reason why we can never leave this apartment.