I haz a happee!

A happy new house!  Be prepared for a long post with gratuitous photographic displays!

 So Thursday, December 30, I went to the bank and signed my life away...but I got the keys to my new house!  I stopped by Lowe's for painting supplies, picked up some lunch, changed out of my suit (I, apparently, am the only person I know who dresses up for a house closing, but I have a suspicion that the loan officer is happier loaning a large sum of money to a person who looks like a professional, not a dumpster-dweller), and headed over to my new house with a few things.

Including the house-warming present from my bank.

Now that the house was mine, I could think about what I wanted to do with the rooms in the new house. 

The master bedroom needed a coat of paint, not too far from the starting shade of blue, but the original job was really shoddy (did they thin the paint before using it?).

The smaller bedroom, my office, needed several coats of paint to cover up that ghastly shade of Pepto-Bismol pink and some work to cover really bad drywall patches (this is not as pink as it should be but I was having trouble getting the correct exposure because the lighting in that room is really dank, also on the list of things to change).

Mom and Dad came down to help - Dad to help paint and Mom to get started on the kitchen (see below for what was up with the kitchen).  We weren't done with painting that evening - it was just too many walls to paint (even with Jess and Jackie coming over to help) and we needed another full coat in the office to cover the pink, even though we'd started with a tinted primer.  So back to the condo for bed:

Which was really the couch because I had to start taking the bed apart for the movers.  I didn't go to sleep until nearly 2am because I was also taking apart the stereo system and packing all the clothes in the drawers in my room.

Up at 6am and I took the cats over to the new house.  Which involved tricking two highly suspicious felines into their carriers (also known as giving up on doing it nicely and dropping them butt-first into the carriers), packing them into the car with all their toys, blankies, and new litter boxes, and taking a (mercifully) short car ride with two howling animals.  They were installed in the downstairs bathroom, known as "the cats' bathroom", for the day.  Then I raced back to the condo in time for the water heater guy to install the new water heater (old water heater was peeing water on the floor at the condo), the movers to come for my furniture, and the contractor to fix the drywall (I was practically paying the buyers to take my house).

 It was like a circus!! We found little kitty hoards under all the furniture. 

After the movers left, Dad and I worked on more painting - we didn't finish until Saturday (!) but the results were well worth it.


 

My bedroom has a much more saturated blue color - along with a more even paint job - so it feels very calm and peaceful.  The cats felt more at home once we got the bed made (when I let them out of the bathroom they wouldn't go anywhere without me, even crying to get me to come downstairs so they could use the kitty box; Chaucer would stand at the bottom and cry to have me to come down and get him).

My office turned out to be AMAZING!  The color is Bimini Blue and after a coat of tinted primer and two coats of color it looks exactly like the card.  I've got a little touch-up work to do, still (and we got a bit of paint on the woodwork), but I'm busily filling up my bookshelves with books.

So, do you want to hear about the kitchen?  The kitchen was a disaster.  The oven was beyond disgusting (I'm sorry I didn't remember to take a picture), like multiple-years'-worth-of-cooking pizza-directliy-on-the-racks-without-a-pan level of dirty; we had to vacuum the ashes out of the bottom after running the cleaning cycle.  My mother, who is quite good at getting kitchens in order, spent nearly three days cleaning cabinets, even borrowing the putty knife to scrape God-only-knows-what off of cabinet bottoms.  She made me promise that the next time I buy a house I request on the offer to have a professional cleaning done prior to close (and that goes for my brothers and sisters-in-law, too). 

In the end it turned out to be a very nice and clean kitchen with a low wall looking over the foyer where Chaucer likes to sit and vulture the food. 

I swear that I cleaned my condo unbelievably well prior to the sale on January 5 - it took two days and you could have eaten off the floor in the bathroom where the litter boxes sat. True story.

I had the carpet cleaned at the condo prior to closing.  It was so sad to see it empty - even though I am happy to be well rid of it, it was my first house and I cried when my realtor called to tell me the sale was completed. 

Bye-bye old kitchen, it doesn't even look like I lived there (or anyone, for that matter).

Among the surprises at the new house, I was gifted with a large porch swing (they asked if I wanted it and I said I didn't care because I already had a swing...so they left it) and multiple junk drawers full of old makeup, barbie shoes, hair-ties, nails, screws, keys, crap, about $3.50 in pocket change (which I fed to the Peanut-Butter Bear Bank), and these:

 

I think these are what I used to put notecards on but they were holding up the shower curtain in the upstairs bath!  Not only were they slobs, they weren't very smart because these bad boys rust!  Classy!

So my new house is slowly coming together.  The cats have settled in nicely (I found favorite toys upstairs on the third day, so they adjusted quite well; Dante has found his old hiding places again).  I've got a lot of boxes left to unpack - and I don't have any nice living room furniture as yet - but it feels like home now.

Welcome, friends! (My youngest brother and sister-in-law gave this to me for Christmas a few years ago - I never had a satisfactory place to hang it until now).

Reading With Oprah

I recently finished Reading With Oprah: The Book Club That Changed America by Kathleen Rooney. Rooney evaluated Oprah’s Book Club in terms of the cultural impact of the club as well as the various criticisms of the OBC. The discussion of “high-“vs. “low-brow” culture was very interesting as well as the definition of “truthiness” as it pertains to the James Frey debacle. Rooney included extensive quotes and opinions from many of the OBC selected authors - she sent a questionnaire asking about the authors' personal feelings about the OBC and the inclusion of their work on the show (even Jonathan Franzen responded).

Say what you want about Oprah’s Book Club but it did get hundreds of thousands, millions, maybe, of people to read a work of fiction. Even people who professed to not have read anything after high school graduation went out and bought Fall on Your Knees or The Poisonwood Bible or Sula and many other titles, one after the other. The 63 selections are mostly wonderful works of literary fiction and I’ve read twelve of the selections myself.

But not because I follow the OBC. Or watch "The Oprah Winfrey Show". In truth I am far from Oprah’s target audience. My mother never watched daytime television so I never picked up the habit; I’m never home during the afternoon and don’t feel the need to tape anything during the day to watch once I drag myself back home at night. Instead, I read (in this way I am more like Oprah herself, who claims to read in the evenings rather than watch television). The OBC phenomenon never struck me as particularly interesting because why the heck would I let someone whose opinion I couldn’t really care for (and a television personality to boot, no thank you) tell me what to read? I’d have to watch the show then, right? Even in the second reincarnation of the club when an online component made participation easier I still wasn’t interested. I’d already read East of Eden and just didn’t want to look like one of the many little media-controlled sheep buying and toting around their paperbacks with the little Oprah sticker; it’s a little too “Josie and the Pussycats” for me. I actually spent an hour with a hairdryer removing the Oprah sticker from The Road because I was so disappointed that ALL the books came with the sticker when the novel released in paperback; I wanted to read McCarthy’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel because it won the Pulitzer, not because a TV show I don’t watch said it was good.

Oprah has become the guru for so many people but Oprah’s opinion simply doesn’t matter to me; the opinions that matter to me are those of my friends and fellow booksellers, people I know and see every day in real life. Oprah’s not my book guru – my book guru is my friend Kat (who also happens to be the merchandise manager at my store). Kat has amazing taste and is the most well-read person I know. She’s on a mission to read all the New York Review of Books Classics titles – she suggested a group of us read their new Pinocchio – and introduced me to Special Topics in Calamity Physics. She loves literary fiction (as do I) and I can always count on her to find me a new, wonderful, and quirky book to read. She is also the one who found the Rooney book…and then persuaded me to buy it when I expressed interest in reading it.

So, who’s your book guru?

Current book-in-progress: Runaway by Alice Munro
Current knitted item: fuzzy blue top-down sweater
Current movie obsession: You've Got Mail
Current iTunes loop: The Five Browns

A slight course adjustment

HP did not consume the evening; instead HP1 played on the TV while I read all the plot synposes for Gilmore Girls on TV.com. My friend Jackie is going to blog about reading/watching/listening all the cultural references made on the seven seasons of GG and, since I'd never watched the show except for part of a re-run where Rory gets into a car accident, I thought I'd do a little cribbing of season one. I read through all the seasons. I foresee a Netflix run in the future.

I think I'll go read a book now.