This year on A&A's Adventures in 2014: Only time will tell, but it will start with a bang of boxes, balls, and the smashing indoor mountain biker romper room/garage.
Say it's only a paper moon, sailing over a cardboard singletrack - End of garages as we know it
We live on a quirky little offstrip from a busy street leading to Lake Padden. The Lake Padden area is interesting for its almost street-by-street heterogeneity. A few blocks afoot, we have the trailer homes and cardboard pre-fabs. A few blocks at a slightly higher incline and we have some of the not so nouveau but notless chintzy riche of the Bellingham area. Go a few blocks in a katty corner and you eventually reach Molly and her brood. But that's up a lot of hill and has absolutely nothing to do with this story (...or does it? Is that revolver in the drawer a snafu from props or does somebody know something about Act II that I'm not sure about? Never can say).
Blended into the mix are a few middle range ramblers, a few sturdy older houses, and our little block. Our block is a four house street whose existence is deeply doubted by UPS at least (rant about recent shipping irritations edited out for content).
Our block caters to a certain yippee kayee Bellinghamster: they's gots monies, but they crunch like their favorite hempseed kale salad with bean sprouts. Homes are an interesting olio of capacious grandiosity, expansive lawns, and um... well... touches of the trailer park? No, nothing so trashy, if only by virtue of their context. More like carefully tended gardens surrounded with a little "wilderness" and a share of something that is either found-art or abandoned art projects or finished art that questions my basic concepts of aesthetics... or....
Or maybe just excess capacity flowing out from storage sheds. Another pertinent characteristic of our street is the odd confluence of very large garages and the cars that do not fit in them. We are absolutely convinced, for instance, that our neighbors across the street are Canadian smugglers. They have a three car garage with nary a car in it. Not to say they don't have cars. They do. They have several. Some of the cars are permanent installations, while others seem to be roaming cars. The latter sort inevitably sport the British Columbian flag upon their plates.It's not exactly easy to descry what pelf and lucre hide in those infinite recesses of garage without thorough reconnaissance, but there is a wall of stuff whatever it is.
The other few houses on our street also seem to feature both garages and the cars that have been rejected by them, lingering dolefully at a safe distance as prescribed by the inevitable restraining orders. Perhaps we're a street of smugglers!
Or perhaps it's viral: +Andrew Wright I recently joined the ranks of outdoor parkers, capping off the trend for our street. You know, I figure that DINKS are always remodeling and repurposing their homes, right? Since we can't have pets and don't have babies, gotta have something to spend our energy, facebook photo albums, and hardly-earned money on, no?
So, with the help of a little snap of some very heavy coils, we've repurposed the garage into a bike romper room! I'll be setting up the cardboard obstacle course this weekend. Maybe put up some paper trees and a few pictures of cyclists on the walls. A photo of me looking kind of cold and uncomfortable and holding a stereo from which a cowbell blares its dulcet tones? Ta-da! Andrew will have a nice indoor practice area for all his hardest bike handling dips and tricks (because cardboard does run free and hard on Galbraith Mountain, of course)! And... our cars will kind of fit just tucked off the street and to the side of our very steep driveway.
So, this coil thing. Apparently our garage door is very heavy. It has been doing some wonderful things with shape-wear and flattering poses, but once the spring pulley system that was physically boosting efforts to move the damned thing gave its swan song in a grand unwitnessed SNAP, the true heft of it all came crashing down. Or, really, just stayed down. The mechanical door can do nothing to help. My arms most certainly cannot. I suspect a bazooka might mediate the intransigence of a perpetually closed door, but perhaps undermine some of the goals of garage in esse. It may potentially - I'd have to check - also break our lease or something to detonate explosions strategically about the house.
It is rather fortunate that this little snafu with the spring occurred during the day, while Andrew and I had our cars out for their daily walks. Although it was disconcerting to watch the garage struggle through its final heave-hos before heaving itself shut again, being stranded without usable cars would have been far less concerting. Plus, the cars would have interfered with the cardboard mountain bike arena!
I admit I tried my best nominal efforts to regain entrance. I fetched a ladder, disengaged the mechanical door, looked convincingly confused for a good spell, and tugged at things arbitrarily while whispering "open sesame" in a coaxing timbre. I also notified and then stared at Andrew while he looked at things. It took us a while to notice the snapped coil and realize that probably wasn't just wall art up there. Our landlady continues to be a really sweet landlady and was out there pretty quickly yesterday with a handyman who deferred responsibility for the "bigger job" ours presented. We hear somebody with bigger garage guns (and possibly that bazooka) will be out at the house this afternoon. Maybe they can just hollow out some space to build a little bike-door for Andrew's babies. They really weren't meant to be indoor bikes.
I do hope we get our garage back, even if I think we can schedule some kind of shared-space time for the mountain bike romper room. I'm starting to get phantom garage button panics. Also, using keys is like SO four years ago! I feel absolutely passe! Don't get me started on having to navigate weather to reach my vehicle in the mornings!
Boxapalooza and the Long Christmas Ship Home -
Well, the good (nay, great news) is that our garage door appears to have been recoiled and now happily reconciled with its function as a garage opener and closer. +Andrew Wright's car is cozily nestled in, far from the petulant winds and prying rains. I left my car downtown, because my mom had hers and we were doing something together and yadda yadda yadda... I don't really care to drive when I don't have to. Which is entertaining, because I'm also a panicky passenger after that accident I was in, and inevitably go through an entire lamaze session each time anyone else sets wheel upon the roadways (CAR! ok ok ok, BREAKS! ok ok ok! SQUIRELL!!). So I mostly force people to drive me around and spend the drive looking at them like they have hijacked me and are actively threatening my life. Or I stare at my phone, so as to pry my fingers from any door handles with the lure of the pleasant siren screen and numbness of mind inherent.
My poor abandoned car gets one more night in wind and weather. And my lord, is there plenty of that wind and weather to swirl about. It's been steadily blustery for the past few days. Quite blustery indeed.
The winds picked up yesterday, which is also known as "trash day." Wet, harried, and quite hopeful to be done with the outdoors, I pulled the rather dickish move of putting out my recycling boxes - steel yourselves for my childish petulance - not entirely broken down and mostly just piled up in a larger box. In halcyon days of normal winds, they tend to stay put, but even at the time I pondered whether I should have figured out some way to ballast the boxes. I made a note to myself to check outside later and take back any boxes that had made a break for it.
In this case, I have been informed that some of my boxes reenacted their own dance of the snowflakes all around our yard. Of course our neighbor, whom we've never met just happened to be picking them all up and collapsing them appropriately when our landlady was out here for the door. No big deal, but I'd just as soon my little moments of selfishness go less observed. Or at least tended to by a neighbor I've actually met. I'm not entirely sure which neighbor from which home did my dirty work.
But then again, those boxes are gone! We had a significant fraction of our living room brimming with boxes. It had become perilous navigating the narrow inlet between the boxlands and sofa. And, while I'm ok with the gymnastic-chic element we've imbued our little domestic bliss-haven with, the garbage dump look is so two years ago and never really did quite fit me. Handcrafted artisinal horder works for some, but has never quite been my style. I tend to stick with the old standards, like piled up books or - in the e-era - piled up electronic devices with various books downloaded on them. More mutable for your redecorating urges and more instantly entertaining to those of us who are neither toddler nor feline.
As the box flock took its leave, we were replenished with a new influx of wayward boxes. The first box was an easy enough arrival. At some point our coffee carafe had cracked. Apparently one is ill-advised to continue using a cracked carafe, so I ordered a new one while still using the old. I suppose that would make me half-advised. Amazing how exquisitely pellucid they start out, these carafes. All shining gleams of light and patent panther black. Almost a shame to sully it with service, but the lure of coffee's deep throaty purr is greater than any urn aesthetics.
Our other boxes took a far greater journey to join us in our little home. They are, in fact, the last of our Christmas gifts. Once opened in San Francisco, they were far fatter than our luggage could take. By just a smidgen we managed to beat the airplane price for checking bags and shipped them instead. Of course in our vacation daze we went and used UPS, which stirred up old curses. UPS and I do not always have the most amicable of fortunes.
When I lived in Seattle, UPS simply could not successfully deliver a package to me, and several UPS packages were returned to sender. It had something to do with specific UPS policies about leaving packages in various places and signatures and so on, but the contours were not entirely clear and I still chalk it up to as much curse as anything else. I did once or twice manage to get a UPS delivery, only after literally running down the block in my pajamas waving my arms like a mad woman. Usually if I actually got the little "we have your package notice" (often did not), I would just have them send my packages to my mom's house in Bellingham and pick it up later. FedEx and the USPS never had incident.
My track record continues. After wondering about our errant packages, I found tracking information and discovered that a UPS person had "tried" to deliver our package but could not without "a correct street number." Now, I sympathize with the need for a correct street number, but somehow they managed to send a postcard to our address indicating the package could not be delivered and they would be returning it to sender (an issue, because Andrew was sender and receiver, but his original sending address was a fictive Seattle one), I'm a little perplexed what was "incorrect" about our street number.Years of UPS baggage flooding back, I let Andrew field the call to the UPS people. I was willing to go pick it up if they'd let me (they packages were for Andrew), but Andrew suggested they just go to his work address after a litany of lalochezia threateningly muttered by his sweet wife about the insipidity of all brown shorts.
So from their original destination to California to Bellingham to Everett. These boxes have been around. I'm sure that the contents have been fully enriched by this extra exposure to the world. No doubt, stories shall be rich and full-bodied!
Adella and the Giant Bouncy Ball -
I have a new toy! After much mulling, rumination, and ... ok, I'm not much of one for cud, but there was definitely gum involved... I bought myself my own genuine little resolution ball. I call it a resolution ball, because these exercise balls were fairly scarce outside of their gym habitats until just shortly shy of January 1st, that special day when all the exercise equipment comes out to play with hopeful resolvers.
It's hard to describe the sheer glee that courses through my tissues and titillates my synapses when I sit on a bouncy - er exercise ball. Hard to describe, of course, unless you have a visual of my maniacally grinning face. And the subsequent visual of me bouncing up and down, trying to lift my feet up and balance, and then crawling off the ball with unmitigated adventure/stupidity.
I do use exercise balls at the gym with appropriate horror at the potential germ cocktail - nay, shooter - I'm imbibing from the ball and the sweat-stained mats. I tarried a spell on buying one for home, for fear it would be redundant or, worse, discouragement from using it at the gym without the supplying impetus to use it at home. Which may be, but of course it's so much more than a little exercise ball here.
I covered "toy" with a fine mist and a full-throated wheeeeeeeee, but it's also "furniture"! While I don't much like sitting in general, I do often have things that require sitting. The chairs in my home are not the ideal height ratio for the surfaces in my home. They're fairly standard height ratios, but ones that tend to encourage slumping for appropriate table use. My back is not a fan. I have mostly avoided the chairs in our house and either stood at the counter or collapsed in the sofa. Having had a few meals at the table with my bouncy ball, I'm quite happy with the difference. I just need one that's a little taller to sit at the counter now! Don't think I've not already tried balancing on a kneel at the counter... skulls have yet to be cracked, but it's surely a matter of time!
Happy Sunday all! Andrew's off for his first ski day of the year and I'm off to see Rigoletto with my dad. Think I can bring my ball to the opera house? Their seats are not the most comfortable in the world...
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