Demolition Derby

Hey, remember this project? My dad and I are trying to make this, a $25 gun rack I bought from a friend's grandparents...

...into something like this, which will hold my dishes and be a generally adorable addition to my dining room:

Structurally, the biggest part of this project requires deepening the bottom half of the cabinet and replacing the existing drawers with cabinet doors—essentially, we're building a new exterior around the old bottom half and replacing the bottom and the interior shelf. And what has to happen before a new exterior? The old parts have to go!

Like so:

Some of the demolition was satisfying Hulk-smashy hammer work, but the point wasn't to destroy the entire cabinet—I needed to clear out the innards but leave the frame intact and the gun-rest portion pristine. (Well, as pristine as the amazingly crusty piece of fabric inside allows.) My desire to ironically hang my teacups above the rifle rests is, after all, pretty much the point of this entire project.

 So there was some of this:

And a lot of this:

The shelves weren't made of solid boards—they were balsa wood, held apart by other balsa wood glued in as spacers. Sneaky, yet inexplicable!

To preserve the surface of the cabinet, I hammered all the existing nails out from the inside and picked out a few staples, and also nearly ended up at Kaiser for a tetanus shot, saved by the grace of God and the squishy soles of my construction-inappropriate footwear. ("Hey, why is that board stuck to my shoe?")

But at the end of the afternoon, I had it: a cleaned-out cabinet bottom, ready for its new frame, and no nails in my feet. I'm calling it a victory.

Next up: In which I learn to use the power saw!

Annie Get Your Sunday China

A few weeks ago, I bought a gun cabinet. It's going to live in my dining room, and it's going to be the best.

It's for, you know, all...the guns that I...own?

(Don't be ridiculous. I don't own any guns.)

What happened is, I moved into my new apartment in January. I unpacked pretty quickly, leaving exactly one enormous moving box intact, sitting in the middle of the guest room. The box holds all of the entertaining and kitchen items I don't use every day and that don't fit in the kitchen proper: serving platters, a few pieces of good china, candlesticks, a huge bag of tealights I bought at IKEA years ago. The box taunts me. My brain says, this is going to be the coziest guest room ever! But the box says, what are you going to do, put me in the closet? OH WAIT, YOU DON'T HAVE ANY OF THOSE LEFT. To shut the box up, I've been looking for a china cabinet.

About a month ago, my mom and I stopped by some friends' estate sale, more to say hi to our friends than to buy any of their stuff. Out on the lawn stood a tall, narrow, open cabinet with no shelves and oval holes carved into the base. "That's weird," I thought. "That cabinet has no shelves." I went inside. I saw my friends. I tried to throw a ball for their Boston terrier, Zorro, who ignored me and stared into the middle distance of two opposite directions. I bought a set of dominoes and a fifty-cent paperback copy of Anna Karenina. We were just on the way out when my friend Don knocked on side of the shelfless cabinet. "Sure you don't want this?" he said. I'm pretty sure he was at least half joking. "You need a place to store your rifles." You see where this is going. With that, I knew: I did want it. It was old and paint-spattered and made mostly of cheap plywood, and it was definitely, definitely my new china cabinet.

This is how you know my dad is an above-the-call-of-duty kind of dad, and also an engineer: when I waltz into his living room on a Saturday afternoon and announce that I've bought a plywood gun cabinet and I want to turn it into a fancy place to store my trivets, his main response is to run for the graph paper. (I may have heard the words "a project!" emanate faintly from the area of his desk.) By the end of the week, we had a plan--deepen the bottom half, switch out the drawers for cabinets, find a vintage glass door, new feet, maybe some kind of curly decoration on top. Definitely a coat of paint or two.

So far, with the exception of a mostly ineffectual going-over with soap and water, the gun cabinet is the same as it was the day it moved into my parents' garage--but it won't be for long. In the coming weeks (months?), Dad and I will be taking it apart and putting it back together, and I'll be writing about it here.

As someone I know would say: A project!

Where I Am Now

Since I last wrote here, a few things have changed.

I am, by the grace of God, no longer on hold with the California Employment and Development Department. I got a job! I write things and mess with the Internet for an organization in downtown San Francisco, and eat lunch by the water when it's not too cold. That's all I'll say, because: Internet. (MAYBE I'M A SPY.) (I'm not a spy.)

I also bought and moved myself and the cat into a new home, a spacious and sunny apartment in a small building. It is, for the most part, a wonderful thing: growing tomatoes on my back stairs, grilling in my be-twinkle-lighted backyard with friends while the neighborhood goes all war-zone on the Fourth of July. It's far from fully furnished and decorated, but I'm happy to have that be a process. Better to not have my entire home look like June 2013, and who I am now, because who I am now is certain to not be who I am in a year or two. I can build slowly.

Lately, I've been spending a lot of time in my home--after a long spell of traveling and houseguests and parties to attend and parties to host and meetings at church and "meetings" at my choir pub, I am indulging my inner homebody and sheltering in place. I'm cooking simple food, and finishing some handknit socks, and watching a little TV--I just finished the new season of Arrested Development, which I enjoyed mightily but which wore out my cynicism bone for awhile. I recently taped together some cut-up paper bags and traced a sewing pattern for pajama pants, and now that the machine's out on the dining room table, I can't wait to sew ALL THE THINGS! It's been a few years since I sewed consistently, but I'm trying to brush up on my skills while I sew through some of the fabric I've been hanging onto for so long. Luckily, my friends are having children at Duggar-like rates (collectively, not individually); I can always claim that my baby-gift production requirements pushed me into it. Infants: It's all their fault!

Anyway, it's nice. Maybe I should be outside more, but I'm enjoying having a new home and spending time in it.

I just thought you should know.

1-800-AAA-RRGH

Last Monday, I missed a phone interview with the California Employment Development Department. I don't know what happened to the pre-interview notice they promised me; I do know that when I got back from my New Year's Eve Trader Joe's run, Mary from the State of California was disappointed to have missed me. The phone number she left was unstaffed, and their email told me to call the main line. This, I now know, is the first rule of the California Employment Development Department: Don't miss a phone call with the California Employment Development Department.

Nine days and about a hundred phone-dials later--I literally called twenty-eight times yesterday--I still haven't gotten through. Sometimes, the system is up-front with me: I dial, please call back later, goodbye. Click! Other times, it leads me on. "Welcome!" it says. My heart beats fast. I have my reference number handy. Five menus and my Social Security number later...please call back later. Goodbye. Click.

This is like the worst radio call-in contest ever.

Rumor has it the system maxes out when the on-hold wait gets longer than ten minutes. Which, okay. Let's think about this. First of all, this is a phone system for every unemployed person in the state of California. A ten-minute hold line is something you have for a popular dentist in a small town, not the social safety net for the most populous state in the union. Second, I'm a big girl. I have a phone with a speaker function. I can be on hold for more than ten minutes if it means I don't have to spend a week of my life calling this phone number. Give me twenty minutes! Half an hour! I can be on the phone all afternoon if it means you'll start sending me the benefits I applied for.

What will I do, you ask, while I wait my turn? Well, I'll search job websites. Futz with my cover letter. Sing along with your hold music. Memorize that message about Congress extending benefits. Make scrambled eggs. Watch "30 Rock" reruns. Catch up on The New Yorker. Clean my bathroom. Clean my kitchen. Clean my living room. Make sure my professional website works. See if anybody's visited my professional website. Make my bed. Check Facebook. Decide what to make for dinner. Make a grocery list. Knit. Write a thank-you note. Write a note of ungratefulness. What does it matter what I do? At the end of it, I will have spoken to someone. The social safety net will have triumphed!

Some day, EDD, I hope we can do these things together.

Goodbye.

Click.

Reality Day

I would like to propose a new holiday. I like to call it Reality Day. Or the Day of Reality. Or, ooh, the Festival of Reality! Whatever we're calling it, Reality Day falls on January 2, unless January 2 falls on a weekend. Weekends go against everything Reality Day stands for.

You may have noticed that today is January 2.

Happy Reality Day!

Here's the thing: until shortly before Christmas, I had a job. It was a good one: I sat in a small, messy room, surrounded by people I liked--people I like, actually, present-tense--and wrote scripts for a comedic educational TV show/DVD series. In the middle of December, my company's financial tether ran out. I was laid off, effective immediately; I arrived at the office at 9:15 and was home, with my lunch leftovers and the fake hipster glasses I'd brought in for a sketch, by eleven.

I decided to embrace the time off. Nobody's hiring the week before Christmas, let alone the week after, so I declared my Winter Break, college-style, and applied myself conscientiously to the task of relaxing. I hung out with my parents, who are local, and with my brother, whom I don't see that often. I stayed up late with friends, playing games and drinking wine and talking, and slept in accordingly, unless I had brunch plans. I celebrated Christmas. I went to my family's cabin and read The Voyage of the Dawn Treader in front of the fire. I celebrated New Year's Day with friends and fried chicken and a mini-road trip toward dinner, watching the sun set behind the hills as I drove down Highway 101.

That was yesterday. Yesterday was Winter Break. Today is Reality Day. On Reality Day, we wake up to emails about job prospects and unemployment insurance. We brush our teeth before eleven a.m., in accordance with tradition. We ritually update our resumes and polish up our websites. We call the unemployment people, with the eager expectation of being on hold. We eat the celebratory meal of salad. We get stuff done, because that is the nature of this Reality Day holiday, and we are nothing if not enthusiastic about the holidays. ANY holidays.

It also bears mentioning that I'm days--hours, maybe!--from closing on my very first home. This is the exciting end to a long process; my offer was accepted in August, and now it's January, and if you want to talk about wallpaper or window coverings or my vision for the living room,  I can oblige you allllll daaaaay lonnnng. I'm already planning the housewarming party and daydreaming about sunny afternoons reading on the back patio. All of these happy new-home things are coming...AFTER I've scaled the mountain of paperwork, packing, cleaning, move-scheduling, electrician-calling (what kind of person, I ask you, installs a thermostat on the side of the heater?), address-changing, landlord-wrangling work. This work is not, of course, a surprise. We have hurried up and then waited, and hurried up and waited, and hurried up and waited. (Mortgage lenders also take Winter Break.) And when does it all begin? Reality Day! Hurrah! Here's some newspaper! Let's all pack something fragile!

I realize that I am not the only one celebrating Reality Day today. Millions--billions?--of people around the world are walking into cold, quiet offices today, trying to remember what exactly it is they're doing there. They're removing the holiday music from their iTunes to avoid the confluence of Shuffle and Bing Crosby in June. They're finishing up the last of the See's candy and sweeping up the last (they hope) of the Christmas tree needles from the living room floor. And this is why I think Reality Day should be afforded holiday status: we're gearing up, we're ritualizing, we're collectively adjusting. It's a thing. We're all doing it together anyway; why not build a holiday around it?

Or maybe I just want one last day to celebrate before it's really January.

Happy Reality Day.

Houses

The place where I live is under construction. It's been like this for a good six weeks now: no parking because of the scaffolding in the driveway, strange men peering through my (frosted) bathroom window the second the clock strikes 8:01 a.m., water off water on water off water on, bang bang ping whack whack whack ka-THUNK. This weekend, all of my windows were plasticked over and taped--they're painting the outside of the building, which I think/hope is the last stage of all this--so that it felt like a space capsule. No air, no view, except the sunset through the plastic (see above). It's all necessary, I think; the building is pre-war, and now it has a new roof, new windows, new plumbing, new landscaping, a few freshly renovated units, possibly a new skylight in the foyer (was it always there, and I never noticed?), fewer dead or dying trees hanging around, and a new coat of paint. Good job, building! Now, I would like my parking spot back. 

The good/ironic news is that, with any luck, I won't be living there much longer--I'm trying to grab the very tail end of this low housing market and buy a place. I've already gotten and given up one house, a sweet brick cottage that I loved until the home inspector told me that, among other things, it was going to fall down in an earthquake. Today, my stomach leaps every time I get an email: I'm waiting to hear about an offer I made on another place, a lovely flat--that's what I'm going to call it, my "flat"--just four blocks from where I live now. It's probably unwise of me to say so much so early, but I'll just tell you that it's big and sunny, in a great neighborhood, with a beautiful shared yard. Fingers crossed.

A Trip to the Playground

This is a draft I wrote here last fall and never finished: 

I went back to LA this weekend.

(I feel like I forgot to tell you all so much about LA. I moved there just about a year ago, and moved back to the Bay Area nine months later. It was not at all what I expected--so much better, mostly--


The most surprising thing about LA was, after nine months, how much I liked it there--I fully believe that moving north to my family, my friends, my cat, and a pitch-perfect writing job (with income!) was the obvious right choice, but I also think LA will always mean a little bit of fun and magic to me.


I've long thought that my ability to prioritize the fun of LA over the soul-sucking drudgery of LA was directly related to my loosey-goosey relationship with supporting myself through the industry. I was poor there, interning part-time for a production company and teaching SAT prep courses to pay the bills, but I had it pretty good. I worked on a major lot; my production company bosses were real, working producers and treated me like a person; I didn't become an overnight success, but I wasn't hating life in hopes of landing my dream job, either.  It wasn't sustainable--in fact, my job in San Francisco surfaced just as the "human happiness vs. professional sacrifice" conversation was coming to a head--but I was able to live there and work there without succumbing to my very worst fear: sacrificing my professional youth for a professional future that wouldn't happen.


Now, LA is like the Land of Zero Responsibility: I go there and I have friends, and memories, and places I love--but I have no obligation.


It was strange and exciting going back. I have the hardest time believing I was there for so long--I have far too many memories

Reading this now, even unfinished and with a nonsensical final phrase, I love it. It's all the things I always want to say about LA. It's the truth about a short, weird period in my life, and I'm glad I was able to get it down somewhere.

I visited LA again a couple of weekends ago and felt the same way about it. A lot of people have terrible, soul-deadening experiences there, and maybe it would have gotten to me eventually, but as it is, the LA of my memory is mostly a land of the golden hour, of fire pits on the beach, of sangria in mason jars, of late-night pie (or French toast sandwiches with chocolate, peanut butter, and bananas) with friends, of sleeping late and floating in the pool with a book. Especially now that my responsibilities lie elsewhere, LA is a playground. It's nice to have a playground, especially one where the other kids are nice and we sometimes watch Downton Abbey together in our jammies.

Again, I'm not sorry I left. My job here is about a thousand percent better--weirder and more fun--than ninety-nine percent of the jobs I could have gotten in Hollywood. That's what we call a lot percent better. Here, I have people. I have a cat. I have a church that loves me. I have an apartment of my very own, which I will someday decorate like an adult. Here is great. Here is now. Here is within a half-day's drive of the playground, which is also nice.

Let's do lunch, LA. I'll have my people call your people.

Happy New Year

One of the best things about living in California is that, on the second of January, the following things can happen: t-shirt weather; a hike to the ocean, with waterfalls; snacks with friends on the cliffs above the beach; whale sightings at sunset.

Happy new year, everybody.

12 of 12: September

12 of 12! Welcome. Credit and thanks to Chad Darnell for a) inventing and b) hosting! Onward.

7:11 - So so SO much more awake than I would like to be.

8:10 - Sherlock surveys the scene and keeps the stuffed mice under control. It's good to have him around. (For safety reasons, you know.)

 1:05 - Baby shower leftovers: fancy mac-and-cheese and chicken-apple pigs in blankets. Lunch of champions, obviously.

 1:06 - There are a lot of weird off-brand chihuahuas in the world, but Coco here is not one of them. She's awesome and adorable, even when she's trying to charm me out of my pigs in blankets.

 1:35 - Scenic 3rd St., Dogpatch, lunchtime.

 6:20 - Driving into the sun, headed to the Mission...

 6:23 - ...where I drive UP Dolores St....

 6:24 - ...and back DOWN Dolores St.

 6:25 - The actual mission. It's super pretty.

 9:45 - Home from (sadly unphotographed) dinner, and deciding I need to refresh my Neko Case collection. As one does.

 10:02 - Sherlock helps.

 10:20 - So, you know how everybody says this show is great? They are not lying. IT IS GREAT.  You should watch it.

Happy September, everybody.

12 of 12: July

12 of 12! July. Chad Darnell. Yup.

6:51 - Up.

7:43 - Everybody loves a girl with her own tire gauge and needlenose pliers...right?

9:03 - Welcome to San Francisco! Happy July! Here are your mittens.

10:40 - The Standard Deviants production office: where the magic happens.

11:17 - Morning Becomes Eclectic on KCRW, one of a number of things I brought back with me from LA.

12:30 - Picking up lunch at kitchenette. Yup...that's a garage. Where I got my lunch.

12:34 - That's "no relish," as in green olives, because they are the fru-its of the de-vil, as are all brined vegetables.

12:42 - Grilled eggplant and heirloom tomato sandwich with feta on green-onion slab bread, with a side of Vietnamese-style caramel corn (caramel, peanuts, fish sauce, chiles, lime). Not cheap, but not bad.

6:23 - Traffic meltdown in the East Bay. Quick! Shorter and red, or longer and yellowish?

6:37 - Aaaand longer and yellowish wins it.

7:30 - At least dinner's waiting for me when I get home. ...I am Don Draper.

8:40 - A walk in the wind, minus headphones, because one can really only listen to so much NPR before things get a little crazy. Obviously.

12 of 12: June

12 of 12! Welcome! Kudos to Chad Darnell, originator and keeper of the flame.

8:31 - Up, and not too early. As it should be.

9:00 - Cereal stew: Special K with Red Berries + Kashi GoLean Crunch chaser.

9:16 - The way things should be.

10:40 - I moved last Saturday and started a new job on Monday, so this is pretty much how things are right now. Stuff'll get put away...someday?

11:00 - Basket of cat.

12:24 - The Old Navy dressing room, where I try on half the store and buy exactly nothing that I can wear to work.

1:20 - This is probably only funny if you know my dad and his twin passions for Rubio's and building stuff.

1:37 - Al Zampa Bridge, southbound. (It only goes southbound.)

2:50 -Visiting for a friends-and-family screening of Cars 2, thanks to my pal (and Pixar rendering guru) Susan.

5:07 - Eeee! A picture with the Pixar lamp and ball is like Disneyland for grownups.

5:48 - Continuing my quest to assemble a proper work wardrobe, with mixed results. (I didn't buy the dress; I did buy fancy new jeans.)

9:40 - Strawberry rhubarb pie from Ikeda's, which would have been worth the trip to Reno even without, like, graduations and family events and details like that.