I'm in the Phone Booth It's the One Across the Hall. If You Don't Answer I'll Just Ring it Off the Wall.

Well, kids. I'm going to write this big rant post where I cry fat, white people tears about my obnoxious first world problem. Yup, that's right. After three years I decided to upgrade to an iPhone 8. Worst mistake I ever made. I stupidly bought it at Best Buy, and they don't seem to train the people who work there very well. So, the guy who sold me the phone told me he activated it at the store, since I paid him $36 to do just that. Turns out, he didn't activate it, so I had to go to Verizon and pay them another $20 to activate it. I will give Best Buy props for responding to my bad review by refunding money for the other things I bought when I picked up my iPhone.

Of course, the fun didn't stop there. My phone never worked quite right. It kept giving me a black screen, and then it would work just fine. I have no idea why it would sometimes work and sometimes not. It finally got to the point where it was a black screen for several days straight. I stupidly also bought the Applecare insurance, which means you have to go to a specific Apple store, which we don't have in Iowa city, which meant I had to drive to Cedar Rapids after work.

There they were able to restore my iPhone and it worked without the screen turning black for at least a couple of days. Then we went back to the same problem until the screen blacked out the Sunday evening of Thanksgiving weekend and it hasn't worked since.

So, since we're going to Chicago tomorrow, we're going to take it to an Apple store there where they will hopefully give me a new iPhone. I was warned that it might cost me about $100 for a replacement phone. So far my running total is $599 for the iPhone, $136 for the insurance, and possibly another $99 for a replacement iPhone for a two month old phone that has never really worked. My desktop computer cost less than that and it's worked for over nine years. We did get my old iPhone6 back up and running until we can try to get my new phone replaced (hopefully).

This whole mess has made me yearn for the days where I just had a watch, an alarm clock, a Walkman for music and a landline phone instead of a smart phone.

Sorry about the rant. I know that the deal with first world problems is that they're like listening to someone talk about their dreams, no one really cares except the person experiencing them. Sigh.

It's So Free, This Kind of Feeling. It's Like Life, It's so Appealing.

I normally don't do any of those "I'm grateful" posts around Thanksgiving, because I'm grateful for what I have everyday and I try hard to tell the people in my life how much I love them and how thankful I am for them as often as possible.

BUT! I feel like I should put this post in here because even though I tell him all the time, (no matter how annoying he may find that), I am so damn grateful to have John in my life.

My post yesterday about our house, would not have been the same had it not been for John. He bought into the mortgage so I didn't have to mow lawns and donate plasma on top of my full time job in order to be able to afford my mortgage.

He is also great at fixing things. I can fix things around the house if it's easy and things work exactly like the directions say they should, but I will never have an engineering degree. My brain doesn't work like that. I don't have patience for problem solving. If it doesn't work the way they say it's supposed to, I get frustrated and kick it and swear at it. Surprisingly (or not) that almost never helps the situation.

When we needed a new toilet, John researched it all (he is a huge lover of consumer reports), ordered the stuff, went to Marion and picked it up and THEN watched a Youtube video and installed the toilet. If I tried to do that, I'm sure our bathroom would be covered in waste from the toilet and somehow, water would shoot up to the ceiling from a pipe or something.

This is the first relationship I've been in when the other person worked as hard or harder than I did emotionally, communication wise and actual work/cleaning around the house wise. I fake complain about how lazy that is making me, but duh. It's kind of a nice problem to have.

I am so grateful that he likes to play outside as much as I do, and that when I'm not feeling all that great or have a migraine and am on meds for it and so I can't get my heart rate up like we normally do riding bikes or running, he suggests we go for a mellow hike instead.

And even though he rolls his eyes and scowls about it, he lets me stop and take way too many pictures of him when we're playing outside.

John is smart and fun and kind and generous and charmingly self-deprecating. Most importantly, he puts up with my orange cat, which, as you can see his a HUGE pain in the ass.

So, I hope you get to be around people who you are grateful for this long, holiday, weekend...And that you express your love of them every day of the year not just on Thanksgiving.

And Wouldn't It Be Nice to Live Together

Today is the 9th anniversary of me closing on my house. I had rented apartments my entire adult life until I bought this house when I was 44 years old. Even though we will be working on it forever, there really is just THAT much stuff to try and fix.

It's just about 1,200 square feet without a basement or air conditioning. It was built in 1950 and it's layout is as simple as can be, which is exactly what I want. I never wanted a house brand new house that looked like every other house and had way too much space to clean.

The above photo was what the dormer room looked like when I first bought the house.

And this photo is the after. I pulled out the brown carpet and painted the old wide wood plank floor that had some lumber yard name stamped on every board a light gray. The next time I repaint the floor, I think I'll use a medium gray, to give it a little more color and definition.

I like to describe our interior design "style" as weirdo, poor person chic (with cats).

We were supposed to get a new roof in early October and the roofers were going to put some sky tubes (like sky lights, but much less expensive) in during that process. It still hasn't happened, and we're hoping they are able to work us in sometime in the next couple of weeks, but at this point, what's another couple of months, right?...Anyway, I'm excited that the sky tubes will give us more natural light and I can use the dormer/reading/spare bedroom as a studio as well.

The above photo was what our living room looked like before we moved in. What you can't see is how grimy the walls looked in person.

One of the first things I did when we moved in was paint the living room. There isn't much natural light and I wanted our living room to feel warm and cozy - hence the camel colored paint I slapped up on the walls.

You can't tell from the above photo, but the old counters in our kitchen had the quaintest cigarette burns about the same color as the cabinets before we replaced them.

Last winter, we finally scraped the popcorn ceiling, replaced the ceiling fans and painted the walls. This winter we hope to finish this phase of the kitchen redo. We hope to retile the floors and replace the appliances and call it good for a little while.

Like I said a couple of weeks ago, we also replaced our toilet to one of those low-flo dealies. Of course, our house being our house, no house project is ever easy.

We found that someone had cut out a piece of the wainscoting to make room for the older, larger tank. So, we're just going to let this sit here glaring at us until we finish the kitchen and can start on the bathroom. After nine years in this wonderful little cottage, I've resigned myself to the fact that it's always something...

Here's to another nine years of "interesting" home improvements and loving our flawed little cottage.

Welcome to My Nightmare! I Think You're Gonna Like It!

Well, it's time to look at all the very dark places I traveled to through book reading during the month of October. It was a frighteningly fun month of book trips. I read seven creepy books altogether.

1.) The first place I went was to Scotland in 1869. "His Bloody Project" by Graeme Macrae Burnet talked about how badly oppressed the Crofters were back then and the story of a young man who killed members of a family. It was very well done and let you see the crime through the convicted killer's eyes and then took you outside of his confession to see that there may have been another, less sympathetic story.

2.) "The Woman in Black" by Susan Hill. It takes place on the Northeast coast of England and it is a straight up CRRREEEEPPPY ghost story. It was best not to read this too close to bedtime, since it made falling asleep a little treacherous.

3.) The third scary book trip I took was to "Lovecraft Country" by Matt Ruff. It took place right after the Korean War in Jim Crow America and deals with the fact that H.P. Lovecraft was a scary racist. In this novel, it takes the form of the Lovecraft's fiction and uses the best parts of it, but the scary predator in this book is racism itself. It is very well done and entertaining and if you like Lovecraft's fiction (or even if you don't), you should definitely read this.

4.) "The Bloody Chamber" by Angela Carter is a collection of short stories, about scary fairy tales with a definite feminist twist. It took me to all kinds of dark places in Europe in a vague past.

5.) I went for some classic scary fiction for my fifth trip. "The Invisible Man" by H. G. Wells. It's a good classic Sci-Fi novel about an experiment gone wrong. I think I'll finally read "War of the Worlds" next year.

6.) "The Hunger" by Alma Katsu was about The Donner Party story with a werewolf/zombie twist. Some people complained about the ending, but I thought it was very engaging and the characters were well written. It was perfect for a Halloween month read.

7.) The last book I read for October was "The Shadow of the Wind" by Carlos Ruiz Za'fon. This was the book that I found on the street outside my house this Summer. It is a gothic type novel that takes place in Spain after the Spanish Civil War. It is a gothic novel that I loved. A friend of mine thought the writing was bad but the story was riveting. I tend to agree, but the story really made up for any other faults the novel may have had.

Now that it's November and my book journeys have been a little less unsettling. You'd think I'd be sleeping better...

You May Find Yourself Living in a Shotgun Shack

So, Things are still crazy in my world. Now we have to buy a new toilet. I've never bought a toilet before. I am learning that there are more to toilets than I thought. Like you have to figure out if you want a dual flush or a soft close lid or if you want a self-cleaning one. It's bizarre to me. Why do they have to make everything so complicated? I just want a flushing toilet that works...And that's a little taller than the one we currently have. I swear if I have to get my knees replaced, it will be from trying to get up from our very short commode every damn day. Anyway, by the next time I write you, we should have a sparkling new toity and I will be the one cleaning it.

We also had the Pella door guy come and give us an estimate for our front door. Our current front door is not insulated and we probably lose way too much money from all the cold air that rushes through there every day in the winter.  Guess what the guy quoted us for a hung door (hee hee) and a storm door. Four THOUSAND dollars. What the hell? Is it made of gold? Guess what we're going to do? Get our door from someone else.

Have a great weekend and may your houses not need as much work as ours does.