Rent abatement

We're in negotiation for rent abatement. Here's the letter we're submitting to the management. We think we're being very reasonable.

We're liking this place

We're pretty interested in this house! We're going to keep the identifying details offline, because who knows, the sellers might be looking. But we will say that it's walking distance from Greenlake, on the north side.

Here's the front.


And here's a video of the interior. There's one more bedroom downstairs that Dale forgot to go into.

Trash

The apartment trash bin (trash room?), and the recycling. All of Seattle has this problem.

Sammamish holidays

Well! We made it! It's been a very wet and snowy Christmas - everywhere, I guess, but here it's truly unusual. Thank goodness we already live here, because had we tried to travel cross-country to get here, this surely would have been the year we got stuck. As it was, we drove 30 minutes to and from Kari and Danny's house without incident. They got at least 12 inches of snow in the past week and a half. Seattle got somewhat less, and now it's finally turning to rain; only the side streets and parking lots are slushy. We're all hoping for a slow melt, to minimize the flooding. We have water dripping steadily into our apartment through the unfinished ceiling, from the snow melting on the walkway above... in the scheme of things, not the worst, but still.

Kari loves Christmas and it's always very festive over there, with Christmas eve activities including a family feast, writing letters to Santa, and setting out cookies for him and oatmeal and apples for the reindeer. After the kids go to bed there is a flurry of last-minute wrapping, creating artsy gifts (this year was crowns), and setting up the stockings, which go into these gigantic boxes that the kids play in for the rest of the year. I didn't grow up with a full-fledged kid-oriented Christmas, and I am not really up to speed on all the specifics... the details of the Santa mythology, which kinds of gifts are opened when, I get a little overwhelmed. But we swing with it.

Here are the kids discovering their gigantic boxes.



The opening of the presents is your basic mayhem. One of the traditions is to use the leftover ribbons to decorate the dog.



The resulting toys are of course how the kids spend the rest of the day (that, and gorging on cookies). Here's Jordan with a Lego forklift of Sam's. That's Harry in the background with the crown.



At that point he had been in those pajamas for about five days running -- all those snow days, he just never really got dressed. I did finally got them into the laundry today. That meant peeling off the firefighter badge from the front of them, but he said he was ready to let that go.

Jordan's special gift was this lovely knight, shown here attacking the decorated dog.



All the glamour of the morning, though, was in these swords. They're soft, but glittery and bejeweled, and they look a lot like light sabers, and ... there were only two of them, one for Harry and one for Sam. Ah, Christmas. Sam lent his to Jordan for much of the day.



It brought up a lot of Christmas issues for me, because the swords were from Santa, and Jordan asked very quietly and sadly why Santa didn't bring one for him. I was totally out of my depth... what could I say that would continue to respect the household Christmas traditions? But we managed it somehow. And now that we are out of those swords' seductive glow, it doesn't seem to be a problem. Jordan told me later how he had reconciled himself to the situation. He said he thought of something they say at his school, "like when Will was sharing his Star Wars toys? We said, 'You get what you get and you don't have a fit.' This was like that." I've heard that phrase before and I'm not crazy about it - it seems a little rude. But it worked for Jordan. Maybe it helped him recognize that his trouble with the swords was not unique - that there a lot of situations in which you don't get everything you want, and life goes on.

Hanukkah gets its due at Kari and Danny's house as well. Every night there were five menorahs lit before dinner.



And after dinner, the most high-energy games of dreidel I've ever experienced. Here are the kids chanting "Nun! Nun! Nun!" in an effort to prevent whoever it was from winning.



And last but not least, the highlight of Aaron's holiday was Lenny, the gecko. You probably can't see Lenny in this picture but hopefully you can sense Aaron's fascination. He could not get enough.

Shoe mystery explained

My massage therapist informed me that larger shoe size is a common effect of the kind of deep tissue massage I’ve been having. She says it’s just that your feet are allowed to move more freely, like undoing footbinding. Bodywork on the legs and hips affects the feet also. Apparently at the end of her own first ten sessions, her feet had gotten a size and a half larger. She apologized for the need to get new shoes, and promised that she is not in business with shoe companies.

So maybe I’m not getting old yet after all. Heck, I’m not even thirty-eight.

Shoe mystery

Two days ago I realized why my toes hurt:  my shoes are too small.  All of them.  By a lot -- my toes are actually kind of bruised from being jammed in there too tightly.  How did I fail to notice this?  Are my toes the proverbial frog in the boiling water?  It can't have happened overnight.

And why did it happen?  I have been the same shoe size for years - decades, I think.  I wonder if it is a result of the deep-tissue massage I've been getting; she does work on my feet (as well as everything else), and maybe I am standing differently.  I like this theory better than the other one I can think of, which is that it's part of getting older.  Ugh to that.  Maybe aliens switched all my shoes with Martian equivalents.  Maybe the gravity is greater in Seattle and has caused my feet to spread.  Maybe my hands are bigger too and I haven't noticed because I don't wear tight gloves.

It's phenomenally inconvenient.  Every shoe I own hurts my feet.  Except, conveniently, my Sorel snow boots, which I can actually wear with good reason at the moment.  They are supposed to have room for thick winter socks and now don't, but I'll take what I can get.

Ambivalence

I can't figure out whether to be righteously crabby about all the inconveniences we're suffering at the moment, or jubilantly grateful for the stuff that's going well.  The snow that started on Saturday afternoon kept sifting steadily down for about 24 hours, so that now we have something like 6-8 inches.  Even major roads are packed snow and ice, and plenty of side streets are just not passable.  No neighborhood streets will be plowed anytime soon, if ever... Seattle just doesn't have the equipment for that.  So we can't really drive anywhere - we're stuck with whatever's within walking distance.  On the other hand, everything we need is within a few blocks:  grocery store, pharmacy, nice restaurants and coffee shops, parks with hills for sledding, even a friend's house.  We can even walk to work.  So can I really complain?  Our front door is even draftier than before, since the firefighters kicked it in - Dale stuffed the cracks with actual rags, believe it or not, as if we were genuine paupers living in a shack.  But at least the door is functional, and yesterday he replaced the rags with weatherstripping.  It's still ugly, but it's less ugly now, and it works.  The power is on, the water is on in spite of a pipe freezing, the apartment is warm, the gas fireplace is cozy, the fridge is stocked.  The snow creates some limitations to say the least, but it's actually quite pleasant outside in its way, not windy and not even all that cold.  I enjoyed my walk to work.  (Dale generously made it my turn today.)  We're not among the thousands of people stranded at airports all over the country -- and you know we would have been, had we been attempting to travel cross-country this year.  Instead, our only travel plan is to get over to Sammamish on the 24th.  They're saying it'll be raining by then, so I-5 and I-90 should be all right, and we live three blocks from I-5.  Dale and I are feeling more than a little cooped up, being in the kid zone in a small space for a long time - school was closed all but one day last week, and it's hard to imagine it opening this week.  But the kids don't actually seem to mind, and we're all getting along amazingly well, considering.  And it is the holidays, anyway.  We had a super cute first night of Hanukkah last night, with latkes and presents and singing and an actual game of dreidel after Aaron went to bed.  

Teeny Latkes

3 russet potatoes

1 medium onion

3 eggs

3/4 c flour

1/4 c matzo meal or cracker crumbs

1 Tbsp salt

lots of fresh pepper

Grate the potatoes and onions, preferably with the grating blade of a food processor.  Turn the mixture into a colander (poof! you're a colander!) and squeeze out all the liquid you can squeeze.  Let sit for two minutes and squeeze again.  Mix in eggs, then dry ingredients.  Heat up a nonstick griddle with a few tablespoons of oil until the oil is shimmering.  Drop batter onto griddle in heaping teaspoonfuls, or bite-size forkfuls.  Turn when you see that the edges are golden brown.

Serve with hot applesauce, sour cream (or greek yogurt), and salad or soup.  Makes enough for dinner for two adults and two kids who had no afternoon snack after a long walk in the snow (whoops).

This just in

10:30pm Dale and I were watching a pretty good movie and there was a sudden noise of rushing water. Nothing in our apartment, thank goodness, but probably a frozen pipe burst somewhere nearby, sure to be a drag for someone. And then the shrieking alarm started to go off.

It continued, and was intolerable, and we went into what-do-we-bring mode. 1. Children. 2. Warm things. 3. Laptops. 4. Wallets, keys. Other than that my mind was a blank. We threw laptops and warm things into bags, woke and dressed the children, and carried them down to the car, because it was 25 degrees outside and we didn't know how long we'd be stuck out there. We considered driving to Bekah and Bob's house, but the roads are very bad. The fire trucks were blocking the driveway, anyhow, so we just stayed there in the car. Randomly, one of the things I happened to stuff into my pocket was the camera, so here's the scene in front of the apartment.


The kids were great. Aaron never missed a beat. Jordan was shaky at first, but soon accepted our assurances. Here they are just hanging out in the car.


We hoped it was just the broken pipe setting off an alarm perhaps because there's a sprinkler system, but of course you never know. And they have to check everything. So we waited a while and chatted with Jordan about all the cool firefighter stuff. He is of course very into all that so it's a great topic of conversation.

After not too long, they let us back in and turned off the very loud alarm, and we got back upstairs and put the kids back to bed. The firefighters had kicked the door in, and in fact had blown the frame right out of the doorway.


In case you want to know, that's apparently quite easy to do. "One swift kick," they said. They came in shortly after we had the kids down and had some work to do in our front bathroom; apparently the busted pipe is right behind our front shower wall. More construction ahead, it seems. (We are the lucky ones, though... the guy below us got all our water in his apartment.) Jordan got up to check out the five firefighters in the bathroom and was thrilled to accept gold badge stickers from them; then he said he wanted to go back to sleep. that's my boy!

The firefighters nailed our door frame sorta back together before they left. They were super nice, as firefighters always seem to be.

Representational art

A couple of days ago, on one of the four (!) days this week that school was closed, Jordan and I spent a couple of hours on holiday gifts/greetings for his friends back in Maryland. He did a lot of writing (mostly the letter "J"), selected wrapping paper, and dictated charming letters to various people. My favorite was to Fanta: we sent her photos, and he drew her this terrific picture on a card. "This guy doesn't have any body, just a head and arms and legs," Jordan observed with apparent pleasure. And dramatic eyelashes. The nose started out being a third eye, but Jordan decided that was too Cubist.


The inside said something like, "Dear Fanta, Louise, Dan, Kadiya, Josie, and Luke: Merry Christmas and Happy Hanukkah. I love you. Seattle is great, especially the Space Needle. Our apartment has a good view. At school I learned to write the letter J. I love to see my baby brother at recess. Goodbye. Love, Jordan." He signs with a giant, blocky letter J, sort of like a pirate might make his personal mark.

Cabin fever

No pictures of snow tonight: we're indoors. For entertainment Dale constructed a very fine cave out of the couch, blankets, and the beloved orange futon.

Inside, Dale and Jordan played spaceship while Aaron methodically chewed on a flashlight. It was a good time.

Later we played Freeze Dance. No pictures of that, which is a pity, but we were having way to much fun to bother with the camera.

Bracing ourselves

Cold out there.  We're hunkering down for the storm that is predicted to arrive later this afternoon or evening, supposedly with 3-8 inches of snow in the city.  For Seattle, that's really disabling.  The packed snow and ice from a couple days ago is still on the roads; it's not too bad (we did drive to the grocery store today) but there are scary places.  Don't even look at the picture of the charter bus that slid down a steep icy part of Capitol Hill, busted a guardrail, and almost went onto I-5.  Amazingly, no one was hurt.  They all climbed out the back windows.

The University Farmer's Market was up and running as usual this morning.  The meat vendors didn't need coolers... it was 25 degrees outside.  Jordan thought that was pretty funny.  "It's like we're already inside a refrigerator," he said.  Freezer, actually, but I got his point.  

The good news for the day is that the furlough from Maryland for my salary bracket is only two days.  We can live with that.

Offer on Haddon

There's an offer on the Haddon house!  It's low, of course, but what else would it be in this market, and it's a reasonable starting point for negotiation.  The buyer is sincere and things are moving forward.  The buyer proposes a Jan. 20 closing, which is fine for us.  Inauguration day... so we won't rent it out for $2000 a night after all, I suppose.  That's okay - given the choice, I'd rather sell it.

We've started househunting.  This is the absolute bottom of the real-estate year (between Thanksgiving and New Year's), but we may as well look, and the bright side is that if we did find something we liked we'd be in a heck of a bargaining position.  We screened about six properties (first online, then onsite from the outside) and of these there are two that remain interesting:  8028 Burke Ave N (north of Greenlake) and 2822 NE 68th St (three blocks from our old house).  Nothing yet in Wallingford.  There might be new properties in January.  The search is on!

Jordan doesn't like househunting.  He's bewildered at the idea of moving again.  When we took him out with us to look at some places, he wanted to just stay in the car.  Next time we'll maybe just spare him until things are more clear.

Snow

Surprise! It snowed last night, and the resulting inch of powdery stuff stuck all day. I saw it starting and experienced a wave of dread, which evaporated when I remembered where we are! In Maryland, this would be the beginning of who knows how much snow (it was different every year), with rather scary storms, school closures, difficult travel, and frequent power outages. Our record was four and a half consecutive days of no electricity. That was truly rough. In Seattle, as in the rest of the developed world that I have experienced, a long power outage is maybe four hours. No worries.

Today the kids were eager to get out and throw snowballs, so we went over to Greenlake and took a bunch of cute winter photos. Jordan actually agreed to wear his coat. Aaron, once he had mastered his club-foot boots, was dying to jump in the lake and see the ducks up close.




We had fun until we got cold, and then we zipped back home for some holiday cooking. It's a food-gift year and I'm making orangettes, peppermint candy, salted caramels, peppermint bark (with the kids), and if I still have any energy left after that, peppermint patties and candied ginger. I've never made any of these things before, which is half the fun. The orangettes are done - came out great.

Shoe-dini

We went over to Sue's house yesterday evening for the traditional wintertime visit to the Bellevue Botanical Garden, which has an elaborate display of lights. It is garden-themed rather than Christmasy (which is fine with me): flowerbeds, wisteria arbors, oversized bugs, birds in the trees, that kind of thing. It's very well done. It's also very dark, very crowded, very hard to keep track of your children (not to mention your fellow grownups - but they have cell phones), and very, very cold. Painfully cold. We had properly bundled the kids, but not ourselves, and by the end of it my toes were stinging. Aaron's toes would have been cold too had someone in the crowd not said "Did anyone lose a shoe?" Dale immediately knew it was Aaron's. He's become quite the little shoe-dini.

Aaron was a huge fan of the whole experience. He ran all over the place touching everything and talking up a storm and pulling off his mittens and hat every time we put them on. Jordan enjoyed himself too, but was eager to get warm again. His favorite part of the evening was dinner at Grandma's, featuring ham and crock-pot mac and cheese. She was so happy to be hosting her grandchildren, and to be able to just have us over for dinner... her smile was the warmest part of the evening.

Dooraway

Today we had no door. In fact, we had no doorway, really -- just a big hole in the front of the house. Phil had to spend the day locked in the laundry room.

I was a little worried we'd be living with a tarp over the hole for the weekend, but fortunately, by the end of the day, we had a door again, complete with a non-rotten doorway. There's still the same drywall missing in the interior, and part of the floor is gone too. Now, though, I'm in the mood to appreciate the solidity of what's there.

In case you're wondering, we plan to seek rent abatement. Comments welcome on what all this should be worth.

Sweets

Last weekend, I was lucky enough to attend a cookie-making and -decorating party at our friends Matt and Sharon's house. I got to take home my favorite creations. Then we ate 'em.


I also wanted to share this picture from a couple weeks ago, in which Aaron and I share cake at a birthday party.


The birthday was Danny's sister Jill's, her 50th. There were a lot of people there I didn't know, so I wore a nametag identifying me as Jill's brother's wife's brother's wife. Wasn't that helpful? She had a picture of herself at age five on her invitation (and also on the cake), leading some of us to declare that "50 is the new 5."

Hex nut hanukkiah

Jordan made this fantastic item at school today. The base is a CD. Love that!

Construction update

The construction is ongoing. The good news is that our walkway is no longer our personal rain zone. We used to always have water dripping on us when we stood at the front door, through the walkway above, even when it wasn't raining (below left), and our apartment always had a mud puddle in front of it, even when everyone else's walkway was dry. Now the ceiling is gone (below right). So it doesn't drip!

Perhaps more importantly, the rotten beams have been replaced with sound ones, the better to provide a roof over our heads.

Our interior is unchanged from ten days ago, which is a bummer. The manager says they are expecting a drywall estimate in a couple of weeks. I think that means January at the earliest.

Furlough

Furlough means vacation, right?  From the army, or from prison.  Or from ... your job.  Ahem.  The University of Maryland, in response to 20% budget cuts or some such awfulness, will be mandating furlough days for most employees.  Meaning, don't bother coming to work because we won't be paying you.  They might close campus.  (But classes will not be cancelled.  ?!?)  This even applies to those of us paid by grants.  This seems especially silly, because the money will revert to the grant in my case, meaning I will just work on the other days.

Thank goodness I have consulting work.  I submitted my first invoice today.

Nutcracker bliss

Jordan and I went to see the Nutcracker last night with Bekah, Suzie, and Ava, and wow, what a great time.  It was risky:  the 5:30pm performance meant dinner at 4pm and a purse full of snacks, and a late bedtime after that since it's a two-hour show.  It was Jordan's first full-length performance, and first big theater experience... who knew how it would go?  But he was enthralled.  He wore whiskers and fierce eyebrows and a pink nose like the Mouse King (courtesy of Mommy's makeup drawer - Ava and Suzie were elegant ballerinas with pretty dresses and their hair up tight).  For the whole show, he sat on his booster cushion watching every inch of the action and co-conducting the orchestra.  He was thrilled when I told him that some of the dancers were young kids:  he looked up at me with his face shining and said "The same age as me, Mama?"  He whispered excitedly with Ava about who they liked the best.  Every new scene brought a new persona for him to fantasize about - the Mouse King, the Nutcracker Prince, the Whirling Dervishes, even the Peacock.  The production is really amazing - the visuals are all by Maurice Sendak, and the stage effects have his cartoon-drawing sensibility rather than trying to look "real."  I loved every minute of it.  It was amazing to be there half as a kid myself and half as an adult, remembering when I had seen the Nutcracker with Mom in San Francisco, now realizing how beautifully the dance and music convey the story even to a four-year-old.  I think this is the beginning of a great new era of parenthood:  getting to do wonderful kid stuff, and appreciate it fully because you are with your kids.  

School news

Jordan's weekly newsletter is below. Although there don't happen to be any pictures of him here, his teachers have told us that he is VERY excited about the beginnings of spelling: when they put up the C-words "clown," "crab," and "chocolate" on the board and asked which one doesn't match, Jordan was practically jumping up and down with his hand in the air to say it was "chocolate" because it has a "ch" sound at the beginning instead of a "k" sound. He put me through the same exercise at dinnertime a day later. fun stuff!

Construction update

Construction proves that you can get used to anything. The walkways are still in the temporary state we documented over a month ago - safe, but ugly. The water running down the face of the building has damaged the exterior walls, so the ceilings and the siding have been partially removed. Now, water drips through the walkway above us, meaning it rains on our head when we stand at our front door, and there is always a muddy puddle for us to track in. The workers have kindly put up plastic sheeting to divert some of the water, which gives the whole place a sort of a magic-tent-meets-shantytown effect.

As of this morning, there is construction inside our apartment as well, since the water damage involves the interior walls. I guess it was a real mess while they were working - I wasn't here. They left the place in safe condition. There's no way to be perfect, though, and we found a loose staple in the rug, which was worrisome. Here's Aaron looking for more.

Lest you think we are miserable, we had a great Thanksgiving weekend, with three separate feasts - and everyone we visited had a piano. Suzie instructed Aaron in using his fingers, not his palms.

A big hand for the turkeys

Can I get away with one last Thanksgiving post? Jordan and Aaron both made handprint cards at school. Jordan wants everyone to notice that his turkey has a black eye and a fat belly and long feet, and he informs me that the red squiggle is the turkey's long, long tongue.