I know it’s been a while since I posted.  I’ve been busy, and we’ve taken a bit of a hiatus from house renovations.  But I’ll post more this week because we have made a few improvements and are planning how we’ll redo the kitchen this summer.

On Saturday, our new fridge finally arrived, and it’s absolutely beautiful!  The whole situation was wonderful.  The delivery men showed up, exactly on time, and took our old fridge (a.k.a., the Beast) out to their truck.  It was so big that they had to take off the doors and remove our front door to get it out.  Then they brought in the new fridge (also with the doors off so they wouldn’t scratch it) and deposited it in our kitchen.  They even hooked up the ice maker for us.  Sly and I didn’t have to lift a finger for once.

As for the fridge itself, it is so incredibly nice.  It’s new and shiny, and the stainless steel finish doesn’t leave fingerprints on it, so it always looks clean.  The inside is spacious, and we can configure the shelves and the drawers on the door any way we’d like.  I love that the fridge part is on top because now we can see all of our food without having to bend over and dig around (before, we’d forget what was in the veggie drawers on the bottom, and sometimes food would go bad before we realized it was down there).  Having the freezer on the bottom is cool, too.  It slides out, with a big drawer on the bottom, a smaller, pull-out drawer on the top, and an ice maker on the top, with a small pull-out drawer for the ice.  I’m so excited about this new fridge, you have no idea.  No more worrying that the old fridge would catch on fire while we’re out, and no more having the lights dim every time the fridge compressor kicks on (the old one did that).  The new fridge is quiet, energy efficient, and very good-looking.  Now we just have to redo the rest of the kitchen to match.

Delivery guys unloading the new fridge

Delivery guys taking out the old fridge.

Out with the old…

…in with the new

New fridge in the ugly kitchen

How pretty is that?

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LESSONS LEARNED: When buying large appliances, having a deal where the delivery guys take away your old appliance is key.  Again, it’s also nice to have a friend who can get you a discount.  Thanks, friend (you know who you are)!

I apologize for the long delay since my last post.  I’m right in the midst of the usual end-of-semester craziness, so I’ve been a bit swamped lately.

However, this week past week was very exciting.  We got our new carpets upstairs on Thursday, and our new fridge came on Saturday.  This is better than Christmas!

If you’ve been keeping up with my previous posts, then you know that Sly and I picked out carpets and set a date (Thurs., Dec. 4) for our carpet guy, Jim Mongiello, to come and install them.  We decided on a color called “Caravan,” a neutral tan that is dark enough not to show too much dirt but light enough not to make the rooms seem too dark.  It was a middle-of-the-road pile and price, and Sly and I were satisfied with our choice.  For the carpets and installation, the grand total came to $500.

Our new carpet color - "Caravan"

Now, most people just pick out carpets and let the carpet guys do everything else.  However, Sly decided that he would remove our old carpeting so that the rooms would be ready to go when Jimmy got to our house on Dec. 4.  Plus, it’d knock $40 off of the price of our new carpets.  Two nights before our carpet appointment, Sly started pulling up the rug in the upstairs hallway and on the stairs, and we quickly realized that the extra $40 might have been worth it.  After Sly pulled up the old, dirty Berber carpet that had been in the house who knows how long, we discovered a bazillion staples in the floor and a bunch of tacking strips.  So, while it didn’t take Sly long to cut up the old carpet and bundle it into the trash outside, it took us several hours to pull up all the little staples and tacks out of the floor.  Let me tell you, that sucked.  We had to use pliers, and I used a screwdriver to pry some of the staples up so I could grab them with the pliers and pull them out.  The stairs were the worst – staples everywhere!  The tacking strips are also a pain.  We had to rip them up and then use a hammer to pry out the nails that had held them in place.  The next night, Sly pulled the carpet out of the office, but that wasn’t as bad because it wasn’t really tacked down.  So we discovered that whoever installed the old carpets set his staple gun to overkill when he did the stairs and hallway and then either got lazy or ran out of staples by the time he got to the small bedroom.  We also discovered that the floor boards in the hallway were not in as good a shape as the ones in the bedroom that we had refinished, although they were painted the same shade of ugly orangey-brown.  I’m glad we decided to go with carpets instead of trying to refinish the floors in the rest of the upstairs.

Carpet-free stairs

Staples and tacking strips in hallway

See how ugly the old carpet used to be?

Where the hallway meets the new, refinished bedroom floors.

Office without carpets - ugly orange floor!

Uncarpeted stairs - looking up.

Sly and I also put all of the office furniture in the bathroom, which was a sight.  Luckily, the bathroom is big (the only big room in the house!).  And it’s a good thing we didn’t put shelves up in the bathroom yet because then we wouldn’t have been able to fit our bookcases in there.

Bathroom with office furniture in it

Jimmy was supposed to come out on Thursday morning between 9:00 and 10:00 a.m.  Since I don’t have class or anything on Thursdays, I stayed at home to wait for him.  Sly had an unusual work day, though, because he had a conference to go to in Center City, so he didn’t have to leave until late morning.  He ran out to run some errands, and I hung around so that someone would be home when Jimmy got there.  Around 9:45, a white van pulled up in front of our house, and two guys got out, but I was a bit confused because neither one was Jimmy.  They waved at me, though, like it was my house they were heading to, so I hung in the doorway until they let me know what was up.  It turns out Jimmy got stuck on another job, so he sent his brother and father to do our house in his stead.  That was fine by me – as long as someone showed up to the carpet when they were supposed to, I was happy.  So, they set to work.  These guys – Mike and “Dad” – were very friendly guys from Northeast Philly (where I grew up, so I was right at home with them).  They laughed and joked and got busy installing the new padding and carpets.  Sly came home while they were working and hung around until he had to catch his train in to his conference.  I had thought it would take about 1-2 hours for our carpets to be installed, considering that Sly and I had already removed the old carpeting, and our office and hallway aren’t that big.  However, it took almost 4 hours for our carpets to get installed.  Mike and “Dad” didn’t work very fast, and they apparently only had one staple gun, which they kept fighting over.  It was sort of comical, although I was worried that it was taking so long, and Jimmy called to yell at them for not being finished sooner.  Sly and I had planned to move all of the furniture back into the office before he left for his conference so that I could start unpacking the boxes and books for the room that afternoon.  Of course, now he left before we could do that, so I had to wait for him to get home that night to move the furniture in.

All in all, however, it wasn’t really a problem that the guys took a while to install the carpets because they did a beautiful job.  The new rugs really finished the upstairs, and I can now go to the bathoom in the middle of the night without searching for my slippers (I refused to walk barefoot on the old rugs).  It’s amazing how a room can look dramatically different because of something as simple as new carpeting.  Sly and I agree that this was 500 bucks well spent!

New carpets on the stairs, looking down.

Hallway

Looking from hallway into office.

New carpets in the office.

As you can see, the carpets look fantastic!  Sly and I only had two problems.  The first was that Mike and “Dad” took off the door to the office and didn’t put it back on.  That was fine, except Sly and I couldn’t find the pins for the door hinges so we could reattach the door.  Finally, after an exhaustive search and a call to Jimmy, Sly found the pins inside the office window.  The guys must have opened the window to get some ventilation and then put the pins in the sill, and when they shut the window, the pins were hidden.  At any rate, problem solved, and Sly reattached the office door.  The second problem is that we realized that we didn’t sand the bedroom floor far enough into the hallway.  Now there’s an orangey-brown strip of wood in the threshold between the hall carpet and the refinished bedroom floor.  Sly and I will probably have to get a wooden threshold piece to cover that because the other option – sanding that spot and refinishing it – seems untenable.

Oops - bedroom doorway: where old meets new.

After Sly and I solved the case of the missing door hinge pins, we set to work moving our furniture back into the office and unpacking the boxes of books and office supplies that have been shoved into various parts of the house for the last couple of months.  How wonderful it is to have a working home office once again!  Of course, this would have come in handy earlier this semster as I attempted to write a draft chapter for my dissertation, but at least we have a workable office now, so I can edit and revise said chapter with my books and Chicago Manual of Style nearby.  We haven’t unpacked everything yet or put up all of our wall decor, but the office is definitely coming along.

View from office door - notice I painted the closet door.

View from in front of closet

You’ll notice that I painted the closet door, so the new shade of white looks a lot better than the cheap wood color the door was before.  I also painted the trim around the window and painted the radiator, as well as the remaining trim, radiator, and touch-ups in the bathroom.  Finally, I’m finished painting the upstairs!  Well, until we repair the wall in the office where the window is, that is.  After we compound that, we’ll have to paint that wall orange to match the other three.  A homeowner’s work is never done!

As for the fridge, I’ll post another entry about that soon.  For now, enjoy the photos of our lovely new carpets.

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LESSONS LEARNED: Lesson 1) Sometimes it pays to just cough up an extra $40 bucks to have someone else pull up your old carpets and all of the staples and tacking strips that go along with it.  If you want to be cheap like us and choose to remove your old rugs yourself, make sure you’re prepared with box cutters, twine, a flathead screwdriver, and a pair of pliers, as well as plenty of patience.  Lesson 2) Nothing beats professional carpet installation.  There’s no way Sly and I could have installed the rugs ourselves and had them fit our house so nicely, especially on the stairs.  Lesson 3) Something simple – like changing the wall paint color or getting new rugs – can really breathe a lot of life into a space.  Sprucing up your home doesn’t always have to entail major renovations (like what we did in our bathroom).  Lesson 4) I never want to live without a functional office again!  Now that I have one, I can’t believe I worked amid boxes and without my dissertation books close at hand all this time.  Glad that’s over! (For the record, Sly didn’t even have a desk the last few months because his was buried under boxes.  He shared my desk and often my computer, which I know was not fun for him.  I’m sure he’s thrilled to have his own work space back, as well).  Lesson 5) Nothing feels better under bare feet than brand new, clean, fluffy, wall-to-wall carpeting.  Aaaahhhh…..

Now that we’re officially in the swing of the holiday season, I want to post a few of my observations about it.  A few days after Halloween, Christmas decorations and lights suddenly appeared in downtown Narberth.  It looks lovely, of course, but seeing Christmas decorations out such a long time before Thanksgiving put me in a foul mood every time I went downtown.  I was disappointed to find that my new hometown, which I had niavely seen as having the small-town values of community, family, and local pride, was just as prone to pushing the crass commercialism of the modern Christmas season as any other institution.  Seeing Christmas decorations around town screamed out “buy! buy! buy! now! now! now!,” pushing Narberthians (or Narburgers, as Sly likes to say) to rush out and uphold our capitalist economy by competing to buy more and more expensive goods to display their Christmas spirit, regardless of whether or not Christmas was actually months away.  I wondered gloomily if, even in charming small-town Narberth, the true spirit of Christmas was being lost somewhere along the brightly-lit, flashily decorated, highly advertised way.

My suspicions were confirmed yesterday as I perused the New York Times and saw an article about a mob of shoppers who broke through the doors of a Walmart on Long Island just prior to its 5 a.m. opening and who then trampled a Wal-mart employee to death.  What I found particiularly heart-breaking was the fact that this hapless 34-year-old man was a temporary, seasonal worker brought in just to work the holiday season, so his poor family probably has no insurance or the means to seek a proper legal redress for their loss (not that anything can make them feel better – nothing will bring this man back to them).  The whole event was shocking and senseless, and the murderous crowd did not even display any remorse.  As the police attempted to clear the store of shoppers in order to secure the crime scene, many shoppers refused to leave the store until they were allowed to make their purchases.  Since when did holiday shopping literally become a blood sport?

NY Times article on man being trampled by holiday shoppers

How is this callous incident of holiday madness connected to Narberth’s premature decorations, you may wonder?  I believe they are two instances on a continuum of the ever-increasing push for Americans to start shopping for Christmas earlier and earlier each year.  Seeing Christmas decorations the day after Halloween (or earlier in some other places – I’m thinking of some stores and TV commercials) starts stressing people out, making them think of all of the hundreds and hundreds of dollars they will have to spend on Christmas gifts so that their friends and families will think they are generous holiday revelers and not cheapskate Scrooges.  For, after all, homemade gifts from the heart no longer cut it in American culture.  Parents in particular feel the stress of the holiday season, as their children demand more and more high-tech, expensive toys so that they can keep up with their little friends.  Parents give in to the demands so that they don’t have to see spoiled little Johnny or Judy’s face fall on Christmas morning when their #1 Christmas desire isn’t under the tree.

Thus, it becomes a cycle – the child demands a Wii, which is in short supply, so the stressed out parent waits anxiously in line somewhere for hours in an attempt to secure the Wii for their little one, so the stressed out parent is rude and obnoxious to his/her fellow shoppers – who are also stressed out parents who are similarly rude, parents fight over the few remaining Wiis, ugliness ensues.  Multiply this by millions of Americans, and it’s only a manner of time before securing the holiday purchase starts to outweigh everything else, even the true meaning of Christmas – love and family and appreciation for humanity – and we end up with a poor guy, who’s working hard to support his family, getting trampled to death by a mob of shoppers who don’t even care that they’ve killed someone.

All of this just makes me hate the holiday season every time it rolls around (earlier and earlier each year).  If that makes me a Scrooge, than bah-humbug indeed!

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LESSONS LEARNED: It’s difficult not to get caught up in the commercial hoopla surrounding Christmas every year, but it’s worthwhile to remember what Christmas should really be about so as not to turn into another bloodthirsty, shopping drone programmed to take out everything and everyone who stands between you and a holiday sale.  If we start speaking out against this and even, God forbid, start changing our holiday shopping habits, perhaps we can roll back the commercialism that has taken over our lives.  The other lesson is never to shop or work at a Wal-mart in Long Island.

If you’ve been keeping up with this blog, you know that our current fridge, a giant ugly beast from the 1970’s, caused me to call the fire department a few weeks ago because it smoked up the house.  As I mentioned, Sly and I planned to get a new fridge anyway, but not until we renovate the kitchen.  Of course, the fridge fire fiasco sped up our fridge shopping plans, so we’ve been researching fridges since then, taking our time (provided our fridge didn’t catch fire again) so we could find a good deal.  We want stainless steel for all of our appliances when we re-do the kitchen, so a stainless steel fridge is a must.  Of course, stainless steel is more expensive than other kinds of fridges.  We also like the bottom-freezer models, since they look attractive and make a lot of sense from a usage and energy standpoint (they are more energy efficient than side-by-side fridges or ones with the freezer on top).  The bottom-freezer stainless fridges with french doors we found most attractive, but french doors increase the price by several hundred dollars, so we knew that feature was out of the question.

Recently, we began to think that we’d have to lower our expectations and get a stainless steel fridge with a top freezer.  That’s fine (I’m happy as long as we don’t get a side-by-side model because I HATE side-by-side fridges, which is what we have now).  However, fortuitously, one of our good friends got us an amazing discount on a bottom-freezer fridge, GE model GDL20KCSBS.  Check it out:

GE model GDL20KCSBS

Inside view…

It’s stainless steel with black handles, 19.5 cubic feet (plenty of space for the two of us), with an ice maker in the freezer (which pulls out), veggie bins, split spill-proof shelves, energy-start compliant since it will cost only $41 a YEAR to operate, and it looks pretty.  Plus, it’s several hundred dollars cheaper thanks to our friend.

So, Sly and I placed our order last night, and our new fridge will come Saturday, Dec. 6.  We’re getting our new carpets upstairs on Thursday, Dec. 4, so it will be a very exciting week for us.  The delivery guys will even haul out our old dinosaur of a fridge and dispose of it for us, which is a bonus that I’m very excited about.  Now, you know how excited Sly and I were when we bought our water-efficient new toilet for the upstairs bathroom, so just imagine how excited we are about this fridge.  Forget Christmas and even beer week.  Getting new appliances is the most exciting thing to happen to us in a while.

Now we just have to fix the rest of the hideous kitchen so our new fridge has a pretty place to live.

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LESSONS LEARNED: If you shop around enough, you can get a really good deal on the type of fridge you really want (especially in this economy!).  But it also pays to know somebody.  And at some point in your life, you start thinking that it’s way cooler to get appliances than to get toys and stuff.  Not sure how that happens, but it sneaks up on you with age…

I never really thought that I’d get so excited about having rotting plant material in a big pile in my back yard, but I have to say, I’m really enjoying composting.

In the beginning of the summer, Sly built a compost box in the back corner of our yard out of a few wooden pallets, and our compost pile is covered with a plastic tarp.  At first, we just put plants we pulled out of the back yard in there, but once we moved in, we started saving our coffee grounds and doing research into what sorts of items we can toss into the compost bin.  Apparently, you can compost coffee grounds and tea leaves, any vegetables and fruit, shredded paper (but not magazines, just regular paper), cardboard egg crates, egg shells, leaves, and dryer lint, among other things.  Basically, you can compost any plant-based material that doesn’t have animal products in it (except egg shells – those can go in the pile). We keep the pile covered with the tarp, but Sly goes out back to turn the compost material every so often to make sure it is decomposing evenly.  The materials also get very hot from the decomposition process, which is actually pretty cool.  We’re hoping some earth worms decide to make our compost bin their home so they can help move along the waste-to-soil process.

So, we started saving up celery tops, orange peels, onion peels, coffee grounds, tea leaves, crushed up egg shells, and other stuff.  At first, though, Sly started putting the compost materials in a tupperware container covered with plastic wrap, which he kept on the counter because we don’t have must room in the kitchen to put anything.  This allowed him to wait a few days between running out back to dump stuff in the compost bin.  However, I was pretty grossed out by this system, since I could see the rotting veggie peels through the container and could catch a whiff of it every now and then.  There had to be a better system.

So, I jumped on my trusty computer and, voila, I found (and ordered) a countertop compost pail.  It holds roughly a gallon, is made of chrome, and has a replaceable charcoal filter in the lid to keep bad smells at bay.  We keep it on a shelf in the kitchen window and empty it into the compost bin out back every time it starts to get full.  So now, we have a discreet, stylish, and odor-free way to gather together our compostable materials.

Now I can’t wait until the spring, when we are going to plant a veggie garden in the back yard.  By using our compost to enrich the soil, we’re hoping to have some very happy tomatoes next year.

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LESSONS LEARNED: Composting is a great way to get free fertilizer for your garden, and it reduces your impact on the environment by recycling food material that would normally take up space in a landfill.  Building a compost box outside is pretty easy, and you can compost in your kitchen without stinking the place up if you just get a nifty pail with a charcoal filter in it.

When Sly and I moved to our new home, we didn’t realize that we’d be drafted into a war that suburbanites have been fighting for decades.  The battleground?  Our back yard.  Yes, we joined the suburban war on weeds.

When we first got the house, the weeds were clearly winning.  At some point, the back yard had been tamed into a garden.  There were paving stones covering most of the area, arranged around four flower beds that formed a square around a bird bath in the very center.  At some point, I’m sure that was very pretty, although the flower beds in the middle of the yard meant that you couldn’t really use the space for much.  By the time we got the house, however, the back yard was covered in weeds.  The flower beds had been neglected for who knows how long, so weeds grew up around the daffodils and hostas and between the paving stones.  Purple morning glories, which grow all over the neighborhood, had taken over the cyclone fence surrounding the yard, so that it was impossible to open the back gate.  Not satisfied with the fence, the morning glory vines began attacking our deck and encroaching on our next door neighbors’ yards.

So, in June, while I was off on a research trip and then at a conference, Sly and his parents went to work in the back yard, ripping out weeds until they were all gone.  The battle had been won, right?  Nope.  The weeds regrouped and made a comeback, with reinforcements.  Within a few weeks, the yard was even MORE overgrown than it had been before Sly and his parents weeded.  It looked like a jungle back there, and the morning glories in particular ran wild.  Unfortunately, we had other things to worry about inside the house, which we had to take care of before we moved in.  So the weeds became entrenched.

The weekend before we moved in, the day we painted, I started tackling the back yard, along with Sly’s mom and one of our friends.  I got the morning glories off of one side of the fence and off of the back gate, and Sly’s mom and our friend began pulling up paving stones and piling them at the bottom of the deck.  We knew that the only way we would outsmart the weeds was if we pulled up the paving stones so we could really get at their roots and pull them out for good.  We made some pretty good progress that day.  And then we didn’t do anything else to the yard for weeks.

Finally, one day, I grabbed our weed whacker and headed out back, determined to weed whack everything in sight and to pull up the remaining pavers.  I had been planning on doing this anyway, but seeing our neighbors out back (they live on the street behind us) talking across their fence and pointing at our yard spurred me to action.  I certainly didn’t want to be THAT neighbor with the unkempt yard that everyone else hates.  So I pulled the rest of the morning glories off the fence (they’re pretty but uncontrollable and had to go) and then proceeded to massacre the weeds that had invaded the yard.  I viewed the carnage with a sense of satisfaction.

Sly and I decided that the next step would be to implement a total war, scorched earth policy: we would rent a roto-tiller.  So the two of us pulled up the remaining pavers and stones, and the next morning, bright and early, Sly ran to Home Depot and rented a big roto-tiller.  When he got back, he went to work, tilling the dark, moist earth and ripping up every plant and root in sight.  I went along behind him and pulled out the perennial bulbs in the ground, since we didn’t want tulips and daffodils springing up in the middle of what we hoped would one day be a beautiful, lush lawn.  When Sly was finished reducing the back yard to pure dirt, we cleaned off the roto-tiller (no small feat, since the plants and weeds became wrapped around the blades) and raked the yard level as best we could.  Then we put down grass seed (sun-shade mix), raked it under, and then seeded again.  Then we watered the lawn with the back hose and waited.

Within a week, we had some grass sprouts.  Within two weeks, we had a nice lawn of new grass.  The fact that it rained a few days helped, since we didn’t have to water the lawn on those days.  I never thought I’d be so happy about grass growing, but Sly and I were very proud of our new, weed-free yard.  We’re hoping that the grass keeps the monster jungle weeds at bay, and next spring, we’re going to pull out some bush stumps in the back, cut down a remaining large bush, and make a patio at the bottom of the deck stairs out of the pavers we pulled off the yard.  We’re also going to put in a vegetable garden, which we can nourish with the compost we have decomposing in our compost bin, which Sly built in June.

We have won the battle against weeds, for now, but the war continues in suburbia…

Jungle

Jungle 2

Jungle 3

Just before we moved in

Getting there…

The battle of the back yard…

weeded and seeded

Sly working hard

secret weapon

grass seed

And we have grass!

lots o’ weeds

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LESSONS LEARNED: The longer you wait, the tougher it’s going to be to get rid of unwanted weeds in your yard because they grow like, well, weeds.  The morning glories with their creeping vines seem to grow a few feet every day, and some of the weeds that sprouted up between June and July had stalks as thick as saplings.  Also, the best way to get rid of weeds over a large area is tilling the soil.  A roto-tiller gets everything up, and it’s kinda fun, too.  And taking care of your yard keeps your neighbors from hating you.

So, last night the carpet guy, Jim Mongiello, came over with samples and measured our upstairs for new carpets.  He seems really nice, and his prices are reasonable.  My parents’ neighbor recommended him, so that counted a lot in my decision to call him.

He was even nice enough to leave the carpet sample books with me and Sly so we could take our time choosing a carpet.  We did settle on one – a middle of the line light tan plush carpet.  It’s not the best one, but it’s not the lowest quality, either, and it’s the one we can afford.  The next step is to have Jim come back out, tell him what we want, and then set an installation date.  I’ll keep you posted on how that turns out.

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LESSON LEARNED: Smaller carpet installers/dealers are probably as good (or better) than large stores like Home Depot on carpet pricing, and I have a feeling that they offer better customer service (more personal) and better skill in installation.  And sometimes a reference from a friend is a lot more helpful than doing an internet search for carpets, contractors, etc.

Sorry I haven’t written in a while.  The excitement of the Phillies’ victory parade (which was AWESOME! except we had to drive from Narberth b/c SEPTA trains weren’t stopping here b/c they were too full) and the election results on Tuesday night have kept me busy.

Anyway, we may be getting carpets upstairs finally.  When we moved in, we knew we wanted to re-carpet the hallway and guest bedroom/office because the current carpets (berber) are dirty and ugly.  We originally planned to have Sly’s friend install carpets for us, so we picked out carpets and had him measure around the time we moved in.  The day we moved into the house, we decided not to unpack the office until we got new carpets.  That way, we’d save ourselves a lot of time and hassle re-packing to clear out the room for the carpet installation.  We thought we’d only live with an unpacked office for a week or two.  That was two months ago.  Thus, I’ve been working in an office cluttered with boxes, and all of my books, which I despearately need to write my dissertation, are packed up in boxes in the office closet and in the basement.  Sly can’t work at his desk because it’s got boxes on it, so we’ve been sharing mine.  And then the office started to become a repository for homeless tools that Sly was using in the bathroom and bedroom.  So this is what the office looks like:

Now, I’m trying to write a chapter of my dissertation and apply for several dozen grants, and it’s impossible to work like that.  I need my books, and I need space to think.  And Sly needs his own desk back.  I’m sure he doesn’t enjoy the current arrangement of him having a homeless laptop.  So I finally had a private flip-out a week or so ago, and I finally gave up on Sly’s friend, who we’ve had a hard time getting to come out to do the carpets.  Thus, on Monday, I called a carpet guy recommended by one of my parents’ neighbors, and he’s coming out tonight with carpet samples.  Keep your fingers crossed that his carpet and installation prices are reasonable and that I have an unpacked office soon!

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LESSONS LEARNED: When you’re waiting on someone else to do something in your house, whether it’s furniture/appliance delivery or a contractor or a family member/friend, it almost always takes longer because you have to wait until the work fits into their schedule.  And sometimes, when their schedule takes too long, you have to take matters into your own hands.

Tomorrow is Halloween (and the Phillies parade), and Sly and I were excited to have our first Halloween in a house of our own.  At our last apartment, and in my previous apartments, there was never a place to decorate where people other than myself/ourselves would see it.  This year, we have a porch, so we decided to put up decorations.  This included pumpkins, so we went to a local orchard (Linvilla in DE County – very expensive and crowded – not sure if we’ll go there again) and picked pumpkins.  After much hunting, we decided to get a nice orange pumpkin of symmetrical proportions and a medium-sized white pumpkin, just because that was different.  We brought them home and proudly displayed them on our front porch.

Now, my parents used to put pumpkins on their front step when I was growing up, and they usually remained pristine.  Occasionally, however, local teenagers would go around and smash everyone’s pumpkins in the street.  Similarly, my and Sly’s pumpkins have been vandalized, but not by local teenagers.  No, these vandals preferred a more gradual approach to pumpkin destruction, chipping away at the pumpkins bit by bit, and one at a time, until all that remains is a pulpy mess.  They’re organized, stealthy, and they hit every pumpkin on the block.  They started with our orange one, and when they were satisfied with their work, they moved onto our cool white pumpkin.  Halloween is tomorrow, and all we have to display are two piles of pumpkin goo.

These pictures are from a few days ago.  Now the pumpkins are worse.

Now, I had my suspicions as to who the perpetrators were, but I wanted to confirm them.  I didn’t want to accuse the local squirrel population if the culprit turned out to be a racoon.  It’s very important to have evidence.  However, the other day, I opened the front door to catch a squirrel red-handed (or red-pawed?) sitting on top of one of our pumpkins and chowing down.  The guilty wretch took off when he saw me, but I’d caught him.  He and his little friends are our local pumpkin vandals.  I am sure that the Narberth squirrels await Halloween with excitement, biding their time until they can grow fat off of the local pumpkin displays.  I don’t mind that they’re hungry, but you think they could clean up after themselves instead of strewing pumpkin seeds all over our porch.  Obviously, they have no table manners.

And so my trials with the local rodent population continue…

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LESSONS LEARNED:  Beware of pumpkin eaters when displaying real pumpkins as decorations.  Or else put the pumpkins out a day before Halloween.  If you decorate early, the squirrels will eat them.