We live here.

Phyllis the couch is held for ransom.

So it’s Friday the 13th, and that means the second week of January is drawing to a close and that means that Phyllis the couch is supposed to be sitting in our living room, but she isn’t, and I’m pretty irritated about it.

(If you don’t know who Phyllis the couch is , check out the above link. If you’re still unclear about why she’s called Phyllis, check out the brilliant suggestions in the comments of that post. If you don’t know why she’s supposed to be here by this week, it’s because I haven’t posted about it. Read on. If you don’t care, click here to relive Hamster Dance.)

Phyllis is undressed. (Gotta protect the hub's identity in this scandalous picture.)

So after obtaining our antique couch and hauling it back home in our antique truck, we brought Phyllis into the house and realized (much to my delight) that her mustard velvet upholstery was going to have to go.  It was mildewed black in some parts and the cat loved it a little bit too much. Anything that he’s that enamored of is usually too disgusting for words. So we resolved to use the money we saved by adopting Phyllis to have her reupholstered.

I don’t know how he found them. One day I came downstairs and my husband had located a local upholstery firm that defies all the rules of modern business. It’s closed four days of the week. The proprietors don’t believe in signage. They don’t sell upholstery fabric. They also don’t believe in email. My husband had to drive down to their super-secret location with the photo of Phyllis that I posted on this blog.  But despite all of the things that they don’t do, they’ve been in business since the Cold War. I think they’re probably wizards or gnomes or cobbler elves or leprechauns or something.

But even if they are magical creatures, they are magical creatures who are now on my smack-down list. Because I don’t think that fairy tale law allows mythical little men to break their magical word, and also, I feel like they are holding Phyllis prisoner.

Allow me to explain: In order to keep down the cost of reupholstering Phyllis, my husband did all the woodwork himself. He ripped off the mustard fabric, which unleashed a cloud of mold spores into our living room. To control that, he doused the couch in vinegar. Our house didn’t smell right for months. Then he sanded all the  woodwork down and refinished it.

We bought a lot of fabric from a local shop (the fabric has something resembling fleurs-de-lis in the pattern, which my husband liked because he thought they were some sort of tribal spearheads) and brought the whole mess to the couch gnomes, who allowed us to set foot inside their magical workshop. It was awesome – the walls were piled with chairs and couches, and every few feet there was a stapler gun suspended from the ceiling. If you didn’t watch out you could turn around and BAM! –  eyebrow piercing.

When it came time to decide when Phyllis would come home, the head gnome paused. He said he could have her ready for Christmas, and then gave the sort of heart-rending sigh that is usually a signal that although he could do it, it might kill him.

Part of me was like, “Okay, so do that,” but it was the week of Thanksgiving, and although I was impatient to have Phyllis gussied up and in our home, we didn’t really need her by Christmas, and also, moving her into the room with a Christmas tree in it would be a pain and anyway, why would I want to burden these nice gnomes during the holiday season?

I generously suggested that we pick Phyllis up the first week of January instead.

“Second week of January,” said the gnome and then I felt like a sucker who should have insisted that we’d need her by Dec. 24 or Christmas would be ruined.

My husband called this week, on the first day that the shop would be open. The conversation went a little bit like this:

Husband – “Is the couch ready?” (He refuses to call her Phyllis outside of the home.)

Couch Gnome – “I’ll have it to you by the end of January.”

Husband – Silence.

Couch Gnome  – “Something wrong?”

My husband suspects that  – like a little kid who forgot that his book report was due – the gnome hadn’t even started work on Phyllis. So now, we’re waiting until the end of the month, although the gnome said he’d give us a call when and if it’s done earlier.

But I’m afraid that we’ll never see Phyllis again and that the little men aren’t gnomes, but trolls, and that the couches and chairs stacked against the walls of their shops aren’t their creations – instead they’re the corpses of their victims. Oh god, we delivered Phyllis right into their murderous little hands.

So in honor of Phyllis (and because Zazzle made me take down the dwarf one), I made another tee shirt. (I actually have been making a lot of tees lately. I’ve already got quite a little collection on Zazzle. Not because I expect people to buy them, really, but because I’m the sort of gal who loves nothing more than an in-joke on a tee shirt, and Teefury is not meeting all my tee-shirt needs these days.)

Please, people. Appreciate your couches. Love them. Sit on them a little longer than normal today. For Phyllis.

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FEMA visit

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Yesterday, the claims adjuster from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (we’ll just call it FEMA) came to the house. He was very nice, and like many of the people who’ve come through my neighborhood in the past few weeks (American Red Cross volunteers, distributors of FEMA information) he hailed from a faraway state.

He walked around our house, surveyed the damage and made notes on a tablet. The visit was strange for a lot of reasons. For one thing, our house is still a mess, but really, everything is back to normal. All the major appliances have already been replaced. All the garbage is gone. The house no longer smells like low tide. It’s stopped being a clean-up and started to be more of a renovation.

When the adjuster came by, I was sitting at the kitchen table, copy-editing and drinking tea.
After his tour of the premises, the adjuster stood in the kitchen and ran through his list of prescribed questions. The last one was this: “Do you feel you will have to relocate while your repairs are made?”
It was strange to be asked that, as I stood in my kitchen with my tea still steaming on the table and my dog sitting at my feet, when so many people are so much worse off than we are. My husband’s family is from Texas. They’re all okay, but they’ve sent us photos of the fires. Thousands of homes have been incinerated. And then there’s Vermont, where whole towns became rivers during Irene. And there are the people near us, whose homes washed into the Sound.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m grateful for any help we can get. The saltwater destroyed all the major appliances and most of the belongings we kept downstairs. Still, what we experienced was a hardship, not a disaster. I can’t imagine coming back to our home to find that everything – even the vehicles – has been destroyed. Or coming back to find that my first floor is coated in a chocolate fondant-like layer of river mud, or of discovering that the back half of my home has been sunk out at sea.

We’re lucky. We still have our home and each other and the furry critters. We still have a house for the FEMA adjuster to inspect.

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The closet purge

I’m cleaning out my closet this week. It’s long overdue.

I’ve been ignoring the warning signs: My shoe rack bent the nails holding it to the wall and came crashing down, I can’t shut one of my closet doors, and I can’t find my favorite black tank top anywhere. That last one really clinched it. If all the clothes that I don’t wear are obscuring the one item I want to wear all the time, it’s time to get rid of some stuff.

I set up my camera this weekend and got to work, photographing, measuring and putting stuff on eBay. By the time I’m done, I will hopefully have gotten rid of at least a third of my stuff. Maybe half.

My husband, who was out fishing when I finally snapped, came back home to find me under a mountain of clothes I never wear. He’s a little concerned about this purge. He knows I love clothing and worries that I’m tormenting myself by cleaning the closet. He’s afraid that what I’m engaged in is a sort of Sophie’s Choice for clotheshorses. The first time I cleaned out my closets, just before we were married,  he offered to bring garbage bags of clothing down to the basement and store them there.

“You might need them later,” he told me.

I knew I would not need a floor-length bedazzled cotton hippie-inspired skirt from the sales rack at Bob’s. Not later. Not ever. I didn’t need it to begin with.

I tried to reassure him, but he still looked concerned. I think part of the problem is that my husband doesn’t understand my relationship with clothing. I relate to clothing the way a cad relates to women. I’m happy when I buy it, I’m happy when I use it, and I’m happy when it walks out of my life and stops blowing up my cell phone 24-7.

And like a cad, I don’t really mind sharing. My feeling is this: I like my clothes. I think some other people probably like my clothes as well. So if I’m not wearing an item, and it’s languishing at the back of my closet when someone else could be rockin’ it on the street, what’s the point in my hanging onto it?

Still, to abandon the cad metaphor, there are some things I’ll never part with. My wedding dress. And that black tank top that I got at a consignment shop for a few bucks, but which fits so well and looks good with everything. Or the white hippie shirt I bought from a vendor at the student center in college. Or the silver brocade dress that I bought on the first day of our honeymoon because I felt that, as a married woman, I needed some “grown-up” clothes. Or the 30-year-old “Shazbot” tee shirt that my dad bought when Mork & Mindy was popular in the ’70s and which was passed from me to my brother until I finally stole it and ran off to college. (I think every member of my immediate family has had it in their wardrobe at some point. It’s got some holes now, and the fabric is more or less transparent but I still wear it under a sweatshirt when I walk the dog.) Or the mint-green sweater my mom got as a present when she was expecting. Or the green faux leather jacket that my great aunt Rita had in the ’40s, which my mom “borrowed” in the ’70s and I took over in the ’90s. I have a bunch of things like this; items that came from family members who borrowed from family members. I love that.

All of these sort of come together in a cohesive way for me. It’ s my life story, told in clothing. If my closet were a museum, this would be the permanent collection. The other things are just on loan.

But I don’t know; maybe the “permanent collection” isn’t so permanent. It may be that in a few years it will make sense for me to get rid of all of it  in order to make room for other things. If we have children I’m certainly not going to be able to monopolize every closet in the house. So I may get rid of almost everything, even the good stuff. And that will be okay.

But here’s what I’m hoping for: maybe if I’m lucky, I’ll be able to keep the good stuff and someday – when all I can wear are sweatsuits and the other practical clothes of old age, some granddaughter or niece or young cousin or neighbor will be able to come over and raid my carefully curated collection.

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The pet problem.

We have an opening for an animal in our house.  We are definitely a two-pet household and after my cat died this fall, my husband and I entered into half-hearted negotiations about whether to get a pet, what kind of pet to get and when this adoption ought to take place.

Goober, indulging his little catnip problem.

Currently our only pet is Goober the cat, a contrary creature whose issues are myriad. He likes people but can’t stand being touched, can’t hunt prey animals but violently repels other predatory animals from our yard, and would rather eat grass than tuna. The list goes on and on.

Most people who meet Goober like him. He’s unobtrusive and has a doofy kind of charm. But our cat has a dark side.

We adopted Goober because we thought he’d be a docile companion to our older cat, Copy.  Now our vet blames Goober for Copy’s death in November. I have a lot of good reasons not to believe that, but I will admit that Goober made Copy’s life hell. It looked playful to me, but recently something happened that gave me pause.

Earlier this week, in preparation for the blizzard, we tried to let Boyfriend the stray cat into the house. Goober, a delicate, neutered creature, waited until Boyfriend’s head was just inside the door. Then he attacked, driving the intruder off our porch and into the yard. I thought Boyfriend, who fights nightly in summer and is missing part of an ear, would be able to handle Goober. In fact, I’d even been a little concerned about Goober’s safety. Now I’m concerned for any small animal that enters his domain.

That rules out several potential newcomers. We won’t be adopting another grown cat, because a challenge to Goober’s feline supremacy will mean blood. Hedgehogs, parakeets, small dogs, toddlers, pot-bellied pigs, small dinosaurs and possibly ponies are also out.

I think we have no choice but to adopt a dog. A large, tolerant, mellow dog. Since I’ve been wanting a dog for a year, this would work out well for me.

My husband however, disagrees. According to my husband, the only creature on this planet insane enough to withstand Goober without posing a threat fits inside a teacup.  I’m not sure it’s wise, but my husband wants to get a kitten.

So it’s either a dog or a kitten. Both of these are exciting choices, but we’re at an impasse. If anyone has any thoughts on this, I would really love to hear them.

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Home improvements

We can do it!

I’m back online after spending the second of two weekends on home improvements, and the gods have not punished me yet.

Until recently, our back porch was literally rotting away. This really bugged me  – the steps became slimy in the rain and a couple of weekends ago, I pulled a patch of moss off the steps only to realize the moss had been covering a damp hole in the wood.

The fact that I could stick two fingers through my back step raised my ire to new levels. I decided that my husband wasn’t getting to our redneck-looking back porch fast enough, and so I took things into my own hands.

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