Archive for ‘This Old Apartment (Building)’
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Marty’s off to New York for a couple of days and, as H.o.p. was going to be missing him, Marty prepared yesterday a big pot of red beans that would simmer and simmer and simmer and be prime eating by the time Marty was doing the sound check for his gig. So while Marty was in New York, H.o.p. would be here eating his favorite red beans and rice.
It was a gorgeous day yesterday. The weather is unbelievably perfect. The several windows that aren’t sealed shut with time and paint we have been keeping open and the slightly cooler air mingles with the smell of the red beans and andouille making something like heaven on earth these first autumn days.
Early this evening I go in to prepare H.o.p. his bowl of red beans and andouille. It’s not quite thickened enough but it’ll do and smells beautiful. I glance out the kitchen window to my left where we have an exhaust fan lodged that’s capturing the smell of the beans and broadcasting them out the back alley, and there’s George waving his arms ecstatically. He has smelled the red beans and andouille and they are calling to him.
I give George a bowl of red beans and andouille which he’ll carry back up to his apartment where he’ll prepare his rice. We’re not having rice today as Marty’s not here and H.o.p. doesn’t like rice. He likes his red beans and andouille straight.
And that’s why I love this old apartment building. I like looking out and seeing someone waving their arms enthusiastically over the aroma of red beans and andouille and having quite enough to prepare an extra bowl.
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We woke up, made coffee, then stepped outside to watch the finish of the Peachtree Road Race.
10 or so cases of bottled water were sitting in the hall.
Above is the winner in the men’s division, Ethiopian Terefe Maregu. Yes, from the rear, but I was clapping as he came running by (we were one block from the finish).
I didn’t get a photo of any of the other winners because, again, I was wildly clapping.
But, hell, as far as I’m concerned, anyone who crossed the finish line was a winner.
55,000 participants, all shapes and sizes. Amazing how there wasn’t a uniform or predominant body type constructed by training…except for a set of twins who wore identical gear exposing apparently identical physiques. And, no, I don’t have a photo of them either because I was marveling at that exceptional similitude as they passed. The same way I was marveling at how un-uniform everyone else was.
The empty sidewalk is because the last block was, well, blocked off.
After the finishing participants picked up their t-shirts, some came looking for the train. But the street they needed to cross was blocked…because of the race.
When we came back inside, the 10 or so cases of bottled water that had been stacked in the entryway were gone.
H.o.p. is posting some of his comics again over on his blog. On top of all the other drawings he does, and still making a lot of neat little sculptures, he’s churning out about 6 Angsley, Kitty and Catter cartoons a day this week.
On Monday, while the landlord was here with his helper fixing the kitchen cabinet (which was threatening to fall down), H.o.p. began drawing these cartoons of Angsley and Kitty in order to entertain them, and continued yesterday and today.
Below is one of my favorites.
This one is pretty good too.
Friends don't let friends use Behr paint
June 10th, 2008 |Posted In: General, This Old Apartment (Building)
This past weekend I painted the kitchen and Marty painted the bathroom.
Friends don’t let friends use Behr paint.
The thing is, the wide world web had ample opportunity to warn me, “DON’T USE THE BEHR PAINT! IT IS THIN! IT DRIPS! AND DRIPS SOME MORE! THEN DRIPS LOTS LOTS LOTS MORE WHEN YOU’RE NOT LOOKING!”
No one bothered.
Of course, we’d already purchased the paint for the kitchen and it’s not like we would have thrown it out and dashed down to the store for the Sherwin Williams. So, never mind.
I also got the camera back, which has been in the shop for a while and was thoroughly dysfunctional for a while before that, the while that I was getting used to the idea of letting it out of my hands and sending it off to be repaired.
One of these days I’ll get a decent lens for it other than the kit lens.
There we are driving down Boulevard on our way to get ice cream for H.o.p. and I see a pint-size purple restaurant with a couple of tables outside and customers headed inside and big letters proclaiming honest to god New Orleans PO’BOYS!
Marty had already proposed eating out, which I’d nixed, though we were all starved as it had been an afternoon filled with shopping on empty stomachs. I just did not feel like eating out. We were frazzled. Shopping for paint for the kitchen (I still love our landlord but he never painted it after ripping it up when replacing pipes last autumn) with a bored ten-year-old boy and trying to settle on colors with a bored ten-year-old hopping around wears on the nerves. Seriously, I’m choosing colors I’m going to have to live with how long, colors to go in about a 3 by 3 foot space, no one’s helping, Marty wants nothing to do with it and I’m suspecting whatever I choose is going to look like hell no matter what, it’s going to be Dirk Bogarde in “Death in Venice” lying on the beach with his vanity-of-vanities rejuvenating hair dye and make-up and rouge melting all down his face. You’d understand better perhaps if you knew how hot and greasy our kitchen gets which isn’t really a kitchen but a small (almost) 100 year old room which may have once been a boiler room and into which was squeezed a stove, refrigerator and sink. Having seen a bathroom in an apartment decorating blog painted a magical evening blue, I’d been talking blue the past few weeks. Marty said finally for me to stick with the blue idea and H.o.p. pulled out of the Behr paint section just the right blue when I couldn’t find it in the Glidden. I stood around for too long afterwards considering considering and considering some more then at the last minute I opted for a “sweet honey” to go on the lower half to give a dash of brightness as there’s no sunlight in that room. At the moment it sounded great.
H.o.p. was, truly, fit to be tied by the time we were done and we were all half starved. Thus the promise of ice cream for him and a stop by Grant Park for some running around time before fixing dinner at home.
It’s been a long time since I’ve had a Po’Boy. And now here was this little purple place, Just Loaf’n (that link’s an opportunity for you to view a commercial of theirs), promising real New Orleans crawfish boils and Po’Boys. How long has it been there? I don’t know, but Sunday was the first time my eye lit on it.
As soon as we found the ice cream shop was shut down we headed back to Just Loaf’n.
After ordering we sat at one of the three tables in the shop, drinking Community Coffee, and stared just stared at the kitchen with high hopes. After a while of sitting and staring, H.o.p. said he thought it was getting a bit long and I told him no this was not too long at all not at all at all for a Po’Boy, just as the sign on the wall cajoles to be prepared to patiently take your time and wait for a good New Orleans Po’Boy prepared with fresh ingredients.
The Po’Boy we had yesterday was saucy fairly falling apart under the weight of its own juiciness wonderful good (I don’t know why it is that the pickle in the Po’Boy always tastes extra special). It made me happy. How true blue it was I honestly don’t know, all I can say is Marty approved and it stood up well to the memories I have of Po’Boys past (admittedly long past), it wasn’t dressed up to be anything more than what it was and its weight and its dressings and its textures and all the mixings of flavors were such that it didn’t need to be dressed up to be anything more than what it was, which was really crumbly good.
I didn’t care for the dirty rice but slather it with hot sauce and it’ll serve okay. Though blander, the dirty rice actually wasn’t far removed from what I’ve had in NO. I just like Marty’s dirty rice better.
Their Old National Highway location promises muffalettas. 24 hours a day. The Boulevard location is only open 24 hours on Friday and Saturday and doesn’t have muffalettas.
“Only open 24 hours on Friday and Saturday.” Not that I expect restaurants to be open 24 hours. No, it’s just that 24 hours of opportunity means after some late sessions at the studio, when Marty’s saying “What can we eat” and I’m saying “I don’t know, what do you think” one of us can now say, “Po’boys!”
I love Central Grocery muffalettas. Every time we pass through NO I get a Central Grocery muffaletta.
I wonder what a Just Loaf’n muffaletta would be like? We’ll have to drive all the way down to the airport to get one and see.
A tornado hit downtown but we’re about a mile and a half distant from where most of the damage was concentrated. Our power went out for a bit but we didn’t have the television on and had no idea there was a tornado warning, we were only aware there was a storm. We didn’t know what had happened until we started getting phone calls asking if things were okay.
Marty drove over to see if the studio was all right, and it wasn’t hit either and the streets are clear. The power, however, is out over there and for blocks all around.
There was a lot of damage over in Cabbagetown and East Atlanta. CNN and the Omni Hotel were hit fairly hard and some of the downtown streets are looking pretty trashed out on the news.
At 12:30 am, there was this BOOM…
February 7th, 2008 |Posted In: General, This Old Apartment (Building)
So last night at around 12:30 am there was this huge but kind of muffled boom that sounded like either a thundercloud had exploded or a building a block away had fallen down.
Beat.
“What was that?” I said.
“What was that?” H.o.p. said.
“I heard it too,” Marty said.
We’re sounding like the momma and poppa and baby bear there, aren’t we.
No one else was doing it so I went to the front room and looked out the window knowing full well I wouldn’t be able to see anything out of it but a few yards of city street.
The boom was fading and in its place now there arose a sound like rushing wind. Bizarre!
Marty had followed. “It’s wind,” he said.
“No, look at the trees,” I said. “They’re still.”
The rushing wind sound continued for a bit. Then it died down and was replaced by the winding whining whir of a motor in bad trouble.
I heard people yelling.
I was still dressed so decided to step outside to see if I could find out what was going on. When I opened the front door I was met with smoke. And fumes. Though it smelled like burning rubber, when you live in an apartment building and there’s smoke you go check it out.
Walked up to the corner and somehow someway a car had whipped through the shrubbery of the building, torn up the grassy turf so it was all over the sidewalk, and landed itself in a telephone pole. The police were already there. Whoever was in the auto they apparently weren’t going to handle and would leave to the medics. I don’t know how messed up the driver was because I wasn’t going to get closer and in the way of things, but whoever had hit the telephone pole was not in a condition to be questioned.
A couple was standing on the corner across from me. Another couple of people were talking to the police, probably from the apartment building. That was it.
A policewoman went around and began banging the back of the car with her club. She’d look in the back seat and then bang the trunk of the car again, around the tail lights, with her club again. Then look in the back seat again. She did this multiple times.
I went back inside. Marty went out to take a look. The ambulance had arrived. He departed as they pulled up the gurney to the side of the car.
Hope whoever it was is all right.
I woke up Tuesday morning set to spend the day devoted to working on Sue’s photos but checking my email I discovered that I was part of Dreamhost’s $7,500,000 f*** u* in which they accidentally way overcharged all their customers. Only I didn’t know this was a major all-encompassing script snafu yet. All I knew was that my account, which I always pay up for a full year every August, was being erroneously and hugely billed. When I saw the web control panel was down though I figured something was up and immediately checked their status blog to find they’d a post up about the mess. Very big mess. 26 pages of comments on that status blog. And yet more here on the regular Dreamhost blog.
Then we got a parking ticket when we weren’t even in the wrong, and we have a customer receipt to prove it but who has the time to go down and protest the ticket.
I worked on Sue’s photos, occasionally checking in on the Dreamhost status blog to see how things were going there. When my brother called to talk early Tuesday evening I was just about done, and ready for a break. I told him about how Sunday evening, as H.o.p. was preparing for bed, he called me in to see ALL THE BLUE AND RED LIGHTS down on the corner. Monday, we discovered that one man had been shot dead and another just shot in what was perhaps some drug-related incident. Guy died on the street, two bullets to the chest. And I realized, oh, hell, this must sound really bad considering Marty was almost caught in gunfire a month ago.
Monday night, returning from photographing Sue, walking back to the apartment with H.o.p. from the car, he was reticent.
“Is this where the man got shot?” he asked as we passed one apartment building.
“Is this where the man was killed?” he asked as we passed the next.
Midtown has its problems. Today I was looking up info on the shooting and was sidetracked into reading neighborhood association crime reports for the past couple months. Crime has been worse here lately, like I didn’t know it. But it is all over Atlanta, as well, most crimes up about 25%.
It snowed today. Real snow. Not sleet. Nice large flakes fairly hurled down from the skies. H.o.p. and I stopped reading Lucy and Stephen Hawking’s “George’s Secret Key to the Universe” and went outside to play. Within an hour there was enough snow to scrape off the cars lining the street and start building a small snow man on a strip of grass belonging to the condos next door.
When H.o.p. and I first stepped out, we were laughing, approaching the corner, and surprise out from around the corner of the building pops a vagrant who had apparently heard us coming. “They said it would rain but God decided to make snow!” he exclaimed merrily to us, waving his arms which were covered in plastic bags. I was startled because I just don’t like people popping out from around corners. I wasn’t sure I recognized him or not but I figured he probably recognized us. I may be wrong, but I had the feeling he recognized us. I was already smiling and kept the smile on and said something about it was great, wasn’t it, thinking at the same time it’s not so great for a homeless person. I felt wary because we’d been surprised. I also felt there was no reason to be wary. But he’d surprised me, popping around the corner, and so I was wary. I waited for him to hit me up for some money, but he didn’t. And I had no money on me, having just stepped outside to play with H.o.p. I’d only my keys with me. The vagrant went on his way and I was torn between not liking being surprised and wishing I’d had a couple dollars on me to pass to him on a snowy afternoon.
Anyway, H.o.p. and I, after throwing snowballs at each other, and storing a few in plastic bags in the freezer, scraped together enough snow off the cars to make a small snow man with a snow ball in his twig hand.
None of the pedestrians passing seemed very elated by the snow and most seemed to take no notice of us frolicking.
After a couple of hours of play, H.o.p. was soaked, it was getting dark, I made him go inside and then, realizing the snowman was likely to be accidentally stomped on by dog walkers, I moved it to a more secure plot of green by the building across the street, a spot where H.o.p. could admire our work from our window.
Then, while I stood at the window watching the snow in the dark, a pedestrian likely on his way home from MARTA, passing the small foot-high snowman, stopped, looked, looked again. He stood a moment looking at the snowman then took out his cell phone and photographed the paltry little guy. He crouched down and moved in and photographed it twice more. Then went on his way.
“Our snow man made someone happy,” I called to H.o.p.
He grinned big, pleased.
We have living above us the next Coen Brother’s movie plot.
You think I’m joking. I’m not. I’m dead serious about it. And, no matter how much I love the Coen Brothers (“The Big Lebowski’s” dude is my hero) I don’t want the plot of their next movie living above us because DAMN IT the constant ceiling shaking WHAM WHAM WHAMS are really getting to me, and so too is the elephant stomp square dancing in two ton shoes as they cavort between the WHAMS.
This goes on for hours!
HOURS! Not one hour, not two. It will go on all evening and if it starts during the afternoon it goes on all afternoon WITHOUT CEASE. These guys don’t believe in coffee breaks.
As I sit here, it’s 11: 10 and tonight it began at about 8.
It’s getting worse, too. More frenetic and HEAVIER. I’ve started to worry about the plaster of the ceiling falling in, that’s how bad it is. I’ll look up and check to make sure the ceiling lamp’s still secure–the one in here, the one in the living room, the one in H.o.p.’s bedroom, because those wham boom collisions of whatever with the floor are happening everywhere seemingly at once.
Supposedly, two mild-mannered nurses live up there. HAHAHAHAHAH!
Three times tonight I stood and stared and wondered should I tromp up the stairs to their apartment and ask them what the hell they think they’re doing? Have they never lived in an apartment building before?
Witness the kitchen of our apartment. Most of the time, on blogs, people show pics of really cool looking kitchens which, if not bodaciously spacious, are aesthetically pleasing. They show pics of their new tiled floors or new ceramic tiled backsplashes. Not many people put up pics of ugly kitchens which don’t have a title of “We are remodeling!” We aren’t remodeling. We live in an apartment. Yes, I know some people remodel their apartment. Not us. Our cash must go elsewhere and besides we never know when the building might be sold out from under us, though no one wanted it the last time the landlord’s brothers attempted to sell it. His brothers do the real estate buy and sell end. He acts as handyman and manager, keeping things rented and looked after and fixing what needs to be fixed imperatively.
Our kitchen, as you can see, is decidedly Ungreen, except for the fact most of it is second hand and has been in use a very long time. To make myself feel better, I count that.
Well, our glassware and dishes aren’t secondhand. We got them at Ikea this year when most of our old second-hand stuff had broken and we decided to go ahead and get stuff that matched. But all our oven crockery is secondhand and our storage containers and you can’t see it but my traveling coffee mug may not be secondhand but I’ve managed to keep ahold of it for eleven years, even once dashing back to the middle of a 6 point intersection, in which 6 lanes of traffic had started moving again, to retrieve the cup I’d accidentally dropped when running across said intersection. At night. Not too bright, I know, but I’m sentimental about that mug.
Anyway, recently our last microwave bit the dust at about eight years of age and the replacement we purchased turned out to be slightly larger than our last microwave and ate up a couple of inches more of food prep counter space, the only food prep counter space we have.
Exhibit A
Ignore the colonial chair, which I hate. I deplore that chair, which my MIL didn’t want and my husband tends to accept second hand goods indiscriminately. Such as that chair. Which she didn’t want because the finish didn’t quite match her other chairs so she was needing some new chairs with a matching finish. We don’t worry about things like matching finish because I paint all our second-hand furniture. I planned to paint that chair bright red and yellow and green but it turned out to have a weird poly finish on it and wouldn’t be easily painted so I didn’t even try. That chair will soon be out on the sidewalk waiting to be picked up by someone else in the apartment building, trust me. Because I hate hate hate colonial and am now committed to getting rid of that chair.
We always land in places where people snatch up anything that can be possibly recycled. That’s one reason we landed at This Old Apartment Building. Because the landlord used to work hard (volunteer) for water conservation and because he recycles everything. I liked this, that he had worked for water conservation and that so much around here had been preserved or recycled, yes, in the interest of saving money, but whatever. He’s always saving furniture and crap and finding other uses or people who would like to have it. There are times when this can be annoying because the kitchen door opens onto an urban junkman’s holler and so we only open it to take out the trash and to ventilate the kitchen when cooking. I imagine this is very annoying to the people living in the pricey higher-rise behind us, but then I imagine there isn’t anything about this old building that isn’t annoying to them. I too would prefer we had a New Orleans style courtyard alley out back of that door and that the junkman’s thing was confined to the areas around the storage portions of the building. Ain’t gonna happen though.
I’m not very bright in some ways. When we moved in here we had narrowed the choices down to here and an apartment in a house that had been completely refurbished. Beautifully refurbished. The floors were gorgeous. The kitchen was gorgeous. It had a fireplace. It was small but gorgeous and had a back yard. I mean it was awesome and barely within our price range. But it wasn’t near public transportation and wasn’t within walking distance of a grocery store. We would also have been second floor tenants and I worried about this with a child, that H.o.p. would drive the downstairs neighbors crazy, especially in a house which hadn’t been originally designed for dual family occupancy and to absorb sound. So I opted for here. Plus as I said I figured a landlord who’d worked for water conservation and spent hundreds of hours raising money for the public library was our kind of landlord.
Our refrigerator is not remotely green. The refrigerator and the oven were supplied and the landlord isn’t so green as to get an energy-saving frig. I’m just glad the refrigerator works and that the landlord promptly replaced the old one when it needed to be replaced. You can’t see the oven but it is an old model in what used to be called a dijon mustard color. It is beyond the refrigerator on the left. It is second hand because our landlord used it in his house before moving it here. Inbetween the frig and oven I’ve shoved a needle thin shelving unit which serves as our pantry. There are a couple of shelves over the oven for storage of pasta and spices and rice but with the exception of the bottom one they’re too high to conveniently reach.
The needle thin shelving unit stores mostly beans. We eat lots of beans.
I like our water purifier, which is sitting on top of the microwave. That’s second hand, acquired from a sister of mine. Still works beautifully.
Anyway, there, in front of the microwave, take a gander of our food preparation area. That’s it. Please don’t suggest that we try to hoist the microwave up and hang it from the wall. Won’t work. We put in a shelf above the microwave (which you can’t see here) and that ancient wall is made so well and is so hard that it was almost impossible to install that shelf even with the use of a battery-powered drill bit.
We can’t put anything else beside the rear door as we need to get in and out of it. Our kitchen garbage can is between the door and the derelict cabinet upon which is the microwave and there is simply no way to put anything else back there.
Exhibit B
Exhibit B of our lack of counter room. I suppose we could dispense with the dishrack and get a folding one. That would be one way of helping with the counter space issue, except when we’re cooking on the range we store our two big pots in the dishrack because there’s no where else to put them. Other pots, as you can see, we hang on the wall. Y’know how kitchens look wonderful in the Ikea catalogue pages with pots and other things hanging in wondrous gleaming organized glory from the wall? Did I even begin to fantasize our kitchen would gleam? No.
Indeedy, those are paper towels up above the sink. They are recycled. The plastic packaging in which they come says Green, 100% Recycled. Every so often I try using cut up bath towels and then return to being a bad person again, but I do have stored under the sink several old bath towels should the urge hit again. They are like twenty year old bath towels. Second hand. That’s because until six months ago all our bath towels used to be everyone else’s rejects. When others got rid of their bath towels because they were too old, we’d take ‘em and use them for another ten years. But now we have Ikea bath towels because finally, in our long long marriage, we decided to treat ourselves to some new bath towels. Because some times it’s just plain nice to have new things. Especially new things like bath towels. And because six months ago we accidentally left a load of our old bath towels at the laundromat, which demanded we get new ones.
“How do they wash dishes with that roll around storage thingy in front of the sink?”
Yeah, it’s a pain, but we needed somewhere to have a crock pot and other general storage for water and dishes that don’t fit in the cabinet above the sink and because we keep some dishes down there so H.o.p. can easily reach them.
How perceptive of you! Yes, above the kitchen sink is a small picture of the Last Supper in front of a blown-up image of police advancing on a citizen during a 60s protest (we’ve had that protest pic for years because it looks like my MIL being advanced upon by the riot squad, except she would never have been anywhere near a protest, for which reason it’s funny, and lest you think I was being mean in treasuring this, my BIL was the one who found and gave this to us). Lots of postcards of the desert, because I like the desert. They keep falling down and I keep taping them back.
As for the Last Supper, a one-time neighbor saw it and knew we’d appreciate its weird mirrored finish. The kitchen seemed like a great place to put the Last Supper. It had once been in the bathroom but I was worried about offending some people who were coming to visit, thinking they might not like seeing the Last Supper in the bathroom. And being a sensitive sort, I moved it.
Exhibit C
I suppose some people don’t understand that I have a sense of humor. Especially on days like today. Maybe the past several months (years) in general. But I do. I’ve got a sense of humor.
There you have it. Our kitchen. If you have any cheap cheap ideas for how we can get some food prep counter space, I’d appreciate it.
