Put on the Glasses

Garden Project 2010 has started!  We went to Home Depot this evening and picked up some supplies for the summer.  I am very excited.  Here's a shot of what I bought: This year, Brian and I are abandoning the backyard (so there is no need to fight with the neighbor kids for space) and we are going to plant our garden on the fire escape.  This will be probably be to our benefit because I will be able to keep a close eye on my flowers and a have terrific view out my window. Here are some things you can look forward to reading about in the 2010 Garden Project: Building a window flower box or where to buy a good one Small space gardening techniques What flowers and vegetables grow best in Brooklyn Alicia's desperate attempts to keep the neighbor kids away from her vegetables Leela's inevitable escape attempts back to her old stomping ground I am happy it is almost time to start growing things again.  I had so much fun last summer!  Hopefully I will le...

I changed the look of my blog today.  Are you excited?  I am. Here is a screenshot of what the old blog looked like (please ignore the little beige box; I was hovering over my bookmark): Here is what the new page looks like (I'm putting a picture up for Facebook readers and posterity): I love the new color scheme and clean look.  I hope you like it too!  Let me know what you think and if you have any suggestions for how I can make it even better.

I'm trying to go "paperless." By this I mean scanning everything into my computer instead of keeping it forever. I hold onto everything: letters, greeting cards, articles that I clip from magazines. This paper is all taking up storage space and starting to get out of hand. My inspiration for starting this scanning comes from three sources: lack of storage; this post on The Lawyerist blog; and the A&E show Hoarders . I do not want to be a hoarder. My problem is that I feel guilt tossing a nice card or note. So, with some Christmas money we bought a new, cheap Canoscan scanner from Microcenter. Now I can keep it all without it taking up any more space than my computer already does. I'm only keeping hard copies of important papers, like my taxes, legal documents and bank statements. So far it is going well. I got rid of a couple of garbage bags full of paper and that is only from the area around my desk. It is time consuming to scan but I find a couple of ho...

Every six months or so Brian and I see someone's apartment or go to an open house. This inevitably results in our deciding that we need to change things in our apartment. Our friend, Jay used to make fun of us because our apartment would be completely different every time she came over to visit. We can't seem to help ourselves. This time we saw our neighbor's apartment. We were watching their cat over the holidays and they have the most wonderful, open apartment. They have nowhere near the amount of stuff we have but it isn't empty or cold. We are a bit jealous. So, of course, this results in our consulting the IKEA catalog (it's pages get pretty worn by the end of each year) and rethinking our space. This time I decided to use graph paper to create a new layout for the bedroom. This is our bedroom right now: Behind the bed are windows that you can't get anywhere near with the bed where it is. This layout is also really annoying because the dresser draw...

This is the front side of the Christmas letter we sent this year. We did a silly quiz. My Mom was right: you need to send mail to get mail. We sent out Christmas cards shortly after Thanksgiving and we have received a ton of cards in return. I am so excited! I am decorating my bookshelves with them to celebrate. Thank you, everyone! To everyone that I didn't get a chance to send a card to: this is the letter that we sent with our cards. Enjoy! This is the back of the letter:

I love zombie movies. My first date with Brian, I made the poor guy watch Dawn of the Dead and Shaun of the Dead . A while back I saw a photo of a glass case that held a fake shotgun that said "in case of zombies break glass" (click here for my original inspiration). Of course, I wanted one. However, they were a promotional item for a videogame. Plus, the shotguns were fake, not at all useful if zombies actually were going to attack. I tried to see if I could buy one of those fire cases that hold fire extinguishers and fire blankets and just adapt it. Those boxes, it turns out, cost at least a hundred dollars. I decided to take matters into my own hands and build myself an emergency box to prepare for the zombie apocalypse. I bought a frame for a few bucks from a discount store and hand painted the glass: The objects surrounding the glass were part of my "cat deterrence system." Oddly it worked. Livia prefers to sit on my paper projects anyways. I built a...

She seems to think that my cruise souvenirs make a better bed then a scrapbook.

As some of you have already heard, a few weeks ago, when new tenants moved into the building, a large portion of my plants were destroyed or irreparably damaged. I know, it is sad. Brian and I were initially furious, but, with the advice of my father, I cooled off. We removed a bunch of plants from the garden, the ones that could be salvaged, and moved them up to the fire escape. At first, the destruction stopped. No children were in the backyard for weeks. Then, one night, we heard yelling in the backyard. Looking out the window, we see a group of boys throwing our rocks into the construction pit. We yelled at them to stop. They didn't. I yelled at the father standing next to the building, he yelled at the kids and they finally stopped. Fast forward another couple of weeks. Kids have dismantled much of our rock garden. I go in the backyard to work and one girl tells us how they "can't put the rocks back, they are building a bridge!" Okay, I get it. I was a k...

Not just day lilies are growing in my garden. The tomatoes are starting to come in. I am flabbergasted. I honestly believed the rats would find them before me. I don't even care if I get to eat them. I am just proud of me for not killing them. If they do last long enough I think I am going to go with my Dad's advice: ripen them off the vine to save them from the vermin. I am waiting impatiently for just a touch of color and then inside they go!

I actually grew a day lily! I was so happy to see them bloom that I had to snap a picture to share! I am beginning to think that my thumb may actually be green. Who would have thought? Not I.

I have wanted to post about our apartment for a while but I have been lazy. It isn't just the photo taking, it is also the cleaning so that you don't have to see pictures of my dirty dishes. So, I waited and now Brian has posted a great walk-through of the apartment on his blog (click here ). So, in order to avoid overlap, I plan to post my favorite things about the apartment in a series. So, let's begin! Here you see our art wall: We have too much art. We actually had to put a lot of it in storage. Since we like our new wall colors so much, we decided to try putting all of our little art on one wall. Above you can see postcards, photographs and prints. My favorites are the three on the right: a signed print of Brian's favorite cartoon by Randall Monroe, a drawing of a martini-carrying stick figure and a stylized postcard of the subway. This picture shows our dining table: I love that we can actually sit in each chair without moving the table. Downstairs, it...

I was very happy to see that my marigolds have bloomed. I grew these little flowers from seed and they survived. I am starting to believe that I am actually capable of gardening! Here is my pot of basil: Here is my other marigold pot: I am so happy that they haven't died. With all of the rain we have had, I honestly thought most of my stuff would drown or get crushed. I am ecstatic.

I just had to take a couple of pictures of Brian cutting the grass with scissors. We don't want to buy or store a weed whacker so he is forced to snip.

Brian laid down new flooring in our apartment. The old flooring was not only filthy with dirt and paint splatter (not ours), but badly damaged from water and wear. We knew that refinishing the wood floors was an impossible task for us, not only financially but also in our lack of tools. Therefore, we decided to get IKEA brand laminate flooring. We went with the cheapest, the SLATTEN, at 65 cents a square foot. What IKEA doesn't tell you, however, are that the additional costs make the flooring much more expensive. Brian and I ended up going over our budget because you also need the plastic liner that goes under the floor, spacers, a rubber mallet, a tool to help you tap the floor in, a miter saw (or table saw), quarterround trim and transition pieces to use between rooms. Luckily, by shear happenstance, IKEA was out of a lot of these tools and we ended up buying them at Lowes where they turned out to be cheaper. Above, you can see the beginning of plastic being laid down ove...

The living room was about the same as the bedroom. As you can see above, the walls were a medium grey with dark green trim. The ceilings had also been painted on in this room so we had to paint them. Here is Brian touching up the ceiling: We only primed this room once because it didn't have peeling paint like the bedroom. Brian was too fast for me. His favorite method was jumping up and down (I could almost hear that House of Pain song playing in the background). Here's a shot of him hopping: We are really happy with the color in the living room. It is called "Henderson Buff" and it never seems to be just one color (click here to see how it looked on the paint swatch). In the can it looked yellow. On the wall it changes as the day goes on and it changes depending on what color you have just been looking at. At times I have seen it look lime green, chartreuse, tan, gold and sage green. Here is the room after we finished the walls (the blue tape is still u...

When Brian and I first decided to move upstairs, we had grand dreams of renovations and changes. It turns out that these changes are significantly more time consuming then we ever imagined. For instance, I didn't remember how long it took to paint a room. I wasn't able to get very good pictures of the apartment before we painted it. The bedroom, as you can kind of see above, was a pinkish-white with brown trim (the picture was taken with me standing in the bedroom facing the door). Also, as you can see below, the previous tenants painted on the ceiling with their wall color. This forced us to paint the ceilings too. So, we had to put two coats of primer up before we could paint. Here is the sterilized and primed room: After all of that dried (in high humidity on this island) we were finally able to put color on the walls. Here is Brian finishing up the trim in the bedroom: We love the color on the walls. It is Benjamin Moore's Venezuelan Sea (click here to see...

Livia loves the new place and seems happier than ever.  However, Leela cowers under the bed.  Maybe that is why Livia is happy.  I wonder if the cats will ever get along. We are still unpacking.  More posts to come!

The old tenants have departed and the apartment upstairs is now ours for the fixing. We are moving on the 15th. So, until then, we will be working our butts off getting the place ready. First, the old tenants left a lot of junk. Above, Brian can be seen taking apart the queen sized IKEA bed they left behind. They didn't even take the bedding (they even left a wet towel on the bed... ew). They also left a couch, desk, bookshelf, table, stools, entertainment center, TV, speakers, dishes and a bunch of food. Most of our first day in the place working was taken up cleaning up their mess. Here you can see Brian sawing the couch in half so that we can get it out of the apartment: It simply wouldn't fit through the door and it was in bad condition. I don't think anyone will miss this couch. You can sort of see in the picture above the neat little shelves between the kitchen and living room. We are very excited. Right now, we are painting, sanding, and filling holes. We ...

Just in case you haven't heard, Brian and I are moving! We are not leaving the building. Instead, we are moving up to another apartment upstairs when other tenants move out. The apartment upstairs is the same size as ours but it has over twice as many windows. We are very excited to have natural light in all of our rooms. The big downside to the apartment is that it is in need of renovation. It is the only apartment in the building that hasn't been updated in 7 years. For instance, there is no sink in the bathroom. So, we can't move into the apartment until the landlord puts in a new sink. All other renovations we will handle on our own. We are excited for the move and so are the cats. We already started packing some stuff up and Livia has discovered a new perch: She loves it up there. We will keep you posted about the move!

Last weekend, Brian spent an amazing amount of time digging up rocks. In order to claim the other half of the garden back from the weeds and broken glass, Brian dug through the dirt, pulling out rocks to cover the worst part of the yard. He found an incredible number of rocks, including bricks in a pattern that had clearly been a patio long ago. Below, you can see the rocks that Brian found. All of the rocks behind the pots were dug up by Brian in the other half of the yard. Now, we are going to seed the rest of the yard with grass and we should have a beautiful yard! Hooray! Our garden is coming around beautifully!