the saga isn’t quite over yet tho

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So, the kitchen. Well it still needs painting but also now I have to put everything away. We ate dinner Friday night over at dude’s mom’s house because all our food was there and also we didn’t have chairs in the new kitchen yet.

Yeah. We gotta go find chairs.

First I want to start off with this detail.

[image description: a close-up of the white tiled wall, where it intersects with the ceiling, one of the cabinets, and the stainless steel vent hood over the stove. The tiles are staggered in a regular pattern, but there is a tiny, maybe half-inch-wide segment of tile next to the cabinet in every other row, which I know Jim had to painstakingly trim off and carefully adhere like that, so that it looks like the pattern goes behind the cabinet.] I pointed those out to Jim and said I loved them, and he smiled and said they were a pain in the ass but there’s no other way to do it, and I said I would always always look at them and think about what a pain in the ass they had been to do.

Anyway. Friday evening we brought the cat over and she realized with delight she could not only get to her window but also then traverse the entire expanse of cabinet, daintily picking her way over the stove to go over the sink and stare out that window too. She’s not likely to get into stuff and clearly did not enjoy crossing the stove, so I’m not super worried about her actually getting into trouble. We made do, sitting at the counter on a combo of the folding stool and dude’s work chair which is adjustable to… not high enough but… well at least it’s sort of comfortable.

There is a pile of very long trim pieces that is shoved into the living room and is sort of preventing use of about half the couch, so I didn’t have anywhere else to sit all evening, lol. Good thing the chair was comfy, and I didn’t totally mind it being too low.

But I was resolved that Saturday we were getting chairs somehow.

Saturday morning we got up and got ready, and discovered that our coffeemaker, a Mr. Coffee in excess of 15 years of age, had developed a fatal issue. Dude’s mom only has a little one-cup Keurig and so we brought our machine over, and in the move it developed a crack in the pipe that brings water from the heating element to distribute it over the grounds. This is not really repairable. I had to kind of convert it from a drip to a pour-over, and stood there with the kettle carefully pouring water through the basket. RIP Mr. Coffee, you served us well and long.

Dude opened Wirecutter and looked up drip coffeemakers. He also researched stainless steel cleaners for me, and confirmed our itinerary with me.

We hit the road and got to Target before 9am. We got a bin to fit under the sink for recyclables, we got the last bits of shelf liner I still needed, we got a dish drainer (a nice, new, small one so we could retire the large decaying bamboo one we got also 15 years ago). We got hot glue sticks, randomly, because I need some. And we got the Cuisinart coffee maker that Wirecutter had said was the best drip coffeemaker for most people.

Then we went to Big Lots in case they had counter-height stools. They didn’t.

Then we went to a different commercial region ten minutes away. (That’s how it works, there are little clusters of shops along various roads and there’s different ones in different areas. This other cluster also had a Target but an inferior one.) We went first to a plaza with a Petco, to get the special cat food Chita likes that isn’t at the grocery store, and next door to that was a Harbor Freight, that sometimes has good rolling stools, but they did not have anything suitable. Next to that was a Raymour & Flanagan furniture store.

Well. When we entered the furniture store, we unwittingly passed through some kind of portal, as it was much larger on the inside than on the outside. We wandered, dazed and lost and slightly overheated; we sat in some chairs and they weren’t quite right, those were too hard, these had nail head designs on the backs that dude didn’t like, these were a dark wood that matched nothing in our house. The saleslady found us and asked to help, and we tried to show her the first ones we’d looked at, which had been sort of close to what we wanted, but we could not find them and roamed a long time, together with her, finding new rooms full of other furniture, lost and weary. Finally she just searched their website, and found that nothing answered the description we’d given her and that she was sure she’d also seen somewhere around here. She gave us her card, and we stumbled back out into the morning, feeling like we’d sojourned a thousand years in the fairy world.

We went to Homegoods, which I’d been to the week before, and they’d had some stools that I thought sounded a lot like what Dude was describing as his desired seating item. So I led him straight to them. They had a total of six stools in their display. Four of them were of one set. And Dude was like “Oh yeah! Just like that!”

So we pulled one out and sat on it, and it was comfortable enough, and the right height, and functional, so we said probably we should get these. And we went over and got some kitchen storage thingies, some lazy susans and a drawer organizer thing and whatever, but then we came back to these stools and there was an employee there and we asked her if we were supposed to just shove these in our cart or what and she was like oh hang on and got a guy from the back to come take them to the front, and he was like “your name’s on ‘em so just say those are yours when you check out”. Bada-bing. We got two of them, apparently Nautica brand, which I’ve heard of but don’t know anything about. Sure!

[image description: a view into the trunk of a hatchback (Subaru Forester), showing two gray-upholstered wooden stools crammed in 69-style to the left (in the progress of being crammed in, there’s Dude’s arm in the middle pushing the second one), and to the right is a Target bag and the box of a coffeemaker and the recycle bin and all the shit we got at Target jumbled into the corner.]

Triumphant, we set out for home, but there was another furniture store on the way home and Dude wondered if we ought to go see, just to see what they had. So we did, we went in and I beelined for the recliners.

See, the thing is, Dude’s mom has a recliner in her living room. And it’s the throne, where she watches TV. And Chita loves to sit on it, it’s where she spent most of the time we were staying there. And I sat in it mostly because that’s where the cat wanted to be, but oh wow, it was comfortable. And lo… when I stood up, my hip was in the right place, and there was no pain, unlike when I unfold myself from shrimping on the couch and have to put myself back together every time.

And yeah my general pain levels were way down the whole time we stayed there, even though the mattress is way too hard and ought to have fucked me up pretty good. And…

shit. I’m the kind of middle-aged that needs a recliner.

And they had one, at Ashley, and it was on sale for enough that the delivery fee and taxes still made it come out less than the sticker said. But they can’t deliver it until late January. Which is fine because our living room is full of kitchen furniture and I have to finish putting all of it away.

So. New kitchen and also new living room furniture. But I’ll worry about that later.

Now we could go home triumphantly and get started putting stuff away.

The chairs are yet another neutral, but it’s a coordinating neutral, they kind of match the countertops, with a creamy-white kind of base color flecked in grays. We have made no progress thereby at choosing a color for the kitchen– I had been prepared to accept a boldly-colored item and have to pick colors around it, but no. We remain classy, tasteful, and neutral, and I’m going to have to do something about it.

[image description: A bay window with a glossy countertop in front of it, and in front of that are a pair of counter-height stools, with cream-upholstered seats and backs, and wooden legs.]

I think I need a better lamp to go on this windowsill. There’s plenty of lighting in the room, but no non-overhead light for this space, and nothing controllable from this end of the room. I’m vaguely considering a tiny chandelier if I can find such a thing, that would be fun.

I also think it would be fun to install some kind of art piece up there in that chunk of wall between the trim and the ceiling, you see that narrow band there? It’s like six or eight inches by like. 48 inches. I’ll measure it later. A slogan would be funny but I also just had the idea of like, a mini Bayeux tapestry only depicting some other kind of event, not sure what.

I’ll put it on the list, LOL.

Anyway– the really critical things are 1) that it turns out our gray kitchen coordinates beautifully with our gray cat, who is of course the most beautiful, and 2) our gray cat can hop up on these stools and thus is able to avail herself of Attention and Snuggles. (I had worried I’d have to get her a stepstool I’d have to then leave set up, so she could reach this window.)

[Image description: a gray and white cat is encircled within a man’s arms on the kitchen counter, and has the back of her neck pressed against his face, her eyes closed in contentment.] She was rubbing her ear against his nose, which is a thing she for some reason loves to do.

So. All is well. I’ve been putting things in cabinets and taking them back out, and running everything I possibly can through the dishwasher, and to my astonishment haven’t wrecked a thing yet I didn’t intend to (I already know from being at my sister’s that a certain category of plastic container will mostly melt in there but that’s fine if you’re just trying to get it clean to recycle it, it’s not like it gets onto other things). And Dude realized the dishwasher has an app, so he paired his phone to it.

At Middle-Little sister’s prompting, we’ve named the dishwasher Suds MacKenzie, since it lets you pick a name and that’s the funniest one we could think of.

We retrieved our groceries from Dude’s mom’s house and cooked dinner and set off the smoke alarm so now we’ve really broken it in.

The stove is really level. For the record. (Your picture was not posted)

This is more of a rant than anything but I figured it fits here, but someone tell me why the fuck th

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And with the New Year I'm already dreading seeing any social media or streaming that has ads. I think we should start a "Just No Ads! January" and turn on ad blockers for all social media and boycott streaming services with ads for that month. Just movies and books you curate yourself with no fucking diet or weight loss pill or exercise machine ads.

-ATL (Your picture was not posted)