suziebeezieland

the laundry room in my kitchen

Our laundry room is in our kitchen, so I like to keep it tidy because we have to look at it all the time. :) 

Claire has a hamper in her bedroom closet, and we have one in our bedroom, and there is one in the bathroom for towels. This little white basket here is just for kitchen laundry, like dishtowels and napkins and placemats and table cloths. No unmentionables. :) You have to have standards, if you're going to have your laundry in your kitchen. 

The black wardrobe used to be my brother-in-law's when he was little. My sister painted it black several years ago, and I am borrowing it for as long as I need it. (We have a lot of these "long-term-furniture-loan" situations set up between the two of us. It's quite nice.) The inside is full of all my baking ingredients and supplies. (The drawers are really nice for the pans.)

The side of the stacked washer and dryer is not lovely, but I think these aprons are.

Our Melanie tucked a few of these chalkboard labels in a couple of my orders from her lovely etsy shop, The Paper Pear. I love them and use them all over the place! (Instead of regular chalk, I like chalk ink markers, because they don't smear as easily.)

Bob likes to tease me for labeling clear glass and plastic containers, because, he points out, "You can see what's inside!" 

little bathroom demo day

The picture on the left is our little bathroom this morning, and the picture on the right is our little bathroom now. Check out the vinyl tile that was hiding under the real tile. Yeesh.

It's so exciting. I feel like Ramona when she wants to go tell first grade that she has a hole chopped in the side of her house. :D

Our demo guys were great ... clean (they threw everything that would fit out the window straight into a bin instead of schlepping it through the house) and fast.

ps The demo guy told me there was a mouse nest in the corner. Let us never speak of it again.

the incredibly capricious, hurtful fickleness of hollywood

I was just checking the news on Yahoo and saw these two photos of our BFFs Colin and Gary (and some chicks) at the Oscars tonight.

I'm a little hurt that my sister and I weren't invited, but whatevs.

a bathtub and some faucets

We're gearing up to get both bathrooms remodeled. Whoo-ee, it is going to be a mess around here for awhile. But I'm really thankful we get to do this, because they're both falling apart right now. 

I met all of our contractor's subcontractors the week before last, and they seemed like knowledgeable guys ... an electrician, a plumber, a tile guy, a structural guy (he was to make sure we can take out the wall on one side of the shower in the big bathroom and replace it with glass without having the ceiling cave in) and a demo guy. That was encouraging.

I've been pricing things and figuring out what to get, and then over this past weekend we actually made a couple purchases online.

We are wanting to put a 5-foot-long clawfoot tub in the big bathroom, and I'd had sticker shock looking through the catalogs over at Home Depot. A very plain and basic 5-foot acrylic clawfoot tub we had liked was $2040. Yikes! 

Then I found out Rejuvenation was having a "half-off clawfoot tubs" sale. This 5-foot cast iron tub was originally $1145, but is now $573. Yay! For the first time in my life, I have ordered a bathtub online.

(The shipping wasn't as bad as you'd think.)

The only thing I'm worried about is that I really like my UPS guy, Mark, and I am thinking he may never speak to me again if he has to haul a cast iron bathtub off his truck. That may be the final straw. Did I ever tell you about the time he crawled up on the roof of our porch after a DHL guy mysteriously threw a package up there? I love Mark. 

I found pedestal sinks I liked at Home Depot (from the Kohler "Memoirs" line ... who comes up with the wistful and dramatic names for bathroom lines, anyway?), and I've been looking for faucets. I looked at all the in-stock faucets at Home Depot, and went through their special order catalogs, but didn't see anything I liked that was in our price range. So then I started looking online. 

I peeked in at Restoration Hardware, even though I knew they would be too expensive. But I also knew they would be lovely, and would give me some design ideas.

The Grafton is $469 onsale. Yikes! But so pretty.

Then I mosied on over to Pottery Barn to look at their faucets. I like the Cole, but at $299.00, that's still way more than I want to spend for a sink faucet.

Then I checked out Overstock.com, and lookee here. It's "The Metropolitan." It looks a whole lot like The Cole! :) But The Metropolitan is $139.99.

In fact, I'm kind of thinking it is The Cole. What do you think? It's made by Kingston Brass. I wonder if that is who Pottery Barn uses to manufacture theirs? Anyway, it had good reviews on Overstock, so I'm hoping it's solid. I can return them if they're not. (I ordered two -- one for each sink.)

That's still a chunk of change, of course, and I don't want to get that disease where you think "oh, that's an okay price" just because you've been looking at really way-too-expensive things right before that. I mean, it's a bathroom.

I remember my bathroom when I lived in Poland. Boy, there was a bunch of stuff jammed into that bathroom. The toilet was separate (a true "water closet"), and then the bathroom had a tub with handheld shower attachment, a sink, a washing machine, the clothelines over the tub, and the hot water heater for the bathroom, which was mounted over the tub.

These were not pretty western European bathrooms. These were eastern European bathrooms, made of plastic and laminate and all of them under some strange Communist-era mandate to be entirely ugly while not always being functional, either. You'd always hear wild stories about people's gas hot-water heaters blowing off the walls if they weren't maintained properly. In one bathroom I saw at a school, the faucets were too short and you couldn't get your hands under them properly in the sink. But that was Poland in the early 90s ... I trust things have picked up a bit in the past 20 years.

Americans were always going over there and trying to decorate and pretty-up their bathrooms, and my Polish friends thought that was hilarious. "Why would you make it pretty? It's just where people go 'w celu gówna,'" somebody said, doubled over with laughter ... a highly pragmatic approach. 

I won't wear you all out showing you every little thing about the bathroom remodel. But I'll post some before-during-and-after pics once it's done. It'll be awhile yet.

I just had to tell somebody that I ordered a cast iron tub online. Ha. 

clouds

Here's another Szymborska poem, because just because she isn't in the news anymore this week, doesn't mean I don't still miss her.

Clouds

I’d have to be really quick
to describe clouds—
a split second’s enough
… for them to start being something else.

Their trademark:
they don’t repeat a single
shape, shade, pose, arrangement.

Unburdened by memory of any kind,
they float easily over the facts.

What on earth could they bear witness to?
They scatter whenever something happens.

Compared to clouds,
life rests on solid ground,
practically permanent, almost eternal.

Next to clouds
even a stone seems like a brother,
someone you can trust,
while they’re just distant, flighty cousins.

Let people exist if they want,
and then die, one after another:
clouds simply don’t care
what they’re up to
down there.

And so their haughty fleet
cruises smoothly over your whole life
and mine, still incomplete.

They aren’t obliged to vanish when we’re gone.
They don’t have to be seen while sailing on.

 

(Translated by Stanisław Barańczak and Clare Cavanagh)

a little princess + the wizard of oz

Have any of you collected any of the new Puffin Classics? They are pretty, reasonably priced hardbacks. (They're less than $12 each on Amazon.)

I also like them because they fit in the old-fashioned telephone cubby in our hallway. :)

I just noticed that A Little Princess and The Wizard of Oz are coming out in May. They're available for pre-order at $10.67 each.

the porch light from middle-earth

One of the odd things about blogging is that you sometimes find yourself presuming that someone in the universe besides yourself is actually interested in your porch light. That's probably not good.

But since suziebeezieland is a sporadic record of selected items from my actual life, and since I don't talk politics or play sports, and since I can't stand gossip and don't really know how to knit, here you go. A brief synopsis of my porch light. 

As you may recall, (1) the first light I ordered was backordered until May, and wouldn't have fit, anyway, because I measured incorrectly, which I found out when (2) the second light arrived and didn't fit, because of the previously aforementioned incorrect measuring. (That little sliver of wall between the lamp and the door is EXACTLY eight inches wide. It is hard to find a cute lamp with a projection less than eight inches.) 

So Bob picked (3) the third light. He spotted it while I was dejectedly browsing lights online, and said "Get that one! It looks Hobbit-y!"

It didn't strike me as something I would necessarily have picked out on my own. I tend to like cleaner lines, and I'm not a fan of faux metal finishes. But I was kind of worn out with myself about the porch light at this point, because let's face it ... you probably shouldn't spend more than a few minutes of your life thinking about your porch light. And accurate measuring is definitely Bob's strong suit, and he so rarely has design opinions that I love to do what he suggests when he does speak up.

And so I ordered it, and I love it so much! It's so wee and cute! It does, indeed, look like something Tolkien would have come up with if he had pursued a career in lighting rather than the English language. 

It's darling and storybook-y, and it fits in the little space, and it functions. And it has the soft lines we needed to break up all the strong vertical and horizontal lines out front. I don't think any of the lights I picked would have been as good.

So Bob's hired, man. Never underestimate a guy who takes his design cues from The Shire. He can choose all the lights from now on.

the secret garden

Claire and I were playing with Kinotopic more this morning, because it's fun! I thought it would be fun to mess around with this pretty Puffin cover from The Secret Garden.  I think it looks a little smoother on the actual Kinotopic site, because there it's a little movie there rather than just an animated gif.

tweet tweet

This is my first cinemagraph. I made it using the Kinotopic app.

I (obviously) need to practice, but it's really fun!

It kind of looks like a tattoo on somebody's arm, but actually I used a Rae Dunn (off-white) vase with a birdy on it, and wiggled it for a little bit for my 3-second video. The app takes you through what to do once you have that little video. It seems to work best if the movement you're using is rhythmic and slight and not too jerky.

Some of the cinemagraphs people have made are so fantastic. I especially like this one with berries, and this one with tea steam, and this one with the plant's reflection in the window, and this one with the construction site. And this one with the skirt. And this one with the smoke. Magical! Click on the "top" link next to "featured" and "latest" to see the best ones.

(Kinotopic is my new favorite app. I'm horribly fickle when it comes to apps, but it seems like each is more glorious than the next with what they can all do.)

vroman's

We are fortunate to live close to southern California's oldest and largest independent bookstore, Vroman's. It has a lovely second floor devoted to children's books, and Claire and I like to go poke around it sometimes for fun. It's one of those places that has a lot to look at, and you don't need to actually buy anything to enjoy it. (Although we usually leave with something or other.) Claire and I spent some time there yesterday while we were waiting to meet Bob for dinner.

I should mention that Claire used one of her birthday gift certificates to buy herself a pair of fake glasses. She was trying them out yesterday, and is quite taken with them. I didn't let her wear them to school this morning, but she has plans to put them on as soon as she gets home.

a little harry potter birthday party

On Saturday, we had a little Harry-Potter-themed family birthday party for Claire. (On her actual birthday she went bowling with a few friends and then came back to the house for pizza and cake.)

I say "a little Harry Potter birthday party" because if you Google "Harry Potter parties," you will see that some people have devoted their life savings and the bulk of their days on earth to throwing really huge and elaborate Harry Potter parties, in which their entire homes are remodeled to look like Hogwarts.

These looked like a lot of fun. :D

I just did my typical thing where we only decorate the dining room. This keeps it under control. :) I was in charge of food and decor. I kept it simple ... we had (at Claire's request) shepherd's pie, peas (my brother-in-law Greg said it was the first birthday party he had ever been to that had peas), English muffins, and, inexplicably, peppermint creams. Also, cupcakes.

Bob was in charge of all the fun activities. He also made the butterbeer.

And whoo I'm telling you, that boy had FUN.

He had a little Ollivander's wand selection ceremony in the kitchen that involved Claire and her cousins all standing on chairs watching a science experiment in the microwave ... it was incredibly clever, and I'm going to videotape him doing it and show you later on in case you ever want to do it yourself.

He made THE BEST butterbeer, and I'll have him show you that, too.

He also made a Quidditch pitch in the front yard and ran a quidditch practice (after previewing the quidditch game in the first Harry Potter movie with the kids).

And he came up with a really great Sorting Hat ceremony (a random drawing rather than a test, although he did rig it so that all the kids ended up in Gryffindor) that was one of the funniest things I've ever seen, because both my mom and Bob's mom ended up (completely randomly) in Slytherin and were then cheering Slytherin on. They totally cracked me up.

Expelliarmus!

I put Harry up the day before the party, and then was scared by him all day whenever I walked by. I kept thinking Bob was home from work.

I found these quidditch broomstick favors here, and the directions were here. They were very fast and easy to make. I filled the base up with Skittles Riddles, which are a different flavor than the color would indicate, and which seemed kind of magical. :)

Isn't Harry realistic? Seriously, I jumped out of my skin about twenty times on Friday.

We had a blast. 

my sister makes a little heart wreath out of a paper napkin

Happy Valentine's Day! :)

I went over to my sister's this morning for a cup of coffee, and she had these really sweet little paper heart wreaths on her light. So she started to show me how to make one, and I said "Wait!" and grabbed my phone to video tape it (1) so I could show you, and (2) so I could remember, because I get a little confused trying to remember things that have directions like "up" or "down" or "sideways" in them.

She said she found it on Martha Stewart and there is a video of Martha Stewart making one, but I like my sister way more than I like Martha Stewart, so here is a video of my sister making one. :)

nine

Sniff.

happy birthday, chuck!

Happy 200th birthday, Charles Dickens! :)

The art of Dickens was the most exquisite of arts: it was the art of enjoying everybody. Dickens, being a very human writer, had to be a very human being; he had his fault and sensibilities in a strong degree; and I do not for a moment maintain that he enjoyed everybody in his daily life. But he enjoyed everybody in his books: and everybody has enjoyed everybody in his books even till today. (G.K. Chesterton)

making a poppy seed shaker

Today Claire and I planted poppy seeds and sunflower seeds in the wee tiny strip of dirt in front of the fence that separates our driveway from our neighbor's backyard.

I see this fence and this dirt when I look out my kitchen window, so I like to have flowers growing in it. (We don't park in this part of the driveway.)

Poppies have tee-tiny-itty-bitty seeds. (So do many other flowers.)

You can just pour the seeds into your palm and sprinkle them into the dirt, but it's easy to lose a lot of the seeds, or end up dumping them all in one place.

So a few years ago I thought about it and tried this, and it has worked better. We pour them into our parmesan cheese shaker. (It has a screw-on metal lid with holes in it.)

You can see how tiny the poppy seeds are. They're almost like coarse dirt, and it's very hard to know if you're sowing them somewhat evenly.

Next, I pour the sunflower seeds into the cheese shaker with the poppy seeds. (We're planting several different types of sunflower seeds this year.)

The sunflower seeds are too big to come out of the shaker holes themselves, but their weight makes the poppy seeds shake out evenly, so they don't dump out all at once. 

The poppies will come up in the spring, and the sunflowers will come up in the summer.

Put your palm over the holes and then shake the shaker so all the seeds get mixed up together. 

Any little stray poppy seeds stick to the sunflower seeds instead of the inside of the glass, for some reason. So the stray seeds get planted instead of wasted, since they're stuck to the sunflower seeds. :)

Water the dirt first, because it will help the poppy seeds stick to it, then shake the poppy seeds into the dirt.

Then take the lid off and shake out the sunflower seeds. These are a lot easier to control, and you've already mixed these up together, so you don't get all the tall sunflowers down at one end of the fence and the short ones down at the other. 

Then sprinkle some soil on top of them to cover them all up. (If you actually hoe the dirt after you've seeded, you'll make the poppy seeds go down too deep. So just sprinkle dirt over them. You can poke any sunflower seeds still showing down with your finger.)

Then water them every day. :)

I'll post more photos once we have some flowers. :)

a little more szymborska

I dug around in my bookcase and found the two Szymborska volumes I own. The one on the left is in Polish and is very slim, and I bought it in Krakow in 1993 for less than a dollar. The złoty was redenomiated in 1995, but when I lived there, I think there were usually about 10,000 złoty to the dollar. 

Anyway, not very much money at all for such good poetry, even if my math and memory are both wrong.

The volume on the right is still available used through Amazon (and here is her author page), and is a good English translation. This book enjoyed a brief, fashionable stint in Starbucks after Szymborska won the Nobel Prize, and I bought it there because I wanted it, but also to rescue it, because Starbucks seemed all wrong for it. It was kind of a cultural reconnaissance mission while I stood in line for a latte. Come here, book. Come home and live with me, and I will treat you right.

I should mention that though her themes are often grim -- she is, after all, an old Pole, which means she survived idiot Nazis and idiot Soviets -- she is very, very funny.

Stanisław Barańczak, who (along with Clare Cavanagh) did the translations, is himself an award-winning Polish poet.

Here's another Szymborska poem I really like. It swims back into my head on a pretty regular basis.

We're Extremely Fortunate

We're extremely fortunate
not to know precisely
the kind of world we live in.

One would have to live a long, long time,
unquestionably longer
than the world itself.

Get to know other worlds,
if only for comparison.

Rise above the flesh,
which only really knows
how to obstruct
and make trouble.

For the sake of research,
the big picture,
and definitive conclusions,
one would have to transcend time,
in which everything scurries and whirls.

From that perspective,
one might as well bid farewell
to incidents and details.

The counting of weekdays
would inevitably seem to be
a senseless activity;

dropping letters in the mailbox
a whim of foolish youth;

the sign "No Walking On the Grass"
a symptom of lunacy. 

wisława szymborska

I am sad to hear that Wisława Szymborska, one of my favorite poets, has died.

(It is pronounced "Vees-wah-vah Shim-bor-ska". The crossed "L" always makes a "w" sound in Polish. The "w" always makes a "v" sound. The "sz" always makes a "sh" sound.)

I used to see her sweeping her front walk when I lived in Krakow. She was just normal. Except the inside of her brain was not.

But this was three years before she won the Nobel Prize, and I was back in the U.S. when she did, and I always wondered if that meant she couldn't just sweep her walk anymore. It must be wretched to be famous if you are a poet. I think most poets are ingoing rather than outgoing. I guess you get the occasional Lord Byron, but he was more like an actor, really. I bet most poets just want to take their Nobel Prize and slink on home.

Szymborska's poems are deceptively simple. Here is one of them:

Nothing Twice

Nothing can ever happen twice.
In consequence, the sorry fact is
that we arrive here improvised
and leave without the chance to practice.

Even if there is no one dumber,
if you're the planet's biggest dunce,
you can't repeat the class in summer:
this course is only offered once.

No day copies yesterday,
no two nights will teach what bliss is
in precisely the same way,
with precisely the same kisses.

One day, perhaps some idle tongue
mentions your name by accident:
I feel as if a rose were flung
into the room, all hue and scent.

The next day, though you're here with me,
I can't help looking at the clock:
A rose? A rose? What could that be?
Is it a flower or a rock?

Why do we treat the fleeting day
with so much needless fear and sorrow?
It's in its nature not to stay:
Today is always gone tomorrow.

With smiles and kisses, we prefer
to seek accord beneath our star,
although we're different (we concur)
just as two drops of water are.

thicket

Our house is painted! I am so happy. 

It's greeny-bluey-grayey ... a color match of Glidden's old, no-longer-produced "Thicket". In the sun it looks more green, and at dusk it looks bluer.

I wanted the house to be just the two colors (Thicket and white), plus the roof.

We're getting new rain gutters, which is the opposite of interesting, but I have to tell you that I am very thankful for them. The old gutters were leaky, and rain would hit the house horizontally and make strange noises when you were trying to sleep. 

Then I will work on the garden. It's a desolate mess right now. But I like how stark the house looks, with its sharp angles and gray and white, like something out of an Andrew Wyeth painting, if he had painted in California and not New England. But then the roses and the tulip tree in front kind of give it some fluff. I think the flowers in the beds will look nice and soft against that crisp background.

I had a dream last night that I planted a pretty flower that turned out to be illegal in California. (I don't mean drugs.) I know this was sparked by all the "we do not ship to California" notifications in my gardening catalogs. We're a very strict state when it comes to bringing in plants. This is a burden you must bear if you fancy yourself the new-world Land of Milk and Honey. We are concerned about things like Japanese Beetles and Red Palm Weevils and Light Brown Apple Moths and Exotic Fruit Flies and Pink Bollworms. (The Pink Bollworms, for example, eat the California cotton crop, which is worth one billion (!) dollars annually.)

So in my dream, I planted something that had flowers that looked like scrunched-up balls of paper, suitable for a Dr. Seuss book or a Tim Burton movie, and then I became worried that someone I knew would turn out to be secretly working for the California Department of Food and Agriculture. They would come over for dinner, but pause in the garden and see my illegal plant and then have to skip dinner and arrest me, instead.

Sure enough, in my dream, my mild-mannered and retired neighbor, Joe, turned out to be an agent with the CDFA. 

I am pretty sure that in real life he would have let me keep those flowers, because he is an extremely kind and soft-spoken man, and really not the type you would imagine going into law enforcement of any kind.  

I saw him today in his front yard and wanted to tell him about it, but that is always a little risky, to tell people your dreams, because one person's "creative and funny" is another person's "stark raving mad".

Best to just smile and wave, maybe. :)