Transplanting a Seattleite

It is Lore that the first decision in any kitchen, whether designed or moved into when one had no say in the design, is Where Do I Put the Flatware? Lore is not wrong, of course, and each kitchen and each person making the decision about the kitchen has different constraints.

There are less legendary decisions in any living arrangement. Some obvious — where will I place the bed? — some less obvious — where will my keys/wallet/phone land when I walk in the door and put stuff down? The latter decision, for example, is prone to be made impulsively and, worse, inconsistently. Personal Organization / Decluttering Lore is full of Hero Organizers who come in and impose order on the drop zone.

Anyway. My sister and I had some discussions about requirements of our spaces. Early on, during the more intensely locked down months of the pandemic, I had envisioned a house with almost as many home offices as bedrooms, which I still am a little sad about not insisting on when the architect unilaterally decided that wasn’t necessary, but that the home theater and music room I had specifically said I didn’t want somehow were. The home theater went away because of some buildability issues (woot!); the music room “stuck”, because that’s where another R. requested feature, the turret, rose from. It has never had a particularly well-defined use assigned to it and for a while was going to be R.’s office. However, R. did a little too much complaining about the lack of windows in the exercise room, and I decided that entirely too much of the house was devoted to him wanting things for extremely specific purposes and then complaining about what he got. So the music room remains somewhat his, but is now operating as a hybrid 3rd living room qua guest suite (there’s a neighboring but not en suite bathroom that isn’t assigned to any one or two other people in the house), and this is all quite close to “Door 10”, which is the main secondary entry that isn’t the garage. Yeah, that’s confusing.

I felt somewhat bad that the office in my sister’s space wasn’t really large enough or well configured to be an office for her as well as her not husband B (in the event, even after contortion to satisfy her not husband, he’s still uncertain if he’ll ever even move in. He’s an adult. This is a decision he gets to make, and whatever decision he makes will be fine with everyone else). She described where she usually sits in her house, and I commented that this was also one of the places I set. My version of it is the stool at the end of the island counter by the fridge. Obviously, there is no comparable place in the new home.

I mean, there kind of is — I bought a vintage (not 100 years old so not “antique”) school chemistry table that I intend to use in the kitchen, and I made sure that the pneumatic stool tucks under it and rises to an appropriate height, so I can sit there if I so desire. But it is in no way the same type of “place” because the kitchen is intentionally enclosed in a way that the island countertop in my current house very much is not.

There is a bar in the new house, that is roughly the right location and space, but I don’t know if I want to perch at a 42” bar. I mean, maybe?

But there will also be a 36” square dining table with two dining arm chairs between the swinging door to the kitchen and the bar. If you come into the house through the front door, or from the garage door into the house, and you head toward not my sister’s side of the house on the main level (you don’t go up to the 2nd floor, or down to the basement, and you don’t head off to my sister’s suite — look at all the contortions I’m going to to avoid saying either “my side” or “the main side” both of which do and do not apply), you will inevitably walk past this table, whether you turn into the kitchen, stop at the bar, proceed into the living room and stop or continue through the living room or the kitchen to the dining room or deck, or R. and my personal suite.

In an “L” of cabinets, there is a difficult to access space and a lot of solutions to accessing that space effectively, many of which I am deeply familiar with. In the house I grew up with, that space was accessed from the back side of the cabinets, where there was a counter height bar with three stools. If you pulled the stool by the window out, there was a door, and that access to the counter space was where we kept the containers of breakfast cereal.

In this new house, I have a cabinet with a very simple face, painted the same color as the surrounding wall in the living room next to where that dining table will sit, that nestles into that awkward space in the “L” of cabinets in the kitchen (specifically, the “L” between the fridge and the smaller sink, where the granite is and ideal for baking — I really did cram every fucking thing I love into this house, and I’m still trying to shove more in there every day).

Obviously, this whole time I was wondering where my butt was going to land every day, I was plotting not just the comfy reading spaces in my bedroom and living room and other places around the house. I was also setting up a table with some drawer storage and a spot for someone to sit opposite or next to me and have a cup of tea (or another beverage) and an important conversation. In the really impressively comfortable new dining chairs. It would have been more helpful if I had known that’s what I was doing. I could have more clearly communicated it to everyone else.

ETA: Oh, my sister’s spot is almost certainly going to be the dining height table portion of her kitchen island. It’s a very clever solution to a really tricky room, that the kitchen subcontractor came up with, when I finally understood what the architect had planned, after JB (one of the project manager’s) pointed out how much was budgeted for the banquette and massive table in the corner. It was awkward, in the way that all large restaurant corner booths are, and because of the orientation of the table and because of some mobility issues was likely completely unusable for one of the two people who the space was designed for. And because of other mobility issues was going to be a problem for at least three other people living in various parts of the house. A genuinely impressive feat of That’s Not Going To Work For Us.

I hope you got yours done forever ago and already have your refund, but if not, there’s still a few more hours to get that extension request filed.

I walked with M.

I went to the dentist.

The last of the new flat bath mats have arrived, so, yay! A. really hated the pretty shaggy pink ones I got, but the flat ones in pink are really nice.

I will catch up on blogging in a bit; it’s been a busy few days, but nothing bad.

Today I puzzled out a color choice for the Vector design I had picked out, and C. signed off on it, so unless the shower enclosure folks say there’s something else unworkable, we are good to go!

I drove out to the house. I made A’s breakfast and lunch before I left, and also my own breakfast and lunch. D. supplied vegan cupcakes from Wild Chestnut which were extremely yummy.

We had an 11 am meeting to wrap up the window treatment discussion. And we had a meeting with N. about the bar countertops.

I stopped at Slattery’s in Fitchburg and had dinner with T. That was fun.

I was a little discouraged to arrive at home to learn that while R. had heated up chicken and rice for A. and handed her blueberries, she hadn’t gotten any vegetables and wanted some. *sigh* I mean, I made the two other meals of the day for her. Why is this hard. Also, honestly, she really ought to be able to get carrots and lettuce out of the fridge for herself.

I attended the PGHOA annual meeting last night via zoom. Apparently, the new WA state law regulating condominiums requires HOAs to make meetings accessible to more owners. Fuck Yeah, WA state legislators! Nice to see someone has decided to stop requiring us to rip all our finger nails out trying to hold onto the past.

At the PGHOA annual meetings, technically, meetings plural, we went over next year’s budget proposed and accepted by the board. Absent 51% of the (had to be a quorum) folks at the meeting voting down the budget or revising it, this is the budget. When I was young, I used to look at these things pretty hard. Now, less so. It’s good to be young.

JJ is at least younger than I am, and she had some Questions, notably about the phone and the cable / internet lines. And to be fair, they were confusing. She tends towards hostility, but I bought into this thing back in the ‘90s and I’m much more interested in things going the way I want them to vs. getting into an argument about it. So I “clarified” her question, and CD, outgoing and just re-elected board member, told a story. The story went roughly like this.

Last summer, we finally redid the elevator, as current equipment was increasingly difficult to get parts for and was increasingly finicky (4 story building, elevator is original equipment dates from 1979). We did get a good lifetime out of that elevator. That elevator had — as elevators all over this country are required to do — a phone in it in case of emergency. Sometime during the year, possibly during the renovation, it was discovered that the phone no longer worked. A little bit of information here: if the phone doesn’t work, the elevator may not be used until the phone does work. A bit more flavor on that: we’d been paying for elevator inspections that the company we were paying to do the inspections were not doing. For years, maybe? If they had been doing the inspections, they presumably would have caught the phone problem. Since they weren’t, we don’t know when this started. A year or two ago, the board complained to the management company, and they gave us a different manager and she started catching a lot of stuff, which in turn led to us fixing a bunch of stuff. All to the good.

Anyway. The board member in question spent several hours over a period of time attempting to reach someone at the telephone service provider and … couldn’t. They were taking the payments and not providing the contracted service. Are we sensing a theme here?

So I start thinking about this. If the inspector aren’t inspecting, they won’t catch the phone. This is unlikely to be us as the first victims of this failure to provide service. (Who is inspecting the inspectors?) (Probably this is a paperwork production operation, so as long as the paperwork says the work was done, nobody catches it until the customers complain.) The reason our budget lines for phone / intercom / internet / cable are so weird this year is because that’s generally a deflationary item (if yours isn’t, your probably should look into that) and because we replaced the old phone service in the elevator (that wasn’t performing) by rolling it into the internet based system (which everyone should be doing everywhere).

I understand that you might be tempted to say something like, but I want a “real” PSTN copper landline! If you even know those words, which if you are saying this and you know those words, I hope you have already stopped driving in unfamiliar places, after dark and during rain and other bad weather and you should really have a discussion with the folks who love you about under what circumstances you will turn over your keys and when you replace your driver’s license it will be with a state ID card instead of a license. You might remember the olden days, when the copper landline would “work” even when the “power” was “out”. That’s because there was a big ole battery somewhere, which there increasingly isn’t and also if you are still feisty about this go several paragraphs back up and remind yourself of how _the elevator phone wasn’t working for an extended period of time because the provider was no longer providing the service but was still collecting the checks and just fucking ask yourself how much you are being scammed elsewhere in your life for the false promise that you can keep living like it’s the Reagan Era_.

The real question here — and may the goddess love and bless you and all those you love, because no one else is rewarding your patience so I hope you’re getting something out of it — is: How Many Other Elevators Is This Happening To?

Six years ago in a Ma Bell group on FB, someone posted:

“As a tech who worked tall buildings.
We used to get called out because the phone in the elevator didn't work.
Turns out some newish account manager look over the lines and canceled lines that had no activity
Yes my brothers that was the elevator phone!”

So back then, the risk was, oh, this line is never sued, let’s get rid of it. Things have happened since then.

https://dbscomm.net/end-of-service-for-landlines/

“As of August 2, 2022, The FCC no longer requires telecom companies to provide/sell landline service to small or local telephone companies.”

I missed that development, and may return to dig into it more. Further from that source:

“FCC Order 19-72 was lobbied for as the cost of maintaining copper wire infrastructure has increased over the years, and telecom companies have grown to see it as a dead technology. So in August of this year, the large phone companies were no longer required to support copper landline service, known as POTS (plain old telephone service).

While larger telecom providers like Verizon and AT&T are moving on from costly copper wire and investing heavily in fiber optic communications, there is still a strong demand for service in elevators and buildings that are only wired for copper service.

However, some telecoms are holding onto their copper landline business for the time being and raising prices, industry insiders say that copper phone service will cease to exist by 2025. Another good reason to move on from POTS.”

Welp. I guess we rode that train right to the end of the line.

Anyway. I dug into this today in part because I was wondering whether there was any news coverage of this particular issue. What I learned is that the elevator guild knows all about this, and requirements on new elevators are really great in terms of accessibility and generally not having this problem, but buildings with a single, aging elevator are very much disconnected from that community if their inspection service provider isn’t providing.

My efforts to find an online database of elevator inspection permits were not successful for Seattle — the state maintains a database but it does not include Seattle and Spokane. Those cities do their own elevator inspection. New York and Texas both have a long history of periodic media coverage of problems with their elevators and inspection regulations (or lack thereof), but I suspect a fair amount of regulatory energy has been expended on trying to get private elevators to stop killing children, vs. ensuring that the existing regulatory framework isn’t rotting from within. I suppose we’ll keep having problems of increasing severity until there’s a movement for reform. Or maybe it’ll all be fine, because everyone will have to upgrade anyway for non-tragic reasons.

M. and I attempted a walk, but it started to sprinkle, then rain in earnest. We returned to my house for a snack and chat, and then tried again and made it up to the top of the hill and back. Yay, us!

I picked A. up and we got to therapy almost on time. Woot! The yellow couch is gone from the waiting room, and we saw the replacement delivered but not set up. Very exciting!

I did some more research on treadmills, and I think I’ve got one picked out for the new house. But I’ve thought that before and thought better of it, so who knows. I also did some research on LED panels for under stone, and found one that will do a full cutout for a sink, so that’s pretty cool.

I had a long phone call with J. It was a little weird at times, because it was difficult to convey to him just how much research I had done on various dining options, and just how poorly the in park options were going to work for us. Also, he confused Plaza Inn and Carnation Cafe. Easy to do! But also, I kept saying, I’m pretty sure you mean Carnation Cafe, and he kept saying he didn’t remember the name, but it wasn’t that one, and then went on to described the baked potato soup (still on the menu) and the location (hasn’t changed) which are both definitely Carnation Cafe. Ironically, that restaurant probably would work really well for all of us. Also, I don’t think he has on any level connected with just how fucking wedged the parks are going to be over Xmas. I don’t think he’s ever been there for Xmas.

He also had some questions about how PreCheck works because he doesn’t use it very often and forgot, and he also had not considered about the implications of older offspring aging out of being able to go through on his PreCheck. We walked through how to get older offspring PreCheck, and I texted that to older offspring later in the day, in hopes that will be more motivating all around. I also made sure everyone had RealID (the kids got their passports to go to Canada, a trip that was supposed to be this past summer but will likely be next summer, and J. has enhanced DL).

I was feeling really weird this morning, like I’d gotten slow and lacking in confidence about making decisions, because it was hard to motivate to make all the dining reservations, and also figure out wtf to do about the bar sink since it’s not in the mass plumbing db. Reddit has beef with that faucet because it’s crazy (true) and expensive (true) and thus only bought by people with no taste (really, reddit? Really?). That plus not being in the approved products database just left me feeling very meh. I found a Rohl I liked, not as well obviously, and proposed that, and then the HVAC / plumbing guy was like, hey, we can do it, and if the inspector catches it was can swap it out for inspection and then swap it back. The faucet has all the characteristics of an approved faucet it just isn’t in the db. Then I felt even weirder, because I was like, I spent hours coming up with an alternate, and for why. And honestly, it’s not even that expensive. The plumbing supplier came right back with a quote and they were doing cost +10% and let me tell you that is much lower than the Amazon price for it (and also the online overstock place).

So I really got some momentum on the idea that I’d lost the ability to make confident decisions, because I mean I’ve planned Disney before, and to California before, and with a dozen folks before. That plus the house decisions shouldn’t be that demoralizing. It took me a few hours to realize, but not DisneyLAND with the full entourage. That’s usually DisneyWorld, and I haven’t been to Cali since February 2020, and I haven’t been there for Xmas for a really long time (probably since the 70s?). I talked about it with R., and he thought the issue was getting things wrong (forgetting to make sure the faucet was in the db back when I first picked it, for example), but I have zero issue with being wrong. I just need to be fast and decisive and right a lot. That’s my magic — my magic is NOT in always right. But talking it out made it clear how ridiculous it was to feel incompetent while doing all this ridiculous shit. It’s fine to beat myself up about taking on this nonsense. It is not fine to beat myself up for how well I’m doing at executing on the nonsense. I am executing just fine.

I drove A. in but Dutch was canceled.

K. had to reschedule, but we got to have a delightful phone call.

I walked with M.

I made blondies.

R. picked up A.

I dis-assembled the Millenium Falcon and it was picked up. Razor Crest was picked up earlier today. I was ghosted on the router, however. I’ll probably mark it available tomorrow.

FF was in stages, first the S.’s, who are traveling, then a gap, then P. and finally J. showed up after B. returned to his mom.

I got sketches for the shower enclosure and they are amazing. So happy! Of course my happiness will be tempered when we discuss cost and constructability but it’ll be fine.

Nice day!

Also podcasts. Yay podcasts! And I’m currently listening to Hozier Unreal.

I had to go early for a meeting about kitchens / bar / a bathroom. It went well, and led to a conversation with my sister that confirmed what I thought she would say about the bathroom and her kitchen. So, yay! Walkthrough was fun, altho insulation is happening and I wasn’t wearing a mask. We stepped outside. Lots of painting, which is exciting to see, and N. commented the soft marigold in the upstairs hall made him think about the Southwest. Wait until he sees how the main floor turns out. LOL

I also had a chat with Priestess. That was very pleasant. A. and I watched some Cedrus on tiktok.

I went for a one mile walk by myself upon my return. The weather is finally meaningfully cooling, at night definitely, and in theory tomorrow during the day.

I brought A. to and from school today, because R. drove out to the construction site. This is because I have to go out next week to do kitchen related stuff. Also, there was a video meeting with JS who will be making our front door. Hooray front door! JS is unreasonably handsome (not a bad thing per se, just startling) and definitely nerdy. JS and SO had a good back-and-forth about how the process on making the door happen and coordinating with the metal art would work. I feel pretty confident about the whole thing altho I might still have some questions about the hinges. I’m not worried tho.

The main meeting went well. The dragon finial is up and looks great. The siding looks great. Lots of progress!

I walked with M.

A. and I had dinner at NYAJ’s. Very pleasant!

I got a decent amount of continuous sleep last night, which is really wonderful in so many ways.

I got out of the house (R. got A.’s lunch together and helped with breakfast) at 9 to get to Florence for an 11 am walk through of the various kitchens with the metal artist and with the kitchen designer. That was productive. We also had the MEPFP and OAC, and SC from HVAC was on site and is very ready to switch to a different vendor, and I am entirely in favor of. So we’ll get hot gas reheat throughout, which is wonderful.

There was an issue with one of the ducts in the main kitchen — it was not going to fit through a space it was intended to go through without some significant adjustment and as we were talking it through, SC was like, wait, why is it so big, this room isn’t that big, so it is almost certainly going to be downsized to something more reasonable AND so will whatever it is connected to. Woot!

I won’t be getting shelving at the end of the bar alley, because the beams are just going to complicate it a little too much to make it worth the effort. I’m back to thinking about a neon sign there.

I’m pretty tired, and will head off to bed soon and hopefully get another decent night’s sleep. A. and I had a long talk, and I think we’re making some headway on talking about some of her big, uncomfortable feelings, many of which are really typical of this age, and the rest of which are really typical of autism. Sometimes, ya just gotta say it out loud to let go of it.

We went out to Woods Hill Table for dinner, and they have what Less Than Greater Than would term a “Baller Cocktail”: a $29 Vieux Carre made with some very fancy vermouth and armagnac. They smoke it, put it in a stoppered potion bottle, and put the bottle in a wood box with a metal clasp to deliver to the table. 10/10 would recommend. Theater is excellent, and the drink itself was worthy.

I had the duck leg, and I thought I was getting some kind of panzanella with summer veg, but it was mostly watermelon. Very yummy, and very savory, so no complaints. We had the coconut sorbet, and something called “Apple Pommeau”, which is apple apple water as near as I can tell, but some kind of apple alcohol made in the style of a dessert wine. It was yummy, and I think it’s from Ithaca, NY.

I walked with M. I also walked with R.

We had a weird and unsatisfying, and distressing for R., further discussion about why he’s so opposed to me getting a storage unit for managing the complex timing problem of ordering furniture for the new house (I don’t want it too early and I don’t want to wait forever for it either, and we don’t really know when we’ll get a certificate of occupancy, and the construction manager doesn’t want any furniture delivered pre-certificate).

I had a delightful conversation with J.