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LBI / fall weather / apartment update
Oct. 13th, 2009 10:26 amThis weekend F and I went down to Long Beach Island, NJ with my parents. It was lovely. We did some shopping, some reading, went up to the light house, went out for dinner, played some cards. F had never played progressive rummy before, and he concentrated very very hard. He did really well, too, but lost in the last hand of each game. I lost dreadfully, which is just what happens sometimes, with what was possibly a personal best score of 349+.
The house we stay at has an attached miniature golf course, which is now closed for the season, but we had the keys! So we had an epic minigolf battle. F won, but his game was much more consistent on the front nine--on the back nine, he got three holes-in-one, but also had a couple of rougher holes where he scored a 4. Final score was I think 41, F, 47, R. At least I acquitted myself decently.
On the way back we stopped at a farm stand on route 70 and got pumpkins, and then stopped at the Dairy Bar a little farther on route 70 and split a pumpkin custard. Yum.
It is getting to be very autumny here. F's new favorite sentence is "It's chilly." He says it often. This is going to be his first full winter in PA since he was in high school. He will be whiny, and understandably so. I promised to be patient with him. We need to buy him some thicker pants and more wintry sportcoats, perhaps some turtlenecks and things--all his business clothes were purchased with Florida or California in mind. Khaki sportcoats are nice, but just aren't going to cut it in PA past October. I suspect we need to make a signficant investment in wool and corduroy. F also needs some long underwear. He was whining that he gets cold on his ten-minute walk to work, and I told him that his legs would be warmer walking to work if he had some long underwear on under his khaki pants. He said he doesn't want to have to wear the long underwear under his pants all day. I may have told him to suck it up, or I may have said "welcome back to the northeast", but see, that's the sort of thing I'm not going to say anymore now that I've promised to be patient. Now I'll just buy him some long underwear and quietly put it with his pants. I'm going to work very hard to be sensitive and supportive.
Last night we made really good progress on our apartment. We got all the excess stuff out of the dining room. The dining room is now totally done. It is my favorite room in the apartment. We also cleared several boxes out of the living room, which made me really happy. The boxes mostly contained my knicknacks and little bookshelf treasures--F had already unpacked a lot of his treasures, so I'd been feeling underrepresented. Now no longer! So what if half my knicknacks are action figures and the rest are sheep? My stuff is awesome. F also hooked up his stereo and figured out how to hook up his big speakers without wires everywhere. He very deviously ran the speaker wire around the fireplace by tucking it into the crack between the brick and the wood. You can't tell at all that there's speaker wire there, and it hardly shows otherwise. He did a very good job. Then we listened to Tori Amos to test it out, and it was great. His big speakers sound good when you get them working.
Short term apartment projects:
- hanging the mirror above the fireplace
- figuring out where to hang all the family photos, possibly getting more frames
- getting a book stand for the proposal book
- putting out the Halloween decorations!!!!!!!
Long term projects include sanding and staining the dining room table, and sanding and painting/staining my desk. Those might wait until spring. We also need to organize the bookshelves in the office and unpack the very last of the books. That's more of a medium-term project. And then there's the junk closet, where we just stick everything we don't know what else to do with. There are two short bookshelves in there. (It's a pretty big junk closet.) Right now the plan is to keep them in there and unpack all the photo albums onto them. There are a lot of photo albums. But this is a long term project for sure, so we'll just have to see.
The house we stay at has an attached miniature golf course, which is now closed for the season, but we had the keys! So we had an epic minigolf battle. F won, but his game was much more consistent on the front nine--on the back nine, he got three holes-in-one, but also had a couple of rougher holes where he scored a 4. Final score was I think 41, F, 47, R. At least I acquitted myself decently.
On the way back we stopped at a farm stand on route 70 and got pumpkins, and then stopped at the Dairy Bar a little farther on route 70 and split a pumpkin custard. Yum.
It is getting to be very autumny here. F's new favorite sentence is "It's chilly." He says it often. This is going to be his first full winter in PA since he was in high school. He will be whiny, and understandably so. I promised to be patient with him. We need to buy him some thicker pants and more wintry sportcoats, perhaps some turtlenecks and things--all his business clothes were purchased with Florida or California in mind. Khaki sportcoats are nice, but just aren't going to cut it in PA past October. I suspect we need to make a signficant investment in wool and corduroy. F also needs some long underwear. He was whining that he gets cold on his ten-minute walk to work, and I told him that his legs would be warmer walking to work if he had some long underwear on under his khaki pants. He said he doesn't want to have to wear the long underwear under his pants all day. I may have told him to suck it up, or I may have said "welcome back to the northeast", but see, that's the sort of thing I'm not going to say anymore now that I've promised to be patient. Now I'll just buy him some long underwear and quietly put it with his pants. I'm going to work very hard to be sensitive and supportive.
Last night we made really good progress on our apartment. We got all the excess stuff out of the dining room. The dining room is now totally done. It is my favorite room in the apartment. We also cleared several boxes out of the living room, which made me really happy. The boxes mostly contained my knicknacks and little bookshelf treasures--F had already unpacked a lot of his treasures, so I'd been feeling underrepresented. Now no longer! So what if half my knicknacks are action figures and the rest are sheep? My stuff is awesome. F also hooked up his stereo and figured out how to hook up his big speakers without wires everywhere. He very deviously ran the speaker wire around the fireplace by tucking it into the crack between the brick and the wood. You can't tell at all that there's speaker wire there, and it hardly shows otherwise. He did a very good job. Then we listened to Tori Amos to test it out, and it was great. His big speakers sound good when you get them working.
Short term apartment projects:
- hanging the mirror above the fireplace
- figuring out where to hang all the family photos, possibly getting more frames
- getting a book stand for the proposal book
- putting out the Halloween decorations!!!!!!!
Long term projects include sanding and staining the dining room table, and sanding and painting/staining my desk. Those might wait until spring. We also need to organize the bookshelves in the office and unpack the very last of the books. That's more of a medium-term project. And then there's the junk closet, where we just stick everything we don't know what else to do with. There are two short bookshelves in there. (It's a pretty big junk closet.) Right now the plan is to keep them in there and unpack all the photo albums onto them. There are a lot of photo albums. But this is a long term project for sure, so we'll just have to see.
