love is blonde

When we started house hunting last summer it quickly became clear that the kinds of places we could afford in the city were in somewhat sketchy neighborhoods. We looked at several dozen places, and in a good number of them I feared for our safety. In the end, we stretched our budget a little bit and ended up with a place where we feel safe almost all the time.

It helps that every single door and window of our home has bars on it. I like the bars! I know that nobody can break in unless they have the strength to bend steel beams. Of course, anything can happen on the street, but you can say that about any street in this city.

So yeah, we live in a city where crime happens, drug deals happen. We’re careful and alert and so far we haven’t been the victim of anything bad in our new neighborhood or anywhere else in the city. I hope that streak is never broken.

But see, there’s still this one thing that scares me.

Behind our house is a very, very creepy alley. It twists and turns and widens until you end up behind some big buildings on a totally different street. There’s a bunch of abandoned junk strewn around, and it might even serve as a campground for homeless guys, though I’ve never caught anyone back there.

Except for this:

A big, stuffed cheetah. He’s just chillin’ on a lawn chair in a patch of bamboo. Every single time I round the corner and spot him, he freaks me out!

But really, he’s harmless. I hope.

I hope that this cheetah remains my biggest danger in the neighborhood. But I’m still making my husband take out the trash. I don’t want to take any chances.

This weekend was long on days and low on internet usage, which was great. I’m so computer-bound during the week that it’s nice to use my Macbook as a coaster on the weekends. (Kidding, sort of, as I do have 1.5 years of AppleCare protection left.)

I can’t say I did much that was useful with my offline weekend time, but it was nice nonetheless. We watched more episodes of The Wire, played an intense game of Celebrity with husband’s coworkers, assembled more IKEA furniture, and I went running outside and felt HOT. I say this in all caps because it seems like the last few weeks have been so freezing and/or wet that I forgot what HOT felt like. I also did a lot of house cleaning, not that you would notice because I’m sure it will be a mess again in 3.2 minutes. And I don’t even have children!

This afternoon Mother Nature couldn’t decide between rain and shine. As I was driving down Pennsylvania Avenue right as it crosses the Mall, I saw the most amazing thing. In the sky was a huge, bright rainbow, so bright you could see every color, even the violet. At the end of the rainbow was not a pot of gold, but the United States Capitol. Truly, it could not have been more picturesque. I feel very lucky to live here.

And now, a few questions for you:

Is it possible to get Montezuma’s Revenge from the pizza place down the street? in America?

What scent do you love on your man? (That sounds oddly like a Cosmo headline. Forgive me. And “none” or “deodorant” are perfectly acceptable answers, I’m truly curious.)

How on Earth is it possible to regularly get to bed before midnight and still do all the things you need to do in life?

We’re settling in to the new house well, I think. Well enough that at this very moment all four of us (meaning me, the husband, and the kitties) are taking a break from unpacking and cleaning to laze on the couch together and enjoy the newly connected internet and the television the size of a baby elephant.

Speaking of zoo animals, more specifically humans with less civilized behavior than that of a zoo animal: A few nights ago husband and I were walking down the street (a BIG street too, like the street that the White House is on, but on the other side of town) and this man walking about 10 feet in front of us whips out his dong and starts peeing on the sidewalk while he is walking. It seriously took me a few seconds to realize what was going on because Really?! People do that kind of thing?!? This wasn’t just like a little tinkle sprinkle on the lawn either. It was like this guy had just come from a marathon kegstand contest or something. Ewwwwwwww. Ew.

The worst part about it is that (I realized a few minutes later) we were headed to the same place (a restaurant) about half a block away, and during our meal I could see this animal man out of the corner of my eye. It honestly takes a lot to gross me out (hello homeless man pooping on the side of a building downtown) but this was really, really disgusting.

City life — gotta love it! Just wash your hands A LOT, okay? Moving on…

Hmmmmmmm, could it be that I have no other good stories to tell you? I’m kind of sick of talking about the house, and mostly I’m just wondering why I fretted so much over paint colors when I haven’t even had two seconds to go to the paint store to buy paint, let alone actually put it on the walls. I’ll be lucky if this place is painted by 2008. Crap, I’ll be lucky if we’ve finished unpacking by 2008.

I’m trying to get into the spirit of the season and consume as much pumpkin product as possible. (I could live solely on orange foods for the rest of my life, I swear.) I’m thinking of making these healthy chocolate chip pumpkin muffins this week. Anyone have any good pumpkin recipes to share?

Unless, of course, I’ve ruined your appetite already.

love: my new house

hate: no internet until Friday. How did I live before the internet existed? I truly wonder sometimes. We’re at a local coffee shop stealing an hour of WiFi right now.

love: I took today off of work to finish up some house stuff

hate: I would pay $1 million to be able to take off the whole week

love: with the help of my mother in law, sister in law, and DC-BFF, my new kitchen is completely unpacked, organized, clean, and ready for you all to come over and drink wine from my three dozen wine glasses. (Okay, maybe we over-registered for drinkware, but they are all so sparkly and pretty!)

hate: you can’t come over for dinner quite yet because we don’t have any chairs. Or a coffee table. Or hand soap. But we’re working on it!

love: did I mention I LOVE MY NEW HOUSE. And Andrew loves his new ginormous television. All are happy.

hate: except the cats. Cats are not happy about the move at all. (But they don’t pay the mortgage, do they?)

love: all the help we had with moving this weekend. It was freaking amazing and made things go so smoothly.

hate: I’ve been so busy and exhausted from all the moving that I’ve taken no pictures for y’all! I’m sorry, I’ll try to remedy that soon. Don’t worry, I haven’t started painting yet or anything.

Quick questions for you: It’s TV premier week — what new shows should I be recording (in HD, suckas!) on my TiVo? And leave your loves and hates in the comments. And (lastly), like I said, I don’t have internet at home all week so I might be a little MIA this week…Good thing I’ll be too busy making out with my house to notice.

Good news: The house inspection went really well. We will probably negotiate some small things, but nothing that should be a deal-breaker. So we’ve crossed that hurdle. (A very big hurdle in a 98-year-old house, imho.)

Bad news: How about I let the photos speak for themselves?

Good news: I am okay. The guy who hit me is okay. We both have insurance. Everything is going to be just fine.