SJ on the Move

Wednesday, February 28, 2007

Hostile takeover


I've been usurped. After numerous on-line petitions concerned about my lack of attention to the stateside adventures of SJ reached the powers that be, I no longer have creative control of this website. So, it has been a good run - and I hope I'll be able to post the occasional op-ed piece on this site in the future - but until then, I've been demoted to a blog covering the adventures of one of our houseplants. You can visit me at my new location www.ficus-in-the-US.blogspot.com

Monday, February 12, 2007

The Black Hole


I think it was somewhere around 4 years ago that we decided we really wanted to get a new dining room table to replace the red formica table that had been passed down through several generations on SJ's mom's side.
If you've read my previous post, it should come as no surprise that it took awhile to finally get around to actually doing it - but nevertheless, we finally did.
The worst part of our dining room "furniture" wasn't the table, however. It was the chairs. We purchased a set of wooden arrowback chairs from Ames about 7 years ago (a store which actually went bankrupt several years ago) for about $18/each - so you can imagine the quality. Over the years I have patched them together with glue and drywall screws, but they were really getting to the point of embarassment. Several of them were so wobbly they would sway in the wind, and one of them was flat out broken in pieces.
So, after we got our new chairs we were left with the conundrum of what to do with our old ones. Luckily for us, the space in front of our house has been affectionately referred to by one of our friends as "The Black Hole". Anything that you want to get rid of, no matter how ridiculously devoid of value it is, put it in front of our house and it will be gone within 10-15 minutes. I'm not kidding. Over the years we have put out : a broken mop, a beat up screen door, a rusted garment rack, and countless other items of negative value - and each has been lovingly adopted into a new home (sometimes before we even made it back inside the house - and I'm really not kidding).
So, we put out our "set" of old wooden chairs, most of them unsafe for human use - one actually completely out of commission - and within 15 minutes someone had stopped, loaded them into their car, and left. So, when you come to visit us, make sure not to stand still in one place for too long outside our front door - you never know what might happen.

Sunday, February 11, 2007

The List


Be it literal or ethereal, I think everyone carries around a list of things they'd like to get accomplished but never seem to "find the time" to get around to. That nagging doorknob that always falls off, that crown molding with the nail holes that haven't been touched up, or in our case - the dimmer switch that has been broken for about five years.
I don't know why it sometimes seems to take forever to get around to taking care of these little projects that don't seem very important, but probably do have a measureable impact on our quality of life when measured longitudinally over the years it takes to get them done. Most likely it's a case of other more "urgent" but likely more unimportant issues taking precedence. Or maybe it's the fact that it's a lot easier to sit down and watch an episode of Scrubs than to get out the toolbox. Probably a bit of both.
In our case, we finally fixed our broken light switch thanks to the help of my father this weekend. Which got me to thinking about my list - the doorknob, the crown molding, and oh yeah - that blog of mine I've been neglecting since we emigrated back to the U.S. a few months ago. So, my pledge is to devote more time to publishing the stateside adventures of SJ - at least right after I go catch just one more episode of Scrubs...