This (Scary?) Old House

21 Feb

Last Halloween I bought a new (old) house in Richmond, VA. By row house standards, it’s small (3 BR, 2BA, around 2000sf) but since I’m coming from 20+ years of condo-living in DC, it feels huge for one person. It might technically only be one bedroom larger than what I left, but it’s more than twice the square footage. It’s also a bit intimidating to move from a low maintenance condo to a 110 year old house that still has the original coal-burning fireplaces and a dirt crawlspace in the basement. But I’m adjusting.

Because it’s so old, what should be small projects end up turning into Projects with a capital P that take twice as long as they should, due to unforeseen complications. We had a string of unseasonably warm days (we’re talking 70s in February!) so I decided it was time to get the screens out of the basement and pop them into the windows so I could get some fresh air in here. Simple, right?

Wrong.

First, the screens needed to be washed because they had cobwebs and old leaves stuck to them (presumably from when they were taken down last fall). I dragged them into my backyard (yes! I have outdoor space now, which was one of my big reasons for wanting to move!) to hose them down. I lined them up against the fence, stretched out the hose, and turned on the spigot – and NOTHING. Nary a drop of water.

I checked the valve in the basement where I had turned off the water during a cold snap to keep my pipes from freezing: it was open, and yet, there was no water flowing. Head scratcher. (I’ve since googled it and it sounds like maybe I need the aerator replaced inside the faucet?) Who knows? I guess my plumber will be able to afford his vacation after all!

I didn’t feel like wasting time, so I grabbed the screens and dragged them into my downstairs shower. (A side note: in this house, all the bedrooms are upstairs, along with a full bath. On the main level, I have a kitchen, living room, dining room and a bathroom with a shower. I couldn’t think of any situation in which a main level shower made sense – except as a back-up – until I needed to hose down these screens.)

Once the screens were cleaned, the next task was matching them to the correct windows. No two windows in this house are the same size, although most of them look like they would be. It felt like one of those toddler games where you have to push a specific shape through the matching hole. Except I was running around my house with 16 rectangular screens.

By this point, I hope you’re starting to understand the “complications” I mentioned earlier. Nothing is straight-forward.

Now for the actual POINT of this story. (I know, sorry it took so long to get here…)

For some reason, there was a ton of dirt caked on the sill just outside each window. It would’ve technically been inside the screen/my house if I didn’t clean it, so each time I installed a screen, I would first open the window (from inside) and wash out the frame.

When I was installing one of the screens in my upstairs office window, in addition to the regular dirt, there were also leaves stuck to the top edge of the frame, connected by a few cobwebs. I took my rag and went to wipe them out – and ended up in a horror film.

Apparently a spider and her very fruitful egg sac were lurking underneath one of those leaves, because as soon as I dislodged it, there was an explosion of spider babies every where – blowing in through the window, scurrying across the windowsill, dropping to the sidewalk below. Reader, I screamed. Spiders freak me out. I’ve gotten to a place where I usually try to relocate them rather than kill them – but that’s when I’m faced with ONE spider, and that’s assuming he’s not a fast-moving spider.

In this case (and I’m not proud of myself), I just started smacking as fast as I could, playing whack-a-mole to kill as many spiders as possible so they wouldn’t run straight into my house. Fortunately, I was wearing gardening gloves, which gave me a bit more bravery than I would’ve had bare-handed.

My assault on those poor spiders was probably the equivalent of an Air Arachnid flight going down in terms of body count. But even more disturbing (at least to me) were those that I missed. How many spiders were there? For the rest of the night I kept scratching at my head, convinced that stray baby spiders had found their way into my hair.

I’m beginning to think that buying a house on Halloween might have been an omen. Oops.

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Re-Entry: Pithy’s back!

18 Feb
A little cat paw waves hello

hi frenz…

It’s been three years since my last post. Looking back on my arrest in January 2020 is to hop in the wildest of time machines… to a time before the pandemic, before the January 6 coup attempt, before George Floyd (and countless other Black men) was murdered, before Roe vs. Wade was overturned, before Russia started a war in Ukraine, before MSU became the latest university grappling with a mass shooting, and personally, before I moved to Richmond.

How can three years contain so much? No wonder I stopped writing – looking at that list, it’s been overwhelmingly bleak.

But this blog isn’t titled BleakyPants and I’m itching to re-establish a semi-regular writing habit that isn’t entirely work-related, so to paraphrase the ever-sexy Justin Timberlake, I’m bringing Pithy back!

Be forewarned – the pandemic has done nothing to force my maturation, so if you continue to follow this blog, you’ll still be treated to humor that’s probably more appropriate for a middle school classroom. But with all the heaviness around us, it’s the escape I need. Hopefully you do too.

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What to Expect When You’re Expecting… To Get Arrested!

2 Feb

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I don’t know how you honored Martin Luther King Jr’s legacy in January, but I got arrested for civil disobedience on Wednesday while protesting the Senate’s refusal to call witnesses in the Impeachment Trial. Obviously I have a LOT to share on the topic, but since this blog is called pithypants, I’ll start with the lighter stuff first.

So here’s a quick primer on what to expect if you decide to take your outrage to the next level this year…

Lesson 1: If you’ve not yet been arrested (I hadn’t!) I highly recommend coming to DC and letting your first experience unfold with the US Capitol Police. They are professionals. While the experience isn’t exactly pleasant (I mean, it’s uncomfortable having your hands cuffed for hours), I didn’t encounter a single officer who seemed to be on a power trip. They were friendly, civil, and – if I’m being honest – entirely deserving of the salaries we pay them. In fact, when I learned that they probably wouldn’t be able to make change when I paid my fine, I suggested that they take the extra $10 and buy a six pack of beer.

Lesson 2: You shouldn’t offer unsolicited money to the police. Turns out, even if you’re being funny, they will get big eyes and respond seriously, “We can’t take that! We don’t do bribes!” Um… oops? Sorry about that. I wasn’t looking for a second charge!

Lesson 3: When you’re arrested in a “mass arrest,” you will be processed as a group. Which means: you’re only as fast as the slowest member of your group. The larger the group, the longer you’ll be in custody, because everyone has to go through all the steps before they start releasing people.

In a nutshell, the process consists of getting:

  • cuffed
  • patted down
  • having all your personal property (except clothes, ID and cash for the fine) removed and placed in a plastic bag
  • photographed
  • loaded in a paddywagon and transported to a processing area (in our case, a drafty warehouse over near the Navy Yard)
  • searched again (more thoroughly but still with your clothes on, thankfully!);
  • your cuffs moved from behind your back to in front of you
  • read your Miranda Rights
  • to sign your arrest certificate (after they run your ID through their database to check for priors)
  • fingerprinted
  • to pay your fine
  • your stuff back
  • released!

In our case, it took about four hours.

Lesson 4: Consider your clothing carefully if you think there’s a chance you might get arrested. I say this because most of my regrets were around aspects of my clothing. I was grateful to have my big winter coat for the hours that we were sitting in the cold warehouse. I was also glad to have worn a sports bra rather than a regular under-wire bra because it made the bra checks (performed by a female officer) easier. (In case you’re wondering, for a bra check, they ask you to lean forward slightly and they grab and shake the band of your bra so that if you have anything there, it will fall out.) Conversely, I kicked myself for wearing skinny jeans. Had I known my stomach would be exposed, I probably would not have worn something that showcased my tubby muffin top. Next time I might wear a dress. 🙂

Lesson 5: Know what you’ll be charged with. In my case, I learned a new vocabulary word: incommoding. Look it up.

Lesson 6: If there’s a chance you’ll get arrested, be sure to carry cash (to pay your fine) and a valid ID in your pocket. If possible, ditch anything else because it just slows the whole process down (see Lesson 3). In our case, our fines were $50, payable in cash, so for the people who didn’t have cash on them, we pooled our money to cover them.

Lesson 7: When possible, team up with an organized group that knows the ropes. I was fortunate enough to have been with a group that was familiar with the process. They let us know what actions might lead to arrest, made it clear what consequences we might face if we were arrested, and provided forms for us to complete before protesting to secure legal representation in the event that we got arrested.

After I was released from custody, I walked out the back door of the station, completely disoriented and unsure how I’d get home. As I was fishing my phone out of my plastic bag of belongings, I heard a small group of people cheering and chanting, “Thank you, we love you!” from a hotel parking lot across the street. I had not expected a welcome committee, but it was incredibly nice to be met by a lawyer who made a copy of my arrest record, asked how I’d been treated, and verified how many people were still awaiting release, while another person brought me food and asked if I needed to use a bathroom. They planned to stay there until the last person was released so that if anyone hit any hiccups or needed help paying the fine, they would be covered.

Lesson 8: Be sure you have an Uber/Lyft app on your phone so you have an easy way to get home. I was one of the few people from the DC area who got arrested. The others were from Pennsylvania, New York, North Carolina, Wisconsin, and even California. Which is to say: I’m probably one of the only people who had a remote sense of where I was in the city. And even so, it was after dark and I didn’t know how close a metro was, so I was grateful to grab an Uber.

Lesson 9: Even if you’re tempted, don’t tell your Uber driver, “I just got out of jail!” unless you want him to go silent, drive quickly, and look at you suspiciously in the rearview mirror. On second thought: definitely tell your driver you were arrested. Way better than making small talk for 20 minutes.

Lesson 10: Listen to the stories of the people who took the leap with you. (Not that it’s difficult – without a phone or any other source of entertainment, all you have to pass the time is each other.) You’ll be inspired by the retired Army Colonel who has been in town from New York protesting every day since January 6; by the soft-spoken college student who came out from Wisconsin because she doesn’t see the point of a college degree if our country continues on the path it’s on; by the young nurse from California who flew in that morning just to protest, knowing she might miss her return flight back because she got arrested; by the Marine running for US Congress, whose uncle was the regional president of the NAACP in Mississippi; or by the man who now wears a body camera to protests after losing multiple teeth in the violence at Charlottesville in 2017. These people made me proud to be an American.

And finally, if you want to see what we did that led to arrest, here’s a link to a pretty thorough video from that day.

 

 

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I never said I was a plumber.

11 Jan

My toilet has a weird handle: you lift it to flush, and it drops back down and points toward the floor between flushes. It’s been this way since I moved in, and it’s never struck me as particularly odd, but apparently it is.

I know this because pretty much every guest who uses my toilet somehow manages to leave the handle in the lifted position. Honestly, I’m not even sure how they do that or how much time it takes to get it to stay upright, but without fail, whenever someone disappears to the restroom, minutes after they return to the living room, I’ll hear the tell-tale sign of the toilet endlessly refilling. I’ll go drop the handle back into place, then explain the oddities of my plumbing to my visitor.

I share this because we had people over for brunch on New Year’s Day. Many of them hadn’t been to my place before, so rather than brace myself for “handle duty,” I simply took a little Post-It note on it so people would know what to do.

It worked like a charm and a dozen people used my bathroom without leaving it in the upright position. It worked so well, in fact, that I decided to just leave the note there, since on at least one occasion I returned from vacation to find the toilet running because the cat sitter didn’t know the flusher trick.

Alan, apparently, had other ideas. As I was working on my laptop the other night, he came into the living room and stood next to me with a shit-eating grin on his face. He’d cleverly moved the Post-It note to the button on his pants.

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And he accusing me of the being the 12 year old in this relationship? I don’t think so.

 

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Four reasons I dislike Finter*

15 Dec

I like fall. And I like winter. I do NOT like the unnamed season between the two, which is where we are right now. I’m choosing to call it Finter. Here are my chief complaints:

  1. It feels like it’s always cold and rainy. Not cold enough for snow, but somehow cold enough to ensure your feet turn into ice cubes that require a long soak in the tub to thaw.
  2. The leaves that fell and haven’t been picked up by the city are disintegrating into massive piles of pulp. In addition to being ugly, they’re super slippery – I’ve almost wiped out WEARING SNEAKERS a half dozen times in the last week. And regardless of how well you wipe your feet, you WILL track this leaf confetti into your home.
  3. The other issue with the leaves: they’re blocking storm drains, so whenever it rains (see bullet #1: always), water backs up until it’s about 3-4 feet away from the curb, ensuring that whenever you leave the sidewalk, you WILL step into at least an inch of standing water.
  4. It’s dark out at 4pm. Tonight I was sitting here reading my Kindle in the dark and I thought, “Well, I guess I’ll brush my teeth and call it a night…” then I looked at the clock and realized it was only 5pm. It felt like midnight.

SIDE NOTE: I just went to find an image for this post and I googled “pile of leaves.” This was on the first page of image results, and honestly, Google, I think you’re kind of an asshole:

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Please, help me: what is redeeming about this non-season? Anything?

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