Further home improvements have occurred Chez Mad Dog! Many of you will recall the magical transformation of the porch formerly known as The Sunporch of the Damned that Alex effected, as if by feat of ledgerdemain (where, after all, did all that crap go?), while I was on the road. Now he has outdone himself by installing sunporch bookshelves:
Still life with James Joyce and dog butt.
I hadn’t really wanted to bring this up before, but the sunporch transformation is just the last in a long series of heroic efforts we’ve made over the past eighteen months in order to make our apartment liveable and turn it into a suitable and wholesome home for our pets and my yarn stash. Our landlord, a greedy, neglectful scoundrel busy man with multiple properties, had done little or nothing with our house over the years.
Let’s see some before and after photos, shall we?
The living room was…well, let’s just say that spending too much time there virtually guaranteed an emergency call to your psychiatrist and a steeply increased dosage of whatever psychotropic drug you were using at the time:
Why someone had installed a board above that bay of windows is a mystery that shall surely remain unsolved. But the funereal vinyl curtain is a nice touch, don’t you agree?
We leapt into action and came up with this:
Sadly, there was simply no way to include the black vinyl curtain in the new decor.
Every room in the apartment was some variation on the horror that was the living room. Here, for instance, is the original bleak kitchen:
which featured loose wires hanging out of huge gouges in the wall. (I “fixed” these, by the way, by blithely pushing the wires back into the wall, spackling over them, and painting over that. I faintly heard one of the wires wheeze, “For the love of God, Montressor!”)
Paint and some furnishings produced this:
And finally, the original incarnation of my office, with various pieces of furniture left by previous tenants:
I want to call your attention to the fact that the mirrors had been affixed to the wall with some sort of infernal epoxy and then painted around at some later date. I understand that the person who did this is “no longer welcome” at any of our nation’s Home Depot locations.
I washed the walls five times, I pried the mirrors off, I painted:
Same corner, folks. Veni, vidi, vici!
But wait! There’s more! What about the derelict pickup truck in the driveway?
Yes, that one. The one we had to push back several yards in order to close the gates to the back yard (which we were attempting to secure for Shelley’s use).
I solicited advice from my friend Tony shortly before Operation Derelict Truck Push because I foresaw difficulty. Extreme difficulty. And he’s the sort of person who would know what to do with a derelict truck that had been sitting in the driveway for so many years that it had sunk three inches into the asphalt, creating its own wheel wells.
Me: So, uh, Tony, what’s your advice? I mean, supposing we can overcome the inertia of this moribund truck that has sunk under its own weight into the driveway and has four semi-flat tires?
Tony (authoritatively): Well, the main thing in these situations is not to lose control of the truck.
Tony is a wise man, a truth that was only reinforced some minutes later when the now-freed truck began to roll with increasing momentum and speed down the driveway toward a parked car.
Imagine the good-natured fun and high-jinks as I tore through the thicket of brush on the driver’s side of the truck, gripped the driver’s side door handle and—now bleeding from various cuts and scratches—ran screaming alongside the truck as it barrelled driverless down the sloping driveway!
When I could leap inside and pull on the emergency brake, disaster was narrowly averted. See how just living here provides a high-adrenaline existence of constant danger and adventure? You don’t get that with just any rental property!
While we’re talking about things outside the house itself, it bears mention that when we moved in, the back yard was overgrown in thigh-high weeds
that Alex was forced—in a truly 19th-century afternoon—to cut down with a scythe. It was just like in Anna Karenina when Levin goes out to mow with his serfs.
Inconveniently, however, we have no serfs.
But I feel satisfied that after all that work, we’ve created an inviting and pleasant home environment. Otherwise, why would all these balls of Trekking keep following me home from Woolcott?
They know a good home when they see one.
And let’s look on the bright side. If I run out of space for my stash in the house, there’s plenty of room. In the cab. Of the truck we had to push.
 
                                                     My three-year-old nephew, cavorting with the goats.
                                                             A beautiful tree.
                                        Black swans.
 
