New Thing #339: A Holiday Light Addition

For a few years my holiday house-decorating routine has been the same: Icicle lights hanging over the garage.

The colorful lights shaped like a tree under the living room, where the sparkling ball hangs at the top.

There's the string of snowmen in the living room window, and the wreath on the door.

I love it, but I was always on the lookout for just the right thing to add to the display.

This year I found it.

It's the snowflake you see at the top. You'll remember, once I successful climbed a ladder last month, that nothing was going to stop me from reaching the previously unreachable parts of my house.

And when I found this snowflake in the store last week, I knew it was going to be perfect for that one spot that seemed a little bit empty among all of the Christmas lights but I just didn't know how to fill it.

So it all came together perfectly, until I got home and opened the box and saw this:

I guess I expected the snowflake to come right out of the box ready to go on the wall. But, alas, some assembly was required.

So I put together the pieces and decided it didn't matter if I messed up (no two are alike!), and went outside to hang it up.

I only planned on putting up the snowflake and not the rest of the lights, but the girls got excited, and once I dug out one thing I figured, why not take out everything, and so it all took shape:

The icicle lights hanging over the garage.

The colorful lights shaped like a tree under the living room, where the sparkling ball hangs at the top.

The string of snowmen in the living room window.

The wreath on the door.

And the snowflake hanging underneath the window.

Perfect.

New Thing #328: Going Up On A Ladder

I'm not a climber. I've seen climbers - children and adults.

You turn around and next thing you know they're high atop the nearest structure.

That's not me.

First of all, I was never very good at finding the foothold - even climbing fences as a kid.

But secondly - and most importantly - I am afraid of heights.

It's not a crippling fear. I'll go up on the roof if it's enticing enough…I just won't go near the edge. (I had a friend who lived in midtown Manhattan for a number of years, and we went to the roof of his apartment building once. I couldn't believe how unsafe it was to be up there - the ledge wasn't all that high. But I could have lived up there, I loved the view so much.)

So it's not the type of fear that will prevent me from experiencing something worth seeing, for example...but it is the type of fear that will keep me from doing something like bungee jumping or skydiving.

Or from climbing a ladder, for the most part.

I say "for the most part" because there are going to be times, I've come to realize, when in my current state of husband and father I'm going to have to climb the ladder.

Especially when, as you see in that picture above, strong winds this summer ripped our shutters off the exterior of our house. (Imagine my surprise when I realized after seven or eight years of living here that our shutters were decorative and not practical. Thank goodness for these storms, saving me from having to embarrass myself by trying to close the decorative shutters someday.)

I made a cursory attempt to fix the shutter a few weeks ago, reaching up to the nail with the shutter and falling a bunch of feet short. It was then I knew I was going to have to take the trip up the ladder. Also, not pictured, a more recent storm knocked a screen off of one of our bedroom windows.

So I took out the ladder. (An ordeal, because it was tucked away in the back of the garage because, you know, I don't ever use it. I bought it one weekend - I think it might have been a Thanksgiving weekend, actually, a few years ago - when there was some tree trimming that needed to happen because some branches were getting too close to the house. I chickened out of the climbing of the ladder when my brother and my dad, both visiting and helping me with the yard work, were much more eager to climb it.)

I steadied it against the ground, then against the wall, and then re-steadied it. My daughter came out and said, "Are you scared to climb it?" And this is an important part of fatherhood - it makes me braver. "No," I said. "I'm just making sure it's really safe." And then, with my daughter watching I marched right up that ladder and placed the shutter back on the nail. (And then I took a quick peek to make sure any neighbors weren't watching and I snapped a "ladder selfie" to prove I had done it. Kind of wish I had either smiled or not. Not crazy about the in between look there.)

You can see the shutter on the far left on the top picture is also pulling away from the wall. I climbed over there and played with it for a few minutes, but I couldn't do anything about it right now. Then I went around to the front of the house and used the ladder to fix the screen on the bedroom. Then I went to the corner of the house where some overgrowth had gotten tangled up in the gutter near the chimney. I used a step stool on one side of the house and the tall ladder on the other side. I was able to clear a little bit out but the fun and games were over when I knocked a brick off the chimney (yes, our chimney is falling apart, I discovered) and it hit me in the head.

That was the end of our ladder fun for the day.

The screen will probably blow off in the next storm. The shutters will definitely both come down with the next gust of wind.

But that doesn't really matter. My daughter saw me climb a ladder like a man. When other kids talk about the dad things their dads do, like climbing ladders to fix shutters, she can share a story too.

Maybe I'll even get adventurous and use the ladder to hang this year's Christmas lights even higher!

But then I think that ladder's getting returned to the back of the garage for another few years.

New Thing #317: Chasing Daylight

Weekends in November are almost exclusively reserved for raking leaves. And, not quite redundantly, raking leaves is exclusively reserved for weekends in November.

It's rare that I take part in that activity at other times. (Until I killed the big tree out front. Since its leaves start falling in May now I get a jump on those leaves and I don't wait until November for them. But that's not what I'm talking about here.)

This year, though, due to a number of reasons, I'm needing to squeeze in the raking at other times.

Which is how I found myself racing home on Monday afternoon to take advantage of what little daylight was left so that I could do some outside work.

Here's the confluence of events: I'm down a November weekend of yard work because we have to go to New York this weekend, it seems like the leaf collection stops a weekend earlier this year (or it could be because Thanksgiving is so late and the next week is December my internal leaf calendar is off), and my wife's busy work weekends have all forced me to accelerate my leaf-picking-up and take advantage of gathering leaves when I can.

So on Monday I had the rare (these days) opportunity to leave (no pun intended - leaf! Ha!) work at 3:45 and try to get home before it got dark (roughly 5pm) and do some weekday afternoon leaf pickup.

It helped that it was Veterans' Day - I realized when I left work that traffic was not going to be an issue. (Vegetable pickup was a slight issue - I had to swing by the farm for our Monday veggie pickup, but that's directly on the way home so it was only a minor - if any - detour.)

The picture above gives you a good idea of the amount of daylight when I got home - not quite dusk yet.

I was able to run inside, get into some sweats (yes, I'm at that stage where I don't care if I'm picking up leaves on my lawn in sweat pants. Who do I have to impress?), and pack two of those big bags with leaves. (That's in addition to what you see above, bringing this week's total to six bags, in addition to the 10 from a week ago. If history is any indication, there's still 10-15 more bags worth of leaves to be gathered.)

It was a productive afternoon - I felt like I snuck in some extra time, which was the whole point.

And, you might not think this way, but here's how I think:

When I'm finishing up my leaf pick-up for the season the weekend of the 22nd and 23rd (although I'd love to have Thanksgiving weekend to finish up every year if you're listening, Town of Framingham), I'll remember this extra bag and a half that I snuck in on Monday and I'll thank myself. (Ha! Thanksgiving. Pun not intended.)

New Thing #307: Yard Work, Times Two

I'm not the biggest fan of yard work. Actually, once I'm immersed in it, it's not too bad.

The bigger problem is - I have no idea what I'm doing out there.

I can mow the lawn and I can do some weeding…but I'm mostly just faking it.

I'm doing what I think I'm supposed to be doing…and I'm probably not doing it well.

Which is probably why, for the first time ever, I ended up having to do some stuff over again this weekend.

It's November, and in my front and back yard that means it's time to pick up the zillions upon zillions of leaves that have accumulated.

In the front it's especially tedious - our driveway is like a wind tunnel that attracts all of the neighbors' leaves. (Though - bright spot! - due to what I believe is my negligence but could be due to a blight of some kind, the big tree in our front yard that used to produce even more leaves has pretty much died. So each year it loses its leaves in April or May, and by October/November it doesn't factor in to what I have to pick up.)

This summer, though, when I wasn't at school working, I took advantage of the girls being at camp to work in the yard. I did significant work back there that I had neglected for a couple of summers. So I had a bunch of bags sitting in my yard, under an overhang, filled with yard waste, waiting for the fall for when my town does leaf pickup. (Framingham sets certain weeks where, along with the trash pickup, they come to get our leaves and sometimes brush. These were all things I didn't have to worry about growing up in Queens and living in Boston before becoming a homeowner.)

Anyway, what you see in the picture above is  one of those bags filled with yard waste. As you can see, it's ripped. And what was in it is falling out of it. And that happened with all ten or fifteen bags I worked on this summer.

Apparently, the bags are very biodegradable. Unfortunately, that means the rain and other conditions since July have worn the bags away to almost nothing.

I discovered this circumstance when I lifted one of the bags to bring it from the back to the front for the garbage pickup. The bottom fell right out.

So not only did I spend Saturday picking up some of the leaves in the front, but I also had to buy some new bags to move the contents of each of the old bags into in order to get them to the front of the house.

There's only one thing worse than doing yard work once…and that's doing it twice.

Or, actually, just as bad is finally getting all of the leaves off the ground, and then watching the last leaves fall onto the pristine driveway.

It'll be a while before I'm facing that situation though.

I still have a lot of cleaning up to do.

New Thing #222: Not Being Scared Of A Baby Bunny

Listen. I'm a city boy. I'm not used to animals running around in the human world.

Growing up, we had a dog, so I'm fairly fine around dogs (though my default setting is I don't trust them around kids), but I don't like cats.

I think this is in no small part due to the fact that there were a lot of random roaming cats in my neighborhood when I was a kid. (OK, maybe there were like 2.)

They'd frighten me when I'd see them.

But I was lucky to not have to deal with mice or deer or raccoons.

Until I was an adult.

But this week, I manned up around that cute little baby bunny you see there.

All right. As has been my writing style recently, before we move forward we must move back.

1999, Boston University on-campus apartment, Beacon Street, Boston, Massachusetts. I'm sitting around on a Saturday morning and I see something move among the mass of wires behind the television. I was home alone and I darted out of that apartment so fast I didn't even finish putting my sneakers on until I was on the sidewalk. I went to some friends' dorm, spent most of the day out. That night we watched Saturday Night Live and I swear I saw a mouse dart into the bedroom. My roommate wasn't so sure. He decided it would be a good idea to lay out a Pringle in the kitchen, just on the floor, to prove whether or not we had a rodent. (I hate that word.) Woke up, the Pringle was gone. Worst sleep I've ever had, those couple of nights. We trapped it by Monday or Tuesday.

When I lived in Watertown, probably in 2003 when I was working overnights, I was leaving for work at around midnight and saw a raccoon the size of a dog dart across the street. Working overnights was pretty terrible. Never more terrible than the next few nights when I had to go from my apartment to my car.

Every night before I go to bed I say a little thank you prayer that I have not had a rodent problem where I have lived since college. (But I don't pray to Saint Francis of Assissi. That dude just wouldn't understand.)

Every so often something gets close to the house - once a possum walked across the porch. You'll remember there was this back in June. And, quite often, there are bunnies.

I've been spending a lot of time cleaning up the backyard this summer, trying to make up for a couple of summers of too much neglect. This week when I was back there, for the first time this summer really, I saw a couple of critters. First was a chipmunk. This'll happen every now and then, but it ran away from the house, so we were cool.

Then I saw something dart across the yard and hide beneath some brush. I didn't really recognize it but I thought it was a bunny. It just didn't seem that big. I heard it rustling and rustling. It was close. But I didn't run away. So I know that was good progress for me.

Then, I saw it kind of hanging out on a brick ledge. Not only was it a bunny - it was a baby bunny!

I went up close and snapped a picture. Then it scratched its ear with its little hind leg (which, even on a baby rabbit is quite big) and I thought I should take a video. I thought then it would make the perfect Vine! (I'm waiting for the right moment for my first Vine New Thing. I thought this was it.) I recorded it pretty much doing nothing for the 6 seconds.

Somehow I deleted that video. Very frustrating. But let's focus on the positive - I was real up close to something that wasn't a person or a dog for, essentially, the first time in my life. It was kind of thrilling. I almost wanted to touch the baby bunny. But I didn't. I'm not a crazy man over here.

So, turns out, I like baby bunnies.

Or, at least, I don't hate them.

Or, better yet if we're being honest with ourselves, I'm not scared of them.

OK. I'm less scared of them than other things.

And I'm already recognizing the big problem. If I have a baby bunny in my backyard...well, chances are it's not the only one.

You know what they say about bunnies and proliferation.

If I come across a bunch of baby bunnies at once...well, that might be a whole other ballgame.

Hope no one takes a Vine of me if that happens.

New Thing #205: Installing A Bath Storage Cabinet

I am far from the handiest man you've ever met. I am also reluctant to change this trait because I am so afraid of doing something wrong and ruining something to the point where the damage is irreversible.

I am slowly learning that most mistakes are correctable.

But it's hard for me to pull that trigger and drill a hole in the wall.

This weekend, though, that's exactly what I did when my wife asked me to install a bath storage cabinet in the bathroom.

New Thing!

Originally we were going to put the cabinet above the toilet. But it turns out there's a bit of a curve in that wall and the cabinet wouldn't sit flush (ha! unintended pun) against the wall. So we decided to move it across to the wall above the towel rack, across from the toilet.

(This also serves as a nice courtesy to our visitors because if you are using our toilet when the cabinet inevitably falls from the wall due to shoddy workmanship, you will see it as it falls on you rather than have it blindside you.)

There were no instructions with this fixture, so I thought I was on my own and called my dad for advice. Should I use wall anchors? Butterfly thingies that open up in the wall? Do I need to find a stud? (I know, I know. If there was a stud in the house he could probably have installed the thing.)

Turned out, as I was talking to my dad I saw the instructions on the box. They recommended the butterfly things if you couldn't find a stud. I couldn't. So I went to the hardware store.

That night I measured carefully - four spots on the wall and four spots on the cabinet where I would be drilling. I drilled the holes. Turns out, my drill bit was a little too small for the butterfly things, and anyway, with this kind of a fixture, I think those things would have been too complicated to install anyway. So I used the wall anchors.

And then I accidentally drilled one spot too big. So five holes for four anchors later, I screwed the cabinet into the wall.

Yes, I would have liked the screws to feel a little tighter in the end. Yes, I would have liked not to have a 1/8'' hole visible in the cabinet next to where I had to drill another hole because of my wall hole screw-up.

But the anchors are secure, and the screws have that cabinet attached to the wall pretty tight.

But slowly I'm coming to the realization that I can handle a drill. I can make some home improvements. I can D I Y. (That's "Do It Yourself" for those not in the know. Although, I suppose I should say I can D I M. "Do It Myself", you see.)

The only catch is that my wife shouldn't put anything too heavy in that cabinet. Or lean on it too heavily.

And if I were you, next time you're here...I'd ask to use the downstairs bathroom.

New Thing #193: Re-Organizing The Pantry

I wish I had taken a "Before" picture so you could see just how impressive this effort really is. But I only thought to take a picture once I had cleared out the pantry.

Suffice it to say - those shelves were filled with 8 years worth of clutter.

And then we'd add groceries every week.

I've been slowly and steadily doing a re-organization of all of our kitchen cabinet space, and this was a big one.

I'm proud of the work I did...and you'd better believe I remembered to take an "After" picture.

Ta-Da!

To be honest, I'm still working on the finishing touches of the pantry.

There's more room for me to move around some stuff from some other cabinets - especially on the floor there. (For example, after the "After" picture I moved the breadmaker to the bottom right part of the floor.)

But this is a world of difference from what we were dealing with before.

I'm particularly proud of the baskets and organizers we bought from the Container Store. (I'm hopeful that if you click the picture it'll enlarge and you can better see the details.)

Let's start with the baskets - on the right side of the third shelf from the top you'll see a two-tiered basket. That will now house the loose snacks that the girls pack for lunch rather than the big box of the snacks that takes up way too much space. I forget what my original vision was for that bottom shelf, but my wife and I decided to put the girls' applesauce snack down there. Again, this eliminates a box that takes up too much space.

Under the next two shelves you'll see hanging organizers - those are for kitchen towels and placemats, respectively. I never thought these things would work, but they are awesome. They hang off the shelves perfectly, they don't take up too much space, and we had no good spot for our placemats. It's so organized now! By far the best part of this whole re-organization. (We also bought a basket that hangs under the shelf - that's in a different cabinet and now houses my wife's Keurig cups.)

After we organized the pantry we were able to create some room in other cabinets and then discovered a whole bunch of baby bottles that we no longer need and could throw away.

We're doing a lot of re-organizing and I'm not going to bore you with every little thing. But the pantry is a big key to the rest of our kitchen re-organization.

And it was so successful that I had to share it with you.

New Thing #23: New Dining Room Set

I wrote last week about how much I enjoyed our visit to Bob's Discount Furniture a little more than a week ago. Part of what made it such a great shopping experience was some cool furniture...including what would become our new dining room table.

But the table isn't the whole story - there's the chairs, of course.

And the bench.

The bench?

Yes, the bench.

How cool is this?

We really liked two tables - one your more traditional table and chairs, and the other a table and chairs and bench.

We ended up going with the one with the bench. Six chairs and a bench, to be exact. (We still have a kid in a high chair, so right now five chairs, a bench, a high chair, and an extra chair in the living room.)

We were actually worried it was going to be too big for our dining room, but it had a leaf so we thought we'd only use the leaf if necessary.

Turns out with the leaf it's perfect.

It's nice to have a meal without the table wobbling, sitting in chairs that you're confident will support you.

And I like that my daughters are going to grow up with the coolest dining room table on the block.

New Thing #17: Bob's Discount Furniture

I hate the commercials for Bob's Discount Furniture. I never saw them until I moved to Massachusetts.

I don't know if that's because they started here or not, but I do know that now they're on in New York as well. I'm sure that before the year 2000 or so they were not.

Regardless, they're annoying commercials.

But I discovered this past week that the store is fantastic.

Due to unforeseen circumstances, the need for a new dining room set became urgent this week.

On Saturday we went to Bob's to see what they had.

We ended up with a great new dining room set. (Stay tuned - when it arrives it'll certainly be a "New Thing".)

But we also ended up with a great new experience. First of all, the store has some pretty great furniture and compared to other local furniture stores the prices are great. (I'm always amazed at how expensive things are at Jordan's Furniture, which prides itself on its 'underprices'. "If those are underprices I'd hate to see their overprices," I like to say. No one likes me saying it.) But even better, there's a little fish pond inside the store, which the girls loved, and there's also a cafe with what I believe are free snacks and beverages.

I don't know exactly what's in the cafe - I didn't venture there yet. I didn't want to take the girls back there and have them wanting all the snacks.

But I figure I can just do it next time. Because I'll most certainly be back.

New Thing #10: Breaking A Chair By Sitting In It

Spoiler Alert: One of the upcoming "New Things" was going to be a trip to a furniture store to buy new dining room furniture. That's going to have to happen sooner rather than later.

During dinner Wednesday night, the chair I was sitting in went right out from under me.

And it was kind of hilarious.

A couple of things you need to know:

1) I have been thinking an awful lot about my weight lately. This incident did me no favors.

2) The dining room table and chairs are hand-me-downs. My wife and I have had them for almost ten years now...and they go back in her family much farther than that.

So they were definitely on the way out. We'd have to pop the dowels connecting the legs to the seat back in every once in a while to make sure the chairs weren't getting too flimsy.

That's kind of what made this so hilarious. As I was eating Wednesday, I felt the chair shift when one of the dowels popped out. I bent to look to my right, to see if it was something I could quickly fix. And when I shifted my weight, the chair totally gave.

My daughters (and, to a slightly lesser extent, my wife) were quite concerned, so that was a nice side result. But I was fine. (Other than my hurt pride. Seriously, no matter what your weight situation - I'm definitely not too overweight - a chair breaking under you is going to do some ego damage.)

This could have been a funny "New Thing" even if I had staged it, allowing it to break below me, cartoon-style, knowing the chair was going to break someday.

The fact that it happened organically makes it even better.