You Probably Saw This Coming…

deck minus a splash of color

Okay, I'm going to get a few things out of the way first because living in an apartment building for the first time ever presences itself with situations where you have to learn to laugh at yourself or you'd die of embarrassment. 

Situation One - I learned the hard way that a pocket door tends to bounce back open if you close it too hard. I found this out while sitting on the toilet and gazing across to the where the closed door should have been and seeing instead the wide open bedroom window shade. Anyone walking by on the sidewalk would have viewed something neither one of us wanted them to see. To make it worse the bathroom is lit up like an airport runway with no other lighting choice in between that and total darkness. That pocket door bounce not only opens itself at inopportune times it also closes itself at inopportune times. After going in there without turning on the light the door closed itself and I ended peeing in pitch blackness. I followed that trip up by me digging around to find the box where I’d packed a few nightlights. 

Situation Two - You probably saw this one coming. I locked myself out of my apartment when I went into the hall to put some cardboard boxes out for maintenance to pick up. It wouldn’t have been so bad if it hadn’t been on Sunday and if I hadn’t just gotten out of the shower with my wet hair plastered to my head with clips to dry the waves out of it, and if the main entrance leading to the concierge’s desk---that great place that solves all our problems---didn’t have a gaggle of ladies waiting for the bus to take them to church. I was embarrassed right down to my fuzzy slippers. A side note here I’m going to have to dust off my bling because everyone else here seems to wear a lot jewelry.

Situation Three - Only half the residences have moved in yet so it’s pretty quiet here in the evenings and one night I was the only person in the cafe` eating when a tall guy came in who shall henceforth be known at T-Shirt Tom. I’ve seen him before and he’s memorable because he’s quick to introduce himself and he wears t-shirts with quirky sayings on them. He asked if he could sit with me and I graciously closed my notebook, set down my pen and we made small talk long enough for me to find out: 1) he’s got 100 or more t-shirts and that his grandkids buy them for him, 2) that he follows college football and soccer, and 3) that his favorite team is from the college where he got his law degree. 

Being the great conversationalist that I am---note the sarcasm here ---I was looking for a common thread so we didn’t look so much like I was a talk show host doing an interview. So I said that I’m not into sports but this summer I’ve been watching and learning about baseball. He looked at me like I’d pulled a giant turd out of my pants and laid it on the table. And I kid you not, the next thing he said was, “I changed my mind. I think I’m going to sit over by the TV so I can watch the game coming on.” It reminded me of a time in my twenties when a guy in a bar came over and asked if he could sit down. After a few minutes of conversation I excused myself to go to the restroom but instead I left the building. To this day I’ve felt bad about doing that. I was young and dumb and didn’t think twice about the guy’s self-esteem. Now I’m old and smarter and my self-esteem is high enough that I found the humor in karma finally catching up with me. 

Situation Four - There’s an intercom between the front door and our apartments. When someone comes to visit they’re suppose to punch in your apartment number and it rings like a door bell inside your unit and when we answer it we can see them on a camera. I have the first number in the building and I’m getting a lot of people wanting me to buzz them in---mostly moving company employees. Not going to happen if I don’t know them but one guy was quite insistent that he was my son. "Come on, Ma, quite fooling around and let me in!” In and out of the building he went all one day and every time he’d ring me instead of his mom. I finally I went out to the front door and showed him how to buzz the right apartment. If I was shopping for another son-I-wish-I-had it wouldn't be him.

Tomorrow my desk gets delivered and I can hardly contain myself. It was custom built by the Amish and I haven’t even seen it yet. But over the years I’ve bought five pieces of furniture from the same place so I have total faith that I’ll like it. 

That’s all for now from the Daydreamer’s Den --- yes, I picked a name for my place! I've always been a daydreamer only now I get to celebrate that aspect of my personality instead of feeling guilty over how much time I've wasted in the process. ©

 

My 'lovely' view of the road and parking lot off my deck. The building in the far view is our library and recreation center for crafting, book clubs or whatever we all vote to start up over there

This is the wall between my half bath door and the door to my den. I used to collect clothes pins---all different and the washboard now holds the six oldest, all that is left of my original 100. The baskets are running board baskets from circa 1905, made for touring cars. The ice box refrigerator is over 100 years old and speaks "cottage" fluently as that's what most of us had on the lake before we had electricity.

The idea for using old fruit jars to house some of my downsized collectibles I shamelessly stole from Dawn's blog, Bahamian Valhalla. That jar of watches is every watch I ever had in my lifetime, but I sold 50 or so of my husband's pocket watches. We used to collect political pin-back buttons and sold 100's of them on e-Bay but I screwed up and forgot to keep the best for my jar. Sewing buttons are in another jar and I didn't make that mistake again. I sold 1000's of sewing buttons. 100 wooden nickels takes up another jar. The largest jar contains the fool's gold and rubies my husband and I mined Out West on what I consider the happiest day of my life.

These now hold knitting yarn, but they are lined with tin to keep food cold.

I turned the inside of the ice box into a pantry which is going to work out good. The top left section is where a block of ice would have gone back in its day. The meat section is right below it. At cottages people used to keep these old ice boxes even after they got electricity and used them for keeping pop and beer cold at parties.