man, oh, man. my house is my dream and my nightmare. i love that it’s old. really old. like 116 years old and all the charm and victorian aesthetic that haven’t been ripped out by rehabbers for the most part. and then i hate some of the not so charming features.

like the original windows. note the wavy glass–that’s the original leading dripping down after years and years and years. pretty cool. speaking of cool, it’s getting to be winter pretty soon (ignore the fact that it’s supposed to be 70 degrees tomorrow–three days before Thanksgiving) and those lovely original windows also are not exactly air-tight. more like air-tunnel if you’re sitting next to it. i’m just mad because it takes forever to put up the 3M plastic window covering dealy. the first time i did it, it was kind of fun; cutting out the plastic to fit, measuring the double-sided tape, hot blow dryer air to tighten it up to crystal perfection. after the fifth window, it’s not as magical.

add to this my neighbor’s recent good fortune. there’s a city program that will actually pay for homeowners in certain city neighborhoods (ours is one) that if you can prove that you have lead-based paint on your windows, they’ll REPLACE them. for FREE. the paperwork process took about a year, but she now has beautiful new windows in her entire house. ones that don’t have the extra benefit of a year-round draft. or brain-damaging lead dust particles.

of course, you have to meet an income requirement. i’m usually too poor to meet any other interesting requirement, but not this one. of course. so until one of us loses a job (not really worth new windows) or tony tries his hand at being a stay-at-home dad, new windows are just an expensive dream that will have to be realized at a later date. oh, well.

in the meantime, i will have to focus my ‘this old house’ energies on repainting the cast iron tub white instead of the obnoxious black it currently is. who paints the exterior of a cast iron tub black??? and then of course, there’s the trim in the two season sun room. or maybe some crown moulding in the living room?

too many projects, never enough money.

the other day i traveled to bosnia. how little time it took to get there may surprise you. i arrived in only fifteen minutes. i know, it seems impossible, but really, i was there.

i wandered outside of my neighborhood last sunday looking for a new coffee shop to discover. at last i found my own little slice of eastern europe. hello, caffe milano. from the outside it’s a typical storefront with showcase windows, cool couples seated facing the scenes of traffic and belligerent drunks. on the inside it’s all bosnia, all the time.

of course, i didn’t know this until i opened the door. i expected a typical funky, peace-nookish, granola-y coffee house atmosphere. but as soon as i opened the door, i knew i was a long way off from woodstock.

first of all, everyone looked and sounded completely bosnian. execpt me. and i guess the eastern europeans take their coffee experience a little more formally. there was a lot of poly-blend and lycra happening in there. and the discotheque/singles bar vibe was complete with the dance house music and international music videos playing on the plasma screen tv. and there i was, the only one in fatigue colored shorts and chacos speaking in my brashy amerikan.

all this hits me as i’m slo-motioning walking through the door. i’m soooooo not a local. oh well. too late to turn back now. i’m here, i might as well hang. so i sit up at the bar and order a tea. i asked for an iced chai and she didn’t know what it was. now i really knew i was in the wrong place.

how about a hot tea? okay! yea! there’s hot tea in bosnia! and not just any hot tea, rasberry hot tea. i’m pretty sure there was crack in it, because after about thirty minutes i was wired enough to go running a 5k or something like it. i kept shaking and dancing my feet to the techno bounce. i got a lot of essay grading done, surprisingly enough.

when i was done, i tried to pay. my money was no good there. i was befriended by the locals who took me under their wings, taught me a native dance, and then paid for my drink after christianing me with my new croatian name, grblinka.

no, not really. i tried to pay with a check card and they didn’t have a debit machine. ahhhhh, yes. i forget that eastern europe is not always as technologically advanced as the west. i managed to scraped together a dollar in u.s. currency and that seemed to appease my waitress.

then it was time to go. i had a family to get back to in faw nation. so i gathered up my crappy junior essays and bid my bosnian friends dovidjenja.