Laundry Day

While Tony slaved away at 14-hour days at his company's conference in San Francisco, I decided to surprise him by doing the laundry. All of it. At the same time.

Understand, we have a washer-dryer in our penthouse urban paradise. It's small, meaning that I have to wash the bedclothes one sheet at a time, and so slow that a full cycle of regular clothing can take up to two and a half hours and still be damp at the end. The fact that this sort of arrangement is ubiquitous in Europe (at least according to our landlord) is small comfort. Though we manage to keep up well enough with our day to day needs, you can imagine how the nonessentials pile up. Add to that the magnificent wedding shower gift of new sheets and towels, and our situation had become dire.

So I rented a station wagon (!!!) from Zipcar and threw ginormous bundles of laundry down the stairwell. Linus, who had already suffered through the trauma of Tony's 4am departure, was convinced that I was packing up and leaving him forever and began a howling fit commensurate to his grief. (Nothing in this life is always sunshine and puppydogs. Not even puppydogs.)

It took 4 giant washing machines, three and a half hours, and one emergency trip to the ATM, but we finally have clean sheets again. Sometimes the suburban life is very appealing.

(Ed.: Sorry for the repost. Mobile uploading didn't go as I planned)

The Power of the Mocha

Tony, enjoying a mocha at our favorite coffee shop (where everyone really does know our names). It's the only thing that makes him human in the morning.

It has long been our habit to compete with each other in making absurd puns using the word "mocha". Typically we select a theme such as slogans (in mocha we trust), Christmas carols, or hymns (what a friend we have in mocha!). Then the last person to dissolve in helpless laughter is the winner.

I like our rituals.

Making subway rides go faster

Behold my latest effort: socks. The yarn is that niftiest of inventions, self-striping sock yarn (who knew?). It is handed down from a friend who had to give away some of her stash when she moved into a smaller apartment. The delicious irony? Tony and I now live in the same size apartment, two floors up from her. Yes. They are small.

My needles are US size 1 -- just about the thinnest you can get -- and are made of bamboo. They are light and flexible; using them is like knitting with toothpicks. The stitch marker that mark sthe beginning of the heel section is actually a light bulb-shaped paperclip. Ah, electric industry swag.

Where I stand on the risk ladder

On April Fool's night, Wednesday, April 1, Tony came home from work and began to rearrange our living room for his weekly poker game. He slid the sofa into the kitchen, carried the coffee table into the bedroom, and extracted his motley collection of folding chairs from the corners they inhabit six and a half days a week in our tiny apartment. Suddenly his phone rang, flashing my name. He picked it up: "Hey." A strange voice answered: "There's been an accident. You're going to have to go to the hospital." What happened, Tony wanted to know, which hospital? "I'll call you back."


At the same time, I was stretched out on the side of a rain-slick road, trembling from shock and fear and cold, feeling my way around the holes in my memory. I had awoken to lights and strange faces in my eyes. They wanted to know what day it was. My lower lip was swollen and sticky with blood.

In the month since crashing my 150cc motorscooter in the warehouse district near Gallaudet University, I've tried to stitch together my patchwork memories. Based on what I remember and what the paramedics told me, I think I lost traction on a right-hand turn and panicked, slamming on the rear brakes. Braking in the middle of a turn is one of the worst things you can do on a motorcycle. Instead of laying the scooter down on the right side and collecting a few bruises, I caused the scooter to flip violently to the left, throwing me off to land on my face (judging by the gouges on my helmet) and slide down the road. The paramedics told me with some admiration that I must have practically hydroplaned on the wet street.

I don't know how long I was unconscious; I don't know who called the ambulance. When I woke up, my helmet, jacket and gloves had already been removed and my jeans were soaking wet. The paramedics, jolly and gentle, put a plastic collar around my neck and strapped me to a board for the ride to the hospital. With effort, I told them Tony's phone number from memory and insisted repeatedly that they had to call him. I tried to tell them that it was poker night and someone with a car would be able to give him a ride.

The paramedics left me in the hospital waiting room, still immobilized in the stretcher. I never learned their names.

Uncontrollable shivering. A desperate need to use the bathroom, followed by a near-disaster when my left leg collapsed as I tried to stand up. X-ray. CAT scan. Tony arriving with dry clothes. Nothing broken, though my left knee was swollen and my left calf hurt so much I couldn't bear to have it touched. Going home on crutches at 2am.

A month later, I can once again walk and turn my head and lift my left arm above shoulder level. There's an unexplained achy lump in my left calf, which might be a blood clot, a torn muscle, or a knot that never loosened. I'm still waiting to hear from the doctor.

Tony and my family weren't surprised that I was back on my scooter the next week. Others marveled that I had the courage to ride again, but here's the thing: when you choose to engage in potentially dangerous activity, you decide how much risk you're willing to take. Then you live with that decision. I spent a lot of money on good riding gear and everything that I bought did the job that it was supposed to do: the armor in my jacket prevented me from dislocating my shoulder, the chin bar on my helmet kept my face in one piece, the gloves ensured that I still have skin on my hands.

I knew what I was getting into. I may never look at turns the same way again, but the crash hasn't changed my attitude toward riding. That's life: you pays your money and you takes your chances.

Turn and face the strange changes, Part 1

Dear Friends and Fans,

I've been meaning to send the Official Meganomics Update for some time, but I kept delaying my efforts because several major life issues were still in flux, and I wanted to have something concrete and certain to write.

After three months of apartment agony, Tony and I have finally moved. We rent a top-floor apartment in a condo building that, like so many ambitious condo projects in DC after the economic downturn, has been converted into rental units. It has many luxury yuppie fixin's like granite countertops, a balcony, and one of those nifty kitchen sink faucets that pulls out and converts to a sprayer (whee!). We are very happy with it (the animals are unanimously in favor of the sunny south-facing balcony), and we anticipate staying here for a while. The only drawback is that the downstairs neighbor complains that she can hear Linus's toenails clicking through the hardwood floor, but clearly she's deranged because Linus is perfect in every way. I'm just glad not to be moving every six months anymore!

Linus works on his tan

New home... for now

Earlier this fall, no longer able to stand the hour-long commute separating us, Tony and I moved in together. It's a choice that I would never, in my devout Catholic girlhood, have imagined making. I still have some old-fashioned beliefs about relationships.

But DC is big, expensive and hard to get around if you don't have a car. Our houses were five miles apart on opposite sides of the Potomac river: a 25 minute trip by car, but an hour or more by public transportation. It grew harder and harder to bear the vagaries of DC subway travel and to limit our time together to a rigidly-outlined dating schedule. If one of us went away, even for a few days, we might not see each other for over a week.

My lease ended in November, so we began a tentative apartment hunt in August. We had just about settled on a well-run apartment complex in the Maryland suburb of Silver Spring--a little far from downtown DC but quiet and pleasant--when the owners of our favorite coffee shop, where we've been eating twice a week for a year, told us that their friends were almost finished renovating the upstairs apartment of the house next door.

Well.

A ten-minute walk from a metro station in the neighborhood I've grown to love AND easy access to the best mochas in DC? We were sold. It seemed too good to be true.

And, of course, it was. The owners promised us several renovations, some of which were still incomplete when we moved in. That was ok. We could be understanding tenants. No mailbox? Letters could slide under the door! A front door that only locks with a padlock, from the outside? Someone had been hired to redesign the whole entrance--and designers are so unreliable! Anemic heat? You know how old buildings can be!

Then the kitchen sink started to leak. Our landlords would call a plumber and ask us to meet him during work hours... and then he wouldn't show. After another couple of days and more phone calls, the landlords would hire another plumber, who might show up or not. And another. After eight weeks and a complete replacement of the (newly installed) disposal and pipes, the sink only leaks a little, small drips easily caught in a cereal bowl that I dump out once a week or so. We've kind of given up on that because we have bigger issues to deal with.

The first time I ever ran the clothes dryer at night, it shorted out the current for our whole apartment. That's because all the outlets in our apartment are--wait for it--wired to a single circuit. The apartment is under-powered for the number of appliances it contains, so our landlord was supposed to apply to PEPCO (our local electric company) to increase the voltage sent to the apartment. PEPCO has no record of any such application. For now, we have to turn off the heat every time we run the dryer. I forgot today and had to replace yet another fuse.

Tony is bent on getting our of here with our security deposit and credit rating intact, so he began the grievance process by sending our landlords a letter listing all the housing codes the apartment violates (at least four) and threatening to schedule an inspection with the local housing agency if they haven't begun repairs in two weeks. Did I mention that Tony is my hero? He is now in charge of all customer service complaints.

For my part, I am ambivalent about leaving. The apartment is inconvenient at best and, with our exits impeded front and back (the fire escape is bent and rusty), dangerous at worst. Ok. But it offers a lot of things that many other places won't: we can have the animals with no problem; I can store the scooter, the bike, and the trailer in our back yard; and the kitchen is a glorious, gorgeous expanse of sunlight from its south-facing windows and storm door. That picture above? That's Linus on his private sun porch, where he guards the approach to our "castle" while enjoying the greenhouse effect. Plus, I dream of growing herbs--maybe even potatoes!--on the fire escape come spring.

I just want our landlords to fix the problems so we don't have to move again (remind me to tell you about the sofa delivery nightmare sometime). Tony wants to live in a place that has adequate heat and power supply. The saga of the kitchen sink has shown us that improvements, if they come, will be lengthy, inconvenient and unreliable.

We're in for an exciting couple of months. These days find me more and more nostalgic for the beautiful little apartment I had in Winston-Salem, where I paid $450 a month to live by myself near a park in the center of town AND had stained-glass windows. Alas.

But there's an upside: Tony is here at last. Forever.

Season's Greetings

Several readers have asked, most flatteringly, for updates. I hope to provide some soon. In the meantime, we extend from our family to yours our very best wishes for a peaceful and love-filled holiday season.

Merry Christmas* and Happy New Year from Megan, Tony, Linus and Pepper!

(* retroactive ;-) )