Rocket City Digs

Clearing the Shelves, Phase I: DVDs in Binders!

RocketGirl75 — Sat, 04 Sep 2010 17:52:43 +0000

After last week’s post, I had one of those weeks that ends with thinking “What else could happen?”–but me not being completely insane, I didn’t dare think it. The baby had already gotten her first cold, and then RocketMan got it, and then come Monday, I got it, and missed two days of work; then RocketBaby had a reaction to her MMR vaccine (low-grade fever that wasn’t serious, but extremely annoying) AND she decided to get a few molars in. Then after a night in which I’d only gotten 5 hours of sleep, we awoke Friday morning to RocketMan’s back being officially out. And a bunch of other stuff, too, that I won’t get into, but suffice to say: crazy week.

So I’m thrilled to say that last week’s post implanted a wild hair firmly in my behind, and I was determined to impose some order on our chaos. I’d long since filed Buffy, Angel, Dr. Who and Supernatural into a variety of CD cases, but none of them allowed for expansion, which is a problem, as Dr. Who and Supernatural are still on the air. And we’d already transferred some of the less-viewed movies (specifically, my musicals and Disney movies) into a three-ring binder, so we knew it was a system we liked. Our only reason for having some of the DVDs out was the “browse” factor–what if we want to look at the cases when we want to watch a movie? But I’d found that flipping through the binders wasn’t so bad, after all, and honestly? When I want to watch Star Wars, I want to watch Star Wars, and the only question is which one.

By my calculations, if we’d had every DVD on the shelf–say .5 inch wide per DVD, given or take a few (for box sets), we would take up approximately 140 square feet: 16.5 feet of shelf space, each at 8.5 inches high. At the point that we bindered up all our DVDs, we were using about 70 square feet of shelf space.

Waste a lot of space, you do.

We had DVDs by the stereo, DVDs on the shelves (next to a ton of baby books) and DVDs stacked on the end table. And Dr. Who AND Supernatural will be releasing their fifth seasons this fall, and I still haven’t found a used copy of Johnny Dangerously. All in all, we bought three boxes of Case Logic CD/DVD Album Refill Pages and four three-ring binders, for a grand total of about $100; one binder and one box of the pages are in the closet, waiting for our next trip to Rasputin. (By the by, I see no reason to drop $25 on a CD binder–three-ring binders cost $2.99 and unless you’re planning on traveling with them, do the job just fine.)

Check out the results: we actually removed a shelf, and are now using 17 square feet of shelf space, for a savings of 53 square feet–123 square feet if you count all of our DVDs. Not bad.

We're only making it better.

Of course, I whipped out the labelmaker (who doesn’t love a labelmaker?). All the DVD cases (and most of the bonus DVDs) will be going into storage.

Bonus material gets its own binder. We're putting most of them in storage.

As for browsing, most DVDs have fancy labels, so we’ve got no problems there. Just take sci-fi/fantasy off the wall, open it up, and browse away.

With two spaces for #7 and #8!

Next week (I hope): book-packing!

Drastic times, drastic measures: Converting a one-bedroom to a two-bedroom

RocketGirl75 — Sun, 29 Aug 2010 16:38:44 +0000

It started with the chairs.

In early July, the AIDSWalk committee convinced a few furniture dealers to donate four chairs for a fundraising raffle. Mind you, I work at a major international interiors and architecture firm, so we’re not talking a nice armchair for the den–we’re talking two tricked-out office chairs and a set of supercool lounge chairs. I bought six tickets and dropped them all in the lounge chair raffle; RocketMan instantly asked what we’d do with them if we won, but, really what were the chances?

A week later, our sun room looked like this:

Set phasers to stun.

Within an instant, we became the incredibly geeked owners of two Phillipe Starck-designed Kartell Eros chairs, retail between $400-$600 each, depending on which website you visit. They’re the coolest chairs I’ve ever owned, and I love me some chairs (this is one of my favorite coffee-table books: 1000 Chairs).

Before you keep reading, mind: I am NOT ungrateful. When my name was picked from the hat, they probably heard the squealing in Sacramento. The chairs are all shiny and sci-fi, and the swivel is as smooth as the molded plastic of the seat. RocketBaby spent several evenings being spun into delirium. On the downside, though–they take up about 16 square feet of floor space. We don’t really have an appropriate place for more sitting chairs. And, as RocketMan pointed out, they don’t exactly fit in our honey-wood cottage aesthetic, such as it is.

But Kartell Eros! I feel like they’re HEIRLOOM chairs, that forty years from now RocketBaby will be begging me to have just one for her new lunar module. I’m loathe to let them go, especially since, for all intents and purposes, they cost $25 each, and that means the universe personally gifted us with them. So we started looking at maybe getting a bigger storage space: one that could ostensibly serve as the fifth room of our apartment, as opposed to just an extra closet.

Then there was the vacation. Visiting actual houses with actual backyards and real-and-true laundry machines, and doors that close, and playing loud music without disturbing the baby–all of these things spoiled us for our return to San Francisco. I love our apartment, but suddenly the curtain in the hallway nursery seems like an awful inconvenience. I started poking around online for two-bedroom apartments. RocketMan began fantasizing about doing laundry three times a week. And a few nights ago, we had a serious discussion about whether more space would make us happier.

By the end of the conversation–which crossed the line into argument once or twice–I came to three conclusions: 1) having a door on the baby’s bedroom (one that is not made of plywood) would definitely make our lives easier, if not happier; 2) I really, really don’t want to spend half again as much money on a bigger place right now, especially when our current rent-controlled place meets most of our needs adequately; and 3) even if we find a two-bedroom, it could still be the same size as our current place, so why move at all?

So our solution (temporary though it might be): Push this apartment as far as it’ll go. We’ve done a lot with it, but we can do more. And if we hate what we end up doing, well, there’s the nuclear option of hitting the rental listings. My plan for Exceed Apartmental Expectations is as follows:

1) Get the bigger storage space. Paying an extra $60 a month is a lot less than $600, and we’ll have room for some of the changes listed below.

2) Pack up the books. We have at least 80 feet worth of shelving for books, most of which we don’t read on a regular basis. Pare down the books to two shelves, ship the rest to the storage space, when we get a place with a library, we can break them back out again.

3) Pack up the DVDs. We have most of our DVDs in binders, but three shelves’ worth of our favorites. We don’t need them to be visible anymore. Four shelves down to one.

4) Here’s the biggun: move the baby into the bedroom, and the bed into the sunroom. Here’s our current layout:

You might remember from awhile back, when I said the reason we didn’t want the nursery in the sunroom was because we wanted that extra space and privacy for us, and that’s true. But our needs have changed, and so we’re seriously thinking about making the leap to full two-bedroom status. If we move her into the bedroom, she’ll have a quiet space and a door. Moving our bed into the sunroom might be weird for guests, but as it is, we’re hardly inviting anyone over at night because her nursery is so close to the living room. We’ll have to move the computer somewhere–or get that laptop we’ve been talking about–and it’s likely we’ll have to keep our clothes in the bedroom. But having that extra aural privacy for her (and thus us in the evenings) could go a long, long way in making us less like slaves to rent control, and more like adults with a two-bedroom apartment.

We’ll see what happens on days like today, when RocketMan’s sleeping in late. But this all drives home my favorite part of renting: nothing’s ever permanent.

The Toys of Our Youth

RocketGirl75 — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 04:46:10 +0000

As you might know by now, I’m a big fan of 1) Vintage; 2) Thrifting; and 3) Forcing both of those things on my baby. While visiting my hometown did involve the insaneostress of rolling with the folks for nigh on two consecutive weeks, I did get to revisit the sources of much of my nostalgia, most of which were covered in my last blog (Rain Day, the willow tree, etc.). An extra bonus was sending my 64-year-old dad into the attic to fetch my beloved Big Bird chair, which I’d long since assumed had been passed on to some lucky Goodwill customer. My mother claimed, no, it wasn’t so; after a half hour in the 110-degree attic space, Dad confirmed my suspicions. (By the by, if you love me, you might buy me this Big Bird chair from ebay. Mine had a blue base, not yellow, but it’s the same damned chair otherwise. I sat in that thing until my 8-year-old bottom could barely perch on the wings. Losses like this make me want to own a giant house and be a pack rat.)

Anyway, Dad did manage to find a few gems up there in the sweaty darkness: one, my Speak’n'Spell, which has yet to be shipped to me in SF, and which I foolishly neglected to photograph while I was in PA. It had the same batteries in since it was relegated to the attic–25 years now, maybe?–and they hadn’t corroded, and the thing still zapped into life with its ineffable wow… wow-WOW! sound effect. It still mispronounced words ending in “tion” and still congratulated me in the same electronic monotone: “You are correct. Now spell… ANYTHING.” My heart sang. I can’t wait to see it again.

I was also reunited with this love from college. I was a Mac person once upon a time. An OG Mac person, really–I graduated from the Apple 2C to the Apple 2GS and got this baby for my high school graduation. It also still works (although I didn’t test the Stylewriter II), although it did start whistling in a most unsettling manner after ten minutes of use. Clicking through the files brought college back to me in a rush. FYI, when it starts, it says, “Beam me up, Scotty.” When it shuts down, it says, “I’ll be back.” Is it any wonder people thought I was a little nerdy?

The sticker is for the German Green party. Deutschland, uber alles blumen..

But my nostalgia wasn’t limited to Rogersville, PA. We headed off to Cape May, my favorite place in the world for antiquing next to the Alameda vintage fair, and I found a fantastic little Playskool wooden wagon filled with multicolored blocks and long dowels. The woman who sold them said the set was called “something like dowels and blocks?” and when I looked it up online, Etsy seller HappyDayVintage came through with the Vintage Playskool Wagon With Blocks. I snaked it at a sweet little gingerbread store called Out of the Past (next to the mini-golf on the west end of town, if you’re in the hood) for a mere $22! Best feature? Take out all the blocks, and the name JOAN is written in faded crayon on the particle board bottom. Dare I dream that Roger Sterling had a little girl named Joan to whom he gifted these blocks? Alas, again, I admit my failings as a blogger: I haven’t yet photographed the toy, and I haven’t had it shipped to me yet (wood is too heavy for a plane, folks). But here’s a photo of the dowels in action.

Mmm. Magnadoodle.

Not all of my toy discoveries were as pleasant as li’l Joan’s castoff. I wandered into my mother-in-law’s living room one morning, kicked aside some of RocketBaby’s toys, and saw THIS staring at me. I don’t know where it came from. I don’t know who put it with my daughter’s things. All I know is, my mother-in-law said it “used to be hers,” and I’m not calling her a liar, but I think maybe she was under some kind of mild demon possession. Perhaps an Imperius curse?

Hello, Georgie. Remember me?

I made light of it at first. I scoffed at its knowing eyes, its patient smile. Then I stashed it in the bottom of a basket and spent the next hour imagining it making secret, evil, evilly secret plans about handing my baby girl a straight razor and gesturing at my Achilles’ tendon with its pointy hat. So after some thought, I resurfaced it, put it on the dining room table–far out of her reach–and then turned its sinister smile to the wall. Better that we all keep our clown enemies close.

Lastly, my favorite toy find of the vacation lives in Bethesda, MD, at the home of my father-in-law and his wife. At first, I thought the monkey puppet might be creepy in the spontaneous cymbal-crashing tradition, but as I got to know him, I realized he’s more of a gentleman than that. Indeed, I think he might enjoy his evening cocktail too much to be bothered with pasttimes like possessing babies and writing death warrants with percussion instruments: a perfectly fine old chap, a little pickled with gin, perhaps, but good for a bon mot now and then. He was distributed by a company called Character, out of Ohio, and that seems just right for him and his little beanie, yes?

Fetch my slippers, boy, and don't forget I like TWO ice cubes in my old-fashioned.

(By the by, if you’d like more on vintage toys, you MUST check out ModernKiddo, the fabulously fantastic blog by my friends Alix and Dottie!)

Home again, home again, jiggity jig.

RocketGirl75 — Sun, 22 Aug 2010 23:39:48 +0000

After much swearing and the unnecessary ordering of a new cable, I finally found the upload cable for our camera. While my next post will be slightly more informative and slightly less slideshow, I thought I’d share how the three-week family extravaganza went.

The Itinerary: Four days in Rogersville, PA, to visit my parents, including one jaunt into Waynesburg for Rain Day festivities (it rained! Huzzah!); 10 days in Cape May, NJ, to visit RocketMan’s mother (with my parents in tow); three days in Bethesda, MD, to visit RocketMan’s dad; and then back to Rogersville for four more days and a lovely party with some of my high school and college friends.

Here’s the lowdown.

First birthday party…

Can I just have one little lick of this piece right here?

First tractor ride with Pappy…

First beach visit…

The water is moving. Fast. WTF, Mom?

First visit to The National Gallery (if you haven’t been to the Rothko black exhibit, GO.)…

Big Calder, little baby.

All in all, it was nice, if long and a bit stressful, trip. Families are families, after all, and to quote The Breakfast Club, if our home lives were satisfying, we’d stay there forever, and it took only three days back in San Francisco to remind me why I love it here. (One, the weather; two, I walk to work; three, I saw four people I know on the street in the space of one hour, which goes to show what a small town it is.)

That said, there are some things I do miss about the homestead.

This willow tree, for example, which looms as large in my memory as it does in our front yard. I fear it’s not long for this world, though–my dad’s been complaining that it makes “a mess” after thunderstorms. I can’t exactly volunteer to fly out there and clean up willow branches, but I wish I could.

Second, these peppers. They’re just called “hot peppers” at the market, but they’re Hungarian peppers or Italian frying peppers to other folks. To me, they’re the essence of summer: sweet and hot enough to make your eyes water when you’re cutting them. My favorite preparation is sliced lengthwise and stewed in olive oil for 45 minutes; stuff that on buttered white bread and you’ve got the greatest sandwich in the world. And I’ve never found them in California.

They don't make 'em out here.

Lastly, these guys. That is, the kind of neighbors who, on a random Sunday afternoon, drive their truck into your backyard and say, “Want me to pull down that dead tree today?” Thanks, fellas, for providing a good hour’s worth of entertainment during the magic hour of early twilight. Hope you get a good price for the wood.

Heading into familycation, Week 3: A Checklist

RocketGirl75 — Tue, 10 Aug 2010 17:23:14 +0000

The Thorn Birds: Check.

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo: Check.

The Girl Who Played With Fire: Need a bookstore.

Baby’s first visit to the beach: Check.

Outdoor showers every day for a week: Check.

Lobster, softshell crab, Mom’s strawberry slush, Sarris chocolate-covered pretzels: Check, check, check, check.

Family drama ranging from mild to moderate: Check.

Two 3 hour+ car trips: Check.

Unnecessary but justified purchases of vintage pins, toys, decor and sundresses: Check.

Run-in with incredibly creepy clown toy of which I took multiple photographs to share with you at a later date: Check.

One week to go!

Greeetings from the East Coast!

RocketGirl75 — Tue, 03 Aug 2010 14:12:24 +0000

Just thought I’d pop in to say hello from my three-week familycation–five days in Rogersville, PA, ten days in Cape May, NJ, three days in Bethesda, MD, and wrapping it up with a few more days in Rogersville. Visiting my parents, his mom, his dad, my friends, and I’ve actually managed to have a vacation while I’m at it. There’s something about swinging on a hammock, reading The Thorn Birds, that reboots the soul.

When I return you can look forward to more tales of tricking out apartments in the big city, but in the meantime, I’m going offline and back into the world of licentious priests in 1930s Australia. And maybe fill the baby pool.

Hey, folks! Make a new friend today.

RocketGirl75 — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 13:49:01 +0000

Assuming I have a few fans out there (someone must be reading this, right?) I’d love to have you join as an official friend of The Rockets! Just click JOIN THIS SITE at the right and tell me you like . . . → Read More: Hey, folks! Make a new friend today.

DIY Coffee Table: The beater edition

RocketGirl75 — Sun, 18 Jul 2010 16:40:33 +0000

Sometime in 2004ish, I visited RocketMan in his apartment to find a giant plank of wood: about 2 inches thick, 6 feet long, sturdy but scratched.

“What’s that?”

“I found it in the garbage room.”

“Oh. What’s it for?”

“I don’t know. It’s a good piece of wood, though.”

“OK.”

At that point, he had two chairs that he’d picked up off the street, so I knew he had a knack for street treats; this was the first in a long line of trash treats, though, and it was merely a potential treat at that. A few months later, he propped said plank of wood on four4x4s and called it a coffee table. When I say propped, I mean propped; the wood lay balanced on the four posts, and a sneeze in the wrong direction would send the whole pile careening to the floor with a not-unloud thump. But he was trying it out, you see. The wood plank was auditioning.

After much cajoling on the parts of me and his friends, he finally granted the wood plank the role, and I came home one day (this was after I’d moved in) to find he’d taken the Gordian knot approach to building: get some big-ass bolts and just drill right through the sucker. The finished product looked like this:

See the bolts? I think he just got tired of trying to decide what to do and did anything, something for which I’m very proud. Sometimes you just gotta decide to decide and deal with the consequences. In the case of the coffee table, it did us very well for several years. No, the wood was not a high-polish beauty, but she was sturdy, and she worked–and even though you see coasters in that picture, free wood from the trash room doesn’t really garner a sense of “CAREFUL!” in the owner; we try to keep her free of coffee rings, but if it happens, it happens.

Fast forward a few years, and we began to realize a few things about the coffee table: First, it was a shin-banger. For me, anyway. I tend to cut corners from time to time (read: every day, always), and the corners on this beast were brutal. Secondly, it was a beast. Like HUGE for our room. So about two years ago, he got out the table saw and took off about three inches from the right side, rounded the corners, and attached pipes as legs. For a year or so the coffee table lived as a mule, a mutant with two steel legs and two wooden, with one square side and one round. Alas, we have no photographs of that stage, so you’ll have to believe me that the mutant had her own special charm.

Finally, last year, with RocketBaby in utero and our apartment feeling smaller by the day, RocketMan finished the genetic experiment and fully transformed the beast into a beauty. (OK, a slightly more elegant beast.) Out went the last of the 4x4s; out went the last sharp corners; in came more pipes.

We're such grownups now. We have a couch! And burp cloths!

If this looks familiar, it is: he used the same method for building our bed last year.

No more sharp corners; slightly downsized; still stable as ever; and it’s light enough now that we can slide it to the side during the day to maximize play space. We have plans to install some bins underneath to store toys. And best of all, with the Agent of Chaos roaming around, new set of teeth at the ready, we have few worries about her destroying our beautiful coffee table. Worst case scenario? We’ll have to buy the next plank of wood to make a new one.

Begging your patience while we conduct a little cleanup, please!

RocketGirl75 — Sun, 11 Jul 2010 22:41:49 +0000

I’ve moved the site from WordPress’ hosting over to a new host so I can take advantage of all the schamncy plugins and gewgaws a girl can use when she has her own site. But a few bumps have taken me a bit off course, of course. Number one being, clicking links within my blogs no . . . → Read More: Begging your patience while we conduct a little cleanup, please!

The Rocket Guide to Cheap, Fast, Unattractive Babyproofing

RocketGirl75 — Mon, 05 Jul 2010 08:52:50 +0000

Now, you may have noticed over the last year or so that while we’re by no means Apartment Therapy-ready, we try to inject a certain aesthetic into our apartment enhancements. The vacuum cleaner lamp sheds a nice light, but we like the way it looks. The bar is cobbled together from a lot of stuff around the house, but again, it fits in our apartment nicely. And I think we’ve made our hallway nursery pretty darned cute.

But sometimes, one has to chuck form out the window settle on pure function. Such as it is with babyproofing. I imagine it’s the same even in a big home, but in a small apartment, there’s no room to corral the kid once she’s mobile, and it becomes a constant game of trying to stay a step ahead. I’m reminded of the scene in Jurassic Park in which Robert Muldoon, Human Action Figure, tells about how the velociraptors have been attacking the fences to test their integrity. “They remember.”

That’s her. She remembers. When she’s looking at you, she’s figuring things out. How can I open this drawerful of batteries and swallow one whole? How can I dismantle the printer-copier? How can I open and close this door until my fingers get squished? And most important, How can I get into the kitchen? So here we are, left alone in the raptor paddock, trying to get all the systems back online before she figures it out. It needs to be fast, and it’s often not pretty. You’ve seen the movie. One false move and you end up stuffed in a locker, missing an arm.

Of course, all the solutions below are temporary, which is to say, we’ll keep them until we figure out a more attractive way to keep her from injuring herself. Parents have two options: babyproof ahead of time and raise the kid in a padded cell, or manage the danger spots as they become apparent. We’ve chosen the latter; here are the results. (I’ll update when we come up with our Pricier, Better, More Attractive Solutions.)

Tie It Down

Remember the accordion door to the nursery? Lovely item, but as I suspected, it’s irresistible to her current open-and-close habit. Same goes for the credenza drawers. In the former case, a couple of hooks and a bungee cord keep the door immobilized. In the latter case, a long string fastened with a little push-catch (the kind on hoodie strings) keeps the drawers closed and easily reopened. When it came to the credenza doors, we just moved half of the photo albums and filled it with her toys. Gotta let the kid have some fun.

The ol' bungee-cord-strapping-down-the-accordion-door trick.

If you can't beat 'em, put some toys in it.

She can almost get her fingers pinched, but at least she can't take out the chokables hidden inside.

MacGyver a Pegboard

Yup, the pegboard’s back–it’s not just for kitchens and tool sheds. (Especially if you happen to have three or four pegboards stacked in a closet.) In this case, we have pegboards, hook screws and that ol’ favorite, the twisty tie. The printer was the first thing we babyproofed, by the by–it started on the bottom shelf, then moved up, then was covered by a piece of wood slid in front, and when she got around that, we went with the pegboard solution. As you can see, she’s clever enough to know how to work it, but she doesn’t have the strength or balance to get under it to the goods. Yet.

Here’s the printer pegboard:

Damn you, reflective surface in which she can see her face!

And at the base of our bar, where we keep our glass jars:

Use a… deli container?

So we know the curse of the pre-war apartment is the Curse of One Outlet Per Room, but corollary to that curse is “All electrical workings shall live OUTSIDE THE WALL!” That means several things: 1) We have wires everywhere; 2) The few outlets we do have are loaded with heavy-duty power-strip plugs; and 3) The outlets and power cords stick out at least four inches from the wall, making them both grabbable and even an excellent boosting mechanism. On top of, of course, gnawable.

I came home one day from work to find this ingenious, awful-looking contraption:

"Deli Container With Outlet" -- ca. 2010

I can’t be entirely sure, but I think that had fruit salad in it the day before. The weird thing is, it works. The plastic makes a nice noise but it’s too much of a bother to get around (for now). By the by, if anyone has connections on a giant, box-shaped outlet cover that hinges up and allows us to get at the plugs underneath, let me know.

The Classic Gate

No babyproofed home would be complete without the wooden baby gate. We have one in the kitchen and one in the bathroom. She really, really dislikes them both.

First you put me in a clown suit. Now you won't let me dig through the recycling?

Most babyproofing, we’ve found, is more a matter of habit: don’t leave the coffee mug on the coffee table. Don’t leave the bedroom door open (unless refolding your clothes is a favorite pasttime). Develop an eye for chokables–the current standard is to put it in a film canister, which makes me wonder: 30 years from now, how will Eliza test what’s chokable? Oh, right. App.