Charlotte’s new favorite thing: books on your lap.


Our new apartment is in an even older building than that from which we recently moved. While it’s been converted to have central air conditioning and forced-air heating, two ornately covered radiators are still in the living room and the dining room. We have the couch against one, with the window into/onto the “sunroom” behind. It’s a good set-up, even though said window hasn’t been opened in decades (literally).

Already, it’s covered in books. And most of them are Charlotte’s.

Her new favorite thing is to run at you, board book in hand (always right-side-up, usually open to a page with a dog or a cow), thrust it into your hands, and then charge your lap (or your knees, if you’re in a chair). If you ask, “Charlotte, do you want Daddy to read you that book?” she yells “Doh!” which is, I think, how she says “yes.” (She says “no” for “no”.) Often it’s something by Eric Carle or something involving animals. When the story is over, she closes the book, claps, yells, and promptly exits your lap. The performance is finished.

Meanwhile, she yellst either “Dog!” or “Gog!” at the dogs, “Duckkk” at the ducks and “Mmmmmmmmmoo” at the cows. It’s completely adorable.

My old boss told me that she read somewhere that the single most accurate way to predict good performance at school is the number of books  in the child’s home.  Not the parents’ education levels (poor Charlotte), not the time spent reading.  Just the books.

And I shudder to think what’s going to happen to the Kindle Generation.

Mrs. Former Boss can’t remember where she read it, and I’ve been too lazy to look it up for confirmation.  But I can’t help but believe that the fact that we’ve been reading to and around Charlotte since before she saw daylight and took a breath has a little to something to do with her infatuation with books.

I hope the substance is not vital.  The first thing I ever read aloud to her in utero was by Jean-Paul Sartre.  I’d hate for her to grow up with my, ‘er, sunny outlook.

Fortunately for Charlotte, we live four tenths of a mile from a nice children’s bookstore.  And, fortunately for us, it’s mere yards from the local coffeeshop.

Broke in grad school.

“Also, sidenote: People who are not broke in graduate school are suspect. Because everybody else is broke.”
(Mrs. P., 06.17.2011)

Said my wife on our last — and kinda bitter — night in The Old Building.

We have a walk-through late this afternoon. And then. That’s it. Our five-year relationship with a building we’ll walk past fairly often is over.

I feel badly for nearly-voluntarily moving away from Charlotte’s first home. Then I remember the broken windows, the leaking walls, a few two-faced people there. And I think to myself, “Fuck ‘em. We’re moving up in the world.”

Whatever “up” means.

Repainting Charlotte’s [old] room.

We spent yesterday cleaning and painting the old place. I painted Charlotte’s room blue in 2010 using a small paintbrush. That’s all. It took about 12 hours of careful painting. I know it was hard and almost pointlessly slow, but I really wanted it to look nicely for her. Then the wall leaked in three places and a fourth place behind her mirror, which we didn’t find until we moved — complete with fragrant mildew.  This, along with the 7-month broken window and 2-month broken window, were large factors in us moving out of a building in which we’d lived for five years (and three units).

Yesterday, I applied 3-4 coats (depending on the spot) of paint to cover it all up. The last stroke at the top of the Northeast wall that covered up the blue made me incredibly sad. My wife was interested in painting the room. I was [and am] bitter and sad and mad that we almost had to move because the building’s increasingly poor management and maintenance; so I almost took her up on it. All that work, and Charlotte won’t even remember those deep blue walls. Painting over it depressed me. But, frankly, I’m a faster painter, and we needed to just get it finished. So I did all the painting.

It’s sad, to me, that we had to abandon the first place that Charlotte ever called home before she would ever remember it.  Sweeping our bedroom yesterday, I realized that I was standing where Charlotte’s crib stood until she was 6 months old.  The first night away from the hospital and the army of nurses.  The first night in her own PJs, having a real bath, in her own crib, in our home.  The first place she ever slept at night because it was nighttime or slept through the night (though the latter is really still a rarity; she has a small stomach but a hunger for playing and exploring).

Now it’s not home anymore.  There are just a few piles of crap and our bikes there.  After Thursday, we have no claim at all on it.

Hell, it’s probably the room where Charlotte was conceived, though, for the sake of family folklore, that — ahem — happened after a Tori Amos concert in Washington.

Who knows if Charlotte will remember our current apartment?  It’s much larger, though, and she usually forgoes her toys in favor of running around.

We are at the new pad.

Almost everything is unpacked. The internet works. The [sound of angels and a choir] central air conditioning works. Books are shelved. All is well. We haven’t hung/hemmed curtains yet (except Charlotte’s, of course) or hung anything from the walls. But it’s all coming together.

Pictures soon.

I’m lucky enough that my family and my very good friend helped immeasurably in the move. Small thank-you presents and home-cooked meals are tiny tokens after an entire day (and, in the case of my Dad, another evening and afternoon to boot) spent watching Charlotte, lugging boxes, running errands and etc. We’re trying, though, to thank folks the best way we can.

Charlotte woke up at 5:45am on the first morning here and flipped out. She didn’t know where she was. But now she’s used to it, has her stuff and knows she’s home. Her walls aren’t blue anymore, but her room is much cosier now.

Just when I get sad to leave.

I’ve mentioned our long-broken windows and other assorted perils of our current (soon to be ex-) apartment.

Low and behold, someone showed up this morning to fix them.  Over the course of an hour or hour and half, he broke glass, made a mess, cleaned some of it up and left.  Okay.  Come to find out, they’re showing our apartment tomorrow.  One of those windows has been broken for seven months.  But today — TODAY — they get fixed.

Only they don’t.  It’s been about four hours since My Man left and almost two since they said they’d be coming with glass today.

So two of our windows are missing their glass.  Nice.  I also sure had fun cleaning the glass and paint chips from the floor.

I’ve decided to be naughty for tomorrow’s showing, but I haven’t decided how yet.  I do plan on revealing the name of this building, for search engines to find — after we have our security deposit back.  There are some [negative] reviews on the web, but still.  Man.  Gotta give prospective tenants/victims warning.

–Wait.  Another, larger, guy is here to replace the glass.  It only took seven months!  Awesome.

Time to get Charlotte up from her nap, I guess.

Apartment hunting now?


So we got fed up with our apartment last week, when we noticed that there was MORE water damage in the kitchen, where a wall is leaking. There are three spots where water has seeped through in Charlotte’s room. Luckily, I used really good (non-VOC) paint when I painted her room last year; it’s bubbling instead of falling off the wall for now. Then there’s the brown finger-sized stain on the living room ceiling, the cracking plaster and paint all over the whole apartment, the stuck windows, the falling windows, the two broken windows (and how I love to shower with a breeze in the room, but that one’s broken and, hence, locked).

Sure, you could chalk this up to it being an old building. We’ve lived here for nearly five years, our longest at any one address since we lived with our parents over a decade ago. Three apartments. We might have the very best one right now, actually.  But they used to run this place differently.  They used to run this place better.  Used to be that a maintenance request came right away.  I mean the same or next day, depending on the problem.  But now, we’ve had a window broken since October that the management has known about but hasn’t fixed; another they’ve known about for 3-4 weeks; water damage they’ve known about for 3-4 weeks.  They used to keep the building clean when we had the shitty carpet and the ugly wallpaper.  Since remodelling the place last year, they stopped sweeping/mopping or doing anything to keep the place from looking like a pooptrap.  I was excited that I would be less embarrassed to have people over, since everyone we’re friends with/related to owns a house (and quite a few of them look down on us for not owning a house or trying to own a house).

So, yeah.  It’s not a problem of it being an old building.  Wall leak?  Fix it!  Broken window?  Fix it!  New floors/walls/ceilings in the hallway?  Clean it [all]!

So we’re sad to leave, if we leave.

They showed us another building yesterday, which is where the office is.  We made the mistake of assuming that it was better maintained.  The building was gorgeous.  But the unit was, well, worse than ours in a lot of ways.  We went to lunch, made pro-con lists in my Field Notes, saw my old advisor/mentor, and apartment hunted online while Charlotte took her afternoon nap.  Called about a building we’ve always liked, and while they didn’t have any two-bedrooms there, they owned another building further up in Roland Park where they had/have a nice two-bedroom just out of our price range.  The lady said it was unlocked, to go and look at it.  Weird.  But we did, and we really liked it.  It has a sunroom, working fireplace, but it doesn’t have a great view.  We talked to the lady who works for the owner at night, and she called her boss, and he came down $100 a month so that we could swing it (and so that he could fill it). I also got a free coffee at the local Starbux (I know!) because I forgot my wallet.  Good omen?  And I broke the French press that reminds me of this building this weekend.

So.  We’re nailing down the last leads and getting the hell out of here in 2-3 weeks.  It’s only occurred to us lately that the difference between a charming old building and a shithole is that the latter is what happens to the former when you don’t take care of it.  I don’t feel safe having Charlotte here when windows fall and break (and don’t get fixed) and walls leak (and don’t get fixed) and plaster and paint crack and sometimes have tiny pieces of ceiling fall (and don’t get fixed).

Of course, I have mixed feelings about moving further into Roland Park and farther from everything we walk to now.  The closest grocery store is expensive.  The closest coffee shop is a Starbux.  Further from family and friends, too.  But.  Same bus line.  Easier to get to the one that goes downtown.  In a perfect world, they’d fix shit and take better care of this place, and we wouldn’t have to move and drop another $200 a month to live somewhere nicer.  But, thems the breaks.  Thems the breaks.

To rent is divine?


It looks like we’re no longer on the market for a house.  This means that I can go to bed before 1 or 2 a.m. every night, not spending 4-5 hours at a time on house-hunting.

After a pretty exhaustive search for houses in areas we like (none of which, I confess, I like better than where our apartment is) and long walks (Charlotte and I strolled for nearly three hours today — lucky I’m always packing baby snacks on my person!), we cancelled our meeting with the real estate broker.

I haven’t written about the details on here or in my journal or even much in my brain.

While renting is not always the best financial decision, our student loan debt and very…modest income don’t make us the best candidates for loans.  Our apartment needs some repairs, and we have not ruled out looking for another apartment.  But, for now at least, it’s home sweet apartment.

I LIKE apartment living, though, to tell the truth.  I haven’t lived in a house since I was 19.

And, if nothing else, this probably will end my recent radio silence.

Housing aventures!

Crazy week:

Apartment to house to condo to apartment to condo to co-op to house.

Also, the whole thing is really making me hungry, like all the time.

Strange, huh?

Worrying about the home.

There’s some water damage in Charlotte’s room and a new small brown mark (the width of a pencil, but not as long) on the ceiling of our living room. We live in a very old (and very charming) building with plaster (not drywall) walls, wood-framed windows and a slate roof. Cracking plaster/paint is a fact of life here, along with the periodic refinishing of the iron bathtubs, replacement of windowpanes, etc.

Last week, I was all atwitter about what to do. Our building’s repair guy is very nice, and I like him a great deal. We talk about fatherhood, car-free-dom, walking and food.  He also makes a huge mess. I’m not fond of the idea of having lead paint dust all over Charlotte’s room, and I’m pissed that we have to shell out $40 for a new gallon (they don’t make pints or quarts, or least didn’t last time I checked) of the non-VOC paint I used to paint her room to fix the water damage that the management knew about before I painted the first time.  This paint is great, but you can’t store it; it rots. Last week, I noticed more spots, and, frankly, Superbuildingguy would do a much better job repairing the plaster than I would. So we’re arranging for him to do it while I remove everything from Charlotte’s room (no easy task) so as to keep potential lead from her toys, crib, etc.  A pain the ass, but not impossible.

I think this building’s apartments have a two-year repair cycle, wherein plaster and paint repairs are needed. We’ve lived here nearly two years. So we thought seriously about moving lately, even to the first-floor corner apartment, the only one with a fenced-in patio. Charlotte could have a sandbox, we thought. We could grow things. We checked it out last night on a whim, and we don’t like the layout. Also, it’s more expensive (three bedrooms/two baths, one of which we don’t need), and it smells like cigarettes in a major way.  Something is ticking in me about getting out of dodge, though.  My wife and I agreed, yesterday, after a walk-train trek to the county, that we have nomadic souls who were somewhat brought up as home-bodies.  This is not a criticism of our upbringing.  The importance on the home is a nice value that my parents gave me.  Maybe my thirst to move and move and move is a reaction to it.  We’ve lived in three apartments in the same building for nearly five years, as if we like the neighborhood/location a lot but can’t stand to be completely still.  I don’t know.  Maybe staying in the same four-story brick building is the ultimate homesteading, like we’re slowly claiming the entire place.  Still, the first floor place didn’t get us excited once we saw it, even after we spent most of yesterday being excited by it.

Two years ago, when we decided to have a baby, the apartment in which we live now was available. I’d gotten the “your toe is wrecked forever” news from my foot doctor, and I was upset. But then we checked out this apartment one night, and we got incredibly excited. We’d envied it because it’s a corner apartment on the top floor, with a nice view, four large windows in the living room providing a nice cross-breeze, with trees outside the windows, and there are two large bedrooms with a cool old bathroom in between. It’s a beautiful apartment, despite the cracked paint/plaster. My mother said that it felt very “grown-up,” and my friend Dan (who’s a fireman and enters myriad apartments in Baltimore) swears is the “coolest apartment layout [I've] ever seen.” It’s a nice pad.

So what do we do? Move somewhere that will need repairs in two years that we’re not crazy about? Stay here and deal with the mess? Maybe fix some things ourselves?

I do have a hankering to paint the living room with the non-VOC paint, even the same color — just to freshen things up a bit. There is still the scarred hardwood floor (original), and there are cracks in and along the ceiling.  But it’s not like any apartment is perfect — or any house.  And if we were home owners, we’d have to fix it ourselves, or pay someone else to.

I always imagine people coming over and saying on their way back to their large houses or county townhomes:

Did you see the cracks in the ceiling at John and Frankie’s apartment?
Did you notice the marred floor?
Someone was cooking on the first floor; it smelled strong.
They’re so stubborn with their no-car apartment city life. I wish they’d grow up.

This is largely in my head, though my family and quasi-family circle includes a dozen people who feel compelled to comment on and to judge all the “crazy” things I do — loudly. This is another problem entirely. It’s hard to ignore the noise when some people get very offended if you don’t heed their advice, if they hold it against your kid when you piss them off, etc. It’s not hard to imagine people watching and judging you when you know for a fucking fact that it happens constantly.

Just the same, perfect floors and walls and ceilings don’t please people who view  your valuing different things as a challenge to their own ways of life.  “Johnny has a PhD and likes not having a car; what’s that mean about my SUV dependence?”  (Nothing, really.  Cars aren’t for us; that’s all.)

My point was that the thing I can’t ignore is worrying about lead and fumes and dust and mold and my daughter’s health.  Paint’s cracked?  Fuck it.  Let Keith fix it and paint it.  That’s all we had to do before she was here, in our last apartment.  But it’s not that simple, anymore, with dust and paint fumes to think about.

Of course, when you/I look at it in a long blog post, it is simple.  Fix what needs to be fixed.  Repair plaster.  Kill possible mold on said small brown stain.  Paint with safe paint.  Don’t make a mess, and then clean up what mess you really do wind up making.  Bam.

In other news, Charlotte’s lead tests (at nine and twelve months) came back with flying colors.  And her iron deficiency clearer up.  Maybe she’s inherited our…stout constitutions?

Apt. planning, June 2009.

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When we moved this summer, we spent the day at Ikea. We measured the rooms before we left since last time we shopped for an apartment, we bought two desks we didn’t have space for. We used pages torn from a Moleskine Cahier, squared. We stayed long enough for two meals (lunch and dinner) and were still loading my dad’s pick-up truck when the store closed. It was very nice to get it all finished though.

Lots of new windows.

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My new apartment has a lot of big windows.  Nine.  Most I’ve ever had in an apartment.  Even with the ACs in, there are lots of windows left for catching a breeze.  One in the kitchen and two in the living room face my street, with a nice view of cyclists and traffic.  The other two in the living room, the one in the spare bedroom, the one in the bathroom and the two in the bedroom all face the pretty roof of the building next-door and lots of enormous trees.  When you look over the roof, you can see the lights of the big apartment buildings further down University Parkway, near JHU.  It’s like a quiet little spot in the city.
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Yes, they all stick like crazy because the building is old and because they are wooden.  But I’m at peace with it.  It’s worth it.  The rents here are pretty reasonable, and it’s close to everything without needing a car.  Indeed, to talk to my neighbors, parking here is, to be sure, a real bitch.  I don’t care at all.

I live somewhere else now.

First take-out tonight at new apartment.  First shower.  Soon, first sleep.  We moved nextdoor.  But, you know.  Moving is tiring, and my limbs are still not fully functional.  We’ve only hung curtains in the potty so far.  Only put together one thing from Ikea.  Got a new couch that is the color of poo.  Poo.  It’s very heavy, too, and our elevator was out all weekend.

You can move the apartment number literally up one integer in your address book if you have it.

Foot/toe update.

So. Saw Mr. Foot doctor today. Rather, first another doctor (not PA or RN, a Doctor) came in and mistook me for someone else who had just had leg surgery. Then he told me about my toe after he looked at my “film”. Fragmented bone. Too small to screw in like they would normally do. Should heal Okay. But if not, they’d cut out the bone fragment. That if that didn’t work, they’d “fuse” my joint. Forever. Best they could do. What?

Then I went to X-ray and had time to think about what he said. I have to admit that I was freaking out a little over the prospect of a permanent procedure on my foot, when I get around the world almost entirely with my feet — and double angry that it’s all because of one single person.

Then my real foot doctor came in, looked at the new X-rays. Turns out that I don’t have one broken bone, but two. And there are, apparently, several fragments of bone from them. He examined my foot, too, and he said I could get off the crutches now. Don’t really have to go back unless I have problems. That it’s too small to do anything, and we just have to let it heal the best it can. Okay.

That would feel like good news, I guess, after the scary shit the other guy was talking about. I was told I should expect my foot to be swollen for a year. Could be worse, right? But still. I’m probably going to get arthritis in this toe. And I already have a trick toe. My baby toe on my other foot has a split bone in it (funny story), and it hurts fairly often. On a rainy night like tonight or in the cold, I can literally feel that shit in my bones. The best I can hope for with my big toe now is chronic pain and/or surgery because some lady couldn’t watch where she was driving her fucking car? And she paid so little attention that she was on my foot for a while?

On top of it, her insurance company won’t return our calls. So we’re hiring a lawyer, something I really hoped to avoid. This is turning into a very unpleasant situation.

But tonight we got to see our new apartment, and it’s lovely. And baby-trying time is coming fast. My heart is light after spending my entire day being furious, frustrated and forlorn over my inability to deal with things I can’t control (like that, despite the shitty way it happened, my toe’s already smashed). It has a cute little bathroom that you enter from either bedroom, and a little kitchen window like downstairs used to have.