Home Repair FAIL

Shortly after we moved into our last apartment, my mom offered me a chair her office wanted to get rid of.  I wanted an office chair, so I was enthusiastic to get one for free, even though my mom warned me that the chair had an "idiosyncrasy".  I concluded that it was probably one of those chairs that makes fart noises whenever anyone sits on it.  Alas, the idiosyncrasy wasn't nearly that entertaining.

It turned out that the problem was that the chair would no longer stay in an elevated position once anyone sat on it.  This wouldn't necessarily be an inconvenience to everyone, but I'm someone who special orders pants with a 36" inseam.  Raising a chair's seat contributes considerably to my comfort.  Still, it was a nice chair, so we brought it back to our apartment.

It occurred to me to wonder if I could fix the chair.  I did some looking on the internet, and sure enough, a solution presented itself to me.  The problem was in the chair's gas cylinder, and all I needed to do was replace it.

Shortly thereafter, we learned that we would be moving again, so I postponed doing anything with the chair.  After we moved into our new apartment, though, I decided to order a replacement gas cylinder and get cracking.  I'm not super handy (except maybe with jewelry pliers!) but I do enjoy learning how to fix things.  One thing I love about the internet--and I mean this in the most non-perverted way possible--is that you can find instructions and/or videos on how to do almost anything.

When my gas cylinder arrived yesterday, I perused some of these videos.  One of them recommended unscrewing the apparatus under the seat and then using brute force with a hammer to dislodge the old gas cylinder from that and the wheeled base.  Despite our rather sizeable collection of screwdrivers, I couldn't find one that would fit these particular screws.  Finally, I realized that a hex key we got years ago with some Ikea furniture we put together would work!  So I unscrewed the apparatus under the seat of the chair.

I then tried to dislodge the gas cylinder using the hammer.  Not only did this not work, but it made quite a racket, which I felt self-conscious about since I live in an apartment building.  I went back to the videos.

The next video I watched featured someone using a pipe wrench to remove the old gas cylinder.  I surveyed my collection of wrenches.  I tried several that may or may not have been pipe wrenches, but all they did was scrape the metal without moving the gas cylinder at all.

The last video I watched showed someone spraying WD-40 in the places where the gas cylinder connected to the chair, and then dislodging it with a rubber mallet.  I had neither WD-40 nor a rubber mallet, but thought that the latter at least might be useful to have on hand.  So I went to bed with my chair a collapsed mess on the floor, and then went to a hardware store this morning.

I dragged the chair onto our balcony so I could use the WD-40 in a well-ventilated area.  Then, I tried very, very hard to dislodge the gas cylinder using the rubber mallet.  No dice at all.  Scott gave it a try, and did manage to dislodge one of the wheels, but the gas cylinder remained stubbornly in place.

Defeated, I put the chair back together.  I am now the proud owner of a rubber mallet that looks like it came straight out of Looney Tunes and a new gas cylinder that I may or may not ever be able to use.  Maybe the solution is to find a much shorter person whose office chair is stuck in a permanently elevated position and orchestrate a trade.

A Moving Milestone

We moved into our new apartment on Saturday, and today marks the first day since then that we've had all three meals in our apartment!  I even made a dessert and some granola to have with breakfast tomorrow.

The unpacking is easier this time than it was for our last apartment, which we moved into not even two months ago.  I already sorted our belongings and got rid of stuff in the last apartment.  Now, I just have to finish figuring out where to put things.  Every apartment layout is a little different, and I decided to order some shelves to keep order in a particularly cavernous closet.

The weirdest idiosyncrasies I've seen in this apartment so far are:
1.  A refrigerator with a missing crisper drawer.
2.  A shower with water pressure so strong that it actually blows the shower curtain around.
3.  A front-loading washing machine whose door won't close, causing us to be unable to do laundry at this time.

With luck, those will be resolved soon, and we'll have a more functional, if perhaps more boring, apartment.

Today's Mystery

Overheard today in Whole Foods:

"What *is* Chapel Hill toffee??"

And...the person who asked the question was holding up a box that looked like this.



Happy Valentine's Day, everyone!

A Bright Spot Amid The Chaos

I'll save the entire story for another post, but Scott and I are moving again.  The story behind this move is a happy one, but...this will be our second move to a new apartment in a span of less than two months.  I had assumed that our current apartment would be only a temporary home, but I hadn't counted on it being quite this temporary.  I ordered checks with our new address and threw out most of our boxes.  I also took a lot of care in organizing and arranging our stuff because I wanted our apartment to be as comfortable and homelike as possible.  So by removing things from their carefully chosen places and boxing them up again, I feel like I'm in a state of regression.

When we first moved in, I spent so much time sorting through our belongings and weeding out stuff we didn't need that I didn't think I'd find any surprises when I started packing again.  But, when I took out a suitcase to start packing out-of-season clothes, I found my camera, which I thought had gone missing when we came back from Kazakhstan!  I can't imagine what sort of brain fart caused me to leave something I use on a fairly regular basis in a suitcase, which I then closed up, and put away in a closet.  I can only conclude that moving makes me really ditzy, which makes it all the more scary that I'm doing it again so soon already.

Yet Another Way To Spend Money!

I was using the Washington, DC metro trip planner the other day to time metro rides to some different places, when I noticed an ad for some DC metro themed merchandise.  I was immediately intrigued.  When I lived in the DC area previously, I was a huge metro fan.  I'll admit that part of my affection for the metro system has to do with my extreme discomfort with driving and the fact that I didn't usually ride metro during rush hour.  But all of that aside, I think most reasonable people could agree that there are times when it is extremely useful.

Getting back to the ad, there is a DC metro gift shop!  And it goes far beyond t-shirts, coffee mugs, and the like.  Check out these awesome items:

A metro cuff bracelet, for those times when your outfit isn't complete without that special statement accessory!



A shower curtain, for those bathrooms whose color schemes include red, orange, yellow, green, and blue!



Best of all, there are costumes for kids!





Get excited for next Christmas, everyone!

An Unusual--Though Not Unique!--Way of Injuring Myself

Scott and I took a road trip to Georgia today. While on this road trip, we had occasion to experience one of everyone's least favorite aspects of road trips--using a gas station restroom.  I've used enough not-terribly-pristine restrooms that general sketchiness (which this one had in abundance) doesn't usually bother me that much.  But his particular restroom had a twist that will forever set it apart in my mind:  Its toilet paper dispenser flew open very suddenly and hit me on the side of the head!  Needless to say, it was startling, and it actually hurt quite a bit, too.

I'm not up on specific vocabulary to describe toilet paper dispensers, but this one was a large plastic one with room to hold two large rolls of toilet paper.  It looked something like this one:


I was convinced that I'd had a truly unique experience, so when we got back in the car, I started doing internet searches on my phone to see if this had happened to anyone else.  (Can my phone still be referred to as a "smart phone" when I use it to conduct any type of searches that contain the phrase "toilet paper dispenser"?)  I found at least two stories about metal toilet paper dispensers coming apart or coming off the wall and resulting in serious injuries and lawsuits.  So, I guess I should feel lucky that the plastic TP dispenser only resulted in a bump on my head.

There is a school of thought that it is good to learn something new every day, but I think I could have done without today's lesson, such as it was.

Then And Now, As Seen Through Kitchen Wares

With dramatic downsizing and deaths among some of my elderly relatives, there has been a large supply of housewares in the family pipeline over the past few years.  Since Scott and I sold and donated so much of our stuff before moving to Kazakhstan, we have been gratefully accepting a good number of things that were looking for new homes.  It's fun to have things that belonged to someone else in the family; plus, it's always one less thing for us to buy now.

A box of china made its way to my dad some months ago.  It had belonged to one of his grandmothers, who died before I was born.  He asked me if I wanted it.  I hesitated, thinking I would have to wash everything by hand.  But my dad said he thought it would be okay in the dishwasher, and that if it wasn't, nobody was going to be upset about it.

I looked at one plate at the time to check out the floral pattern on it, but left the rest packed away until we moved in to our new apartment.  When I started unpacking the china, I was fascinated by some of the stuff I found.  First of all, there were twelve (!) teacups.  They were much smaller and daintier than the cups people generally use now to drink the hot beverage of their choice, and they came with saucers!  There was a set of small, shallow bowls whose intended function I can't guess.   Dinner plates were to be expected, of course, but the ones in this set are smaller than modern dinner plates.  (Maybe the small dinner plates will encourage me to eat less!  Ha!) Then, I unpacked further and found a sugar bowl, cream pitcher, and gravy boat!

I had a similar experience with silverware.  We were already using a set of silverware that had belonged to my mom's aunt, but we kept running out of key pieces like "regular" forks and soup spoons.  So when my dad offered us a set of silverware from my grandparents' old house, we took it to supplement our existing silverware.  I found some pretty amazing things in that box, too.  I found spoons with abnormally long handles (iced tea spoons?).  I found tiny forks with three tines.  A casual web search suggests that these are dessert forks.  The forks that I had thought for years were dessert forks (the ones that are a bit shorter than "regular" forks) are evidently fruit forks, at least according to the website I consulted.  This set of silverware even came with a cake server, which seems like a very good excuse to eat more cake.

In the end, space limitations and the near certainty of another move within the next several months are making me pass up this opportunity to become a classy person who knows how to set a table properly.  The gravy boat from the china set is destined to find a new home because it's rather bulky and gravy is not a part of my regular dinner rotation.  There are only so many beverages I care to drink in very small quantities, so half of the teacups, as well as all of the saucers that came with them, will similarly be sent on their merry way.  I would probably keep the sugar bowl and cream pitcher, except that I already have ones that I like, and the thought of having everything match doesn't seem like a compelling enough reason to keep extras on hand.

I haven't yet decided the fate of some of my more outlandish silverware.  Silverware is smaller and less breakable than china, so it doesn't pose the same immediate set of problems.  Something tells me, though, that even if I keep the entire set, I will probably continue in my terribly uncivilized habit of using "regular" forks for every part of the meal, even though I have the opportunity to do otherwise.