Outside in

Our mission this weekend is to clean our apartment as though we were going to have company. There's no company in sight, of course, but this place looks like, oh, two blizzards and four snow storms blew through it. (January's equivalent of a tornado, I suppose.) Anyway, it's a wreck. We were traveling for Christmas and then traveling again last week (more on that later), so there were bags still unpacked, laundry to be done, floors to be swept, mail to be sorted, etc etc etc.

The bathroom is the room that got most tackled today. Toiletries put away, gels and creams consolidated, tub, toilet and floor scrubbed. But for the last few months, we've had nothing on our shower except a clear shower curtain. We'd bought one a few weeks back, but hadn't put it up yet. Today, we remedied that. Today, we brought the outside in.

Nice, huh? But I haven't really shared here on the blog WHY we had to get a new shower curtain. It's a bit of a traumatic event involving an early morning and a snake...

So, a few — I guess months — ago now, Scott had a morning appointment and so he had left the apartment. I don't remember exactly what time it was, something like 9ish. Which is early when you don't go to bed till 3 a.m. I was awakened by a weird sound coming from the bathroom. It sounded like metal in the pipes. I begrudgingly got up, closed the bathroom door, and went back to bed. 

No dice. I could still hear it. So I got up again and went into the bathroom. There was no evidence of anything except a metal clanging in the sink pipes. I went out to the living room to try to find a number for our apartment building management to call and see if they knew what was going on. Then I heard POP! CLANK! from the bathroom. So I went back in, and the stopper in the sink — not like the cheapy metal ones you buy to collect hair, no, it's the kind that actually goes up and down when you press the lever on the back of the sink — has been popped out and is now laying in the sink. Weird. So I go back out to the living room to make a more earnest effort at finding that phone number. (All the while, weird noises still coming from the pipes.)

I'm sitting at my computer, and all of a sudden, I hear a CRASH in the bathroom. I run in there to find my SHOWER CURTAIN BEING PULLED DOWN THE DRAIN OF THE SINK. It's been pulled so hard the whole tension rod fell into the bathtub. I immediately begin a tug of war with whatever is pulling the shower curtain down the sink (you can see how far away it is!) and realize that a MECHANICAL METAL PIPE SNAKE has come UP OUT of the sink, GRABBED the shower curtain, WOUND around it, and PULLED IT BACK DOWN THE DRAIN. I am tugging in vain on my shower curtain and the snake is fighting me hard. I'm screaming "STOP IT, STOP IT!" at the top of my lungs, but no one hears me. After what felt like an eternity but was probably more like a minute, I manage to get what was left of my gauzy shower curtain unwrapped from around the snake and the metal tube retreats back down the drain. (You really have to picture it like a tug of war. Back and forth, back and forth, the whole time.)

By this time, I and my bathroom are covered in dirty water. My shower curtain is in shreds. I march straight down to the management office and demand to know what the heck is going on. I'm sure I'm a sight to see. They get a maintenance guy on the phone who is, lo and behold, snaking out the drain between our neighbors and us. Well DUH. The apartment manager nicely apologizes and offers to reimburse us for a new shower curtain. He also sends up the cleaning lady who does an amazing job scrubbing down the entire bathroom.

So, yeah. I am slightly traumatized by my horror movie-like morning, but in the end, we got an expensive shower curtain we likely would never splurge for ourselves (hey, they're paying for it) and a sparkling bathroom. And a heck of a good story. If you didn't have to live through it.

(Disclosure: Curtain seen here is not the expensive one. I'm not putting that one up with snakes in drains on the loose. We found the current one for $15 at Target, on a whim after we had already bought the other one. Photo of expensiver CB2 curtain is below.)

Go on, read it!

I know many of you — whether you got to my blog from hers or vice versa — enjoy reading my friend Kari's blog. Well, she just celebrated her 1000th post on C'est la vie, and I really think you should go check it out. Make sure you click on her link for more details :)

http://jkmassonfrance.blogspot.com/

Congratulations, Kari, on your 1000th post, and its contents!

23 inches of snow...

... leaves a real mess. Sure it looks beautiful here ...

but I wouldn't want to be this person.

This year's ornament

I think I've written about it before, but every year, the one Christmas tradition Scott and I have is to pick out an ornament for that year. It can be cheap, expensive, have some meaning, or just be something we happened to like.

This year, we wanted to find something that commemorates my new greeting card business. We came across this one at Macy's, and it's now on our tree.

Granted, it's not a Christmas CARD per se, but it's a scroll. Close enough, right?

Here's a look at the other ornaments we've gotten each year since we've been married:

2004 - The first ornament

2005

2006

2007 - Christmas in Atlanta

2008 - The year we moved to NYC

2009

Why this year's tree is special

Well, I guess it's not so much the tree itself that's special. It is, after all, the same tree we've used for the last three Christmases. What makes it special is the tree's location.

2009

2010

You might not recognize it because we've moved around some furniture, but that tree is in the exact same spot it was last Christmas. Which is the first time that's happened since we got married six and a half years ago. It's the first time we've been in the same apartment for two Christmases.

So even though every year's tree is special, this one's just a little bit more so. It's funny to say we've put down some roots here, because we feel far from that, but I guess it's a little bit true. There are some options in the cards for being in a different place next year, but all things the same, we'd love to still be in this apartment come next Christmas. But we'll see what the winds of change have in store.

For now, I'm going to enjoy my little tree in my little apartment for the second year in a row.

How we know Santa is from the South

Everybody knows Santa lives at the North Pole. But what they didn't tell you is that he originally lived in the South. Not the South Pole. The South South. The y'all South. I bet you're wondering how I know this, aren't you? It's because I've seen him twice in the last week.

Reason #1 we know Santa's from the South: He flies Airtran (which is based in Atlanta). And he said he had spent the past week in New Orleans. On one of our flights this week, a jolly-looking man with a big white beard sat behind us on the plane. Someone else asked if he was Santa, and he said actually, he was. He travels for a photo company letting kids sit on his knee and make Christmas wishes to the Jolly Old Elf himself. (Super-nice guy. He even let us out of our seats on the plane without trying to push past us first.)

Reason #2 we know Santa's from the South: He eats at Chick-fil-a. While he and Mrs. Claus were visiting a shopping mall in Delaware this week, we spotted the couple dining at my favorite joint. And what self-respecting Southern boy don't like him some fried chicken?

So there you have it. Santa's a Southerner. I was going to suggest replacing his cookies with some waffle fries, but on second thought, we Southerners like both, and you DO want to be on Santa's good side, don't you?

Leaf-peeping in Central Park

Self-portrait