house – Marble Crow

Hello! It’s… uh. It’s been a while.

The past few months have been pretty intense. I downgraded my WordPress hosting, because I found that I wasn’t using many of the benefits of my upgraded package. This sounds simple, but, in reality, required a lot of back-and-forth between three chat bots, some emails, and a discussion forum. Either way! It’s all sorted now and, if anything breaks in the near future, it’s entirely because I’m messing with themes and colors again.

Now, as for the rest… I vended at my first in-person event this year! It was a great experience, I sold a ton of artwork and sculptures, and I’m very happy.

Then, shortly afterward, my house caught on fire some. I was sitting in the bath when I smelled something like melting plastic. I checked the bathroom window, but it definitely wasn’t coming from outside. When the smell intensified, I asked my Handsome Assistant to see if he could track it down.
He came running back with a fire extinguisher, there was smoke everywhere, cats were evacuated, fire department was called, and I sat in the driveway for a while chatting with friends on Discord because I’m pretty sure that was the one thing tethering my sanity in the midst of all of the chaos at that particular moment.

Anyhow! Everyone’s fine and the house is habitable. However, as a public service announcement: Do not leave your bathroom vent fans on when you’re not around, they are absolutely capable of subterfuge. As it turns out, our basement bathroom vent fan’s wiring blew out in a rather spectacular fashion. Like, flames. Melted insulation. A scorched gas line. If we hadn’t been home, or I hadn’t smelled it when I did, it would’ve been a catastrophe. As it is, it’s just been a very stressful series of inconveniences – including having no heat for several weeks.

Also, yellowjackets live in the walls now. This is totally unrelated to the fire. They just saw some gaps around the powerlines and decided it was free real estate, and now they live there. Sometimes they get into our bedroom. I woke up gently spooning one this morning.

If circumstances were different, these guys would’ve died off with the first frost as they usually do. Since they’re living in the walls, they’re here to stay. Or at least for way longer than my Handsome Assistant and I are comfortable with sharing a space with them. I don’t mind stinging insects, but as far as housemates go… I mean, they’re not great.

Lastly, we have ducks!
We did not initially intend to get ducks.
My Handsome Assistant likes the idea of having egg-producing pets, despite the fact that neither of us eat eggs. (It is his latent Ohio prepper sensibilities.)
These are not egg-laying ducks.

What happened is a friend of ours rescued some ducklings from Tractor Supply. It was the end of the season, the store can’t return them to the breeder, so they just… had these unsexed ducklings. Friend took them, since friend already has necessary ducky infrastructure, and the ducklings grew into three handsome Rouen drakes and one lovely hen.

(Pause for sounds of dread from people who have kept drakes and hens before.)

Duck mating is… Let’s call it “hardcore.” It’s dangerous for the hens at the best of times, and that’s even with a good ratio of drakes to hens. Which is about 1:3-4 at minimum, not 3:1. So, friend needed to find a home for these drakes before the spring breeding season rolls around. If no one took them, they’d have to make the difficult decision to cull the drakes for the safety of the hen, which they really didn’t want to have to do.

So, bleeding heart that I am, I decided we were going to keep ducks.

And honestly? It’s been great. We built them a run and a coop, set up a pool, gave them a separate water source, and feed them a variety of fresh foods alongside a healthful prepared diet. They’re three handsome Rouens, and they’re also a lot of fun. They get excited when I walk outside or talk to them through the window. They wag their tails and bob their heads. They’ll eat treats from my hand and listen very well when I tell them it’s time for bed.

Three ducks with bright green heads and gray bodies eat black soldier fly larvae from a person's hand. — *Left to right, Marcus, Eddie, and Robert.*

… Alright, they listen well when I walk in and say, “Alright handsome boys, it’s time to go eepy-sleepy’! Ready? Let’s go!” In high-pitched parentese like a demented Disney princess.

We’ve only had them for a little while, and I already love them. There’s Marcus, the crested one and the smallest of the three. There’s Robert, the second largest and boldest. And there’s Eddie, the largest and the unwitting target of Marcus’… affections.

Ducks, like many other animals, will mount each other in a display of dominance. So, much like a high school transfer student, Marcus has apparently decided that since he’s in a new place, it is time to try to be the Cool Important Duck. A strategy that would make more sense if he weren’t shy and less than half the size of Eddie.
Eddie’s mostly just confused by the tiny hat-wearing maniac trying to climb on his back.

So, my time a way has mostly been dealing with housefire remediation logistics, rebuilding, setting up duck infrastructure, and finding a way to get the wasps out of the walls.

How are yous all doing?

Hello!

I was updating pretty frequently, until I wasn’t. This is because we bought a house.
(For real.)

It was kind of funny — I’d done a ton of divination on the subject, but kept getting the same advice: Wait. Be content where you are right now. Enjoy what you already have. I figured this sounded pretty solid, so I started to do that. We bought some new furniture, I converted our vertical blinds to a curtain rod, and before I even got to hang the curtains, things changed. The summer solstice came, I did my usual summer solstice ritual, and the ritual divination changed its tune. Now it was “New start.” “Competition.” “Strength.”

I figured that sounded pretty rad, but didn’t think too much of it. I tapped through some real estate websites out of boredom, and noticed something interesting: There were more houses. A bunch of estate sales. Many of the ones that were in the 500s and above were now… not.

I spotted this little midcentury ranch house on a nice sized plot of land. I called it the “John Waters House,” because all of the room colors felt like the palette of Pink Flamingos. I kind of fell hard for it, to be honest.

Alas, it suffered from an absolutely eyewatering smell of dog pee, and so we didn’t put in an offer.

Discouraged, I wasn’t even in the mood to look at the next house, but we’d already agreed to tour it. It’s a good thing we did, too, because that tour completely sold us.

Which is a good thing, because I’m not sure if I would’ve been as keen if I’d waited until the inspection to see it. Not that there was anything wrong with the house, mind.

Our inspector was an older guy. Affable, in an avuncular way, and clearly knowledgeable about his job. Great!

What was less great was the- Okay, I’m basically impossible to misgender. I have been called everything, I identify with none of it, and I legitimately do not care. The first time the inspector joked, saying that, “By the end of the inspection, you’ll be happy,” he pointed to me, “and you’ll hate me,” he pointed to my partner.

“Why?” My partner asked.

“Because there’s gonna be a whole list of things you’ll have to fix!”

“Uh, I’m the one who does the fixing,” I said.

The inspector brushed it off, and so did I. My partner’s taller than me, more jacked, and is generally pretty masculine. People usually assume he’s the one doing things with power tools. It’s whatever.

Then, at the end of the inspection, the inspector steps into the living room and looks at me.

“Are you gonna let him have any closet space?”

I didn’t really know how to answer. It was a pretty weird question, and my brain was already trying to figure out whatever closet-related anomalies the house might have. Then it clicked.

“I work from home. I don’t have clothes I can’t sleep, paint, and garden in. He’s the one who goes to an office and has a spare closet full of fancy suits.”

At that point, I was mildly annoyed. Not at his assumption about my gender, because I don’t see anything negative about being/being compared to a woman. It was his assumptions about my relationship.

My partner and I are pretty good at playing to each other’s strengths. This is especially the case when those strengths fall outside of traditional gender lines. It’s nice not having to feign competency at things I don’t care about, just because I’m “supposed” to. It’s also nice having my interests and aptitudes supported by someone willing to ply me with brewing bottles, paintbrushes, and power tools.

It is not nice having to hear “women and clothes, amirite.”

Besides, even if that was the case… so what? You don’t get to benefit from a culture that demands that women be decorative, then complain about the things they require in order to do so. It’s like the people who deride “unskilled” jobs, but still want their burgers cooked and their bathrooms cleaned.

I didn’t say this. I just wanted things signed, sealed, and done with. Besides, I didn’t think it’d get very far if I did. I stayed as the one doing the eye rolling, rather than getting eyerolled at.

We managed to close on the house about a week later, and it was the longest week of my life. The night before, I couldn’t sleep at all. I stumbled into the Redfin office barely able to see. One of the agents (this really nice lady who toured a house with us once before that) offered us tea, coffee, and snacks. Not thinking, I took a banana and a cup of tea.

Unfortunately, that meant that I had to figure out what to do with an opened banana while we signed an inch high stack of paperwork. I didn’t want to put it on the table to leave a bunch of banana guts everywhere. And so, slowly and with great gravitas, I placed the half-eaten banana in my backpack and took bites of it in between initialing things.

Here ’til the banana splits,
j.

Tag: house

My house caught on fire, and now it has wasps and ducks.

And slowly, with great gravitas, I took a bite from the banana in my backpack.