Folks, maybe you can help me out.  I've been trying to get a hold of about 100 yards of clean fill for our swimming pool, which we want to make into a garden bed.  The trick?  A ten-wheeler dump truck simply will not fit up our driveway.  (Trust me: we tried.)  Anyone have connections, wisdom, or anything else to offer about getting free (or free-ish) dirt?

Hey all -

Anyone in need of a nifty apartment right in Harvard Square, on Dana St? neuroliz's condo is up for rent again!

This is a beautiful little studio with high ceilings, a working fireplace, laundry in the building, and a storage unit included. $1100 a month, negotiable.

Let me know!

I slept. Slept and slept until about noon. Ohhhhh yay.

I tooled around the house, organizing things, then tooled around the neighborhood, looking for Halloween supplies. My housemates are busily organizing all the books in the house, which is awesome. I'm making fresh mint chocolate chip ice cream, with six freakin' egg yolks in it. I may die, but I'll die happy.

Not a hell of a lot going on today. But I'm liking keeping to my promise to write daily, just about the little things I'm doing in life.

primalpastry did an awesome job cleaning our old place once it was emptied out. imlad did the finishing touches while I was rehearsing, and talked to our crazy landlady today to let her know we'd gone and to see about our security deposit. Three of my four new housemates helped with some massive furniture arrangement and other unpacking, and made me laugh a lot.

I am so fried at this point that sleep is what's waiting for me now, not more writing. But I'm grateful: for amazing people, for an absolutely gorgeous day, for a beautiful new home, and for being out, finally, of a place that never quite felt like home. Pulling my energy back from it, in the brief house-closing ritual imlad and I did, felt easy and swift and strengthening.

I'm trying to unload a few things. Listed here are said items with prices; prices are negotiable. Lemme know if you're innerested!


TV - 24" Hitachi, about 7 years old, in great condition. Great picture. No remote control. $75, negotiable.

Blender - Cuisinart Dual Action. Blender in great condition, food Processor attachment is broken but might be able to be replaced cheaply (unit less than 2 years old). $20.

Table and chairs - Oak top table with green legs, 4 wooden chairs. One chair has a broken leg that is reparable with simple woodworking that I don't currently have the spoons to do myself. $50.

So imagine you have a room. A room that used to be a porch. It's supposedly a four-season room at this point, except that it has very little insulation and is equipped only with a single baseboard electric heater. It also has ten-foot ceilings.

On one side of this long, narrow room, you have a little office. On the other, a guest bed. In the middle and to the right of the door, there's a beam in the ceiling that would be perfect for hanging a curtain from to separate the room in two. Which is my plan: separate the room, and get another space heater for the other side.

Question: what material would you use to make this curtain out of?

Today has been a very good day.

I woke up slowly after a good party, and imlad made breakfast. I polished and hung up the spice-rackish thing I trash-picked last week, and it looks beautiful and holds all our spices. We finally took Guernica off the kitchen wall, where it was frankly being a bit of a drag, and hung a picture of a squash blossom there instead.

I turned on the oven and nearly smoked us all to death, but in the end I had seared chicken and ribs, which I then put in the crockpot and stewed for many hours with homemade barbecue sauce.

I went to the gym.

I wrote a bunch of work emails and took a bunch of work phone calls.

I hung pictures of me and imlad around the mirror in our room; I hung more pictures of our loved ones in our hallway. I made a big pot of collard greens and kale with a fat hamhock.

I cleaned off my night table, fachrissakes.

Just finished dinner, and will watch a movie with my sweetie while drinking wine and maybe having ice cream.

Sometimes, the simplest days are the best. (Oh and also: now there's an air conditioner in our living room. Score.)

Hi, all,

imlad and I are looking to move into a place with queen_of_wands. Below is was we're lookin' for; let me know if y'all know of anything!


The following criteria are necessities:
-3 bedrooms, or 2 bedrooms with extra common space of some kind
-Laundry in building, or laundry hookups
-Some outdoor space - deck or yard
-Reasonable walking distance (15-20 minutes or less) to Davis, Porter, Harvard, Alewife, or Kendall T

These things would be excellent plusses:
-Dishwasher
-Hardwood floors
-Offstreet parking
-Pantry space
-Storage space
-First floor or first/second floor
-Pets okay (we currently have no pets)

Please contact us if you have anything to show! Thanks!

Last year, some of you may recall, I had grain moths in my house. These creatures disgusted me no end, and I was filled with the fiery hatred of a thousand light bulbs for these pestilent little buggers.

Many of you gave me excellent advice, and I have had what looks like 100% success in stopping the infestation from recurring this year, in the hot weather. I know some of you have also suffered from this problem, so I thought I'd let you know what I did - and how I did it without using any poison or toxic stuff at all.

1. Clean out the pantry. If you open a bag or box of rice, pasta, cereal, flour, or whatever and see a single moth, throw it away. If you see any little pin holes in a plastic bag that's holding bulk goods, throw it away. Basically, anything that's already infested or shows the slightest sign of it: get rid of it.

Next, empty out and scrub down the places you keep food. I used baking soda and water.

2. Change your storage habits. Get plastic or metal containers with airtight lids for keeping any dry starchy goods outside of the refrigerator: pasta, rice, flour, oatmeal, cereal, bread crumbs, grains, legumes, and so on. Some people who commented on my original post have had problems with sugar, nuts, tea, cocoa and dried fruit, and other more sweet items, but I had no such problems - these particular guys were interested in grains and grains only, especially rice and whole flours. I also have had success keeping pasta in its bag, inside another strong Ziploc freezer bag.

3. Kill any you bring home. You may not want to think about it, but when you buy in bulk from the bins in the store, there are sometimes going to be critters or eggs hiding in the food. When you bring home your grains, put them in the freezer or cold refrigerator overnight. The bugs can't survive the cold. Then put them in your containers for storage.

4. Consolidate. If you can have all of your not-in-the-fridge food stored in one area of your kitchen, do so - it will limit the blast radius of any infestation.

5. Discourage from the area. Cedar blocks thrown in dresser drawers help to keep moths away from your clothes; they do the same thing in food storage drawers, and don't affect the flavor of things at all. You can buy cedar blocks, drawer liners, or balls in many places, usually in the clothing storage area rather than food storage areas. Throw a couple in your cabinets and drawers and replenish them every 6 months or so with cedar spray.

6. Pheromone traps. When the warmer weather came around again, you can bet that whatever moths were left from last year woke up or hatched or whatever those wretched bastards do, and I would see them in the house, one and two at a time. Whole Foods and health food stores carry pheromone traps for pantry pests, and they are brilliant. Basically, they're a triangle of light cardboard with sticky stuff on the inside surfaces, and a lure. The lure attracts the males, and they stick to the sticky stuff and die die die. I have mine on top of my fridge, which is a good height for them to fly into it; it currently has about 20 dead moths in it, most of which I never saw before they bit it. You may wind up with some females left over, but they can't make more little assholes without the menfolk.

7. Integrated pest management. It's important that you do all of these things together to destroy or prevent an infestation, or it won't work.

Thanks, everyone, for your fantastic advice.

Zephyr, Cat of Tomorrow, has been lonely for a while. Wandering about Menage, no other cats to play with or lie in wait for, he yowled at the top of his lungs daily at around 11 am and 6 pm, and at various points in between. He especially loved coming into our room at six am, meowing loudly, and clawing vigorously at my hair. Sometimes, he would wander into a room and get lost.

The poor guy was just bored.

So we decided to get a new cat, as a friend for him. The original idea was to get a young female, so that they wouldn't be aggressive and alpha-like toward each other; rather, Zephyr would spend his time trying to impress her. redheadedmuse might well remember the relationship between her tanklike tabby male and Zephyr back at Versailles: Zephyr spent much of his free time (which, in cat terms, is all time spent neither sleeping nor eating) stalking, then attacking him, intending to play, which her cat took as fighting and responded accordingly.

This did not go well for either of them.

Nevertheless, at the MASPCA we fell in love with Rick, a skinny 3 1/2 year old grey-and-white-patched male who meowed at us in a low voice and made sinuous lovey-movements when we petted him. We brought him home, and for a day or so, kept him alone in the living room with some food and water and litter.

He was skittish, though still lovey, and getting over a cold. We gave him the antibiotics sent home with him, spent time in the room and cuddled him a lot.

Then we introduced him to Zephyr.

Zephyr puffed up, put his ears back, stood defensively, yowled loudly and hissed. Rick didn't react so much, except by backing up. Eventually, he started approaching Zephyr, no matter how loudly he yowled, and sniffing his nose and/or his butt. This went on for a night and a day, until they seemed to reach an uneasy truce: Rick would sleep on ert's bed, while Zephyr lay on the floor nearby, sleeping with one eye open.

Sometime during this, Rick (whose name is obviously entirely inappropriate) went through several name permutations: ert wanted Cat or Astro-Cat? (to be shortened to Astro, which I insisted was a dog, or to Asscat (thanks, amber_phoenix), which is just wrong, if amusing), quinnclub suggested Bogart (Rick from Casablanca, y'see), and I wanted Rasputin. Somewhere along the line I noticed I wanted him named something Russian, at which point amber_phoenix helpfully pointed out that he seems part Russian Blue, which could be why.

I also noticed that he acts kind of like a meerkat, sitting up very tall suddenly and looking around in watchful alarm.

So I wanted to name him Mir.

We found out that Mir means "peace," which fit, since when asked "who's winning" during the Zephyr/Rick melees, Ert would often answer, "It's leaning toward the forces of peace."

Ert wanted him to have a long silly name, however. Preferably named after an 80s band, apparently, since his next suggestion was Mir (Not Mir).

Eventually, though, it came to be that our new cat is called Bluegrass Mir, the Wide-Faced Bard.

Or Mir, for short.

At this moment, the two cats are scampering around the house, play-wrestling, occasionally licking each other and/or biting each others' necks, and otherwise causing a good-natured ruckus.

I think Zephyr has a friend.