My internet access is back! But I’m still busy busy. Look! a recipe for wasabi peas, via girlhacker.

U-Haul has decided our Saturday move has become a late afternoon on Saturday move, which we find in the small print they are allowed to do. So we complained about it for a while and then found out that the guy moving in had a moving company tragedy of sorts and will be arriving on Wednesday instead of Sunday, which gives us gobs of time. Hooray!

A friend once told me about her law of moving – she said that everything about the place you live will get better in the last two weeks before you move out. Your roommates will suddenly become friendly, thier boyfriends will be nice, the neighbors will stop being annoying, etc. For this move, the law is playing opposites. This was a lovely house to rent, but I’m so ready be somewhere else.

Things I learned this year (while living in a house):

– If you don’t change the air filter in the heater every month like you’re told, like say, you don’t change the filter for ten months, you might just discover that the reason the heater stopped working was because the people who did put the filter in put it in backwards and the heater managed to suck the filter into a mound shape causing the heater to work too hard and overheat and shut itself off before it burst into flames. Also, you would have saved a lot of money on heating costs in the winter.

– If you buy one of those bleach gel pens finally and use it on the drain in the kitchen sink you might just discover that the metal in the drain is silver, and not that dirty bronze color you thought it was all year.

– Don’t buy nice ceramic toilet bowl brushes, you won’t want to keep them around all that long.

– If your hot water is too too hot you can actually go down to the hot water heater in the basement and turn the temperature down, that might save you some money too.

– The alarm system isn’t all that scary, but if you do accidentally trigger it yourself you really should phone the company to tell them nothing is actually wrong.

– Don’t keep previous occupants’ mail just sitting around without doing anything about it because it can quickly become a crime rather than just an annoyance.

– Be nice to the annoying neighbors because just maybe one of them will be awake when the house across the street goes up in huge flames and will shout for everyone to wake up probably saving a few lives, and if you had said all of those “Hey you kids get off my lawn” things you’d been thinking you’d really feel like an asshole now. Later you will resent the heroism because they Won’t Stop Playing Techno Music.

– The flue needs to be open.

– A dehumidifier for the basement is totally worth it.

– You don’t want a house where the neighbor’s deck is three feet from your kitchen window, washing dishes shouldn’t feel like a spectator event.

– If you are going to line the bottom of the oven with tin foil be sure not to block the holes that feed air to the flame. Otherwise, every time you turn on the oven the house will fill with gas, the oven will take forever to heat, and when the nice workman who takes a look at it doesn’t say anything directly about you being your own problem, you’ll still feel like an idiot.

– A good vacuum cleaner would absolutely make you happier.

– If you have two cars and two new registration stickers for which you paid dearly and you put the wrong sticker on the wrong car, they will send you a new one without charging you the $300 again because, apparently, you aren’t the first person to do this.

Whenever I get my hands on a Martha Stewart Kids magazine I find myself focusing on the fabrics they use as backgrounds in the photographs. I wonder if there is one person whose job it is to have the perfect fabrics on hand, I’d love that job. In the most recent issue they have a picture of a felt flower bracelet which is giving me ideas.

The impending move and hiding from the heat are taking up most of my time these days. I did manage to make a cover for my printer out of pink gingham oilcloth, I am contemplating green rick rack. So, we don’t have cable TV and apparently we don’t get to watch the Olympics at all – ??

In the new Ikea catalog one of the room pictures has a girl knitting in it. Well, she has paused in her knitting to reach for some yarn, but she is holding the needles correctly. Also, I dig the Dunker floor lamp that can be used as a room divider when there are a few side by side. And why is the Seattle store (apparently) the only one that doesn’t carry fabric?!

Yesterday I was thinking about knitted shoes and found this really cute pattern over at Hello Knitty. Hello Knitty is full of great patterns for sale and carries great kits and yarns — including, thankfully, lots of the non-wool people. And they have terrific teach yourself to knit videos and How-tos (pdf), including adding a fabric lining and attaching a magnetic snap. So lovely!

When it’s not packed full of Halloween shoppers the Display and Costume store here in Seattle is awfully fun. They had a lot of beautiful tiaras, fairy wings, unique trims and a surprising amount of craft related stuff – beads, adhesives, stickers, papers. I must remember this place next time I’m in need of strange materials.

Sunday a week ago, after the big fire across the street, we didn’t have power or phone for a while so there was nothing much to do except sit on our front steps and talk to people who came around to see what was going on. While the official reports maintained that it was accidental, a lot of those people were quick to talk about an arsonist. It’s looking like they weren’t just being paranoid – Arsonist loose in the city. Saturday night we heard sirens all night, turns out there were seven fires in the city, one right after the other. Thankfully no one was hurt in any of those either. Still, this is spooky.