I think I'll call her Zelda

I have a new baby.

Vintage kroehler.

I haven’t settled on a name yet, but I’m taking suggestions. She’s a little rough around the edges, but for $50 off kijiji, she’s a steal.

I’ve been looking for a new dresser for a little while — you know, to go with the newly painted bedroom (which I painted LIKE A BOSS, I might add; photos forthcoming). In my search, I’ve discovered something kind of interesting about furniture in general: there’s no middle ground. Either it’s essentially free or it’s a billion dollars, with very little in between except for MDF crap. I'm right about this, aren’t I? Witness: the dresser that I really, really, really want to buy except for every single one of the nearly three thousand dollars it will cost.

So, so pretty. So, so, expensive.

So, yeah: kijiji won that contest. But I’m actually kind of ecstatic about that, because, perversely, it means that I CAN HAZ ALL THE PROJEKTS. (Also, I’ve somehow convinced myself that I’m now $3000 richer.) It wasn’t enough to spend five days painting the bedroom. Or the following weekend touching up the hallways and the doors (and they look marvelous). Or completely refolding every single thing in the linen closet. Or any of the other roughly zillion household projects I’ve taken on in the past few weeks. I want more, apparently — more backbreaking, painstaking, fiddly steps involving power tools and chemicals and dust and fumes and dozens of opportunities to screw up. Bring it, I say. I watch myself say that, and I know what’s ahead, and I still want it. There’s a metaphor or twelve in that, too, but right now I’m too busy googling “refinishing very thin veneer” to do that kind of thinking. Which is probably a good thing.

There’s a very good chance that my new dresser is going to be (even more) gorgeous. There’s a much higher chance that it’s also going to hurt. I can hold both those things in one hand right now, before I’ve entered a hardware store.

 I'll keep you posted. 

Victor

If you read these pages regularly, you are no doubt aware that

1. Rowan is highly obsessed with Pokémon, and that
2. I am highly obsessed with organization. And, further, that
3. I dislike playing Pokémon, particularly when I have to play against a winner-takes-all eight-year-old who quite literally stacks the decks against me. “Here,” he’ll say, tossing me some wimpy little deck full of crappy cards like Solosis or Sewaddle or Tynemo, “these are your cards.” Meanwhile, his deck is full of Lugia EXes and White Kyurams and Zekroms. And then he proceeds to annihilate me, all the while maintaining some kind of fantasy that he is a gifted player and not just a hustler. (My brother-in-law has a theory that all games with prepubescent boys are simply versions of, “Hey! Do you want to play ‘Victor’? I’ll be the Victor!”) But I digress.

Although on the surface Rowan’s obsession and my obsession may appear to have little to do with each other, in reality, there’s lots of room for overlap. There are, I believe, nine distinct types of Pokémon (off the top of my head: water, air, grass, psychic, darkness, dragon, metal, fighting, electric, and… something else — and look at me, devoting precious brain cells to Pokémon types!), plus assorted energy cards for each type, and so-called “trainer” cards to boot. All of which for years have been jumbled into untidy heaps around the house and Rowan’s room. At best, under duress, he will pile all of the cards into willy-nilly into a cardboard box in his room, which he later dumps unceremoniously onto his floor, scrabbling through a thousand-plus cards to find the ones he wants to create his power decks. Lather, rinse, repeat. It’s a constant point of contention between me and him — not simply the mess, which is bad enough, but the potential, the potential, the thwarted potential to sort all those cards into their various types, to place each type into its own separate container for easy access, to create, in short, a system — ideally, one that involves the use of a label-maker. I don’t like the game, but my fingers have itched for so long now to organize those cards. “Do you think you’d like to sort out those cards?” I have asked him at various points, and he shrugs his shoulders and says, “Maybe later.” “How about now?” I’ll say, and he will refuse to answer. But on Saturday, for some reason, we hit the sweet spot. He wanted to make a new deck, and I said I would help. And thus began the great Pokémon card organizational extravaganza. Isaac got in on the action too, and he and I sat on Rowan’s bedroom floor, colour-coding cards into various piles while Rowan handpicked the ones he wanted to make an ever-more-powerful deck. It took the better part of an hour, with me sneaking back into the room at various points during the day to finesse the system, but we got it done. There are labels. It’s been the better part of a week now, and it seems to be holding — although I won’t hold my breath.

The best part of it all was listening to my older boy exclaim, over and over, “Mom! I really like this! It makes it so much easier to find the cards I want!” Words straight to my colour-coded little heart. He’s Pokémon geek. I’m an organizational geek. And maybe, just maybe, we’ve found some kind of middle ground.