Things I miss from my old apartment

not to scale rendering of the kitchen/living area. bedroom & bathroom not included.
imagine there are kitchen cabinets above the counters I've shown here

• My kitchen, which had roughly four times more counter space and kitchen cabinets as my current one, as well as a neat little nook for my trash can so it didn't stick out like a sore thumb. One side of it was a long countertop which served as a table & was fantastic for baking/cooking. I really miss that kitchen.
• My walk-in closet. It was this little cube off my bedroom that was like four or five feet square, which doesn't sound like a lot, but the use of space was so economical. There was a rack on each side, with a flat shelf on top that I put my sweaters on. I now technically have two little closets, but there's a lot of wasted space due to my house's weird shape & design choices. My current closets are too short to have a top shelf above the top racks. 
• My hall closet, which was small but fit a lot of things. It had one tall open space for a broom/mop, and the rest was partitioned off into shelves 10-12 inches apart & square. I have no storage area whatsoever in my current house. There is a metal garden shed next to my house for my use, but it's rusty and creepy and full of spiderwebs and really hard to open. 
• the turnaround time for things to be fixed. I got to know my apartment's handyman pretty well. It takes forever for my super to send somebody to fix my stuff, unless they might be in liability (aka that one time my carbon monoxide alarm needed a new battery and they thought I meant my smoke alarm). 
• My electric stove, which was sleeker and easier to clean (not to mention safer) than my current gas stove.
• the fact that I lived near families and got to see other people's holiday decorations and had children come trick or treating every Halloween. Every weeknight at 7 pm or so a child from the family who lived below me used to practice their trombone. My house is in a secluded place where I just have like 20 feet of empty land surrounding my house in two directions and 12 in another. It's pretty isolated and has kind of a neglected air, despite my best efforts. If any children go trick or treating on my street, they are too scared to approach my house. I don't miss the noise or my former neighbor's cigarette smoke or having to watch the amount of noise I made, though. 

August 2019 books

August was also a lean reading month.

I read Thimble Summer when I was in elementary school, and I loved it. 1930s rural Middle America just seemed so exotic to me. It was on sale at Barnes & Noble for less than $4, so I bought it. It still holds up, although of course I no longer have the wide-eyed wonder of a child. I'm still kind of in awe that Garnet pulled off hitchhiking to a big city many miles away. I'd be too scared to do that even as an adult (but of course times are different now). There is of course a bit of time-period-usual racism and cultural appropriation, but it'll fly over most kids' heads. Everyone in the book is white, except for the Native Americans briefly mentioned in a flashback story of settler days told by someone's grandmother. Anyway, this is an award-winning classic for a reason. I recommend it for kids; I think they'll like it even today. 4/5 stars, keeping.


I read another nostalgia-based book towards the end of the month. Everything I Need to Know About Love I Learned From a Little Golden Book is an absolute mouthful of a sentence, but it was still a light, short, and fun read. Musings on mostly romantic love are paired with actual illustrations from real Little Golden Books. I read and loved Little Golden Books a lot growing up, so I enjoyed this book. However, I'm not sure I'll actually keep it. I rearranged my books on Labor Day and put books aside to give away, and I still have 4 medium stacks of books that don't fit in my 4 downstairs bookshelves (!). 3.5 out of 5 stars, tentatively keeping.