Brief Update, 6/17/15

by Allegra

We haven't felt much like posting for the last couple of weeks.  We saved a couple of drafts offline, but at this point, the content isn't current anyway.  During the recent heat wave our apartment was nearly 90F despite having the AC running 24/7, so we avoided turning on the computer.

Meanwhile, we've focused on resting, grounding, and taking steps to better organize our apartment.  There are a number of things that we're better off discarding, although it will take some effort for some of us to let go.

We also bought new horizontal blinds for three of the seven windows in our apartment.  The 1990s verticals were cheaply made and had been falling apart for years, but it was only when one slat broke irreparably that we finally decided to talk to our landlord about replacing them. We wanted a specific model of horizontal blinds for those three windows; the bathroom window already had horizontals, and the row of three other windows by the kitchen table had a sturdier set of verticals that hasn't broken or worn out.  Our landlord is in his late 70s and has declined in the past year, so he had difficulty understanding what he needed to do, so we spoke with his daughter, who lives out-of-state, and she agreed to install the new blinds if we purchased them.

The end result was a much cleaner look for those three windows, and it's made a world of difference in how the apartment feels.  It feels liberating to most of us.  It was upsetting, though, for emily, who's six and a half.  She felt a lot safer when the windows and window frames were covered by the bulky verticals.  The horizontals cover the windows only and not the frames, so it seemed to emily that the window frames were "naked."  She has a way of framing things (no pun intended) in a way that other people usually don't see.  So we figured that if we reasoned with her, we could get her to broaden her perspective.  We told her that it might help her to see the windows and frames as being "set free" of the heavy bulk of the old blinds.  It took a bit of convincing, but she began to accept the idea.