Friday, January 9: In the Hierarchy of Functional Kitchens

Lo, we have a working dishwasher and garbage disposal in the basement kitchen! Along with demo-ing a lot of drywall today, the workers also moved one of our dishwashers to the basement and installed it (replacing an old, non-working dishwasher) and moved the garbage disposal from our kitchen into our basement kitchen and installed it. 

What this means is that our basement kitchen is now more functional than 98% of the kitchens we had in all the apartments and houses we lived in in our twenties and thirties. All of our NYC apartments--no garbage disposals or dishwashers. Our two apartments in Barcelona--neither (we didn't even have an oven in the second one, and only hot plates for a stovetop). Our apartment on P Street in Sacramento--neither. We did have a fully working kitchen in our rented house in Roseville, California. Then back to Brooklyn--neither. Our house in NH--neither. Our house in Maplewood did, of course, have a beautiful kitchen (eventually, after we renovated). Andrew also went to Home Depot today and got a bunch of supplies for cleaning the stained, icky porcelain sink--and he did it! It's sparkling. Our humble basement kitchen here in Pittsburgh has reached a level of functionality I never dared to dream of. 

The demolition today uncovered a brick archway behind the drywall on the wall where the stove used to be, and since it matches the brick archways on our beautiful porch, we suspect there may have been a porch on the back of the house long ago. We had a wild few hours of certainty that we should change the entire design to allow the arch to stay, but alas, this probably will not work. We may try to have the arch exposed on the laundry-room side. I hate removing original features like this. We'll see what our designer says. 

It's been a long week. I worked from home today, and while the kids were at their sports, I finally relaxed with some Gilmore Girls. I'm two episodes away from finishing the series. Somehow, in all these decades, I never watched it the whole way through. I started it last year while I recovered from surgery. Later, after a dinner of chili from the freezer (me and Andrew) and a frozen pizza (L&G; it fits in our countertop convection oven), the girls and I watched This Is Us, and then Andrew and I watched The Diplomat. Writing this, I see that this was a lot of TV for one day--but that's fine. This has been a week that calls for intentionally slowing down, way down, and just resting. I can't help but think of some of my old blog posts from when the girls were very little, and Andrew would be out of town and I'd have several days in a row of just entertaining them for like fourteen hours in the basement in the winter--and I'd write something about letting them watch half an hour of Sesame Street and feeling guilty about it. Past self, you should have given yourself a little bit of grace.

A health update: fulvestrant has secured insurance approval! One down, one to go.