Katie & Filters & Home Stuff & Books

shad­owkatt cel­e­brat­ed the Chi­nese New Year with the folks from the mar­tial arts stu­dio tonight at an Ital­ian restau­rant. There was one oth­er female at the par­ty, but oth­er­wise lots of testos­terone. They all seem like polite guys, happily.

We’re at a rather awk­ward stage as par­ents and teen—we want to know what’s hap­pen­ing with her and to make sure that she’s okay, but she does­n’t want us in her “space.” It’s quite the dance.

sam­bear and I had din­ner at Fud­druck­er’s, then took care of some errands. We got replace­ment fil­ters for the ice mak­er’s water line and our humid­i­fi­er. The pump in the foun­tain from which Shel­ley drinks was about to die, so we end­ed up get­ting a pet foun­tain that has a fil­ter built into it. I’ve want­ed to try one for a while, and it cost about the same as a new pump. Yes, I’m all about the fil­ters. The HEPA air clean­ers are up and run­ning, too.

The ice mak­er fil­ter had to be fetched from Home Depot. I drooled over hard­wood floor options and kitchen cab­i­nets. Oh, and there was a clothes dry­er that was absolute­ly awe­some! It was real­ly more of a dry­ing cen­ter than just a clothes dry­er. I can’t find it on their web­site, but it had a whole dry­ing cab­i­net and lots of options for fine-tun­ing exact­ly how you want­ed things processed. You could dry things on mul­ti­ple racks (like sweaters) or hang­ing up. It even had a can­is­ter where you could put a fra­grance if you want­ed every­thing scent­ed a par­tic­u­lar way. I think it cost $1400 or so—something ridicu­lous. But it was impres­sive. I can’t remem­ber the brand, so they prob­a­bly need to work on the pre­sen­ta­tion a bit.

Some of the wash­ers and dry­ers talk, sup­pos­ed­ly. I do not want appli­ances talk­ing to me. If I ever heard such things speak­ing, I’d prob­a­bly put in a call to 911 and ask to have those nice young men in the white coats come to pick me up.

We also went by Barnes & Noble. The 6th and last book of the Sun Sword series by Michelle West is final­ly out, and I got it! The whole series is very intri­cate. I can’t seem to find my copy of the first vol­ume for some rea­son, though. I wish I could find the four books in The Book of the Sun­dered series (pub­lished as Michelle Sagara), but they’re out of print. We wan­dered through the home sec­tion. I want to find a book like The Sybarite’s Bath­room Book, but haven’t seen such a thing. Per­haps we can write one after we achieve bathing heav­en in the new house. I can’t help but remem­ber some of the bath­room descrip­tions from Hein­lein’s books, and I am inspired.