I just spent the evening assembling my new computer. It’s a beautiful thing to behold; blue and silver with blue LEDs (even the power supply is blue!)… but it refused to boot up from my old hard drive, so I ended up building the new hard drive sooner than I had planned. Luckily, all my files seem to be intact; though I did have a CD of the data from February in case the worst happened.

There’s still a lot of fiddling to do to get it set up right, but at least now I’ll be able to sleep tonight.

The past week has been spent furiously checking things off my To Do list. I’d like the house to be presentable by my birthday. Party at my house!

1. Turn the “pantry” into an actual pantry. Check. One of the features on the home listing when we first saw it was a large pantry. As it turned out, they meant the big coat closet in the mudroom. Since we already have a coat closet by the front door, we decided to formally convert it. I even managed to complete the task with only two trips to the hardware store (the first set of wall supports were half an inch too long), though I did borrow the neighbor’s stud finder which could be counted as trip number three. The knuckle test told me generally where they were, but it’s nice to know where the centers are. Voile! Home improvement for eighty bucks.

2. Buy a new mattress for the platform bed that was delivered last week. Check. For the record, this is the first mattress I have ever purchased. It’s nowhere near the top of the price line, but it’s easily the best quality one I’ve ever had. Since the anti-microbial latex layer didn’t cost anything extra, we went for that, too. It even came with a free dropcloth in the form of a gigantic, heavy duty, protective plastic sheath and a plethora of DO NOT REMOVE ON PAIN OF DEATH tags which I gaily cut off with complete disregard for the law. (Technically, as the consumer, I was the only one who could legally perform such an action, but furniture tags are so forbidding that I always feel the need to make sure no one is looking before breaking out the scissors.) It’s weird having a bed that you can’t bounce the cat off of when you flop onto the far corner. (I wonder if that’s why they call it a kitty corner?) Also, I’m going to have to get used to a mattress that can’t be flipped in four directions. I’m okay with that.

3. Order the super cool soil knife I’ve been drooling over. Check. I finally managed to find the manufacturer’s website. So, not only did I get a better deal than at Amazon, but I didn’t have to live with the taint of buying it from the evil empire. It should arrive sometime this week. The weeds are all atremble.

4. Sign up for automatic mortgage payments. Double check. We signed up for a twice monthly payment plan that should knock several years off the life of our loans. The theory is that making more frequent payments ends up putting more into the principal because the monthly interest doesn’t have as much time to accumulate. It doesn’t kick in until the second month though, so I also had to schedule an automatic withdrawal for next month. If all goes well, we’ll never have to think about how much we’re paying ourselves in rent or worry about late payments.

5. Order new computer parts. Triple check. I found a rockin’ deal at Tiger Direct with a very shiny case. It doesn’t have the easy-carry handle I wanted, but all the rebates left me with enough funds to add another stick of memory, a decent video card, and a 250gb hard drive. Which reminds me, thanks for the offer of the 500gb drive, True – I ended up getting sick while I was out there or I would have stopped by for a visit. Even without the hard drive.

6. Pay the bills. E-check. I love webpay. It makes spending money almost fun.

7. Paint the guest room. I didn’t quite manage to get this far, but I did get started on the prep work and luckily we already bought the paint because after checking off all the other items on our list this weekend, we’re about done broke until the next paycheck or so. Plus, I’m sick of buying things. Unless I find the perfect curtain material for the master bedroom, because the dark green velvet ones the sellers left behind with pineapple finials reeeally don’t fit in.

I am apparently extremely picky when it comes to china patterns. Mym and I never bought any, mostly because we couldn’t find one we both liked — which is to say that -I- never found one I liked well enough to invest in. But I’ve always loved my grandmother’s china. A wide band of light blue running around the outer edge of the dish rimmed with silver and dressed up with a loose floral spray in the center, it was classic. Clean and simple. Lovely and formal without being fussy, which is too often overdone when flowers are involved. More importantly, it spoke to me of family and of love.

Every Thanksgiving we were drawn irresistibly to Grandma’s house to partake of her unfathomably moist kosher turkey that practically melted in your mouth. Every year my mother brought her homemade cranberry relish that even the non-relish eaters ate. My aunt would make her sweet potato and apples dish which, without detracting from its deliciousness, was the only vegetarian dish she has yet made that everyone could agree on eating with a straight face. (The Year of the Tofurkey is only whispered about in darkened corners where no-one can see the whites around your eyes — though, if memory serves, I found the squash soup quite tasty.) There was stuffing and peas, and a new dish or two rotated through every year for interest followed by coffee and desserts (and naps at the table) including cheesecakes when I got older and discovered the allure of baking. And all of it served on my grandmother’s china.

It was the first thing to go into the dining room with the linens and silver and it was the last thing to leave the table after all the food had long since disappeared into our bellies or been crammed into the fridge ’til both were full near to bursting. By the time the dishes made it to the sink, the heated conversations and retelling of favorite stories were reduced to snores and contented sighs. In later years when we were too far abroad to make it to Grandma’s for the holidays, I often thought about those gatherings. My grandmother’s china was always present in those memories, as if it set the scene and framed the event.

For some odd reason, no one else in my family developed such a strong attachment to these dishes so, when my grandmother offered them to Mym and me as a housewarming gift, we accepted wholeheartedly. The trick was figuring out how to get them across the country intact. In the end, we took them to UPS who equated the packing and shipping fee to that of a small elephant, but they did the job we paid them to do. I now have enough packing peanuts and bubble wrap to insulate my garage, but every dish arrived in the exact condition it was in when we put it in their care, while on the same day a serving platter my mother bought over e-bay arrived on her doorstep in shattered pieces. So I cannot fault them their methods. They warned me when I brought the dishes in that china is the most expensive thing to ship. But every time I use them I will think of my grandparents and Thanksgiving dinners at their house and know it was worth every penny.