This tea vessel comes from Ukiyo Tea, and it (along with the banchan from Osada tea) were a gift from a friend who knows my taste in teas extremely well. The tea itself is a delight: sweet and lovely. The vessel is great for drinking while working: I add leaves to the glass bulb at the bottom, screw it on the attachment screw thing, fill the thermos with water, then screw the leaves on top. Slowly invert, so the leaves steep; slowly flip it again. Unscrew; drink.

 

It’s a pretty non-fussy way to deliver tea, and to keep it warm for a good hour-long editing session, so as of late, it’s been getting quite the workout. Recommended for those who want to drink loose-leaf tea without fuss or spillage.

I don’t know how to tell this story, except to say—look, if you ever thought I was a competent adult who had her stuff together, I am about to abuse you of this notion.

 

So, we bought this house in 2012. When we bought it, there was ratty, smoke-smelling carpet all over, covering extremely beat up hardwood. We ripped out the carpet, pulled out the carpet pads, and painstakingly took out Every Staple To Be Found. We then got the floors refinished, and it was probably the greatest decision we could have made.

 

In order to refinish the floors, we had to take off a bunch of the interior doors. And—here is where the shenanigans start—we were in a hurry to do all of this, because we had taken possession of the house, but we hadn’t moved our stuff in yet, and we were going to fly back to Seattle and then drive back with all our stuff. We had a dumpster outside for the carpet and pad and also the incredibly disgusting cabinets that we ripped off the walls, and without really thinking about what we were doing, we threw the doors in the dumpster.

 

(Digression: we thought we threw the doors in the dumpster because we couldn’t find them later. In reality, we put them in the shed behind the house, but we forgot about that and found them there six years later.)

 

Whoops.

 

A year later (be as horrified as you want, but keep in mind that there’s only two of us in this house, we’re married, the bathrooms still kind of* had doors, and there’s no line of sight between the outside windows and our rooms, of course we’re gonna procrastinate this) (if you are imagining a story about doors that starts in 2012 is not going to involve excessive procrastination, please, have a seat) we found a handyman who put new doors in. These doors did not have holes for handles drilled in them yet. We paid him for that day of work, he said he’d come back and finish the handles in the morning, and, uh, he ghosted us.

 

I then tried to hire two more people to finish the job. They didn’t. One guy showed up and was like “you know what? I just don’t know how to do that. Sorry!”

 

It turns out you don’t technically need handles on doors, if it’s just two of you. You can just like, mostly pull the doors shut and that’s cool and fine, and besides, the animals like it better that way because they can bull on into any room they want.

 

So last year, after failing to get someone to fix this for us for…um…you know, ten years, I finally googled how to do it myself because we had a Cat Situation that required a door latch. And I did, and you know, it’s not really that hard. I put the handle onto exactly one out of the three doors that lacked handles.

 

One out of three!

 

This Sunday, I decided that I would put a handle on another door. I drilled the holes (Mr. Milan held the door steady, which actually was extremely useful) and then I put the little latch thingy that goes through the door in to see if it lined up and pushed it shut.

 

It did line up stupendously well. And the handles weren’t in. The door latched shut on this room for the first time in twelve years and I was stuck on the other side (luckily there is another egress from the room) sort of staring at it like “I just played myself! What was I doing!”

 

To make an already long story slightly shorter, butterknives are great, latching doors are overrated, we need a utility knife to finish the job, and we are still standing at a solid 1 out of 3 on doors with handles, and maybe we’ll fix that before another decade passes.

————

* I will not be explaining what I mean by “kind of” in this sentence. This is embarrassing enough as it is.

This is one of my favorite novellas, in part because Henry is so delightful and not competent at any of the things he doesn’t want to do.

 

It’s also 99 cents at the moment, so if you don’t have it yet, now’s your time.

Buy The Pursuit Of… on:

If you don’t know about the furor over the Hugos—sci fi genre fan awards—you are very lucky. To make a long story short, a giant goober named Dave, who has been in charge of running the Hugo a handful of times, took matters into his own hands and single-handedly disqualified a number (like a huge number) of Chinese-language works of science fiction from the contest, for no reason. He then also disqualified some more people who don’t live in China, mostly because he thought the Chinese government wouldn’t like those people. He does not appear to have done this as a result of direct government pressure.

 

Now that all of this is beginning to come out, we have names of some of the works that we never got to see, and two of the not-awardees have been translated and are available (free!) through Clarksworld.

 

Upstart, by Lu Ban

and

Hummingbird, Resting on Honeysuckles, by Yang Wangqing

 

Both of these works are short and I highly recommend them. I can absolutely see why these works would be awarded. There’s a lot in them about grief, loneliness…feelings of alienation from the future, and so much more. 

 

If you’re interested, please take a look, if nothing else for the reminder that someone can be living half the world away, in a country with a different internet than the one we possess…and still feel so many of our same feelings.

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