somethingelse's Profile

AnnieDownUnder, re: earplugs - I'm doing the same thing for when I fly with my cat! What I've really been thinking about, though, is adding antihistamines to my mental carry-on packing list when flying with my cat.

My question to everyone else is, would it help, or would it just be creepy? My boyfriend was like, no way in hell I'd take any pills from a random stranger on the plane. You can get individually packaged Zyrtec though, and while I fly Southwest a lot so I try to ask first, I feel bad for people with allergies who didn't mean to sit with a cat. No one's complained, but over the course of a good half dozen flights, I've noticed the occasional sniffling seatmate...

Oh man oh man oh man. I'm a grad student, so I've spent SO MUCH TIME in the last four years on Craigslist dealing with apartments and furniture.

My biggest pet peeve people who post New Jersey apartments under Manhattan. I don't care if it's "only ten minutes from Penn Station (Newark), twenty to midtown!", if I wanted to live in Hoboken, I would've searched for Hoboken, not Lower East Side. There will always be a dozen identical postings in a row too, so I WILL go out of my way to flag them.

I also hate when people advertise Ikea furniture as "already assembled for you!" as though it's a good thing. I'm a broke-ass student and all I want to know is whether the pieces will fit in a big blue Ikea bag so I can get it home on the subway.

I did something like the first project in the dorm room a few years ago. Someone helped me stick up a masking tape grid and I think I used a quart of white paint and a few tubes of paint tint (it was easier to make several different shades of orange that way).

Shrubs! Vinegar drinks sound odd, but are a really nice change from lemonades. There are recipes at http://www.cooks.com/rec/search/0,1-0,shrub,FF.html though I've been getting mine from a Chinatown shop...

The cabinetry is beautiful! I love the birch with the stainless steel. That shelf by the stairs makes me nervous though. I could just see myself pushing a jar of beans down the stairs... I would put a lip or some sort of clear guard on the stairs side of the upper shelves, but they must trust their coordination more than I do mine.

I moved to New York City last year, into the current apartment in February, and I have to say, BEDBUGS are the most godawful pest you could ever get. There's a bedbug epidemic here, we've been told. My roommate brought them back a few weeks ago and now all of our belongings are in ten-gallon Ziploc bags.

Back in Chicago, the most annoying things had to be the "dustmop bugs" (as I took to calling house centipedes) and the ladybugs. Are centipedes a Chicago thing? I thought it was just the building I was in (old with lots of trees and vines and stuff). The ladybugs would fly into the ceiling lights and make that annoying tapping sound, until I learned to spray them with water so they couldn't fly, and let my cat eat them.

My college roommate tried the sponge sterilizing trick and accidentally set it on fire. Our kitchen smelled like burnt plastic for days...

Brettun's Village has a lot of random leather, including full hides. http://www.brettunsvillage.com/leather/

This, for example, is on clearance: http://www.brettunsvillage.com/leather/sides/wld973.jpg

In regards to that New York Post article about the 175-sq foot studio, I'm not all that impressed. True, they don't have a lot of stuff or space, but I don't feel like they've utilized the stuff and space that they do have particularly well. They've just outsourced the storage for it. I guess that's one way to live your life, eating out all the time and leaving your clothes at the cleaners, but I think I'm more of a fan of Tumbleweed Houses, those really look like the designer put a lot of thought into what every inch would be used for.

I don't know how they make these, so they might not be much less toxic, but another alternative might be those giant cardboard tubes used for shaping concrete: http://www.homedepot.com/Building-Materials-Concrete-Cement-Masonry-Concrete-Tools-Specialty/h_d1/N-5yc1vZ1xmiZaqat/R-100321215/h_d2/ProductDisplay?langId=-1&storeId=10051&catalogId=10053