That was interrupted, as usual (as nearly always), by my neighbor. She had started off by yelling “une belle fille bien baisée ! Va te faire foutre, connasse !” at which point I went to get my camera phone, since Kanoko was also being adorable as I cleaned my patio/terrace. This is what followed. Mostly it’s kitty being funny, then at 35 seconds in, you get to hear my neighbor for yourself and witness what I put up with (though on a small scale, since it’s worse than just these few seconds, of course).

As can be seen, I’m merely on my patio, playing with my kitten. I do not engage her; I never engage her. Today is the first time I’ve dared to try and film. She noticed: she yelled “moi aussi je peux filmer !!” and she did, which I don’t mind, because she caught herself on camera calling me “connasse !” while I remained silent, playing with my kitten. Kanoko and I went inside after I’d finished the film, since I figured the neighbor would come outside. Indeed, the neighbor lady then stormed out and sprayed my entire wall, window, door and all, with her garden hose.

I’m getting pretty tired of this. I forwarded the video to a neighbor in the abusive neighbor’s apartment building so that their management can be made aware, again. (I realize I’ll need to be more careful than usual now, since the filming pissed her off and may escalate things. I’m hoping, however, that seeing how bad she can be — and this is average, not her worst — will help handle the problem.)

This afternoon Kanoko was swatting around a broken piece of ceramic. It was dark red and reminded me very much of traditional Provençal terra cotta tiles, called tomettes. My curiosity was piqued — every so often, you’ll hear a story of someone buying an apartment, pulling up the old floor and discovering tomettes beneath. It even happened to my former landlords, whose floor was gorgeous. Since the parquet in my bedroom was badly laid and I thought I needed to replace it due to the water damage from the adjacent bathroom, I pulled on a corner that was already sticking out.

This is what I found. I jumped; I squealed with joy; I bounded into the kitchen to put on eye protection and returned to the bedroom to pull out as much parquet as I could. It hadn’t been glued, merely laid onto a protective sheet covering the floor. The tomettes are in perfect condition. There’s only one exception: the previous owners broke some tomettes to run… a TV cable. Ugh. (By any chance, do any readers have a few tomettes laying around that I could use to repair this? They’re hard to find. Mine are 11.5cm from point to point; 10cm from side to side.)

Pulling up the parquet brought something else into evidence: the tile elsewhere in my apartment is on top of yet more tomettes!!! Tomorrow I’m going to pull up tile in an out-of-the way corner of my living room to see what’s been done and if it’s recoverable — I certainly hope so. I’m delighted since I had in fact dreamt of redoing my bedroom floor in tomettes, but had to set aside the idea since they’re very expensive. Then today I find that it was already done 60 years ago!

As shown here, my deconstructivist bathroom is coming along nicely. This approach brings to the fore images that evoke universal truths: beneath the persona (paint) and ego (plaster) lie hidden yet vital depths of unconscious communications (pipes) and shadow elements (dark hole in the wall). Cleansing and healing elements also come into play (shower). While modern society would have us believe that humans are two-dimensional, able to be classified and “targeted”, we are reminded of the multitudinous facets in every individual, impossible to contemplate in their whole; impossible to reduce to mere words.

Because my bathroom wall needs to dry before it can be repaired, I decided to tackle paint removal in it today. (I had an extra vacation day that needed to be used, so took today off.) The mold damage before, bubbles after putting on paint remover that made me rather nervous since no such bubbles formed on the same paint when I used the remover in the WC, and the wall after removing the paint but before taking on the plaster.

The photo above shows the bathroom as it is now, with a hole in the corner so that air can get back there and help things dry out.

Kanoko turned 6 months old two weeks ago, and is at the veterinarian today, getting neutered and being given an ID tattoo in his ear. (Why you should spay or neuter your pet, et en français, pourquoi faire stériliser son animal.) I weighed him while at the vet’s: 4.5 kilos/10 pounds! That’s a healthy weight for a fully adult cat — normal-sized kittens weigh 3kg/6.5 pounds at 6 months old.

I took the opportunity of a mischief-free apartment to put up the curtain wire over my bedroom storage nook and hang a drape (“before” photo here). The difficulty of this nook is that it’s 2 meters wide, while none of the stores I checked had drapes/curtains wider than 1m60. So I hung a drape sideways! It’s not ideal, but with the tall bed frame bringing things together visually, it works well enough. It will probably look much better once I’ve repainted my bedroom a darkish grey. After considering several color ideas over the last few months, I realized that every time I’d seen a grey room, I’d utterly loved it. It won’t be done for a few months though, since budget priority goes to repairing my bathroom, which will be expensive. It is nice to no longer see the boxes and suitcases, in any case.

This is a new style of postmodern deconstructivism, which I’m sure will be all the rage soon. It’s my walk-in shower, which was put in by the previous owners. When I visited the apartment in February, just before signing, there was no sign of water damage in the bathroom. I asked about the shower, though, since it looked “homemade”. I was told that it had been built correctly and waterproofed.

When I moved in at the start of June, my bathroom wall was covered in mold, and the walls in the WC were soaked. I called my insurance agent. After much going in circles (the syndic, building management, had to be notified as well), no clear cause could be found. The plumber decided to check beneath the shower, just in case, and last week the plumber finally got the OK from everyone involved to partially demolish the walls.

There’s no waterproof membrane beneath the shower floor. What happened is that the grout began to break down, and water seeped onto the floor and into the walls. As for the visible damage, there are two possibilities: it was so new in February that no mold had grown to visible proportions, or the previous owners had painted over existing mold so it wasn’t visible. To make a long story short, I took on a real estate lawyer and met with her last week. Appropriate action has been taken and we’ll see how things go. In any case, I’m happy to have found a great plumber, and hopefully will soon have “after” photos of a new shower installation to post here.

With the water damage cause finally determined, this weekend I had fun with some small DIY projects, making my WC a bit more civilized. I put in a corner shelf and, finally, a toilet roll holder. Kanoko again performed quality control, checking the shelf frame. This photo shows my full WC once finished. In France it’s quite common to have a separate toilet room, and they’re usually small. A closer (and cleaner-looking) view of the shelves. They sit on fittings and are held to them with socket screws, so they’re easy to take off and put back on, which means it will be a snap to repaint my WC walls as soon as all the water damage is repaired.

The previous owners of my apartment had set up the phone line oddly, putting it in a cupboard near the window onto the terrace. I had put my PC in the corner against the wall by the cupboard until today, when I cut the phone cable to reinstall the phone jack near the sofa nook. (Those photos are from April, before I moved in, since it’s easier to see. The rest of the photos are from today.) I don’t have a television (purposefully), but I do like to watch DVDs, and plan to set up my sofa nook so that I can both surf the ‘net and watch movies from it.

After cutting the wire, I took apart the phone jack, noting which wires had been connected. As I suspected, they were rather loose; a couple even fell out — I’ve had intermittent problems with my ADSL connection. Here are what the connectors on a French phone jack look like. I had found this wiring diagram to use for reference, and set about rewiring the jack in its new location.

Sure enough, the phone cable in my place wasn’t standard, and different colors had to be wired. Once that was figured out and done, it worked! On Wednesday the furniture I plan to use for the PC setup in the nook will arrive, and then I’ll show what it looks like — right now it’s somewhat unsightly, although functional.

Questions you may be asking about this photo:
- Are those potatoes?
- What’s that black thing behind them?
- How did they get there?
- Did you cut that hole yourself?

Answers: Yes, those are potatoes. Ever since Kanoko arrived, I’ve been mysteriously losing potatoes. Since it was only one or two at a time, I figured that I was just miscounting them and had forgotten how many I’d actually eaten. But then, a few days ago, five went missing all at once, and I noticed a rank stench coming from the corner in my kitchen where I’d kept the potatoes. The familiar smell of… rotting potatoes. Looking behind the kitchen, which had been set up amateurishly by the previous owners (the main reason I got my apartment for such a low price), I noticed two things:
1. There is a space behind the lower cupboards that’s just big enough for a kitten to get through from the open area beneath them.
2. There is also a space beneath the particle-board bottoms, just high enough for kitten paws and… potatoes.
The two spaces were not big enough for me to be able to fish around with a pole for the potatoes.

Since the kitchen is indeed mediocre, and I plan to replace it eventually, I started to attempt ripping out the particle board bottom. True to inexperienced builder form, however, it had been put together so chaotically that there was no way I could pull it out cleanly and easily. And so I started to saw. I stopped after an hour, realizing it was going to take more than a couple cuts, and decided to wait until this weekend.

Today I finally managed to hack my way through the particle board and create a hand-sized hole, having to make several cuts due to the nearly-impracticable angle in the small space available. The first potato was visible as soon as I finished ripping out the last chunk of particle board. Ten more potatoes — for a total of eleven in all — were nearby. That black thing behind them? A rotting wooden spatula, shown here in a larger view of the area beneath the cupboards, so you can see what I was dealing with.

My lemon tree has been overflowing with flowers lately, filling my terrace with a pleasantly tart and pungent odor. I had no idea how lemons grew until getting my tree a few months ago, so thought I’d share, photographing lemon development in three stages. All photos are from today. First, the flowers — older ones whose stamens will form lemons on the left, and a new blossom on the right. Open blossoms only stay this beautiful white for about a day or two:

Then the “baby” lemons about two weeks after flowering — you can tell they were stamens not too long ago:

And finally, lemons that have been growing for several months now:

As just another Joe(anna) who had her own business (but which was actually mine, and I know enough about finances to know the difference between “earnings” and “profit”), I spent some of my hard-earned euros on a big arbre à chats — cat tree. This meant a bit of DIY. For anyone else interested in putting together a cat tree/scratching post:

1. Identify all the parts and organize them so you’ll know which is which more quickly. For instance, this tree has different-length posts, so I laid them out from longest to shortest.
2. Start with the base.
3. Build up gradually. The perch attached to the cat house/box on my tree had a bracket on it that was supposed to bolt to the box, but its screws had ripped out. Luckily I’m Anna the Handywoman! and have a wide variety of screws around, so was able to reattach it, though slightly off from its original position (the original holes were useless).
4. At this point, since you have a cat, you will probably have to take into account the unpredictable addition of extra weight onto various parts of the tree, in the form of a pouncing, rapidly-moving furball. Keep a strong hold of the tree during this delicate period. Finish with the top perch.
5. All done, kitten included!

I found this particular cat tree in several places, but got it from ZooPlus since it was cheapest. (Good-quality cat trees and scratching posts are expensive…!) It’s called Alicante, and is part of the tall models on their French site. On their US site, here’s the Alicante, where it’s among their medium cat trees. I liked this one since it seemed stable (which it is indeed), was tall but slim enough for my smaller-sized apartment, had several platforms, and came in a decent color. It was hard to choose though, there are so many neat-looking cat trees!

Kanoko turns four and a half months old about now. Here he posed for the camera this morning, and I photographed him blissfully scratching a yucca stump a bit later. Originally I’d planned to pull out the big yucca, but Kanoko loves its stumps so much that I’ve kept it. It’s now regrowing leaves from the tops of the stumps.

Since Malo passed away only two months ago, I still remember how big he was, and can hardly believe that Kanoko has nearly reached Malo’s size at such a young age. Kanoko’s face has really filled out, his whiskers (chopped off by the people who abandoned him) are nice and long now, and his tail is beautiful. He certainly does look very “Maine Coon”. His paws still seem to be growing more quickly than the rest of him! (There’s a photoset of Kanoko that shows his development since my kind neighbor asked if I’d take care of him two months ago.)

There are also pictures of the bougainvillea and other plants on my terrace, including a baby rose plant that surprised me when I found it this morning. My cyclamen are looking to be beautiful again this year, and my lemon tree has been blooming up a storm lately: lots of lemons to come!

As for the crazy neighbor who threatened to kill Kanoko, all has been well since I went to the police, and put up the finer-grade wire on my terrace. I later gave the police report to people in her building, who spoke with their building management about it — it’s far from being the first report that’s been filed against her. Ever since, I’ve made a point of using my terrace normally and ignoring her whenever she came out. She’s stopped going outside very often and no longer bothers trying to scream at me (she never talked normally, only screamed — it’s not an exaggeration that we call her “crazy”, it truly seems that she is mentally ill, which is sad). So Kanoko is fine, I’m fine, and it’s wonderful to have such a quiet terrace.