2008-01-13 - 9:40 p.m.

...the hotline....

Now back to the Red Phone.

I may have mentioned - in various ways - that we live in a heritage house. For the most part, I LOVE heritage houses. Old creaky places with history, lots of wood, and lots of quirks. Beautiful stained glass; doorways that probably used to lead somewhere; lots of hardwood floors; air that circulates; little crooks that probably had some function in the past, a real water closet. That's where we live - a quirky, Funcouver heritage house. Now, of course there are also some real disadvantages that are inherited: drafty old windows; a leaky roof; not a single decent closet; antiquated toilets; DREADFULLY ANNOYING CLAWFOOT TUBS.

Don't get me started on clawfoot tubs. Too late. Here I go. I used to think they were romantic and cool. Now I live with one. And I hate it. If there is ANY place where society has advanced in the last 100 years, it's PLUMBING. You know, you can actually MIX hot and cold water now??? Not to mention CLEANING the darned things - apart from the old finish that never gets clean, there's the fun of cleaning over, under, and BEHIND it. And those dreadful hanging shower curtains that have to loop all the way around you, and inevitably STICK to you while you try to shower. And oh oh, oh, do you know how FUN it is to climb IN and OUT of one of those things when you are 10 months pregnant? In fact, ours has its own personality, and I think it's trying to kill me. You don't wanna know how many times I've been bruised by OL' CLAWFOOT. And do you know how much I'm looking forward to infant bathing in this MONSTER? Me and ol' clawfoot, we're gonna have to have a talk soon. He can bite my legs all he wants, but he needs to leave the Babe out of our personal war, or I'm going to threaten the toes on those feet.

exhaling now.

where was I?

Oh yeah. The Red Phone. I actually wanted to talk about something COMPLETELY DIFFERENT. Well, one of the unexplainable nooks that we have in our house is a strange little wooden framed area right in the hallway. It looks like it MIGHT have been a butler's pantry at one time. Or whatever those things are through which you could haul things up and down between floors. Or maybe it was something else, I don't know. But it's basically pretty useless.. Up until now, we've used it to hold our oldest telephone - but ever since we moved in, K has fantasized about finding a truly old-fashioned hanging wall phone. I mean, he's right. The space cries for it.

So, sometime around Christmas day, K got a surfing urge. And he found quite a few old phones for oogabs of cash. Not worth it for a fantasy gag, really. But then he found a faux phone - well, it's a real phone, actually, just done in the style of a 1950's classic from Ma Bell. He hemmed and hawed for a few days, and then by New Year's Eve, he was ready to buy. And today that baby's installed, and it's a beauty. The Red Phone. I have to get a photo for y'all. It's very cool - has one of those classic, percussive old rings - musical.

So now we collect our calls on the Red Phone. Which I guess means that we can talk to the Kremlin anytime we want....