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22
Apr 12

Visiting our Fenway Brick

Awhile ago, we purchased a Fenway brick as a part of a renovation Fenway was doing. They had some “visiting hours” for donators to go see their brick. This week was Fenway’s 100th anniversary. Even though the Red Sox themselves are crumbling (already!), it is fun to have our names on display at Fenway.

Our brick is at Gate B; we consider Gate B “our gate” as it is the one we use every game we attend. We walk to Fenway from our house and the walk leads right to Gate B. Gate B is also where the new Royal Rooters club is located. Josh loves the original Royal Rooters. Our brick is in the Jerry Remy section.

Everyone got a duplicate, commemorative brick and display case when they bought the Fenway brick. We keep ours near our Red Sox commemorative baseball from the 700th sellout game we were at, our rookie year Harangody-signed mini Celtics basketball and bobble heads – gotta keep all the sports stuff together.

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21
Apr 12

South Boston Beaches

With the day starting at 6am, we had a super busy and productive Saturday. We took a little drive in the evening and walked along the beach in South Boston. It was a good day – but we are anxious about the renovations finishing on time (i.e., this week) and being able to move in this weekend.

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21
Apr 12

The Great Toilet Caper

Our contractor just informed us that the toilet we purchased a month ago, that has been sitting in the living room this whole time, will not work. We need a special toilet, with a 10″ rough. So first we researched and learned what a 10″ rough was, learned that you can’t just buy one from Lowe’s or Home Depot willy nilly, and learned that most plumbing supply stores are not open on weekends. And even then, most specialty plumbing supply stores don’t keep 10″ rough toilets in stock. (This is ridiculous in the Boston city market as most older construction, like all the brownstones, apparently need this type of toilet.) We spent Friday calling all sorts of places, seeing if they had ANY 10″ rough toilets available for an immediate purchase, with Saturday hours. We were not super successful, as the only ones available were very poorly reviewed, with known “quality issues”. After spending Friday night researching our toilet options on the interwebs, reading reviews of which toilets are not awful, and reconciling ourselves to the fact that we would have to special order one requiring us to move into our new place with no working toilet for awhile, we woke up at 6am on Saturday to call around some more. The few shops that are open on Saturdays, are only open from 6am to 11am! We called Ace Plumbing and Heating Supply. We had called Friday and knew they had super early morning hours on Saturday. Even though a desk worker had told us on Friday that they did not have 10″ rough in the store, they had been super helpful and sounded like they could pick one up for us from a warehouse somewhere – we just wouldn’t have it for our contractor on Monday. So now that we knew exactly which toilet we wanted, we called them again to see if they could get that model and how long it would take. This time, the gentlemen that answered knew that they had one in stock, exactly what we wanted (and he taught us even more about toilet options). I made him promise not to sell it to anyone else and that we would be there in minutes – turns out they were only a mile from our place! So, Ace Plumbing is AWESOME. When we picked it up, he told us he had never heard someone so excited about a toilet that early in the morning!

Afterwards we tried to defy geometry and physics to return the our original toilet choice to Home Depot. After getting it down the stairs, we realized there was no way it was fitting in to the model of Zipcar we had. We took the pieces out of the box, broke down the box, but everything into the car piecemeal – and then put the puzzle back together in the Home Depot parking lot. What a fiasco – but at least we will have a toilet when we move in.