Northfield Stories

The third and final of my Leaving Northfield posts, this one was easily the toughest to write.  It's easy to list off five things to eat - who can't do something like that off the top of their head?  But this, this I found hard; lots of things happened, lots of perspectives have been shared, lots of people have been involved.  But June 30 (today) is the last day in my rental contract, and after this I become an Outsider, neither a Townie nor a Gownie.  I am become Katherine Kersten and it chews me up inside.

Continuing my set of departure posts from yesterday, here are The Five Best Foods in Northfield, my adopted hometown...

My eight years of living in Northfield is coming to an end. Before I go, I'd like to document a handful of things about my adopted hometown. First up: My five favorite places in Northfield...

I've outgrown the "Gotta have that thing on TV!" syndrome that you have as a kid.  Call me jaded, but I simply believe almost nothing that I see on television any more.  "Local News" is an abomination, I don't really need the nifty new Zocor/Valtrex/Ambien (ZoVaxAm) triple pill, and the women on Deal or No Deal have so much plastic in them that they could be recycled into some sort of meta-ironic credit card.

That being said, the only thing that I can recall seeing on TV and going "HULK MUST HAVE" in the past decade is that speckled epoxy garage floor coating.  How boring am I?  Yeah, I don't know why, but when I first saw it demoed it was as if cupid sprang out of the TV and shot me in the cement portion of my heart that I wasn't aware of before.

And this lead to that pining heartbreak we're all so familiar with.  While I did have that two components that one needs (a garage, $50), the garage was being used as... well, as a garage.  And as such, it had a car, bikes, a lawn mower, tools, various half-inflated basketballs, an old set of lawn jarts, and the like.  There were corners of the garage that I hadn't seen since we moved in in 2000.  Furthermore I was married, which meant that I couldn't simply turn the garage inside out and dump everything on the lawn for a week.  ("Hon, the reason you have to park a half block away is that the driveway is filled with the snowblower, winter shovels, and the broken kiddie pool that I've promised to fix for two years now so that I can put some speckled paint on the garage floor.  Also, it will take one week.  Hon?  Where are you going?")

So I spent several years mooning over the boxes in the hardware store.  I have this abject fear that products I want will be discontinued before I get a chance to try them.  And so every so often I'd wander over and confirm that yes, the boxes were still there.  I'd button hole the employees with insane badgering questions - "You're going to restock the Qwik-Crete Slate Gray Epoxy Dura-Coat Finish 001-425 soon, right?  Right??!"

And then we bought a different house.  And the skies cleared, the sun came out, and God came down and gave me a high-five.  People would ask me what I liked about the new house and I'd say "The unfinished cement floor in the garage."  The time had come.

It's good that we've got a few weeks before we move in because this sh*t is involved, boy-o. Here are the steps to a proper epoxy-ied floor:

1. Sweep out the garage completely.
2. Wet floor.
3. Apply de-greaser/etching compound.  Vicious, nasty stuff.
4. Scrub compound in.
5. Wash compound out.
6. Allow this to dry for 24 hours.
7. Re-sweep garage.  Nature abhors a swept floor.
8. Mix two part epoxy compound.  Stir for at least three minutes.
9. Wait 30 minutes for some sort of mystery chemical reaction to happen in the paint can.
10. Paranoia sets in as I resweep yet again.  How many leaves can blow into a garage in thirty minutes?  Answer: one million.
11. Clock starts ticking.  I've got 2 1/2 hours to apply the paint before... well, it doesn't say.  It only says you've got 2 1/2 hours.  Considering that the paint can is boiling like a witches' cauldron I don't doubt it.
12. Paint garage floor.
13. Sprinkle those little color flakes.  Worry about randomness.
14. Let dry for three days.

So I'm currently at day 1 of step 14.  The work is done, now I just need to summon the patience to do nothing for another 48 hours.  It's not easy.  But it's done.  I couldn't be happier.

Time to start watching commercials again.  I'll be looking for my project for 2014.

You see that blurry house with the blue marker in the driveway?

That's our new place:

Ahh, I get so few opportunities to use the HTML <address> tags.

Stop by and visit some day. We're still in the townhome until sometime in June.

So I was doing a late-evening grocery run - pregnant wife and no breakfast food for the current kid, ya know.  Anyways, I came out of Econo and heard the sounds of a party being broken up.  Lots of 'See ya's' and 'Thanks for coming!"  I quickly put two and two together and figured out that this was the end of the Lansing Hardware closing party.  I guessed at what was going to happen next, so I parked in the Econo lot facing the store, killed the engine, and turned out the lights.

Technology still amazes me.

Linnea, Ginger, and I went outside to do a little Spring frolicking. (How do you spell "frolicking"?)

I brought my camera to the performance, but the Ol' Grey Kodak ain't what she used to be. It's not focusing all that well any more, so the video is iffy. Sorry...