Questions for 29 - 31 August

[vilakins]

Catch-up again!

29. How many closets does your house have?
That depends on what a closet is! Googling tells me that it's a tall cupboard or wardrobe. Here the ones for clothes are wardrobes, and the others with shelves are cupboards whether or not they have cups in them. (An aside: "nicht alle Tassen im Schrank haben" - "to not have all cups in the cupboard" - is a German expression for being crazy.) Anyway, this house is old and doesn't have many built in.

• Wardrobes (for clothes): there are two small ones under the eves upstairs you have to duck to look into, and a large Ikea one.
• Tall cupboards (with shelves): one in the bathroom, four in the storeroom, one in the upstairs gallery.

OTOH if a closet is something you can walk into (and hide in standing up, as seen on TV or film) then we have exactly none.

30. What year is your car?
September 2019. It's the first new car I've ever bought, and that was because I used part of an inheritance.

31. What's the largest animal you've ever had as a pet?
As a child, the family springer spaniel Sherry who followed a cocker spaniel, Peter. As an adult, it would have to be Vic, the stray we adopted (see icon) as Sebastian is smaller than he was.

Comments

[eve11]

Kitty!

Closets in the US are essentially tiny rooms built into the house for storage, so eg, a standing Ikea wardrobe would not count as a closet. And they generally have a regular sized door that is from floor to person-height. They could have shelves so you can't walk into one if you open the door, but if you removed the shelves there should be a tiny room you can stand in. It is desirable for bedrooms to have closets. Sometimes bathrooms have them too. In the kitchen, one might consider a walk-in pantry a kind of closet, but not a pantry cabinet no matter how tall it is (I think of cupboards as another word for kitchen cabinets). I might consider storage built into eaves as a kind of closet though, even if it's not person-height.

[vilakins]

OK, I was right, then: we don't have any closets! There were five in our previous house, which was much newer and more convenient.

[gwendraith]

Vic looks like a lovely cat! We had a stray once when I was very young. We named him Tinker and he was a long haired tabby,

[vilakins]

We had to get a microchip cat door as he was stealing our cats' food, but the day we saw him huddled in the rain under a tree, we looked at each other and knew we'd have to feed him. At first he was too scared to eat if he could see us through a window, but he tamed down and about a year later was coming in and out with the others, and even sitting on our laps. We would have adopted several other strays, but Vic was the first one our other cats at the time would accept.

The icon is another one of him.

[gwendraith]

Awww, what a lovely story and I love the icon!

[vilakins]

I should add that we did find homes for the other strays: black cat Luke who went to a work colleague, Larry who looked rather like Vic who went to a friend, and a little black kitten found in someone's garage who got a home through the vet I took him to. I'd have kept all of them, but our two cats (see icon) had other ideas; one in particular absolutely freaked out at the mere sight of them.

[gwendraith]

Aww. It is hard to let them go but glad they went to good homes. I found an abandoned kitten in the lift (with basket and blanket) when I lived in Ely. She was lovely and I really wanted to keep her but India and Inka didn't like her so the Cat's Protection League took her and found her a home.

[vilakins]

It is hard. I visited the black kitten at the vet every day after work and promised him I'd keep him despite Claudia and Tessa if he didn't find a home. He went to a family whose cat had died, so I'm sure he had a fun life with the children. He was very active at the vet, getting into everything including staff lunches and a teapot. XD

[judo100]

My new house in Charlotte actually has quite generous closet space, which is one of the things I appreciate about it. There are 5 official closets, plus several other small built in spaces with doors that close, sort of mini-closets.

I had a huge amount of storage space in my old home in High Point, including many large closets and an entire basement in which we could store anything we wanted. I had to downsize a lot in the move, but having a reasonable number of closets in the new place helped a lot.

So not to have all your cups in the cupboard is the equivalent of being a few bricks short of a load? Either crazy or just stupid, depending on who is judging you?

[vilakins]

I think old houses just had standalone wardrobes, judging by the ones I've seen in antique shops here, and those I remember on stays at a local farm as a child. I can't wait till we have our garage built (put back once again by lockdown) as at last we'll have some storage, if not in the house. I also want to have some cupboards with shelves built into the very deep window sill in the upstairs gallery which would help a lot.

Pretty much, yes, like not having all the cards in a deck. I rather like the Australian one, "There's a kangaroo loose in the top paddock", but that's more specifically crazy.