Sep

20

Seat of my pants

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September 20, 2007

I keep being surprised at the many ways in which a kitchen remodel can greatly inconvenience a person. I mean, there’s the not-being-able-to-cook thing, and the no-dishes thing, but as I’ve learned over the last couple days, there’s also the tearing-of-the-pants thing.

See, now that they’ve started painting we have the aforementioned plastic drape (complete with labia, now sadly taped shut) sealing the new area from the rest of the house, rendering our front door usable only for people working in the kitchen. Anyone else, such as the occupants of the house, has to circle around into the backyard and step over our makeshift wire fence. This is obviously no big deal for JB, but for yours truly it’s a massive pain in the ass, especially when I’m wearing heels and carrying a toddler/purse/armload of grocery bags.

I mean it’s literally a pain in the ass, because I’ve managed to get stuck on the top of the fence several times now, and now my one pair of semi-comfortable maternity jeans have little rips all over the heinie area. Yesterday I found myself mid-straddle with one shoe trapped in the fence while I flailed to keep myself from collapsing over the side, and I suddenly realized I was completely visible to all of the painters via a nearby window. I’m pretty sure a pregnant lady stuck on a fence makes for some fine visual entertainment, something to break up the monotony of applying primer, and while I couldn’t be certain I thought I heard a chorus of snickers as I finally detached myself and scurried away to my car.

(Luckily, later on a worker carrying a heavy box made his way through our entryway only to step directly on a stuffed squeaky toy that bleated a single, startling “EE-ERRRR!” like the death call of a spring lamb, and I could hear him bumbling the box and cursing under his breath in Spanish. HA! Vengeance is mine.)

I am officially so, so, so sick of this remodel. My house is filled with spiders and dust and cantankerous toddlers, I’m tired of eating microwaved food with plastic spoons, and now I have to rip my pants on a fence to get in and out. I know I’m going to love the end result, but jeeeeeesus christ we’ve been at this since . . . what, May? WAH.

Also, we keep trying to pick out a hanging light fixture for the nook area and hey, have you ever tried to take a toddler to a lighting store? Take it from me, this is not something you want to do unless the child is in restraints.

:::

Hey, the new blog is up and running! This first entry is mostly an introductory how-do, but please stop by and say hi if you get a chance. And don’t even mock me for that goofy picture on there, it’s the closest thing to a “head shot” I could find.

Sep

18

Toxins, eight-legged freaks, the burning question

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September 18, 2007

LET’S START WITH A LINK

I have never played Dungeons & Dragons, but this page is possibly the funniest thing I have ever seen. “Let’s play a game. You’re looking at the unholy union of a shark and a squid. Can you guess what they called it? If you said “Squark” you are correct. Sigh.” Haaaaaa! Ah, good times.

AND NOW ONWARD TO THE BLOG

Contractors have started painting the kitchen and addition, and while the last thing I want to do is complain about forward movement on this whole endless, months-behind-schedule remodel, I was a little unhappy when we got home after work yesterday and they were still at it, with nothing between us and the chokingly thick fumes other than a flimsy plastic dropcloth attached from ceiling to floor (which featured—I really shouldn’t tell you this but I can’t help myself—a disturbingly vaginal-shaped opening about at chest level, which gently opened and closed its . . . uh, labia . . . with the drafts, like some creepy scene from Videodrome).

Hanging out in a house positively reeking of fresh paint (it had dissipated somewhat by late evening, but not so much that you couldn’t still taste the fumes coating your tonsils) with a 2 year old, while pregnant, seems kind of, oh, I don’t know, like maybe I want my kids to have low test scores. And maybe in our unborn child’s case, an extra limb or two. Growing out of its head.

I can’t do much but open windows and hope the walls are finished soon and we can move on to a less toxic stage, but all the open doors (contractors have the worst habit of leaving the front door wide open all day long, what the hell is that? I mean, other than convenient access to the front yard where they stand and smoke, letting Eau de Camel Filters Hard Pack come wafting inside) and windows are paving way for some extremely unwelcome visitors, namely the Tegenaria duellica; formerly known as T. gigantea. I’m talking about these big bastards (warning! Unpleasant image at the other end of that link! Proceed with caution, fellow arachnophobes!), and their ongoing presence both outside (but frighteningly close to) and inside our house is FREAKING ME RIGHT THE HELL OUT.

One came skittering directly towards the couch I was sitting on the other night, and I don’t think I’ve ever come so close to peeing my own pants from sheer terror. It was sixty or seventy feet tall and its fangs glistened in the moonlight, at least that’s how I remember it. I couldn’t even cowboy up to get rid of it myself, I had to race outside (I accomplished this by levitating straight off the sofa and flying through the air, because you better believe my feet were not going to touch the ground anywhere near that thing) and squeak frantically at JB to come inside and jesus, BRING THE SKILSAW.

I should clarify for posterity that JB feels my comment on the (unpleasant) spider photo that claimed that he took the picture by “quickly lunging the camera at the beast and snapping wildly” is incorrect. “You and I are remembering that differently,” he told me, and I suppose it’s possible that we are. For instance, I remember a man nervously poking at a spider with a metal rake, then positioning the camera as far from his own body as he could in order to snap the photo, allowing for about .003 seconds to do so. I may have forgotten the part where he manfully strode up, unleashed a mighty battle cry, then used his enormous penis to trigger the shutter. If so, mea culpa.

ENOUGH ABOUT PAINT AND SPIDERS

Man, I am suddenly DYING to know if Riley’s going to have a brother or sister. I’ve felt fairly zen about this until this week, and now I just feel like my brain is tuned to some obsessive binary channel of BOY? GIRL? BOY? GIRL? all the time. Until my ultrasound, which is next week thank GOD, got any interesting gender-predicting wives’ tails for me to try out?

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