Oct
24
Less Flipper this time
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October 24, 2007
For some reason I had it in my head that once the remodel work was finished and the contractors were out of our house, we’d be AH DONE, as Riley likes to say—we’d just seamlessly move into our new spaces like expanding blobs of protoplasm, or something. Sadly, this isn’t the case, despite the fact that I am continuing to embiggen in an impressive manner, something I’m sure is the fault of the massive 20-pound fetus I am carrying and has nothing whatsoever to do with the pumpkin-chocolate muffins I have been shoving into my food-hole at an alarming pace.
The old office must be packed up and re-strategized (the new office is smaller), Riley eventually needs to be moved into that room and thus we’ll have to toddlerize it, the new family room needs furniture, and our living room is a wreck. I need to go through Riley’s old baby clothes and basically send his current room back in time by two years, and I’m guessing by the ominous groaning sounds coming from the over-jammed hall closet, it’s about time to purge its contents of the useless stuff it constantly accumulates (an enormous, crumpled pile of non-matching cloth place mats: WHY?).
It all seems a little overwhelming. Thank god for pumpkin-chocolate muffins, which not only offer the benefit of improving one’s mood through elevated blood sugar, but are also so wonderfully dense, they render a person incapable of movement immediately after consumption. You can’t clean out hall closets if you’re in a muffin coma, is what I’m saying.
I have been talking about Things Related to the Remodel for so long on this blog I can’t believe anyone is still reading. This shit is boring as hell, I KNOW. But look at it this way: I could be talking about the unholy union between a human and a marine mammal. Things could be worse.
In other news, JB is still sporting the ‘hawk. He’s trying valiantly to be ballsy about it, but I can tell he’s counting the minutes until he can shave the whole thing off. Whenever he catches sight of himself in the mirror, he has the same hunted expression Dog did a few summers ago after JB attacked her fur with clippers, ostensibly to help her “cool down” in the hot weather—it’s a mixture of embarrassment and defensiveness (“What the fuck are you looking at?”). I think he looks sort of cute, personally, but it may be giving him a bad attitude. Last night I exclaimed over how our new oven releases this massive blast of heat when you open the door, enough to steam off your face if you eagerly stick your face down there to see how your fattening baked goods are doing, and he reacted as though I was the dumbest dumbass who ever watched a dirty dolphin video.
“Gee,” he said, sarcasm dripped from his words and splattering all over my nice clean kitchen floor. “I guess ovens can get pretty hot sometimes.”
(By the way, this is the same man who, twice a year, has to have the concept of Daylight Saving Time laboriously explained with short, easy-to-understand words and a napkin diagram, so I’m not sure he has room to mock.)
Lastly, I bought Riley the cutest damn pair of pajamas you ever did see, with the vague idea that he could be Hugh Hefner for Halloween. JB has informed me they would need to be silk pajamas to pull this off, and also what kind of mom encourages her kid to objectify women? (I laughed so hard at that I nearly lost control of my pelvic floor) but I maintain that if we attach a couple of Barbie dolls to each arm, the kid could have a smokin’ hot Hef outfit going on.
He might need to lose the bear and blankie, though.
Oct
23
Contractors, Quentin, dolphins
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October 23, 2007
By posting the pictures of our newly operational and yuppified kitchen, I probably gave the impression that the remodel was finished and that the contractors had vacated our house once and for all, but sadly, NO. One thing I’ve learned about a remodel is that whatever you think the scope of the work is, the actual work will be much more extensive because everything you touch impacts something else—so if you create a new entryway into your house, that will screw up the flooring that was in that area, and you’ll have to have some swarthy ponytailed motherfucker camp out in your house for days on end while he tries to figure out how to weave in new hardwoods to match the existing (currently, he’s “not sure” how to match the color. Sweet).
When I got home yesterday—after a particularly irritating exit from Workplace where 1) I stumbled on the ridiculously expensive, impractical cobblestone driveway and actually fell to the ground like a lumbering pregnant buffoon/buffalo (note: no injuries were sustained save for my dignity), and 2) I nearly had to go back inside and weepily ask that whoever’s car was parked right next to mine move, because my GIANT BELLY couldn’t fit through my partially-opened door (with some grunting and wedging, I did finally manage it, but jesus, it was distressingly close)—Mr. Swarthy was still dorking around with the flooring, rendering the entryway into the kitchen inaccessible, and I am only partially ashamed to confess that I nearly cried.
“It’s only for tonight,” JB said, trying to placate me, and I may have gotten little shrieky about how I NEEDED! ACCESS! To! The OVEN! (See, you need an oven to make cookies.) Plus, we had gotten rid of all our temporary food/utensil storage, and so literally everything we needed was in the kitchen, on the other side of Flooring Zone. That was about when Swarthy announced he couldn’t figure out what stain to use, and thankfully departed, leaving a giant cloud of “dustless” dust from the sander in his wake (another Handy Contractor Tip: anyone who says their floor sander is dustless is so full of shit he squeaks going into turns).
So anyway, they still need to fix the floors, install some trim, paint some remaining areas, wrap up some electrical work, and the driveway needs to be finished. But hey, we’re very very close, and as long as the kitchen is up and running (and I can get IN it), I’m cool.
In unrelated news, I have to say that as a Tarantino fan I was greatly disappointed in Death Proof. My coworker, whose opinion on movies I respect and nearly always agree with, says he thinks the film was genius, so I’m obviously missing something because I thought that watching it was like having Tarantino’s sweaty dick on my shoulder, bonking me in an annoying fashion as he furiously whacked off to the bevy of big-titted beauties he cast in the movie. Excepting a few really decent scenes, I just wanted him to get the fuck off me. Stop forcing me to take part in your indulgent masturbatory cinematic spooge, Quentin.
(In comparison, Rodriguez’s contribution at least felt like he was giving me the common goddamn courtesy of a reach-around.)
Well, as long as this entry has taken the regrettable turn that it has, I may as well tell you that I saw a video on the internet recently that was so disturbing it seems to have lodged itself in my brain, and the only way I can purge myself of the evil is by telling you: I saw a man giving a dolphin a blow job. And yes, there was a . . . oh my god . . . a happy ending. For the dolphin, anyway. I mean, not that I can be sure the dolphin was happy to have a human manipulating its, um, anatomy, but there was evidence that a biological function occurred and—ANYWAY. So now at the most random of moments, when my mind is otherwise occupied with vague pleasantries related to the startlingly sunny October weather we’re having in Seattle, or the many cookie recipe choices I have at my disposal, suddenly out of NOWHERE I’ll hear this Flipper sound in my head—eh-eh-eh-eh-eh-eh—and I’ll see that dolphin. And I’ll wonder just what the hell kind of bad wiring a guy has to have in his hat-rack to wake up in the morning and decide that you know what, TODAY’S the day I finally fellate that there bottlenose. I mean, carpe diem and all that, but jesus. Go whack off on somebody’s shoulder like the normal skeezebags, dude.
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