Friday, September 28, 2007

Home Improvement (or, Why I'd Rather Be Napping)

I am moving to some other country which honors the tradition of the siesta. An afternoon nap would be just the thing to prevent my afternoon headaches. Add to the headaches Rachel talking on and on and on in that high-pitched voice of hers that zings right through my brain like an icepick, and you've got a recipe for insanity. You have to worry when you catch yourself holding your 5-year-old daughter by the shoulders and saying, "Stop talking. Please stop talking. "

Definitely not Mother-of-the-Year material. That's okay. Someone has to make motherhood safe for the less-than-perfect. Right now I am resisting the urge to feed everyone a simple dinner of brownies and apples. I bet they'd still whine about those apples, though.

We had some fun family plans for today. We were going to fetch our canoe from the storage facility where it has been residing, high and dry, for, oh, 3 years and bring it (finally) to its new home at a friend's dock. We were planning to take turns paddling around the lake in beautiful autumn weather and sitting on the grass by the lake munching apples while chatting with our friends. But somehow our plans were derailed by a neighbor who generously offered to help Larry reattach the railings (hey, a pun -get it? derailed? Boy, I'm clever) to our front stoop. (Warning - the abyss of never-ending home improvement lies ahead - not for the faint-hearted.) One railing was held up by a huge bush and another pretty much hung only by one end. So now, after 3 hours of work, both railings are lying in our front yard. This situation is in perfect accordance with the "things need to get worse before they get better" theorem of home renovation. This theorem also explains why we won't have a railing on our brand-new back deck in the foreseeable future. And why above our brand-new kitchen counters is a half-ripped out backsplash complete with exposed dry wall (which isn't staying very dry by the sink, I might add). And let's not talk about what is going on in our basement, where renovation seems to have been stalled out until at least the beginning of the next millenium.

All I can say is, the woman who used to live here sold us a perfectly decent-looking house and, in 4 short months, we've managed to turn it into a dump. It's a special talent we have.

8 comments:

  1. Yeah - naps are way better! I wonder why we ever thought home ownership was the way to go? Remember when a landlord fixed all the nonsense that ever went wrong? (Like when the keg would leak into the floor below, for example? Now those were the days.)

    ReplyDelete
  2. You just don't appreciate when you have it good, right? Larry and I always reminisce about how great it was to eat in a cafeteria in college and the military - no cooking, no dishes to clean up, etc. But of course we didn't appreciate it then. You have to render yourself a virtual slave to several little people before you can appreciate something like that.

    Although, I must say, our landlords rarely fixed anything. But we didn't care....

    ReplyDelete
  3. Just. Stop. Talking.

    My 5-year old daughter's voice can make my skull vibrate. It's brutal.

    ReplyDelete
  4. You crack me up! I have three doors in my house with no doorknobs. (Makes going to the bathroom fun!), holes in the walls, pudding stains on the ceiling, peeling paint on the outside, a leaking hot water tank, oh the list goes on and on. The thing that makes me crazy is that this is what my husband does for a living! He remodels homes! But alas, the cobbler's kids have no shoes...

    ReplyDelete
  5. mThat sounds like my house! Still working on it. 8. years. later.

    ReplyDelete
  6. I've told my three year old the same thing. I can't imagine what it'll be like when she's five. The horror!

    ReplyDelete
  7. Brownies and apples sounds like the perfect dinner to me. Throw some peanuts in the brownies and you can boast that you fed your children protein AND fruit!

    ReplyDelete