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.