Five Questions

1. Is it warped to wish herpes or explosive diarrhea upon people who piss you off if you immediately feel guilty about having the thought?

2. When the HGTV people redo a kitchen in a half-hour show, why do I think I can do the same thing with the same results?

3. Do you think that '24' has the smallest wardrobe allowance of any other television show? Those people wear the same clothes in every episode. (A whole season is only a day long, after all.)

4. Who are bigger assholes: People who always wear sunglasses inside and at night? Or folks who feel the need to throw a peace sign (or some other hand signal) in every, single photograph?

5. Am I shallow for believing that my mood will improve 200 percent at 9:30 a.m. Saturday, when I am getting a much-needed haircut and color? I feel raggedy.

Weekend in haiku

Weeding is a chore
from hell. Hamstrings on fire
from four-hour day.

No dent in yard work.
Sunday, more of the same. I
want an apartment.

Archie graduates
from dog school. The star pupil
in his class. Hooray!

Tomorrow, back to
work. Sigh. Ready for vacay.
Only five more weeks.

The Drapers vs. the shed

Summary haiku:

I curse the day that

Archie found a way to get

under the shed.

Whenever you move into a new place, you usually continue to discover new things about it for several months. Like the crazy nooks and crannies your cat adopts as hiding places. Or how dangerously slippery the kitchen floor gets every time it's freshly mopped. Or that it's impossible to hang the bathroom towel racks exactly where you want them because there's something behind that part of the wall -- steel? -- that you can't drill through.

But the latest finding has been made by our dog, Archie. Apparently, The Most Fascinating Thing Ever Known To Dog lives underneath our shed. Sure, Archie will mosey about the back yard and run around with Lucy. But he spends an awful lot of time circling the shed and sniffing underneath its edges.

So Friday evening, just as a crack of thunder literally shook my house, and as the TV channels all started flashing the severe thunderstorm warnings, the Doppler radar showed some big, red patches of scary stuff coming our way.

I went to call the dogs inside before it started to rain. Lucy came, but Archie was nowhere to be found. I searched the yard, called his name and for a moment, panicked that he'd somehow gotten out of the fence.

I'm not sure what finally made me look under the shed with a flashlight, but when I did, I saw Archie's body, flattened out, like someone doing a boot camp drill -- the one where you scoot yourself along the ground using your elbows.

Circling the shed, I could not figure out where he'd gotten in. The clearance was pretty miniscule, and he's a rather stout 17 pounds. But he's a Jack Russell Terrier, and they're bred to burrow, so he figured something out.

I called him for 10 minutes; he wouldn't (or couldn't) come out.

Even before the storm, it was probably a good 90 degrees outside. When I looked under there again, and he was panting and there was a string of drool hanging from his mouth.

Right on cue, the rain started to fall. Hard. Sheets of rain, not drops. That kicked up a bunch of dust under the shed, and Archie started coughing. Oh my God, I thought, my son is going to die under the shed!

I circled the shed again, looking for the biggest possible opening. I called him, and he scooted over to the edge, laying on his side. Still couldn't get out. So I decided I'd have to dig him a bigger hole. Of course, we didn't have any shovels small enough to fit underneath the edge of the shed, so I used the only other thing we had: Two-foot long garden shears, made for trimming hedges.

Archie's smart, so he got out of the way as I started jamming these shears into the ground, loosening dirt (and all the nasty bugs that were living in it), then scooping it out into the yard.

This went on for about 35 minutes, in the pouring rain, and I'm certain I looked like a complete psychopath. I'm out there laying on the ground, muddy as fuck (it rained so hard that the dirt under the grass was soft and muddy), impaling the dirt and excavating it from the growing hole. My hair was soaked and parted down the middle from the back of my head, so I looked like Cousin Itt from "The Addams Family." Mascara was smeared all over my face and cheeks.

(When I told my friend about it, she was laughing her ass off, and compared it to the scene from "Mommie Dearest" where Faye Dunaway took the shears and madly hacked away at her prized rose garden. Nice.)

After the hole was big enough, I had to bribe a panting and worn out Archie out with a giant piece of ham. Despite his travails, he still hated the rain more than he hated suffocating under a giant, wooden shed.

I was so proud of myself afterward. I thought he would think me a hero. The mother who saved his life!

Au contrare. Archie was filthy from head to tail, and happily prancing around like a renewed man after his big adventure. Like a teenager who had just been laid for the first time, or a woman who'd just bought 10 pairs of beautiful shoes at once. He even tried to crawl back under after he gobbled up the ham.

He was fucking smiling. (See above picture for an example.)

It's innate for Jack Russells to dig and burrow, I know this. But man, I kind of wanted to strangle him for a minute, or shove him back under the shed.

So yeah. We went to Home Depot and Kyle spent several hours boarding up the entire perimeter of the shed. Hopefully, this will be the end of it.

Meantime, Archie and I are taking to some additional obedience classes, because he needs another outlet for his energy and intelligence. We start on Sunday.

People who paint over wallpaper are fucking assholes.

So yesterday, we embarked on what should be a fairly simple task: We finally got around to repainting our bathroom on the main floor -- a task that should have taken roughly five hours, with primering and the actual painting. I got three walls done and felt pretty proud.

But when went to remove the toilet, it wouldn't come unscrewed from the floor. So we had to use a hack saw to screw through the bolts, which took ... a while. Then we discovered that some fucking assclown had painted over wallpaper -- a discovery we made because the wallpaper was all bubbled and peeling behind the toilet. So we started pulling it up.

Which is like pulling an errant thread on a sweater.

And after the paper is pulled up, all the glue underneath must be scraped off.

This is what our bathroom looks like now:







The Pepto Bismol pink is the old color. The sage green is the new color. And anything that isn't one of those two hues needs to be scraped, spackled and/or sanded before we primer and paint it. We spent most of today doing the part behind the toilet so we could reattach it. (We've had the water in our house turned off all day so that agua wouldn't leak from the detached hose.)

But that doesn't take the sting out of the fact that it's going to be a couple of weeks before this mess finished.

Kyle's expression said it best.




P.S. I've been getting drunk, so I'll be sad tomorrow when I have to go to work.

Bargains make me quiver with joy

Summary haiku:
Saving money when
your tax refund just arrived
doubles the delight.



So, the house. Still working on it. We've gotten the Things We Couldn't Live Without (lamps, shower curtains, wooden blinds in a couple of rooms, etc.), and we're now working the list of Things That Would Make Life More Convenient. Which brings me to one of the most joyous shopping trips I've had in a while.

I went into Target looking for wall shelves where I could display a couple of plants and a totally cute Vietnamese art sculpture I got at Pier 1. (The latter was on my list of Things I Don't Fucking Need, But They're Really Cute So I'm Buying Them.)

I saw several shelves, but they weren't quite what I wanted. Then I came to the endcap, and lo and behold, the perfect shelves were on clearance for $4.98 each -- marked down from $24.98! I bought all the ones they had left (5), because I like to keep the surfaces in my house uncluttered and I have tons of unused wall space in various rooms.

Money saved: $100.

Then I was just cruising around, as one tends to do at Target, when I came to the bathroom aisle. We don't have any towel racks in our bathrooms, so we've just been slinging towels over the shower curtain rod to dry. Which hides how cute the shower curtains are. And Target had these really beautiful brushed nickel double towel bars on sale for $12.98, also marked down from $24.98. I got one for each bathroom.

Money saved: $24.

Next up: A giant mirror to hang on one of our ginormous dining room walls. I had been eyeballing it on my last couple of Target jaunts. It's lovely, with a carved frame that's a muted, distressed gold color. $19.98, marked down from $90. Are you kidding me? Is today fucking Christmas?

Money saved: $70.

Can you believe there's more? The last thing is from the Things I Don't Fucking Need, But They're Really Cute So I'm Buying Them category. I got a fabulous, huge wall hanging for the bedroom. It's electric green silk with an olive green tree painted on it. It's simple and beautiful, but most important, it makes me feel really happy when I look at it. $14.99, marked down from $29.99.

Money saved: $15.

For those of you who can't do math -- which includes me, I had to use a calculator to do this -- I got $285 worth of items for $85. Which left me plenty of dough to pick up a green patent clutch and some canary yellow tights to wear under a couple of my spring dresses.

I am bursting with happiness. I'm off to hang one of my shelves!

Fattie update Vol. 2

Weighed myself just now: I'm down a total of 8 pounds, possibly more because I'm wearing a whole lotta clothes today. (It's cold as hell.) Hooray!

I've been crazy busy at work and obsessed with doing house stuff when I'm at home, most of which takes a lot longer than I expect it to. What can I say? I'm a novice.

Anyhoo, pics (and things that are more interesting than updates on my personal life) coming soon.

I'm a homeowner!

And let me tell you, it's pretty exciting. It's our first house and we're totally gung-ho about making it our own. Plus, we have a whole lot of stuff to do and we're trying to cram much of it in before we move in.

So, for the past 36 hours or so, the hubbster and I have been spackling, removing tile and wallpaper, taping off baseboards and door jambs, and cleaning and painting walls. We also dog-proofed the yard today. We have been to Lowe's and The Home Depot no less than 6 times in the past two days. We've been to Porter Paints twice. We're new at this, so we keep discovering new shit we need.

It's overwhelming. And expensive. But it's also pretty cool.

Here's what I've learned so far.

1. Painting seems new and fun for about 45 minutes, or until you get to the ceiling. Then it's just a giant chore that, in our case, needs to be done in four bedrooms, two bathrooms, a dining room, the kitchen and two hallways.

1a. Painting ceilings is really awful. Do not get directly under the area you're painting or you might end up with paint in your eye. Or hair. Or both. Wear a baseball cap anyway, just in case.

1b. Paint fumes will make you high, even with the windows open. Thank God. Otherwise, I may not have had the wherewithal to go all day long.

2. Concrete blocks don't seem that heavy at first. But after you lift the third one off the floor and into the shopping cart at Home Depot, you'll wish you would have taken your chivalrous husband up his insistance that he go to get 'em. But instead, you were like, "I am woman! They aren't that heavy, I want to go!" What a fucking idiot.



3. If it's been applied properly, wallpaper is really easy to remove. Yes, it's also a little tedious, but the folks on HGTV shows often overreact about it.

4. Home improvements should never be done without an MP3 player and speakers. There's nothing like a little Mobb Deep, Kanye West and Mos Def for inspiration. If you like that kind of music, of course.

5. If the previous homeowners left behind good vibes -- which I feel ours did, especially after meeting them at closing -- it makes a huge difference. I don't really know how to explain this, but I totally believe in good karma and it's in this house, no doubt.

Of course, I will be posting before and after pics at some point soon. Until then, I'm gonna finish this drink (oh yeah, we stopped at the liquor store on the way home!) and get some rest.


Accomplishments since Friday afternoon: Huge master bedroom is all done (and gorgeous!), except for painting baseboards. Upstairs hallway, primer and one coat of paint applied. Upstairs bathroom: Wallpaper removed, messed up tile removed from bottom of walls and subsequently spackled; windows and doors are taped and prepared for painting. Living room: Walls washed, vents cleaned, one wall painted, the rest of the room taped off for painting.

One more drink (diet alcohol!) then off to bed.