Tuesday, October 02, 2007

But We Were on a Break

Can I just take a moment here and explain how my life works most of the time? Without going into nauseating detail, here is how my typical day goes:

Get up. (around 7:30 AM. ish. whatever. Maybe it’s closer to 8). I shower and get dressed. I get the little kids up. We fight about breakfast choices until someone is either crying or there is blood in someone’s oatmeal (those little goobers bite when they get all riled up!) I bandage everyone up and drop the kids off at school and pre-school.

Go to work.

Work all morning. (this is not a euphemism for “get on the fast connection at work and start the bit-torrenting everything under the sun,” I promise.)

Take a short lunch in which I read websites, goof off, plan to go and then abjectly fail to go to the gym around the corner where I am a member and have never once visited.

Work all afternoon until 6. (Almost all of our clients are in L.A., so we keep Pacific time for the most part.)

Come home. Help make dinner. Beat the children until they do their homework. Do the dishes. Issue more beatings to get people to go to bed.

With the exception of Lucas, everyone in the Deal Family compound is a night owl, so everyone (including Ellis) is up until at least 10:30, even on school nights. Yes, we are bad parents, but we don’t care what you think.

Everyone goes to bed and I start writing a blog post for the next day. Depending on how glib I feel, this takes anywhere from 3.5 minutes to a couple hours.

Go to bed.

Repeat as necessary.

So what has been happening of late is pretty much the same thing all day until I get home. Lately we insert the following step after dinner:

Go to Home Depot

Wander around, trying to find whatever thing it is I desperately need. Whatever it is, it is almost guaranteed that I will A) get the wrong size, color, strength, consistency, or shape; B) they are out of stock of the thing I am dying for, necessitating a trip to a totally different Home Depot (usually located one county over), further wandering of the aisles and purchasing the wrong size, color, strength, consistency, or shape of the thing; which in turn means I have to go back to Home Depot after pulling into the driveway and examining my purchases more carefully and coming to the realization that A) I’m a moron; B) I’m an idiot; C) I hate myself; D) I should pay more attention to the size, color, strength, consistency, and shape of the crap I buy. Home Depot sucks my brain right our every time I walk through the doors.

After all that Home Depot-ing, it is now 9:00 PM and so I stay up to do whatever it is my contractor assigned me to do. Since I suck at all this home re-modeling crap, I usually have to do things at least twice. (Ask me about wiring the basement and I’ll talk your ear off with all my attempts at trying to wire up a 3-way switch.)

And you should know, that even though I totally gave up on doing ANYTHING else on the house a couple weeks ago, I’m still on the hook for a couple things, namely demolition and quarreling with my sweet bride about light fixtures and doorknobs. We generally have almost exactly the same taste in “stuff,” but every now and then one of us has to be reined in. Though I thought my days of loitering at the Home Depot were pretty much over, I was quite wrong. I really should buy some stock.

After I have done all my “assignments” it is approximately 2:30 AM. And even if that is a gross exaggeration and it is only 11:00 PM, I assure you that I was working like a dog to get it done, and it was probably pretty strenuous work, so I’m flat out exhausted.

Which brings me to this point:

A) I really can blather on, can’t I?

B) For the time being, I have two full time jobs. My normal one, which has been uncharacteristically annoying and somewhat busier than normal of late and a second, physically demanding job of doing all the junk at home, which I am woefully unqualified to do, but I slog on anyway.

C) I’m being a rather suck-y blogger type at this point, since all I think about is work, how best to beat the children so the bruises won’t show and we have to have the Child Welfare Service people all up in our business (again! for the 17th time) and the DAMN HOUSE. And even if I manage to think about something besides those subjects, I’m too stupid tired to write and get anything out.

So what I’m saying is that posts and all the stuff you have some to expect from me on a somewhat daily basis will slow down a bit until the DAMN HOUSE is done. I’m sacrificing quantity for quality and though many people might make a reasonable argument and say, “what quality is he talking about, exactly?” I’m just going to ignore those folks for the time being and also release myself from the prison of “you really MUST post EVERY day.” I will still be writing, but maybe only once or twice a week.

I have signed up for NaBloPoMo (National Blog Posting Month) in November, so rest assured, quality will totally go down the drain again as I try and post EVERY single day in November. You could even say that this lull I will have in October is merely preparation for the onslaught of AWESOME-NESS which will be comin’ attcha in November. Or you could say other things, which might not be as nice, but again, I’m choosing to ignore the haters.

Also, at some point this fall/winter I fully expect to have the Ransom Note Typography store officially up and running, with more crap (OK, funny tee-shirts) than you can shake a proverbial stick at. Just in time for Holiday gift giving!

In the meantime, I share with you these few photos, so you can feel the joy and pain of my life right now:

The state of the kitchen before I went medieval on it over the weekend.

My delightful and charming wife, helping me get all medieval on the kitchen. Although, now that I think about it, she went and took a nap during the heat of battle while I whacked at stuff with a crowbar. I’m still wondering exactly how she got away with that. OH! Take a good look at the right side of that image. See all those white spots? That, my young padawans, is SNOW. It was still decidedly September then. I call UNFAIR, in the extreme. Plus, it wasn’t that light and fluffy snow we love here in Utah. It was basically coming down like a Piña Colada Slurpee. All wet and gukky.

This is the end of the wire that used to feed the dishwasher that almost killed me over the weekend. I thought the breaker had been thrown AND that the electrician had cut the lines to that area of the kitchen, but I was quite wrong. The flash and EXPLOSION (ok, a sort of loud pop) when I cut that wire were tremendous. Luckily (really, very lucky) I was using fully insulated wire cutters as well as sporting a sturdy pair of gloves. At the very least, I know now that I jump VERY high when I have the shit startled out of me.

The kitchen as it is right now. “Everything BUT the kitchen sink” is gone. The fridge still works, but that’s about it. Technically, the sink isn’t even that usable, as the garbage disposal isn’t working right now. (no switch). Oh! And see that dark stain on the floor to the right of the fridge? That, my young Jedi warriors, is a crap load of water damage we were blessed with. Seems the drain for the washing machine had a slow and indiscernible leak. Every time someone did a load of laundry, a splash or three of water would squeak out and over the course of a zillion years, that sub-flooring turned to mush. Fun, huh?

Anyway!

I’ll be back!

Posted by Jon on 10/02/07 at 12:01 AM

Ooo… #1 You got lucky, no toxic mold from the leak!

Ooo… #2 Brick!

Ooo… #3 Sparks! I sorta did a bad thing installing a reading light once. You should have seen me jump when I flipped the switch, the bulb in the lamp exploded, and smoke started pouring out of the wall.

Posted by michael on 10/02/07 at 12:16 AM
So nice to know I’m not the only bad parent who lets their night owl child roam the halls at night.

Kudos for at least trying to do your thing with the remodel.

Posted by Kerstin Boyer on 10/02/07 at 07:32 AM
Yeah, we were quite lucky on the mold score.

And though that brick looks cool in the picture, it’s really not that pretty up close. We’d have to re-finsh it and sell one of the children to pay for that. We talked about doing that, but who can decide which kid to sell to the gypsies?

That was the second time I snipped into a live wire like that. I’m sure the third time will be the charm that sends me into the Great Beyond.

Posted by jon on 10/02/07 at 08:31 AM
can u come to my house and fix it?

Posted by bighair on 10/02/07 at 10:07 AM
bighair

You do not want me to set one foot in your house. Trust me. All I know how to do is destroy. Not so great at building things of lasting value.

Posted by jon on 10/02/07 at 10:10 AM
I live in the attic of old heritage house ... it has leaks = EVERYWHERE! ... exposed wires… in need of paint… cracks in the stained glass…

wish you were my landlord! I’d even shop with you at four different home depots a night to get this place fixed up!!!

Posted by NerdGirl on 10/02/07 at 10:15 AM
I’m having flashbacks from our kitchen remodel from three years ago. Stay strong.

Posted by blurb on 10/02/07 at 12:39 PM

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Tuesday, October 02, 2007

But We Were on a Break

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