March 24, 2007

status: fully primed

Don’t mess with me or I will beat you to death with this paintbrush.

I love HGTV, largely because I like to find the flaws in their DIY shows. You know, the ones where they say WE DID ALL THIS FOR UNDER $1,000.00! AND SO CAN YOU! But you can’t because unless you know how to rewire a light fixture or hang drywall or make curtains from sheets, you will be compelled to hire someone to do it for you, and that kicks you right over the $1,000.00 mark.

I can, however, paint for myself, but it always–ALWAYS–takes me TWO coats to fully cover the walls. So when the Studly Home Improvement Guy (you know the one, on TLC, who looks vaguely like a chubby and possibly gay Brad Pitt) cracks open a can of paint and announces, “This will take about an hour!” I want to punch him in the face. or, alternatively, offer him whatever he wants to come and paint my bathroom in an hour. Using only ONE COAT OF PAINT.

Other things they don’t tell you on HGTV: the sheer number of swear words you will use during your DIY project, like when you kick the drop cloth into the paint tray for the THIRD time in five minutes, or when you realize, moments after washing out the brush, that there is ONE MORE section of wall that is too narrow to be painted with the roller, or when a piece of plaster FALLS OFF THE WALL while you are painting it.

Goddamn it.

I just keep thinking, it could be worse, we could have wall paper. At least I’ve got that going for me.

March 21, 2007

spring break, day five: road trip!!!

Yesterday, Rachel said “Wait–so this far into Spring break you’ve had a house smell like beer, a car accident, and sniffing paint fumes? Are you sure you aren’t on a college spring break?” I’m sure; if I were there would be significantly more drinking, and maybe a wet tee shirt contest.

Here is how desperate I am to get away from my house my kids my job nice I am: tomorrow morning, at 5:45 am, we’re going to drop my mother at the airport and start driving. To Albuquerque! Which takes eight hours. And involves no wet tee shirts whatsoever, just a LOT of coffee and probably some Girl Scout cookies.

Friday I will get up early (but not QUITE so early) and fly home. The end.

Except for this: in the moments when I’m not totally panicked because I HAVE WORK TO DO and MY HOUSE IS A DISASTER and I AM WAAAAY TOO TIRED TO DRIVE, I am really really looking forward to the flight back. Alone. Just me and a Vogue magazine. And I book I think I was supposed to review this week but haven’t finished reading yet.

Heaven. Perhaps I’ll even get a drink on the plane.

March 20, 2007

spring break, day four: high on life (or possibly spray paint)

Today I plastered holes in the wall and touched up the paint in the kitchen and spray painted the bench on our porch. My dad fixed the fence and fixed our back door and fixed the cabinet where my trays live. I crawled UNDER the kitchen sink and wedged my arm up between the drain pipe and the garbage disposal to fix the cover on the spot where the lotion dispenser is supposed to go (no I can’t describe it any better; let’s just say that I understand now why plumbers make so much money).

We remodeled our utility bathroom five years ago (god, maybe it was longer ago than that–SIX years? could it be?) and we never finished the painting. Today I FINALLY did it and it took all of FIFTEEN MINUTES (including the five minutes I spent prying the lid off the paint can) and now the bathroom looks great. I suck at this home improvement thing.

The exterior painters finished yesterday, and the interior guys are supposed to show up on Monday. I’m going to paint the bathroom on Saturday and empty the kitchen cabinets on Sunday. I don’t know where I’m going to put all the stuff from the kitchen cabinets while the men are painting. I don’t know where we’re going to put the books from the bookshelves. I don’t know what I’m going to do with the kids for a week while my kitchen is transformed into something you might want to pay good money for.

I’ve been getting up at 5:45 to work before the kids get up, but somehow there’s always a kid up. Then I stay up late, working MORE, to catch up. I wake up in the middle of the night thinking I NEED TO MOP UNDER THE DRYER and THERE’S A DING IN THE PAINT OVER THE KITCHEN WINDOW and WADE NEEDS TO MOVE HIS DAMN STEREO BEFORE THE PAINTERS GET HERE.

The house is a mess right now; there’s a drop cloth in the foyer and a four-foot-tall tower of blocks in front of the back door and two grocery bags full of trays in the laundry room. Everything that crosses my path and is not integral to the survival of my family goes in the trash. I look at things and think, DO I REALLY WANT TO MOVE THAT? and the answer is always HELL NO. I almost threw one of the kids out today.

Ha ha! Kidding! Maybe.

Charlie has been spontaneously hugging and kissing my parents; tonight when I tucked him in, he said, “I would like my favorite Poppy to come and sit with me.” Henry came up to me twice today and wrapped his arms around me and kissed my cheek. When my dad went to explain why I was under the sink swearing (because, he said, his back is bad and it’s too hard for him to get under there) Henry cut right to the chase and said, “You’re old, Papa.” My dad laughed.

When I walk around the house now, I see every little mark in the paint; I’ll be spending next week touching up trim in the bedrooms. Part of me hates that this house will look better in the weeks that it’s for sale than it ever did when we lived here. And part of me swears that I will NOT be so lazy about the NEXT house, that I will touch up the paint and throw stuff away and not let things pile up.

I think that’s the paint fumes talking.

March 19, 2007

spring break, day three: channeling my inner ‘tween

Not too long after I hit publish on Saturday’s post, my mom called. “We’ve had a little mishap,” she said, “but we’re okay.” They were outside Yukon, Oklahoma (virtually on my front door) when they hit a hubcap that was lying in the road; they wound up with two flat tires. Wade immediately started putting on his shoes, and said, “Find out where they are and tell them I’ll be right there.”

God I love that man.

My parents are fine; their car (my mother’s new Honda Accord) may or may not be, we’re still waiting to hear. But I’ll tell you what, it scared the holy living hell out of me. Because I’m used to worrying about my kids’ safety, but not my parents.

My mom is flying to Pittsburgh on Thursday morning, to see family, and my dad was planning to drive home alone. But in my post mishap freak out, I got on the internet and got a plane ticket back on Friday, and then I met him at the door and said, “I’M DRIVING BACK WITH YOU! NO ARGUMENTS!”

He said, “Okay.”

So that’s that.

The first year that Wade and I lived in Tacoma, my parents came to visit us, over spring break. The men’s NCAA basketball tournament was being played in Seattle and we had tickets for the first and second rounds. They flew in on Tuesday and took a shuttle from the airport, and when they finally got to our house, my mother staggered in and collapsed on the sofa. She had a sinus infection and an ear ache, and I wound up taking her to Urgent Care the next day. My dad was bent over with back pain, and hobbled up the long flight of steps to our two-story house. We left my mother on the sofa and went to the chichi grocery for soup and bread, and put my parents to bed after dinner.

I called my brother that night and said, “I know what it will be like when Mom and Daddy are old.”

“Well?” he said.

“They’re pitiful,” I told him, “but still funny.”

Part of me still feels like I am 12 years old–not a kid, really, but certainly not an adult. And that part of me still thinks that my parents are 40-something, rather than 60 (or 70)-something. And I’m still relying on them to take care of me, even though every day I manage the business of taking care of my own family, my own kids.

Buying a plane ticket, spontaneously, without any worry about the cost or how we would make it work out, felt very grown-up, very much like something a parent does. And it’s funny to me that it’s my own parents, rather than my children, who bring that out in me.

March 17, 2007

spring break, day one: my house smells like beer

After weeks of mornings where I had to wake the boys up and listen to them moan, “But I LOVE my BED!” and “I want to SLEEP IN!” today they got up at 5:45. AM! Because it’s spring break and they CAN sleep in.

Damn kids.

I’m cooking corned beef, because it’s St. Patrick’s day and that means that we MUST have Heart Attack On A Plate for dinner. I’ve never cooked corned beef before, but my mother convinced me that all I had to do was toss it in my crockpot and ignore it all day. Then my dad told me to put beer on it, so I did that, and now my house smells like warm Miller Genuine Draft. Which is kind of disgusting, to be honest.

The beer ALL went in the crock pot. I swear.

What? You thought I was going to use GOOD beer? To COOK??? Are you INSANE?!?

It’s 3.2 beer, if that makes it better. Or worse. Whatever.

We wound up draining most of the beer off the corned beef about an hour ago, because the house smelled eerily like feet, which was making all of us queasy. Now the house smells more like meaty feet, which is a little better.

I’ll be serving the meaty feet corned beef with roasted new potatoes and green beans. Wade said this morning, “Don’t you usually have cabbage with corned beef?” and I said, “We’re German, not Irish, and cabbage scares me, so we’re having potatoes. And Irish beer.” And he said, “Okay then.” Although actually I bought Scotch ale for him at the liquor store.

At least it’s not 3.2.

March 15, 2007

your tax dollars at work

Well, not YOURS, necessarily, unless you are my mom or dad, in which case, hello! This is where your tax money goes!

In August, the International Astronomical Union met in Prague and voted Pluto out of the solar system. Okay, what they REALLY did was redefine what made a planet, and Pluto doesn’t fit the new definition.

Whatever.

Not everyone was happy about this, and some were more unhappy than others, including people in the city of Las Cruces, New Mexico, the home of Clyde Tombaugh, the guy who discovered Pluto. So to set things right with the universe (if you will) the New Mexico state legislature has declared Pluto to be a planet*. Again! But only when it passes over the state, apparently, which it doesn’t, really, because of where it is in space and how it orbits.

They also declared March 13 “Pluto Planet Day.” Mark your calendars.

(Oh, and the New Mexico legislature also passed a bill that will mandate HPV vaccines for girls entering the sixth grade. More about that here and here. Feel free to discuss. And also to admire how I snuck that in there. Impressive, yes?)

*Click that link and read the comments. Those astronomers are funny.