This past weekend, Ben and I had planned to drive to Las Vegas for a much-needed long weekend away from Utah and the house. Unfortunately, the house kept us here… because we decided that it wouldn’t be prudent to spend money in Vegas immediately after making the first, very-very large payment for our roof.
Being responsible. Teh Suck.
(Besides, this gives me more ammo to push for a trip to San Diego Comic Con in July!)
Oh yeah, have I mentioned that our roof is finished and the skylights that we purchased in October are finally installed? That HUGE headache might be easier to write about after it’s really done, because we still have to fix drywall in several places upstairs and stain the inside trim of the skylights (which we could have done before they were installed, as it turns out, but we were so occupied with finding someone to install them that we never even took them out of the box). And I have to call the manufacturer from whom we purchased said skylights because one of the handles is broken and the pole for opening the mini-blinds (that we still need to install on the inside) is not long enough for my short arms like Sales Guy said it would be. Ben doesn’t even need the pole because of his height. He has a freakishily large armspan, not unlike that of a condor.
(I was going to say golden condor, and then link to the Wikipedia page about the freakish 30-foot or whatever wingspan of that amazing bird. But then I discovered that the cartoon condor I imagine every time I think of a condor was actually an ornithopter [a mechanical bird] from the shown-on-Nickelodeon-in-the-eighties Japanese TV show “The Mysterious Cities of Gold.” Damn cable television interfering with factual knowledge. See, creators of cartoons? See what power you have over the young minds that turn into older minds? Oh, wait, you were already QUITE aware of that power, and you perpetually laugh in the face of responsibility that should accompany it, don’t you?)
Wow, I’m already way off topic from what I thought I was going to write about.
Where was I? The damn house? God, do I have anything else to talk about? Of course not. I bought a house and it will never ever be anywhere close to finished in the way that I once imagined. Oh, those were nice times… times when I thought that the house would be “pretty much perfect” in a couple years. HA! HA HA! I laugh at your naïvete, former self!
Ahem.
This weekend, after having a nice anniversary dinner at the Macaroni Grill (after waiting an hour for a table because it was also BYU graduation weekend but we didn’t mind because we talked and “reconnected” and all that smooshy relationship stuff), we accomplished some more house-related stuff and tried not to think about how we could be in Vegas right now, dammit. We pitched the oldish and somewhat mildew-y tent, which I then spent precious daytime hours cleaning with a sponge, smelly lysol solution and a garden hose. That was a sonofabitch to clean, because it’s a huge 4-16 person tent (depending on the size of the people and their stuff, I guess).
Incidentally, if you own an Armadillo tent made by Walrus, that company went out of business and there are NO ONLINE INSTRUCTION MANUALS TO BE FOUND. If I’m irresponsible enough to let my tent grow some mildew, how could Tent Company possibly expect me to hold on to the instructions for setting it up? Anyway, with the help of Ben’s gargantuan armspan and our combined we-should-be-in-Vegas brainpower, we figured it out. Ben retreated to the garage to clean (and maybe find one of the fifty screwdrivers he owns so that he doesn’t have to borrow my ONE ratchet screwdriver that I keep very close tabs on because I need to know where to find one when I need it).
We had also planned to paint that third coat of red on the family room walls, but didn’t. Ben painted a couple of coats of white on the top half of the back wall that primed for red, and also put a coat of white on the ceiling. It’s looking really sweet. Hopefully this week we’ll buckle down and spend a whole evening just doing a final nice, even red coat so we don’t have to think about it anymore and can enjoy the red room.
What other exciting, boring stuff went on? Ben changed the oil in his car and I cleaned up inside and did the cookin’ like a proper wife. Yeah, we had breakfast for three meals in a row! We also planned out where we will transplant the weirdly placed tulips and the still-surviving young hawthorn trees in our yard (farther away from the house than they are now, thanks to stupid previous flip-this-house homeowners) and where we will plant two more trees. And all of that will help decide where the future sprinkler system will go because if you want grass in Utah, you have to water it, and Ben has been using a garden hose and moving sprinklers around the old fashioned way for two summers and it’s time we install a more efficient, less time-consuming system.
Ah, gardening. I also spent a little time with my two square foot gardens. It’s a neat system and I recommend it for fisrt-time gardeners, even if you’re like me and really are only sort of on the ball in the third year of gardening. My gardens have not yet looked like Mel’s do in his book, video or website, though.
There, that’s my weekend update. Stay tuned for LOTS more excitement. Maybe someday!
