And on the first day…
Two projects had come to mind with our three-day weekend coming up: One, to finally finish my office to include the treadmill/desk. Two, to put out our upside-down container garden.
Monday morning, I’d been thinking about it and I’m ready to get into it. So like a complete idiot, I decide to go ahead and start on project one - which ends up as a massive rearranging of my office, removing the return, taking down shelves, moving lights, general chaos. About 2 1/2 hours in I message James - from the ever-wonderful Netbook that is keeping me on top of things - “Help. I’ve destroyed my office. Hurricane good intentions has struck.” I’m sitting on a sturdy-enough unidentified pile, as I type, and I hear the phone ring. I manage to find the phone. It is Joyce, asking if I’d gotten the news that JC spent the night in the ICU. I had not - as I’d already cut Facebook from my distraction list for the day.
A couple hours later, at the prompting of my insistent stomach, I manage to clear a path to get out of the office and make some lunch. The phone rings. It is mom asking if I’d talked to Joyce. I had, and I’d even checked my messages since and heard more news, which I imparted to mom. It was 2:50 as we spoke, and he had been scheduled for tests at around 2:30. No news yet. Mom asks if I’d heard about Joyce’s tests, and I realize I hadn’t even asked - I am mental - but then imparts she’d already heard there was nothing new in the results. More tests to come all around. I hang up and realize I hadn’t asked if Mom ever found her keys, missing since she’d visited us.
Okay, let’s pause this entry for an hour, wherein a patiently indulgent JamesT and I humor to move the treadmill from it’s longtime home downstairs, up to my office. Here is where random snaps and pops that don’t actually seem to indicate any breaks of the machine make me nervous, and we proceed to fuck up our linoleum, two walls, a door frame and our stair railing in the process. Like for serious, fuck up. Gouges. Splinters. Holes. And I can’t help thinking, wonder if I could have just bought a cheap walking treadmill for upstairs for the price of what it will take to fix our house I just broke. The treadmill is now, however, upstairs - where it will live until it biodegrades. I’m certain the mere mention of the treadmill again will constitute a forfeiture of our marriage.
Rewinding the day, I did obviously manage to unbury and rearrange my office, and did not hear further on anybody’s test results. JamesT makes it home, and just when I’m positive I can’t do more than lift a finger to order pizza, I end up cooking dinner. Now it looks like the hurricane went through the kitchen as well, but I’ll deal with that tomorrow.
At some point just after dinner, we are sitting on the couch and hear a strange noise… cracking… fireworks? but its daytime. No clue, so we carry on. Soon after we are in my office formulating shelf ideas to hold my monitor when we hear another strange noise… this time, we find the source. Chainsaw. Looks like the neighbors are in the corner of our yard - by the stop sign - cutting down one of our trees. In fact what has happened was that a huge termite-ridden section has given way and fallen to block the road. Neighbor with chainsaw tells us he left to jog and it was fine, he came back and it was across the road. He didn’t see any lights on in our house, so he just decided to take care of it himself. You know, never mind that there were tons of lights on, and the tv upstairs if he’d even tried to come to the door, which he so obviously didn’t, but there’s really no good view from here into our house - or we’d likely have spotted the tree ourselves.
Whatever the reason, he decided to cut the dang thing cut into manageable chunks all by himself. He had at last drawn the attention of a few other neighbors who were helping by the time we heard the noise, so all James ended up doing tonight was raking some small limbs and leaves from the road. It’s all out of the way enough for now - but looks like we’ll need to borrow that chainsaw again for some massive yard work on Wednesday. And really, looks like we need a tree doctor ASAP to see if the rest of that big tree can be saved.
And now it’s 10, and my all of me hurts. I’m sure James’ already sore shoulder has been joined by his sore all of him. This treadmill is about 10 million pounds, I was stupid to think it could magically appear up here, and he knows he was stupid to indulge me, but it is here. Still be a couple days before I have my monitor mounts up and can rehang the shelves and such, but soon this project will be complete. I only hope James can tolerate me long enough to appreciate what it was all for. I only hope this whole “project” hasn’t really just been hurricane good intentions.
Crossposted from Flerly.com. You can comment here or there.