I jumped in the shower only to hear a few minutes later, "I'm home!" Crap. He came home early and I wasn't clean yet. When I got out of the shower I told him I was trying to clean up before he got home since I'm sure he's tired of finding me looking and smelling like a homeless person. He said he was used to it and looked forward to my stank. I didn't quite know how to take that but I did make sure he had something to look forward to after work today.
I spent most of my day today listening to the contractors our lease management company sent over to fix a loose banister on the staircase. It's been loose since we moved in but it's not a big deal for us. We know it's loose so we just make sure we don't put any weight on it. I recently got to thinking about some friends of ours who are spending their vacation with us in a couple of weeks. They have two kiddos who are great kids but still they're kids. I had nightmares about them playing upstairs and one of them pushing the other against the banister then it gives way and they both fall to their deaths. That might put a damper on the vacation for the rest of the family so I asked our
A week ago they sent out a couple of maintenance guys to fix it and I knew as soon as they came to the door that they wouldn't be able to do it. The wood that is attached to the floor and also to the spindles is split and needed to be replaced. Mutt and Jeff drove a bunch of 4" screws through the big corner spindle and into the split wood which did absolutely nothing. Like I told them it would before they even did it.
The contractors who were here today really didn't have much more of a clue than Mutt and Jeff did but at least they knew what to do when the 6" screws they drove into the rotted wood failed to hold. Like I told them it would. Why doesn't anyone listen to me??
While they were busy with that I reupholstered my dining room chairs while trying to pick out the few Spanish words I recognized from their conversations. I took 4 years of Spanish in high school and 2 years in college and still I can just barely manage to read the menu at Chuy's.
I had intended to reupholster my green autumnman to match the purple otterman I had done last week. I troll Craigslist on a regular basis and ottoman is one of the words most commonly and entertainingly misspelled there. I discovered that I didn't have enough fabric and really wasn't in the mood anyway so I tackled the dining room chairs.
I also had the opportunity to ponder the Murphy's Law-ish-ness of IBS. Why does it kick in at the most inconvenient times?? There I was with a house full of contractors who probably don't have a single green card among them (no disrespect intended, I'm just sayin') and my colon says we gotta go NOW! I had no choice but to obey so I chose the downstairs bathroom since it was the furthest away from where they were working.
Just when I got "comfortable" in there I heard, "Mees Shannon? Hallo? Mees Shannon?" Well perfect. For two solid hours they hadn't said a word to me then when I sat down to take care of my business I was suddenly in high demand. Knowing there was no way to salvage my dignity, I flushed my 1.6 gal/flush econo-toilet (twice) and exited the bathroom with as much grace as possible. Fortunately Mr. Contractor had the decency to pretend not to notice that I just came out of the bathroom in Glade Clean Linen fragrance cloud with a few beads of sweat on my brow. It was the high point of my day, really.
Apparently Mr. Contractor wasn't nearly as traumatized by the whole event as I was because a couple of hours later he offered to spray my staple gun with WD-40 when he saw that I was struggling with it. It was Jayson's old silver staple gun, the kind that I have to squeeze with both hands while balancing all of my weight on top of it. Maybe he offered to oil it because I mentioned that I wished I had a pneumatic nail gun like his. He probably sensed that I really wanted to borrow it to finish my chairs so he had to come up with some way to redirect my attention. The staple gun actually worked a lot better after he sprayed it so I wasn't eyeing his nail gun quite so much.
When he left, Mr. Contractor left me his business card in case we need him when we buy a house or he said he could build one for us if we like. I looked at the long list of services on the back of his business card and sure enough he does it all, including installing "sidding". Oh bless his heart, he must be on Craigslist.
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