Tag: frustration

No Way to Start the Day

There is nothing worse than putting on your eyeliner and a GIANT HUGE spider drops on the countertop not two feet away from you.  I almost lost my eye.  Stupid spider didn’t even have the good manners to drop slowly on a web trailer.  No, he just free fell and landed hard.  I think he was slightly dazed from the fall because there was a long moment from him landing, me screaming and him running off.  If the countertop was anything else besides granite, I think he would have left a dent.  Of course the spider then ran toward the back of the countertop and disappeared.  Lucky me, I still have one eye left to do, and my sink is in the corner, leaving me vulnerable to a sneak attack by the rabid arachnid.

Mitch as usual looked at me with that condescending expression, head tilted to the left and down. I moved the Kleenex box, the huge spider ran out from behind and off the countertop to the floor.  That’s when the screaming started again.  Now it was on the floor and on the move.  Luckily, Mitch saw it first and smashed it with his fist, yuck.  I made him put the smooshed spider in his trashcan – not mine, then wash his hands WITH soap.

Thank god I can at least go to work with both eyes done.

A Bored Dog Wears Me Out!

Dogs do all kinds of things when they’re bored.  They can be terribly destructive, chew on furniture, shoes and tear up stuff.  Dogs will start snooping around, checking out something that smells interesting then go after it with a vengeance.  Where some people eat when bored, Orso drinks when he’s bored.  He finds the one pastime that he really likes.  Orso drinks water.  Not just come into the kitchen and drink water when he’s thirsty. Oh no.  Orso will stand and lap at the water in one of the water buckets in the kitchen, not really drinking, but sort of flicking his tongue into the water, just killing time waiting for something to fall off of the countertop.  He tries to be so nonchalant about it.  If we’re not paying attention to him, he will stand there for five or ten minutes playing in the water.  The next thing we notice is that he has drained the bucket.  That dog has drunk a gallon of water just being bored killing time. 

It doesn’t sound like the worst thing in the world, drinking too much water.  It’s not fattening, calorie free and keeps your skin hydrated, all silky and smooth.  Sounds great, until 12:45 in the middle of the night, when a giant dog head starts banging the side of the bed to wake you up because his bladder is about to explode.  Whenever any of the dogs gets up in the middle of the night, they only come to my side of the bed.  Mitch always gets to stay in Z land mainly because someone could drive a car through the house and he’d sleep through it.  Not me, I’m a light sleeper so whenever anything stirs I’m awake.  Raising two boys and staying one step ahead them creates light sleepers and it just stuck, even after they grew up, moved out and started their own families.

So at 12:43 to be exact, Orso started banging his head on my side of the bed.  I turned on the light and tried to coax him onto the foot of the bed and go back to sleep, but he was having none of that.  He had to go out RIGHT NOW!  I dragged myself out of bed and of course the other two got up also, because when mom gets up, we all get up.  Mitch can get up go to the bathroom or wander around the house, nobody else stirs, lucky me. I took them outside and Orso stood out there and peed in one spot for 8 minutes, I know because I timed him. 

Now we have something new to watch out for, because I do not like getting up in the middle of the night for anything or anybody, especially not a dog.

Writer’s Block

What do you do when you want to write and nothing will come out?  I’m been sitting here for over an hour staring at the computer, playing solitaire off and on hoping for inspiration to strike me from – somewhere – I don’t know.  Maybe if I knew, then the words and thoughts would start to flow.  There are so many things I want to say but for some reason, no cognitive thought let alone creative thought has come to me. 

It’s enough to make me crazy.  How do I progress and improve as a writer if I can’t get past this huge wall in front of me?

Ah, The Quiet of the Early Morning, Not!

Where is a large bird of prey when you need it?  We’re on vacation this week, which means we get to sleep in past our normal 2:45 am wake up call.  Sounds wonderful, but only in theory.  In reality we have a neighbor that owns two very obnoxious “squeaky toys” with four legs.  They were up and at it barking their heads off at 4:15 this morning.  I know because I looked at the clock.  I laid there for a few minutes thinking all sorts of evil thoughts of different ways of their demise.  Of course, I could never actually follow through with any of my mental wanderings, because ultimately it’s not the dogs fault.  The blame rests squarely on the owner’s shoulders.

Maybe he was lonely, I don’t know, but getting a dog requires a lot more than just being a cure for loneliness.  You have to interact with them, a lot.  There’s training, training and more training. Affection and lots of exercise.  We have labs, and labs have a ton of energy and if left to their own devices, can get very hyper and destructive, mostly from boredom.  Everyone that comes to our home always comments on how laid back they are.  Don’t get me wrong, we don’t have giant rugs here, these guys can destroy a room in no time (and have) if we would let them.  Our neighbor even built a doggie door for them so that he didn’t have to get up to let them out.  Which means now he has even less interaction with them.  He fenced off a tiny little area in his yard for them to run around in. Maybe a six square foot area.  He fenced it off with a garden fence, something my dogs wouldn’t even notice as they walked through.  So now these two loud obnoxious animals rush outside at all hours and bark incessantly. Amazing how something so small can be so loud.  It is beginning to grate on my last nerve.  Even my dogs are tired of their irritating rants.  On our walk yesterday, Charlie turned and started to charge at the dogs with hair raised down his back.  I was almost tempted but I was sure there might have been witnesses.

I’ve even tried to make up to them with no success.  No I really don’t want to see the dogs dead, just quiet.

The Great Bathroom Remodel

I can finally see the end of the tunnel.  The walls are all painted, two were even painted twice.  While caulking the tub, the alcohol that Mitch was using to cut the silicone, exploded from the bottle and splashed down two walls.  Guess what?  Alcohol doesn’t wash off.  So he had to re-paint those two walls.  It seems the curse continues.  We finally decided on the granite for the countertop and it’s laying on the floor in the living room to be installed after the final coat of stain dries on the base cabinet. 

We ultimately agreed on shower doors over shower curtains.  That took a long time to find The One, but we did.  That has been installed.  Of course installing a shower door with all of the parts didn’t go as easily as it would for normal people.  Mitch had to make a trip to the hardware store for longer anchors, I guess we have a fat tub.

All that’s left to do is hang the trim around the doors, install the crown molding, hang the upper cabinet, set the granite countertop and tile around the base of the walls to create a baseboard.  Oh, and install the towel bars and the shelving units in the closets.

I’ve thought about taking an inaugural shower, but decided against it because I know what would happen.  If Mitch discovered that we could actually use the bathroom before the total completion, there would never be a total completion.  We would limp along with a half finished bathroom, saying we need to get this done and never do.

I think we might just survive this remodel.  It’s been a tough one.

The Great Bathroom Remodel (formerly known as The Gutting of the Bathroom)

So many weeks have passed since we started the Great Bathroom Remodel.  It is now the middle of July and we started in April.  And to think that I was so sure with the two of us on vacation together we could knock out the demolition and renovation in one week, maybe two tops.  Silly me.  You can tell I have never been involved in such a huge undertaking.  I guess I really do live in a fantasy world. 

Demolition is over and rebuilding is underway.  There have been interruptions galore.  One week in the heat to replace the brake lines in the station wagon.  A few days here and there to help friends work on their cars.  Mitch just can’t say no.  Not to mention one huge temper tirade.  I thought that was the end right then and there.

The floor is tiled, the bath tub has been installed and most of the sheetrock has been hung.  Mitch is busy sanding the sheetrock as I write this.  He even has the floor to ceiling medicine closet built.  He wired the lights that will go over mirrors, cut the holes that will hold the mirrors and has plumbed all the water lines and drains for the sinks and tub.

I bought the wall paint and primer and am ready to start as soon as all the sheetrock has been hung and sanded.  The hold up now is the staining of the cabinets.  I had one cabinet stained, but because of the heat and humidity it didn’t turn out well.  The surface of the cabinet doors had dust and grit embedded in the stain.  So we had to bring them inside to the basement where it is much cooler than the garage and re-stain after sanding off all of the gritty stain.  I just love to redo everything I’ve already done.  But even in the basement with the air conditioner running, the stain is slow in drying.  We have to have the one cabinet that will go over the toilet done and in place before he can hang the last of the sheetrock.  I have two cabinets left to stain.  At this rate, I might be done staining by the second coming.

We decided on recessed lighting but haven’t found any we like yet  We haven’t picked out the counter top for the floor cabinet.  We haven’t even gone to look at anything yet.  And there’s the matter of the shower door / curtain.  We can’t decide which way to go.  Shower door or shower curtain.  Any suggestions? 

We’re still married, though at times it’s been close.

The Gutting of the Bathroom – Day I’ve Forgotten

We are now into a month without the master bath.  Things are progressing slowly to say the least.  Mitch has tiled the floor and it looks really good.  He does good work.  We decided that the best course of action on the ceiling was just add a layer of quarter inch underlayment over the existing sheetrock and re-texture the ceiling.  Great idea and it fixed the ceiling faux paux, but now the ceiling height is a quarter inch lower than normal height.  A quarter inch doesn’t sound like much, except when you have had custom cabinets made to fit the room and now the room is shorter.  As Maxwell Smart said in Get Smart, “Missed it by that much!”  So Mitch has to shave off a quarter inch from the cabinet in order to make it fit.

Another new development, when Mitch measured for the cabinet over the toilet, he measured the outside of the area, not the back of the wall.  Guess what, the back wall is an inch shorter than the front of the wall.  I know, most normal people would assume that the wall should be straight, but not in this house.  Nothing is straight or level, or normal height.  In order to help solve that problem, the sheetrock has to go.  After the sheetrock was pulled off and replaced with quarter inch underlayment, we’re still five eights of an inch short.  So more shaving.

One step forward, two back.  It’s starting to wear on us.  At least we’re still married.

The Gutting of the Bathroom Day 15

Day 15 I had to go to the doctor’s office today for a tetanus shot.  I woke up this morning to a red itchy rash on both arms and put two and two together.  I know it doesn’t sound like the two are linked, but on day one I cut my arm on the house.  I didn’t think much of it at the time, cleaned up the blood and put a band aid on the cut.  For days I carried sheet rock, old boards and other various dirty things to the car dump.  The same thing happened to Mitch last year, that’s the only reason I even thought about it.  About two weeks after he had worked on the exhaust system underneath the El Camino, rolling around in dirt and rust where he scratched up his arms pretty good, he broke out in a red itchy rash and his joints started aching.  He went to the doctor’s office and yes he needed a tetanus shot.  My last one was fourteen years ago, so I was due.

This day turned into one step forward, ten back.  I had ordered lights for the mirrors online and went they arrived, the lights were way too big and had cloth shades.  Nowhere on the web site did it describe the shades as cloth.  Cloth won’t work in a humid environment.  I returned them to the home improvement store and found out I didn’t all of the necessary paperwork.  That meant a trip home to print out some shipping confirmation that had a barcode on it so that the same store that I ordered from could read and then authorize a return.  Isn’t technology great?

Meanwhile, Mitch is diligently trying to measure, cut and lay the underlayment so that he can tile the floor, but things didn’t go so well.  A couple of catastrophes interrupted that.  A flat tire and a tire store that can’t even look at the tire for 2 hours in order to determine if it can be repaired or if a new tire is needed. 

I’m trying to get all of the errands done, take back lights, buy new lights, stain for the cabinets, dirt and tomato plants for the garden, (and get them in the ground) because it’s time to plant.  Oh and don’t forget doctor’s appointment.  All of this and be done and cleaned up in time for a retirement, birthday and welcome home party this afternoon.  Our friends like to multi-task too.

At least we’re still married.

My Ceiling Faux Paux

The Gutting of the Bathroom Day Six

Day Six scraping the ceiling didn’t go so good.  Imagine that.  Because of the confined space, the bathroom had extra thick popcorn texture sprayed on it.  Scraping the ceiling is one of those projects where the doing doesn’t sound so back until you actually start the doing.  Then you remember that it really sucks, but once you start scraping, there’s no stopping, you have to finish the whole room. 

After I had finished, Mitch looked at the ceiling and pointed out a spot that he thought still had a little too much texture.  I wasn’t so sure, but thought that I would see if I could get a little more off.  I got a little more off alright, the sheetrock was too wet and I scraped off the texture all the way to brown paper.  And it wasn’t a little spot that came off, no I scraped off a big honkin strip of sheetrock.  Thinking there was nothing else to do, I started stripping off all of the sheetrock top, really soaking the textured paint.   What a mess.

Now not only have I scraped off too much, but I have a big horrible mess on the ceiling and on the floor.  Mitch tried to come in and help, but he quickly lost patience and fled to the garage to pull nails out of the salvaged boards.  Therapy I think.

The ceiling has to dry, then we’ll smear sheetrock mud over the whole ceiling, after that we can texture the ceiling again.  Just what we wanted to do, right.  I’ll let you know tomorrow if we’re still married.