So!
On Friday, I made two discoveries: 1) It’s spring! For real this time. I raked the yard and swept the driveway and cleared out the gardens to discover things! Growing things! By next week, we’ll have flowers. Also, Heather informs me that the neighbors1 dig my arbor. If I catch them laying hands on it, though, there’s gonna be trouble. 2) eBay! Yeah, I knew about that before. But I force myself to forget about it for months at a time or I’d be more broke. Anyway, i’m pretty sure that eBay is the one and only reason for the internet. The rest of my weekend has been mostly devoted to unwallpapering my room. If I were to make a pie chart of time allotted to this activity, you would see this as the giant pac-man portion, with the rest represented by corollary activities such as:- Re-learning the lesson I should’ve learned long ago: a banana and a few sips of coffee are insufficient for sustaining a human being through half an hour on the crosstrainer and lifting 8,500 lbs. One VW beetle, perhaps. Two, no. I think my problem is that I learn from only my significant mistakes, and am condemned to repeat the minor, irritating ones over, and over, and over.
- Brunch. Yes, brunch.
- Picking up flooring for my kitchen.
- Driving past the lake on the way to Whole Foods, and experiencing a deep, burning need to be at the lake with the rest of humanity, which was celebrating the first day of the year one could safely wear shorts without fear of being considered a retard, and also mating season.
- Going to the lake for the aforementioned reason.
- Going to a party at Dave’s house and having the honor of meeting the star of Winnie-Cam. She seemed less than enamored with me, but I’m going to blame that on carrying the scent of three cats and a puppy, and not as a personal affront. I hope I’m right about that.
- Seeing ‘The Ladykillers’. Eh.
- Going to Luce, twice.
- Trying to do that eight-mile training walk and being foiled by rain and the threat of another biblical-scale windstorm that will undoubtedly topple my arbor again.
- Figuring out what new endeavor to undertake since my quilting class got cancelled. The point of this class was to spend time with my mom. We have been denied this valuable opportunity, and so now all mother-daughter bonding will again be confined to the times I go over to the parents’ house, and she empties her freezer of every fake-meat product ever invented, because she is under the assumption that I have brought along the entire vegetarian army2 for dinner.
So, the thing with the wallpaper is that it’s taking a hell of a long time. And even though every time I pick up my spray bottle and scraper I hear Scotty yelling, STEAMER!, I just keep doing it this way. I consider maybe going to rent that steamer, then I say to myself, ‘but you’re almost done!’ And it’s a lie! A flat-out lie. But I want to believe it, and I do. Repeat that scenario about a hundred times and it’ll be truth, though. I’ll be done. And hopefully today. Also, as part of this exciting process, I unmounted the curtain rod (a fancy-ass 2×2 with fabric stapled to it), tossed it from the front door into the middle of the driveway, and later (with my dad’s assistance), balanced it on the stairs and stomped it into pieces which fit neatly in the trash. I guess I must have inherited that appreciation of some healthy destruction from his side of the family.
Back to strippin’. The walls, that is. Jenni