I'm Back (and really boring)

I had so many things to say, and now I can't remember them. It's good to be back. I did not finish my book, but I did write eleven more chapters. I hope to be finished soon, and then I can rip the whole thing to shreds and start over.

Let's see, let's see. S.'s First Communion is rapidly approaching. It wasn't so long ago that I had oodles of time to clean the whole house from top to bottom and cook ten tons of food. Now I have considerably less than oodles, and I have done nothing, NOTHING! Except work on my book, that was important, right?

We have paid others to do things to the house, though. We now have a back yard that is a beautiful private retreat, complete with big curvy brick patio and little whimsical slate patio around the corner in what S. calls rather grandly "the meditation garden." Depending on who we're with we call it that or "that little area next to the dining room." Martha Stewart patio furniture. Little bushes that will grow up to be bigger bushes. Sod, which you have to water, which I hate doing. If I could find the cord that connects my cheapo digital camera to the computer, I would show you.

And, after almost seven years in the house, we managed to get the upstairs bathroom painted. It's too depressing to go into the whole timeline, but just suffice it to say that I ripped down the wallpaper before we moved in, the exhaust fan was installed....I'm going to say three years ago?...and there was a big hole where the medicine cabinet should be for about a year and a half. No sense rushing things. Now if we could get rid of the ill-advised primary-color eighties wallpaper in the downstairs bathroom we'd really be getting somewhere.

I now know the national anthem of Denmark, because not-so-little R. had a school presentation on family ancestry, and one of the options was "sing a song from your country of origin." I told R. this was a gift from God that we had to accept. How many times in your life are you given the choice between making a hideous and time-consuming diorama or sitting at the piano with your mother for half an hour and then going to school and doing something that is (for you) as easy as falling off a log? Not many times. Part of that, of course, is that only architects encounter a lot of diorama-type projects in adult life.

Well, I'd better go clean the house and make ten tons of food.