Monday, March 31, 2003

Gentle readers, my apologies for my long absence from this page.  We live in a new house now - or rather, a 1955 house that we are in the process of renovating and modernizing.  The very nice electrician just came by and installed our internet service, and so of course I'm sitting here writing this missive instead of working at my woefully neglected job, painting, unpacking, studying or some other useful and desperately-needed task that would help restore order to the almost overwhelming mess with which we are faced.  Yes, that was a run-on sentence, but I frankly don't have time to edit this.  I'm sitting in front of a bank of windows, gazing out at the Magnolia tree in the front yard of MY house, and that is very good.  We finished moving, and the renovation is well underway.  I think we're having fun, although there have been a few bumps in the road - the attempt to put latex paint over the existing oil-based paint on the kitchen cabinetry (which resulted in a late-night beer and palm sander fest of epic proportions), our first attempt at removing wallpaper, which quickly degenerated into a sort of wearied, beleagured hacking at what we discovered was three layers of the stuff (we called the sheetrock guy), the laborer my dad sent over who demolished our disgusting kitchen sink with a sledgehammer (while we were at Home Depot), breaking a bunch of the impossible-to-match tiles surrounding the sink in the process, and so on.  For the most part, however, it has been interesting, and I have been reduced to tears many times over the past few weeks at the willingness of our family and friends to come over here and help, offer advice, give us money, or just hang out and commiserate as we attempt master what has proven to be a pretty steep learning curve.  As far as we've come (and we have done A LOT), we have a long, long way to go. Work is heating up - my project launches in less than a month - I'm still in school, still in a band, all that.  I don't expect I'll write here with any regularity for the next two months, but I will post a paragraph or two from time to time.  I actually managed to read two books during the past 10 days - I suppose nothing could keep me from that, and I actually hid in a closet with a flashlight and a novel for a half hour last Friday, I had become so desperate for that immersion in a world distinctly not mine - and I have some things to say about those books, as well as some thoughts on the subject of book collecting, which came to me as I was packing about the 50th box of the things.  Please pardon the poorly written, scattershot nature of this email, readers.  I need more time! 4:45:25 PM