Actual weekend accomplishment

I did get the office painted, completely, and even cleaned and put away all the painting supplies! For me this is a big deal as I am generally the world's biggest slacker when it comes to putting stuff away. But, I was delirious and half out of my mind with fever, so that probably accounts for the dreamy way the day passed. I would just pop in a dvd, something familiar and amusing, and two hours later the show would be over and I'd be done with another wall.

I painted two adjoining walls green and the other two walls blue. I'd go into excruciating detail as to which two walls are which color but lordy, do you really care? But this computer sits on a round table in a corner, and on one side of the monitor the wall is green, the other side blue, and it's all pretty groovy.

Maybe you're wondering about the fever. I thought I was having seasonal allergies but I'm happy to say it's just an especially slow-moving summer cold. I'd rather be sick for a few days than have allergies that drag on and on. I have very minor ones and they seem to be getting very slightly worse over the years, so the thought that I might be feeling that crappy for half the summer was really bringing me down.

So now the contents of the office, less the larger pieces of furniture (two tables, a cheap white laminate cabinet, and a cheap metal filing cabinet) which I worked around, are spread out all over the rest of the house. I will devote the next few days of my life to a) blowing my nose and coughing, b) keeping my child fed, clothed and out of mortal danger, and finally c) sifting through the piles and piles of junk everywhere and chucking as much of it as possible to the garage so that in two weeks we can put it out on tables in the driveway and hope that people will show up and pay us pennies on the dollar for what it cost us years ago when our judgment was evidently poorer. What remains will go back into the office, but I'm trying to keep it somewhat more minimal than previously. Which is to say, with fewer bits of crap stuffed into every nook and/or cranny.

I was so crafty. I got off work unexpectedly early Friday night and had time to drop by a store for some shelves to put on the wall, and brought them in stealthily and hid them so they could be a surprise. Sadly, I didn't have time to get them onto the wall before J. got home, plus I lack in confidence when it comes to driving screws into the studs. I tend to accidentally strip out the screw heads and get all mad. So, I fessed up and J. has agreed to assist me. I'm hoping we'll have time tomorrow.

I also removed the extremely ugly curtains that previously hung over the window. They kept the sun out, so they did their duty, but did they have to be so homely? The woman who owned this house before us spent a lot of time traveling for business and seemed to have come away from that with tastes distilled from 80's motel rooms. I wish I'd had the sense to take photos of the desecrations she installed on every window in the house -- all different, yet eerily similar, and desperately, desperately ugly. She is a nice woman but I'm really glad she's not an interior designer.

In other news, I'll be headed out to the college tomorrow to purchase my books. Let's hope there are some decent used copies. I was going to try to cut costs by searching for them on the internet but those that I found were either just as expensive plus I'd have to pay shipping, or else the seller didn't list which edition they were, or other frustrating issues like that. Screw it, I'll just hike down and pony up. At least I'll know I'm getting the right books.

Lastly, I must describe some amusing baby things. No photos of this as yet but I swear they will be forthcoming.

Delia got a "Dora the Explorer" book-with-music-player-thingy for her birthday. It looks like a teensy cd-walkman and it plays these 4 different teensy plastic pretend-cd's. It plays instrumental (think midi file) songs, several on each teensy cd. Delia likes to put it on the floor, crouch down to put in a cd, which she can do without help already, and push the button to play a song. Then she jumps up and dances in little circles around the book and player. It's a total hoot. When the song is over, she goes over and pushes the button again to make the next song play, and returns to dancing (i.e. jumping and flapping her arms in a seemingly random fashion). How can I keep from laughing my head off at her utter cuteness? Well, I can't. So I try to disguise it as enthusiasm, smiling and saying, Good dancing! But really I'm just dying at how adorable she is.

The other thing is, I've discovered the secret that all parents of toddlers figure out at some point: you can ask your kid stupid questions to get them to say or do things that will crack you up so bad you'll have to leave the room or else pee on the couch. I was reading some book or another to her this evening, a library book with a dog in it and at some point the dog was wagging his tail. I asked Delia where her tail was and she indicated the seat of her pants. Then I asked if she could wag her tail like the doggy in the book, and she jumped down off the couch, patted herself on the butt a couple of times, and started waggling all over the place. I like to split a seam trying not to fall off the sofa.

Also tonight she gathered up an armful of stuffed animals (she calls them "critters") and handed them to me one at a time, gravely intoning the genus/species of each: "Bear, grumpy troll, nummer bear, nummer grumpy troll."

How can you not just want to eat her completely up? This so totally makes up for the months of constant screaming.