It’s been a wild couple of weeks, lemmetellyou. To think I had foozled myself into believing that the departure of our contractor from the premises (after a while you start thinking of this person, this skilled professional you are paying hundreds or thousands of dollars to be in your house, as The Dinner Guest Who Wouldn’t Leave) signaled the end of the home-improvement-based ballyhoo ’round these parts. HONK. Sorry, that answer is incorrect, but we do have some lovely parting gifts for you. Such as a gnawing sense of deficiency as you survey the rest of your home. The dingy, fingerprint-marred walls; the nappy and footstained carpets; the pockmarked woodwork. It all looks so dodgy by comparison to the recently renovated bits. So much so that they don’t even look like they’re all part of the same house.

Really, how long could it possibly take to paint the hallway, to put in new baseboards, to lay down laminate flooring in place of the rug? What, thirty, maybe forty years?

Yeah, well fuck that. In fact, fuck that, accidentally calling out some other concept’s name in the throes of passion, finish off prematurely leaving it unfulfilled, promise it that you’ll call it tomorrow and then lose its number.

I’m not falling into that trap. It’s a pernicious, self-perpetuating cycle that will never end if you let it begin. I am just about at the end of what my fatigued and feverish mind can accommodate in the way of new data, and I don’t plan on filling my dwindling storage capacity with handy tips on drywalling and foundation repair. I need to reserve my remaining functional neurons for stuff like XHTML, web offset press line screens and cross-site scripting attacks.

I’m incompetent with a paint brush or a mudding trowel and I by-God plan to stay that way. After I put the last of the towel bars and stuff in the bathroom I am done. Well, except for changing the shower head. And the wife’s already started ripping the wallpaper offa the walls in her office, so I suppose I’m going to have to help with that. And the painting afterwards. Plus there’s the roof of the grape arbor that needs some kind of weather-sealing this summer. And I ended up messing up some of the paint on the side of the house when I ripped some pre-Cambrian coaxial cable off of the siding, so I really ought to patch that as well.

Oh, shit, it’s happened again. Turn your back on a tiny pile of home improvement chores, and the little bastards multiply like bacteria.

While Margaret and I have chosen to remain childless, I think we might be willing to adopt an orphaned general-purpose contractor, if someone knows of one in need. Hell, it’d still be cheaper than putting a kid through college.

Anyway, I hope to contribute a bit more regularly to the blog from here on out, but I guess that all depends on how long all the landscaping in the front yard ends up taking. Watch this space for my imminent suicide note!