Printing Concert Association tickets and watching paint dry are nice, complementary activities. Which fit right in there with the speed of the internet today. And, to be accurate, it’s not paint, it’s polyurethane. There’s that patch right at the bottom of the stairs, near the kitchen, where we filled in the wood flooring a few years ago, but rather than finishing the wood we’ve let it accumulate many moons of foot-traffic dirt, all of which I sanded away this morning. Then put down poly coat #1. Which Hazel promptly ran through. No matter, it will blend in with the rest of the cat-prints in the house.
Seems I’m on a handy roll. Several days ago I assembled three rockers for the front porch with but one disastrous stripping of an allen-wrench hole in the head of a wood bolt. That, Jeff successfully removed with a vice-grip (I was proud) and we replaced it with a hex bolt from our friendly neighborhood hardware store. Yeah, the one where I sit on the 3-person Board of Directors. (And a high-falutin’ position it is, too.) Yes, perhaps we have upped our old-folks-home quotient by having rockers on the porch...but, as I pointed out, people who knock sitting on the front porch in a rocker maybe haven’t tried it. There’s a lot to be said for it. Perhaps the reason the old folks get them is that they deserve only the best.
Then, on Monday, the monstrous-large elliptical trainer arrived, boxed, in the driveway. It seemed to make sense to cut it out of its box and bring the parts in one by one. Only later, while re-reading the reviews on Amazon, did I see that a dozen or so people had warned us against just that. See, there was this one ginormous wheel piece with the free-wheeling peddles attached which allowed itself to be lugged into the house with all the grace of a dead mastodon, pre-rigor mortis. But I finally coaxed it down 2 steps to the family room, and got all the nuts and bolts in place by midday Tuesday. And now I can attest, definitively, to the legitimacy of an elliptical workout. Personally, I turn as red as a ripe tomato, but--thankfully--my legs stop whining about 5 minutes into a 30 minute routine. The 30 minutes pass more easily, I find, if you plug in an iPod loaded with Heart, Disney songs, and the Cell Block Tango from Chicago.
I do not object to the busyness, as relatively meaningless as it all may be. Since Monday, all 3 girls have been away--a sobering preview of what it will be like around here in about 2 weeks. The three of us remaining--I, Jeff and Gabe--went to Lemongrass Monday night and enjoyed(?) a stimulating discussion about whether controlling fire or controlling smoke would be the preferable super-power. And I listen...really...I am now convinced that there are benefits to smoke-control of which I had not been aware. But I cannot think of any way in which it would speed up the printer as it spits out Concert Association tickets, or keep me from running out of ink.
