La casa loca

Fredfred the dog is very happy to be downstairs, finally. It’s been her unfortunate lot to be confined in Olivia’s room from 7:30 to 3:30 daily this week.
The good news is that this means we have a construction crew at work on the family room, and we presume that they do not fancy nips in the fanny.

Sadly, the cats find that the positioning of their cage in the kitchen is as unsatisfying to their sense of feng shui as it is to mine, but it will be returned to its place by the sunny family room window sooner or later, and anyway, if you’re the sort of creature who pees indiscriminantly you’ve pretty much signed away your two-cents in the interior design scheme.

The fact that we have construction hirees at all is the result of an intervention of sorts--in this case it was 3 of Jeff’s siblings who felt compelled to confront him. “Face it bro’,” they said, “you’re a bite-off-more-than-you-can chew-aholic, and you’re asphyxiating yourself. Furthermore, we’re afraid your saintly, albeit somewhat cranky, wife will give you the heave-ho sooner or later and we don’t want to take you in. Heaven knows, we’ve got enough personality quirks of our own without having you honking on your saxophone in our basements.

(a quick aside about Jeff: he did not think it would be that much trouble to live in a house with no roof for 9 months, catching the rain in 30 garbage cans. He does not think it would be that much trouble to dredge down to the Severn River to create our own Fallingwater, or import our own herd of buffalo so we can pretend we live on the great Plains. (One of these statements is true--you guess.) I have learned. Slowly, but I've learned. Now, this is as far as I'll compromise: We can hire a grizzled old cook whom we'll call "Hank," who will rustle him up some grub when he gets tired of Flatbread pizzas from the freezer.

So, Jeff has been strong-armed into a sensible, workable, kind of game plan. This does not, however, change the fact that I, as a matter of course, must still hide my hairbrush, my toothbrush, the kitchen broom, and my personal tools if I ever want to see them again. Additionally, I just ran a bright orange extension cord to the pc so Becca could do homework, since when Jeff unsuccessfully diddled with the light fixtures in the computer room today, he forgot to undiddle before he went to work.