Whew.

I keep thinking I’ll get a chance to sit down and try to entertain you, but it’s just not happening. I don’t know what goes on in this house, but we’re so busy that we’re not sitting down to eat until 10 pm, and by then I’m exhausted.

So what do we do all day? Maybe if I write about it, I can see, you know?

One thing that’s eaten up a HUGE chunk of time this past week is more weeding and sorting. The first Saturday in May is the annual UU Garage Sale, and it’s our annual chance to get rid of anything we don’t want or aren’t using or think someone else might get more use out of than we do. Plus we needed to weed through the financial records prior to 2004. You know that drill. We should do it every year, but we just never do.

So Saturday we spent NINE hours out in The Fucking Edifice, hauling out bins and boxes, going through stuff, sorting records, going through The EGE’s impressive collection of ancient clothes, some of which were so very frightening that I actually squealed. Imagine:  a baby blue knit tie. Yeah, you read that right:  Baby blue. Knit. Tie.

This is a man who does NOT wear ties. Where in the hell did this thing—and its ilk—come from? I hate even to think about it.

Baby pooh-gold-brown cargo shorts. Shirts made in “fibers” unknown to nature. Anyone remember Joe Boxer? Those oh-so-cool-at-the-time boxer shorts? I ADORED those and bought my husband a pair at every opportunity. Good lord. Footballs. Flowers. Teddy bears.

Are you ill yet? Then get this: I found it highly amusing to have bought him a pair with WATERMELONS on them. Yes. Sort of a theme with the photo of him nekkid with the watermelon—you remember that one? But come on:  this is UNDERWEAR, for crying out loud.

I should have just slapped myself instead.

We had to sort through all that shit.

Then Sunday we built a fire in the chiminea and took out the shredder and plugged it in—because of COURSE when I designed The Fucking Edifice and its attendant patio, I planned for just such an eventuality (snort. Like hell I did) and had outlets installed oh-so-handily.

That took another several hours. Burning and shredding. Burning and shredding.

Oh. And then The EGE reminds me not to forget the many hours we’ve spent this past week picking up chinaberries. This seems to have become Our New Hobby. Do you know the chinaberries? Omigod. They are like unto a scourge upon the earth. Positively biblical in proportion. Like unto a Plague of Locusts.

Etc.

I love our chinaberry tree. It redeems itself in the one short month that it produces the sweetest-smelling blossoms this side of wisteria. Chinaberry blossoms + wisteria = my idea of perfume. But then? What’s up with those berries? Because honeys, let me tell you:  those berries smell like shit. No—I’m not just using the word “shit” for emphasis. Or because I think you like to hear me cuss. No! I mean LITERALLY. I will go out there and think, “Whoa. That’s a lot of cat shit stinking up the backyard,” knowing full well that The EGE does NOT allow a build-up of feces in HIS backyard. No way. It took us a while to figure out what was stinkin’, being as how, you know, we generally don’t go around smelling the berries that drop off the tree into the yard. I mean, really:  who does?  Do you go around sniffing your lawn debris? Or crawling around with your nose to the ground, searching out the feces from your animal companions?

I thought not.

Oh, darlin’:  the chinaberries. They are driving us mad. You remember that we severely “pruned” this tree, right? As in “chopped the ever-loving shit out of it.” Or, rather: half of it.  Because my husband took pity on my love of The Blossoms and let half of it wait until next year.

So we’re spending a LOT of hours picking up those damn berries. In the years we’ve lived here, we’ve tried every way of dealing with them:  we’ve tried mowing them (doesn’t work:  the mower doesn’t pick them up). We’ve tried vacuuming them:  yes. That was us, out there vacuuming our lawn.

Do not laugh. You’re laughing only IF you’ve never Known a Chinaberry Tree.

My dad once asked me, “Why do you have a chinaberry tree?” And when I said, “But it smells lovely in April,” he just snorted.

The only way to deal with them, to keep them from

1) hurting like hell when you step on them and

2) turning into MORE chinaberry trees (at least we think they do; they may also/alternately just grow from root shoots)

is to pick the berries up by hand. One. At. A. Time.

It takes for-fucking-ever.

So there was that.

Then there was the thing about The Clothes we found in The FE. Oh, not the knit ties and bad shorts. No. I’m talking about the plethora (which here means:  a whole shitload) of white cotton shirts. Plus some really hot men’s bikini undererwear. Which you English Majors out there will recognize as A Misplaced Modifier, since it’s obvious that I do not think some Hot Man left his underwear in our FE and instead mean that there was some hot underwear out there.

Never mind.

Suffice to say that there was some stuff that needed to be dyed. In the worst way. And so I’ve been doing that for the last couple days.

OK. Let’s speed this monkey up:

--there was an interview, one which should have taken, oh, an hour on Monday but which ended up taking 4 hours over two days, what with all the assorted Drama involved.

--I decided to put light kits on the two ceiling fans in the studio, mostly so I can see colors when I’m 1) dyeing stuff or 2) picking out bead colors. Up until now, I’ve had to take stuff into another room to get an accurate color read.

Only:  the light didn’t work. We tried it on one ceiling fan. Nope. Tried it on the other. Nope. Packed that mother back up and drove it all the way across town, turned it in, got a refund, went back and found a guy who climbed up on The World’s Highest Ladder to get more kits. Came home, hooked them up, only to discover that, when we put in the ceiling fans, we figured we’d never want lights out there, since I LOATHE overhead lighting. And so didn’t connect the little wires to make the lights work.

It’s 95 degrees. We have no ceiling fans (since we’re WORKING ON THEM), it’s miserable holding up things over your head and trying to do the wiring.

Pure hell.

But it’s OK now! Yay!

OK, sweeties. I’m going to cut to the chase. It’s almost midnight. We just finished dinner. I haven’t accomplished anything all week in the way of Real Work (i.e., that stuff that pays the bills). Tomorrow doesn’t look so hot in that department, either. But you know what?

It doesn’t matter. Things take time. Time is relative. Things will get done or not get done. I will try to make time to entertain you when I can. When I can’t? I’ll hope that you’re taking time to sit outdoors with a glass of wine, looking at the sky and thinking of the beings you love the most and heaving The Big Sigh of Happiness. You know, the one where you look around you and go, “It doesn’t suck so much after all.”

XO