monkeymom's Diaryland Diary
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In which Rachel works like a dog and the dog's daddy comes home.
Long day. So tired. I slept for about 4 hours this morning and when I woke up, Rachel told me she tried to sleep in Kim's bedroom last night, but the smell of the cat-peed carpet was too strong due to the high humidity and it was practically making her eyes water, so she gave up and slept in the yarn room.
Okay, so the backstory is that last night before I came to work, Rachel mentioned that she wanted to rip up the carpet in the living room that is spotted by animals, burned by flaming pieces of wood that jump out of the fireplace when Rich isn't looking, and stained by newsprint in the spot where Scott used to stack newspapers as he rolled them for his paper route.
I thought it sounded like a big job, and I reminded her of when she started ripping up the carpet in the dining room last year, and it turned into an unholy mess that took all day, and how filthy cat-peed pieces of carpet and decayed carpet backing were flying everywhere! She said it wasn't as bad as I remembered, and then we got into a discussion of the probable quality of the hardwood floors in the living room, and compared them to the dining room, and she told me again that Rich knows how to replace that odd square of mismatched wood in the dining room - "He saw it on This Old House!"
Well, she was living somewhere else when Rich was replacing the wax seal under the upstairs toilet, and it turned into a reflooring nightmare in which I had no upstairs working toilet for about a month, just a pipe sticking out of the floor with a rag stuffed into the open end to save us from escaping 'sewer gas'! If you remember, the nightmare ended when I called Rich's dad and begged him to come visit us and fix the toilet!
I explained to Rachel that what would happen with that square of mismatched wood is that Rich will pry it out of its spot on the floor and make 5 trips to Men@rds for supplies while referring to his Home Handyman Book, and then there will be a gaping hole in the floor for weeks because he will only have time to work on it on Saturdays and that probably it will end in tears when one of the cats (most likely Patsy, my favorite) falls through the hole and breaks his fat furry neck and dies in the laundry room below.
Then I came to work and Rachel tried to sleep in Kim's room. So when I woke up she told me she wanted to start tearing out the carpet in Kim's room, and I had been thinking about the living room all night at work and was willing to let her start ripping up the carpet, but when she mentioned Kim's room, I told her to go ahead.
I got dressed and went out with RA to Rockford on an errand of mercy that I won't go into here, but it involved taking someone to a doctor appointment and having a really good lunch in a restaurant, including pie, and picking up the person at the doctor's office afterward, and while we were gone for four hours, Rachel not only tore up the carpet in Kim's room, she put the roast in the oven to cook for dinner, too.
When I got home I made some fancy potatoes in the oven that had to be taken out and messed with every 10 or 15 minutes until they were done, and when I finally finished those, the dog really wanted to go out for Walkies (heh, did I tell you that is what my baby-talking neighbor calls it?), so Rachel took a break from slaving away in Kim's (former) room, and we took Buffy out for a walk.
I took my walking sticks and Rachel held the leash and the poop bag, and we walked the two-mile walk through the cemetary and past the park. It was hot, and we were sweating, only for Rachel it was a second layer of sweating over the first, carpet-dusted layer, and then, it was like a miracle! A car passed us as we headed up the last hill to our house, and it was Rich! He was home!
As we got close to our house, he walked down the hill toward us, calling to Buffy, but she was too busy sniffing for mushrooms in the grass, so she didn't hear him until we were really close, and even then, she was hot and tired and didn't get as bouncy as she would have normally, but oh! the happiness!
We cooled off with ice water and air-conditioning, and had some dinner, and then I tried to nap while Rachel finished overhauling Kim's room. When I woke up to come to work, it was beautiful! All of Kim's stuff is put away, there is a big rug from Rachel's old apartment on the floor in there, and it looks great! Oh, and it smells better, too.
So I'm back at work. I haven't heard from Kim at all today and I wanted to know how the first day of classes went, so I called and she sounds really tired. She said she had two classes today and got back late for lunch but Sando went with her to get something to eat, and then tonight she had Family Home Evening, and now she just wants to go to bed. Then she added a couple of items to the list of things she wants me to send, and she said she misses us a little. I should feel a little misty over her, but she sounded pretty crabby, so it made me less sentimental than I probably would be otherwise.
11:27 p.m. - 2007-06-25
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