The Fruits of Labor

Now that I have paid the drug store the equivalent of the yearly operating budget of a small European country, I have retrieved all my film and am confronted with the photographic evidence of my organizational transgressions. Shame on me, I look through the envelopes at pictures of Christmas concerts, first steps and family gatherings long past and my resolve is stiffened, I will conquer my own chaos and perhaps branch out to assist others in their own personal journeys toward serenity. That could be the key to my first million! A home-based business, I come in and teach the lost and suffering souls how to achieve Nirvana by alphabetizing their CD collections and perfecting their household’s entire organizational structure. But back to me, it’s with more than a little dismay that I realize one of the envelopes of photos include a friend’s wedding and he and his delighted looking bride in the photographs have been divorced for a year and a half. I’m thinking I won’t be forwarding them the second set of prints I ordered. For now these pictures will join their neglected brethren in the teetering pile of shoeboxes currently living in the guest room. I promise, I’ll come back for you! I swear can hear them calling “Come back, Shane!” as I shut the door.

My dear friend Eden called from Miami today and announced that she saw on CNN this morning that we were eighty degrees below zero with the wind chill and that she’s roughly one hundred and sixty degrees warmer at her house and is going swimming in the back yard this afternoon. There’s really only one appropriate response to a statement like this: “Bite Me” and hang up the phone. She'll get hers, though...hurricane season isn't that far away.

My reward for sticking with this project for more than a few days arrived yesterday. The fountain for the Zen bedroom I've been bidding for on Ebay is here! It's currently filling our bedroom with the gentle murmur of water falling over rocks in a riverbed. It took some doing to get to this point as the phrase “some assembly required” came into play, and by “some” they actually meant “you might as well take a welding class, apprentice to a plumber and grow your own bamboo, it’ll be less time-consuming”, bastards. Both cats and the dog seem quite interested in the new addition to our room but they’ll leave it alone once the newness wears off, right?
Upon opening the box yesterday, I realized with a sinking heart that this was a project that would have to wait for the clear light of day before proceeding and there was no way I was getting it put together before bed last night. Looking at the list of tools needed to assemble this wonder of engineering, it called for a 6mm metric nut driver and a T9 bit Torx screwdriver. Of these, I understood the word “nut” and the word “screwdriver”, I was in over my head upon opening the box. Oh boy. The decision was made to tackle this one anew in the morning. There are certain benefits to living in a farming based area, those farm boys have tools the rest of the world couldn’t begin to imagine and hidden stores of ingenuity that can save your sanity in times like this. A couple of calls to Dan’s buddies and soon we had the resources needed to assemble the calm-inducing, inner-peace bringing bit of the Far East I found on Ebay. So the inner peace and Zen-like calm was hard won, Dan and I have decided that we can work on separate projects in the same room but never on the same project together…ever again. If he’d just do things the way I think they should be done, it would have been hunky-dory, but nooooooo, he has to be all instruction-reading, direction-following and I know he does it just to piss me off.