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The waves were good today, but I didn’t get a chance to check them out.  I thought about going right after work, but between waiting on an important message from a client and needing to get some work done around the house, I opted to try for tomorrow morning.  Michael has to work at 10:00, so we’re meeting on Wrightsville Beach at about 6:45 so we can be in the water by 7:00 and have time for a nice session.

So what happened around the house?  Well, first I took care of the drawers from the dresser we moved from the office to the nursery.  I had a bunch of stuff in the drawers- paper (both printer and photo), blank CDs, cases of CDs (musical and data), printer cartridges, and so forth.  Most of it was put on a book shelf we moved down to the office from the nursery.

Amanda’s co-worker, Billy Supplee, came over shortly after he finished work and helped me pull up the carpet and the padding for the carpet in the nursery then cart it to his truck and finally toss it in a dumpster at his apartment complex.  The help was greatly appreciated.  To show my thanks I knocked over his Chick-Fil-A milkshake that Amanda had picked up.  (She got one for both of us on her way home from work.)

After that I spent time pulling up carpet padding staples with pliers while Amanda thought about painting the now-empty dresser drawers.  She ended up feeling a little weak so she ate some dinner and dutifully removed some episodes of Days of Our Lives from the DVR instead.

Next I borrowed a small crowbar from Dave Narron and plied up all the tackboards then sanded down some bad and smelly spots on the floor.  Between the Nature’s Miracle and the vinegar I sprayed on those spots, hopefully they’ll be fine.

By the time all this was done Amanda was tired and ready to go to bed.  Before getting ready she did a nice job of conveying and transferring her stress unto me.  I told her that since her mom was coming tomorrow to paint some more, I was going to hold off on putting down the tile primer since we didn’t know how long it took to dry.  We called Lowe’s and discovered that it takes about an hour.  Even so, I said, I thought it would be better to hold off, because even if I put the primer down tonight I wouldn’t have time to put down the tiles before her mom got here if I was going to go surfing in the morning, and if I wanted to go surfing with her brother I’d have to go early, and I was definitely going to go tomorrow since I didn’t go today.

Amanda’s concern was just that it wouldn’t get done this weekend, but I assured her it would.  I figure it will take me no more than half an hour to put down the primer then most of the rest of the work is laying down one foot by one foot squares and just making sure they’re straight.  Until we get to the edges of the floor, that should go pretty fast.  I figure at the most, working by myself, it’ll take three hours, and I’m really thinking that’s a stretch.  If Nick Warkentien is able to help me, obviously you divide that in half.  (Although since I’m moving the work to Sunday he might not be able to.)

The second thing Amanda was stressing about was the clutter in the house right now.  Item 2a is the cupboard we keep the dishes in.  It’s out a few feet from the wall between the couch and the kitchen (normally against the wall), but I’m waiting on some specially cut threshold and shoe molding from her dad before I can finish it.  We decided not to move it back this past weekend figuring we’d have the rest of the pieces in place soon enough and, since the thing is heavy and carries great risk of scatching the bamboo floor beneath it, we were going to hold off on it.

I talked to Phil and he said he’d have the pieces next time he comes down, so I told her we’d get the cupboard moved back this weekend.

Item 2b is all the mess in our bedroom.  In order to pull up the carpet from the nursery we had to move everything in there out, and the most convenient place to put it was in the room next to it, which was our room.  Yes, it’s hard to walk through there right now, but it’ll be fine once the tile is down.  Of course, that’s part of the reason she was stressing out about the tile getting done and therefore ties back in to item 1.

Anyway, that was my night.  No real breaks, just work, work, work.  I’m getting up early tomorrow morning, but I figure I’ll have time to take a nap or something in the early afternoon, which will be nice.

Tired and shagged out from a prolonged squawk,

Zach Dotsey