January 8, 2007

When we made the decision that I could go back to school full-time, one of the considerations was that the on-line spending had to come to a stop. I could no longer go wild on ebay and would no longer be able to enjoy the high one gets from a daily UPS visit.

Apparently the new rule applies to only one of us because Earl had two packages arrive today.

The first package was from KitchenAid. It’s a cozy cover for a our “classic mixer”. It does wonders at keeping our mixer free from schmutz and complimenting our kitchen décor. It gives one a warm, domestic feeling.

The other package contained a labeling system for the clothes closet. Earl cleaned his closet out a couple of days ago and organized everything into sections. The long sleeved dress shirts go in one part, the jeans go in another, etc. In an effort to keep things neat and tidy after the houseboy (me) does the laundry, he now has labels that instruct me where to hang what. He even has a label for “empty hangers”.

He has dashed one of my two favorite household pasttimes as I now will no longer have to play the “find the hangers” game in his closet. By the way, the other favorite pasttime is called “bang my head on the top of the oven while I clean it.”

Keeping time with the latest trends, the labels come in both an English and Spanish version. Since we are on a budget due to my struggling student status, I’ve been informed that my closet will be organized in Spanish.

Olé.

Our cat Tom is freaked out because there’s a stranger in our house this week. He keeps running up to me and looking at me with the “are you going to do something about this?” look in his eyes. Tomorrow he’ll probably start clawing me.

The reason we have a stranger in our house is because we’re having the walls in our basement built, along with a few other odds and ends that needed to be done. When the project is completed, Earl and I will be moving our offices into the basement so that the spare bedrooms can be spare bedrooms again. The recording studio is also being moved into the basement. I’m looking forward to the new “play space”.

The nice thing about this project is that my family’s contracting business is doing the work. It’s a bit of a drive for them but Earl and I both felt it was best to have someone that we know will do a good job doing the work.

The few odds and ends that needed to be completed included the hot tub leaking into the garage and spackling the walls in the downstairs bathroom and laundry room where the owner discovered he didn’t put any joint compound on the plumbing before he sealed the walls up. There’s a trap door under the guest room toilet that was never made to “look pretty”, but that’s been taken care of now.

I swear that if Earl and I ever move again we’re going to build a house from the ground up so that we know what is going where and how it’s getting put there. George (the contractor) and I discovered today that for some unexplicable reason our hot tub drains away from the main plumbing of the house, where it does a loop over the garage, dumps through a trap that can only be accessed by removing the floor under the walk-in closet in the master bath (I don’t know why we have a walk-in closet in the master bath, so don’t ask), and then goes back to where it was suppose to go in the first place. This little loopity-loop was leaking because there was apparently no joint compound on the pipe fittings.

Oy.

George fixed the problem and we made sure everything was nice and dry before he put the new trap door in the garage ceiling. It’s next to the other trap door that the previous owner’s put in when the toilet leaked into the garage a number of years ago.

Tomorrow he starts with the basement walls. Home improvement can be exciting.