One more week frittered away…

…three more weeks left to fritter.

• One seriously demoralizing day this week. We’ve been installing new fixed portlights (windows, to you land-based folks), as the old ones were what we call WINOs–Windows In Name Only. Michu’s been fabricating them in the garage from a large sheet of acrylic, and the installation of the first one went really smoothly. When we went to glue in the second window, though, Michu noticed two hairline cracks on one of the edges. Window ruined. In reality, it meant two additional hours fabricating a new window, and installing it on the next trip; but the psychological blow was HUGE. We were so close to being DONE with one project, and it was going to look awesome, and…no. We were hot, itchy and confident that everything was garbage. We’ve since recovered, but that’s how it’s been going–glorious anticipation quickly followed by crushing defeat. No in-betweens.
  

  

   Windows used to be bolted in; we’ve been trimming out the jagged edges and glueing in the new acrylic. It’s a mess.

• Did you know you can serve your family nachos for dinner? Especially if you call it a Deconstructed Crispy Burrito. Haute.

• 

  I realized that if my husband had worked for me in a restaurant, I would have absolutely fired him. There’s a thing in restaurant work called “working clean”–you know, cleaning up your mess before you move on to the next thing, so your apples don’t taste like onions and the parsley doesn’t get into the ice cream. Michu…has a lot of really amazing qualities. Working clean is not one of them.

• What do unrepentant hippies use to replace the headliner? Natural cork, obviously. The foam backing for the vinyl covering our ceiling and walls has degraded, leaving it hanging, so we’re pulling it off and putting up cork. Cozy, easy(ish) to install, hides all flaws, and–I get to work with contact cement!

  

• We’ve reached the point of having to decline invitations from our lovely friends, which is making us a bit sad. We still have some dinners and parties coming up, but Evil Window Day has made us double down on work.
• The kids have had a week of more “sad” than “excited”. They’ve started asking when specific pieces of furniture are going to exit to the attic–“How about the couch, mom? When is the rocking chair going upstairs?” I’ve still been trying to keep a thin veneer of normalcy around the house, but they know it’s just a ruse. On the bright side, they know they can get away with just about anything at the moment.