Floored

What the hell is wrong with me? My brain is clearly wired wrong. You know how women are supposed to forget how bad labor was or something so they'll want to have more kids? I think that part of my brain got rerouted to the home improvement portion of my brain.

A_ went out of town on Friday. He's been planning to have a "man weekend" for over a year. It was supposed to be a celebration of finishing law school/passing the bar. Yeah.
So he finally went off to have it. He drove down to Nashville and a friend of his drove up from Florida and they played golf and went out to a pub and all that not-really-exciting-jazz.

I didn't mention to him that while he was gone I planned on replacing our bathroom floor. Our only bathroom.
Our house was built in the early 1930s and is a small bungalow with some great original bits and some horrid horrid not so original bits. The bathroom floor was dirty stained whitish linoleum that had been placed right over tile, so you could see the pattern pressed through it. I pulled up the linoleum to reveal small tiles in two shades of pink and tiny maroon tiles connecting them. I'm pretty sure it was not the original and was actually put in in the 1950s, so I felt not so bad about destroying it.

I somehow thought that I could:
Rip this up on Friday evening
Put down the new tile on Saturday
Grout on Sunday before A got back.

WHY I thought this, I do not know.


This is my floor Saturday night after twelve hours of prying and scraping up tile.


By the time A got home at 3pm on Sunday I had finished popping up all of the tile except around the toilet. The ancient, ancient toilet.


And being as brilliant as I am, I convinced A that if we took the old toilet up I would be able to pop up the rest of the tile, put down the underlayment, set the new tile and pop a brand new toilet on.
I mean, easy peasy, right?

Ergh.

Luckily my office has full bathrooms with showers and fresh towels and toilets where one can pee. (Oh glorious toilets!)
I finally put in the new toilet last night, though using the bathroom was a problem because we couldn't walk on the tile yet.
I am happy to say the tile is now walkable so once I drag everything out of the bathtub, finish laying some edge pieces and grout the whole thing I'll be done!

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Of course...I still have a new bathroom sink in my back closet and I want to rip out the shower surround and retile it...

Testing

Trying to see if this mobile blog thing will work.
One good thing did happen yesterday - we got our new mattress delivered. For months we had been saying that the first thing we would buy when we had money would be a new mattress. Our old one was four years old and was quite nice for the first year or so.
(This came right after the horrible terrible awful disgusting bed bug period of our lives. I now carefully check my bed everywhere I go.)
So this new bed is a memory foam and I think it will take some getting used to but my back already feels better. It's firm and you can't really shift in bed which I tend to do.
Ok. This is enough inane babbling to make one mobile post.
Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry

Fuckshitballs

One of my really good friends just called and told me she has cancer. Non hodgkins lymphoma. She doesn't know anything yet, just that she has it. She goes in to find out what's next tomorrow morning.
We talked for about an hour and the entire time I tried to stay upbeat because she said it was really hard on her when the people she had told so far got emotional and told her she would be okay. So I tried to let her know I was here for her and joked and talked about her boyfriend (who has suddenly decided that he's not sure he can handle being with her and I swear to GOD I might drive to fucking Pennsylvania and rip his puny little balls right off of him). And the whole time I kept thinking - Shit. Am I going to do the cancer equivalent of telling her to just relax? Am I going to make an inappropriate joke and upset her? Why did I just tell her I signed up to the bone marrow registry as though that means a goddamn thing? What the fuck do I say when all I want to do is wail to the Gods that this is NOT OKAY.
Sorry to unload this here, but I had to get it out. I started bawling after we hung up and needed to get out my rage. I'm supposed to go visit in August. We're going to a baseball game. I don't know if there is anything I can do until then. Anyone ever have cancer? Is there something you would have liked to receive in the mail? Stupid things I should refrain from saying? Anything?


Edit: And Michael Jackson is dead? I feel like I am swimming underwater. This day is not real.

Remember me?

I was at a garage sale and bought a motherfucking bumbo seat.

For those of you that are not aware, a bumbo seat is this nifty little seat for zee babies.

I saw this seat in its pristine condition and it was a great deal and the people threw in a really cute dog collar for me to give Charlie's best buddy. My mom asked me why I was buying it and I lied. I told her I had a friend that was looking for one. (And no, I'm not coming back to blogging to tell you that I got knocked up and just haven't told my mom yet.) I just wanted one.

I'm sure there is some psychology term for being in denial and having all that crap you try to suppress come squeezing out the cracks somewhere in your life, but my psych class was a huge 8am lecture so I only showed up for the first class and the final. But whatever that is called, my armchair diagnosis came after I bought this motherfucking bumbo seat.

My last post was all about going down to N-ville and having a kick ass time. And I did, people, I did. I drank like my liver was still 20 and I didn't get enough sleep and I laughed. I met a gazillion amazing people and we talked about their films and art and politics and what a dick W*lliam Shitner was for not staying at the party long enough for anyone to meet him. And while I was down there I didn't think about not having kids.

I got back and was reading blogs and it started to feel like every person in the IF blogosphere was either pregnant or parenting. And as happy as I am for each of those friends, I felt like I had to get away for awhile. I wanted to get back to that mental place where I wasn't thinking about kids.

Yeah. That shit didn't work. So I'm back and I am going to be better than ever. (Hmmm..where have we heard that before? Oh. Right. Last time I came back to blogging after dropping off the face of the earth.) Seriously though. If you're reading this on g00gle reader or something, click over and check out my fancy new blog design from Calliope. She did a kick ass job and now I feel all primped and ready to go again. It will hopefully keep me from buying as much baby stuff at garage sales, though Calliope is getting a nice aqua bumbo seat mailed to her.

Let's catch you up to date:

1. A_ passed the bar, which sadly didn't equal sudden and instant wealth or fancy law job. But he did get a job as an associate professor at a university here in town (not the same one he used to teach at.) It pays decently, but nothing extraordinary. But it will keep us from having to beg my parents for a loan or start dealing crack. If we are careful and save, we should be able to try and get knocked up sometime within the next century. (I'm shooting for a year.) He's doing law on the side, though it's slow going to get started and he's spent more then he has made.

2. I am going to have another part time job next year coaching college speech. It doesn't pay massive amounts of money, but it will be really nice to have a team again. They are all good kids and I love the people I will be working with.

3. Charlie is still the cutest dog ever.

4. We took in the mother cat and four kittehs. I managed to adopt out all of them, which was fantastic. I think they all went to good homes and Fat Fluffy (my favorite kitten) and the mama cat are both with people I am friends with on faceb00k and they have posted great pictures.

5. My convention at work was great, other than the night I drank too much tequila (damn guy poured me a FULL GLASS, what was I supposed to do?), had a run in with two whores who didn't understand that nobody wanted to buy their services, and apparently almost got arrested because I was trying to break up a fight between two of my guys by grabbing them both by the collars and shoving their faces together while I growled at them.

6. I am planning to retile my bathroom floor this weekend while A is having a man weekend. We only have one bathroom, so I am slightly worried that we might go down to 0 if I screw this up.

7. I'm thinking about foster care. There is so much to say here that I can't think of what to write. So I will leave that for another post, because yes bitches, I am back to posting.

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What did I miss while I was gone?