Photo Update

Whew! I've been cleaning like crazy today...because, you see, Miss Tessmacher is coming home!! That's a BIG sigh of relief you just heard from me. Do I enjoy time spent alone? Sure...y'know, I'm an only child and all, so I'm pretty comfortable with "by myself" time. Does the house seem empty and not quite as much like "home" when the good Doctor is missing? OH yeah! So, in preparation for her arrival, I've been cleaning up any last remnants of dust that might have filtered through the house. She was worried about her blood lead levels, and when we saw the obste....obstitri...fuck, the PREGNANCY DOCTOR last week, Tess got tested. (Tess-ted?) Anyway, her levels were fine, which prompts ANOTHER big sigh of relief. Maybe when Tess gets home, I'll present her with this lovely rose that survived the winter:

This was a potted plant that was gifted to Tess by one of her students; we plopped it in the ground, covered it with one of those...styrofoam covers, and waited to see if it would survive. It did, although, strangely, it came up red instead of its previous pink. Anyway. Or, I could present her with THIS, my crowning glory, growing right next to the rose:

MWAHAHAHAHAHA! The Dracunculus finally opened! What you're looking at is a flower in the 24-inch range, atop a hefty 3-ft. tall stalk. YESSSSSS. Just a few short hours later, it looked like this:

If you click on the image to see if full-size, you'll notice that it's surrounded by nasty flies. The stench was so powerful, I could smell "rotting corpse" from our deck, 40 feet away. I just LOVE these things. If you buy them, get 'em from Brecks; all of the ones I bought eventually came up, although a few took a year or two to establish themselves.

Work on the stairway has been progressing, althought I always end the day feeling like I didn't accomplish as much as I'd hoped to. Still, I need to remember that it was only two weeks ago that I first took putty knife to wallpaper, and yesterday I spread around some primer and put the first coat of polyeurethane on the beadboard wall. Here's the wall at the end of stripping:

and, here it is the next day with a coat of finish.

And, HERE is a prime example of why we ALWAYS want to wear safety glasses:

All that smuck on the lenses resulted from an errant piece of stripper-soaked steel wool that went flying out of my hands. Little blobs of Zip-Strip landed on my bare skin, and as I was hurriedly wiping them away I noticed that my vision was fogged. Uh...or, not. Turns out that a couple of blobs *splorped!* onto my glasses...thank the stars I was WEARING glasses! Tess always ribs me about them, referring to them as "Birth Control Glasses", seeing as no one would EVER want to do the nasty with someone wearing these. (All evidence to the contrary...har-har!) But, while an eyepatch might look sexy on Patch (Od's blood, I can't believe I just admitted I watched Days in the late 80s!) or Snake Pliskin (not much better!), in real life I'll take my steely-blues any day. Hey, I haven't almost reached 40 with 20-20 vision just to screw it all up with THIS kind of an accident!

Here's a parting shot which serves as a pretty good summary of my life right now: on the left, you'll see a pile of baby shit. Well...not a LITERAL pile of shit! THAT will come in a few weeks! No, I mean a pile of baby STUFF. Ahem. And, holding center court, is a neat stack of our new oak stairs and risers. Remember a few posts ago, I said that our "stairs" really weren't at all, they're just 1x slabs of pine? Well, THESE babies are the real deal! Hey, maybe we'll manage to eliminate all the sqeaks! THAT would be a nice added bonus! Enjoy.