huh. ummm . . . Well, I met w the plumber who'll be bashing up the garage floor and part of the driveway and then fixing the pipes to the water tank and any leaks from there on out . . . though not technically necessary, I added a new toilet to the list. I feel freaked out by used toilets, though obviously every toilet in a pre-exiting home is used eh? But it's like panties from the thrift store, I just can't go there. The plumber says, You want to pick one, or have us do it? O in this case, with so much going on, can you just pick something reasonable? He looks me up and down, says, "I have a nice Japanese model that'll be perfect." His 20-something grandson, who is giving me a milf vibe big enough for the real estate agent to joke about once they've left, cracks up. And I guess that's how a plumber checks out your ass, vis a vis their toilet sensibilities.
As FaintedInk would say, the house is making me look cuter I suppose. To the average person maybe not, but to the inspectors and workmen . . . every time that I've needed a mechanical assessment, it ends in some kind of "wow" over TH that splashes a little over onto me. This old plumber guy didn't even bother much with what I needed to get done, he just kept ogling the copper and saying things like "You're WORRIED? You can spend a few hundred dollars because this is THOUSANDS to replumb a house every inch in copper like this" bla bla. TH seems more and more to have the personality of Russian minor royalty in hiding since the coup.
Meanwhile, we finished work on Big Red yesterday. I got up on a ladder outside OJ's kitchen window, which is my way of nagging. I just start doing the thing you're supposed to be doing. And often, I'm gonna do a bad job of it (cz if I could actually do it myselps, I wouldn't have asked you in the first place) and/or break my neck. So that did it, and she called Dan over and we all scraped and painted all day, then I imposed a playdate on us all. Got some wine, food, put on music, got out some old magazines I had put aside for a collage project someday, and we made collages. RULE: no talking about any of the things that have been making us anxious, in each our own cases, no house talk no relationshipping no 'processing' - just CHILL. I've never hung out w them this way before, in my own space of what would normally be alone-time, not going to do anything or see any movie, just concentrating on being. The find of the night was an article about siamese twins Masha and Dasha, who each could control one of their legs. She just could not stop reading it aloud, horrified and fascinated. I keep telling her that though she insists that she "just doesn't find her sister very interesting", psychologically speaking being born a twin to a disabled sister is probably a thing. Might be more important than, say, the fact that her mother never attended her away-meets for track&field. She pointed to the more cognizant looking twin in the picture, ie the one not smiling, and said "Imagine being that one." Dan said, "Yeah, imagine that." (long pause)
The best collages of the night were Dan's:
