Wednesday, October 22, 2008

A reconstructive day

On Monday, I spent the morning in my usual pre-work do-nothing-whatever mode, so as to conserve my energy for the upcoming ordeal of work. I lay about, knitted a bit, read a bit, prepared my work lunch, and then, thanks be to God, I looked at my calendar to check on something else. To my surprise, I was not scheduled to work at all that day, but rather, the next. Since I was firmly in do-nothing mode, and hadn’t planned anything for the afternoon or evening, I am afraid that I stayed in that mode for the rest of the day. Then on Tuesday, since I really was scheduled to work, I had to be in do-nothing mode yet again. Work was trying, and I had a headache -- was work trying because of the headache, or was the headache because work was trying? One cannot say! In any case, the headache was still there this morning. I didn’t have any real projects planned, other than more of the odious phone calls regarding Tom’s estate, and I feared that I would be unable to flog myself into any sort of activity yet again. However, I strove womanfully, and, to my surprise, I succeeded. There was a terrible hole in the wall in our sitting room, put there by the heater men, maybe two years ago. Rebecca covered the hole with cardboard and duck tape, and I managed to ignore it most of the time. Sadly, the prospect of fixing it was more unpleasant than the prospect of averting my eyes and pretending it wasn’t there. John, who has been helping me get some fixing up done, felt that the hole was something too horrible to ignore, and so he fixed it, but it still remained to be painted. The can of paint has been sitting next to the former hole for several weeks, just waiting to be used. Well, I decided that today would be the day, and forced myself into action. The worst of it is collecting the tools and materials, and once I did that, I was on a roll. Like so many of those tasks one puts off and off and off, it was far less a chore than anticipated, and putting my pictures up again after so long, made me quite happy. There is no “before” picture, because, as I said, I was in denial about it, and one can’t deny what has been photographically documented, so one carefully does not document it, but here is the “after” picture.
Now there is a new hole in the bathroom wall where we are trying, not too successfully to put up a new vanity. It is on its way to the “avert eyes and ignore list”, but it is harder to ignore when you have to stare at it every time you use the facilities.

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