Out of Hibernation

So, we finished painting the kitchen this weekend. This was the paint job that we started the weekend before football season began. It's amazing what I can get done now that the games are over (except for the big game).

Apparently, every man in South Florida did the same thing this weekend. I'm guessing this based on the Home Depot experience on Saturday. Looking around at all the faces behind the shopping carts blocking my aisle, I saw mass confusion. I saw the zombie-like stares of men who woke up and realized that there would be no football this weekend. Some cosmic puppeteer turned on the giant idiot-magnet at Home Depot and there we all were, like a huge flock of moths flying toward the hypnotic power of the paint-shaking machine. Dropcloths were selling like hotcakes. Next door at Denny's, hotcakes were selling like dropcloths. It was suburban synergy at its finest.

While we were there, we bought a light fixture to replace the ugly chandelier in our unnamed room. It's sort of an extension on our living room, but we don't know what to call it. We've been calling it the L-shaped room since we moved in, but hopefully Bill Gates can give us a better name whenever he decides to name the decade. Other than putting the Christmas tree in there, the only other purpose of this room, as far as I can tell, was for me to hit my head twice- daily on the ugly chandelier. Well, now it's gone. I'm proud to say that I successfully changed it out and it works. The best news: I wasn't electrocuted, and we made it through the first night without anything catching on fire as a result of my amateur electrical work. Now, of course, I need to change every light fixture or ceiling fan in the house because they're either ugly, or I hit my head on them, or both.

With each new project, I've noticed that the frequency of my grunting is increasing. I'm not sure when I started grunting. My grandfather used to grunt a lot, and I always found it amusing. I'll have to ask my grandmother when this started, because I've already begun developing a fairly large vocabulary based solely on grunting. I have specific grunts for the following words or phrases: "yes", "no", "I don't care", "thank you", "let's get out of here" (I used this one at Home Depot), "I missed a spot", "I dripped on the molding", "my back hurts", "I held my arm up too long before I realized I was hurting myself". I now consider myself officially bilingual.

One more football game, and then it's back to weekend home improvement until late August. Then, like a large grizzly bear, I shall slip back into my football coma for four more months until the circle of life comes back around.

Tomorrow: The 2006 State of the Undaground Address