Dan tells me that he’s been working eighteen hour days on his brand new Tufts contract that will provide him with work for the summer, and then he sends me this picture.

I get up every morning at 5:20 and the first thing I do is surf to movabletype.com and read other blogs. Many are extraordinary in content and design but far too many are self-indulgent online diaries with insipid descriptions of daily events. The first one I read this morning described getting up and reading other blogs.
Insulating is by far the worst part of a job. Worse than the initial demo, foundation digging, or even what is about to come, blueboard hanging.
Itchy inhaled glass fibers in an enclosed, unventilated space. Iíd rather drink Draino; the end would come sooner.
I lied to Matt and Robby, I told them this was going to be easy and weíd be done in half a day. It was difficult and it took us almost all day. And, I was grouchy, I heard nothing they said, and in spite of their usual good work, could only see their mistakes.
On our drive home, I relaxed, while the boys planned their showers. After Matt took his, he went to bed. I donít expect to see him until tomorrow.
We passed our wiring, and rough inpections and today we’ll pass the insulation inspection.
The building inpector, who runs into far too many builders clueless about alternatives to wood, wished others could see Adam’s creative tie rod design.

Update: Chris from Trusty Transport called from Pennsylvania to say he had Matt’s BMW and would arrive in Acton sometime this morning. Our sketchy plan is that he’ll drop the car somewhere near the Rt 2 exit, and with Matt at the wheel, I’ll tow it home.

Insulation is in and the boys have changed from their long sleeves. All that is left is stappling the plastic vapor barrier.

Certainteed is yellow, Owens Corning, pink.


Mark Garabedian painting the outside.

Iím not sure it was entirely coincidental, but this site was sent by someone related to me.
http://www.thingsmygirlfriendandihavearguedabout.com/

Random samples:

We’re staying at a German friend’s flat in Berlin and he brings out the photo album, as people do when conversational desperation has set in. It’s largely pictures of a holiday he went on with Margret and a few friends several years previously. And consists pretty much entirely of shots of Margret naked. ‘Hah! So, here’s another photo of your girlfriend nude! Good breasts, no?’ I sat on the sofa for hours of this – I think I actually bit through my tongue at one point. Fortunately, though, everything turned out all right because Margret, me and one careful and considered exchange of views revealed it was, ‘…just (my) hang-up.’ Great. I’m sooooo English, apparently.

Margret flooded the kitchen last week. Turned the taps on, put the plug in the sink, and utterly forgot about it (because she’d come upstairs and we’d got involved in an unrelated argument). She goes back downstairs, opens the door and – whoosh – it’s Sea World. The interesting thing about this is, if I’d flooded the kitchen, it would have been a bellowing, ‘You’ve flooded the kitchen, you idiot!’ and then she’d have done that thing where I curl up in a ball, trying to protect my head, and she kicks me repeatedly in the kidneys. As it was, however, there’s a shout, I run downstairs and stand for a beat in the doorway – taking in the scene, waves lapping gently at my ankles – and she turns round and roars, ‘Well, help me then – can’t you see I’ve flooded the kitchen, you idiot?’

Margret’s four-hundred-and-fifty-second most annoying habit is to stealthily turn off the central heating (then light the gas fire in the room she’s in, natch). I’ll suddenly notice that, sitting typing at the keyboard, I can see my own breath while from the bedroom one of the kids will call out, ‘Papa, I can’t feel my legs…’ And I’ll shiver down the stairs to find the central heating set to ‘Summer/Hypothermia/Cryogenic Suspension,’ and Margret in the living room watching the TV in a door frame warping furnace.

Our sink is blue and we’re not talking about it. It happened over a week ago; I was leaning over the sink, brushing my teeth, when I noticed that there was a sort of lazuline patina that had seeped over most of the surface. Margret hasn’t mentioned anything about this. Why she hasn’t is that she’s obviously tried to clean the sink with, well, I don’t know, some fluid used for stripping entrenched cerriped colonies from the hulls of submarines or something (they were probably offering three bottles of the stuff for the price of two at Aldi). She is waiting for me to mention it. But I am a wily fox, and will be doing nothing of the sort. I’m no wet-behind-the-ears, naive youth anymore, not by a looooong way, and I can perfectly see the spiked pit the seemingly innocent words, ‘Did you know the sink’s blue’ are covering. It would go – precisely – like this:
Me: Did you know the sink’s blue?
Margret: Yes. I did. I used a jungle exfoliant produced by the Taiwanese military to clean it, and it discoloured the surface.
Me: Oooooooo. K.
Margret: Well maybe, just maybe, if you cleaned the sink once in a while…
You see what she did there? Now I’m facing a whole day of ‘When did you last…?’ Well, not this canny fellow – not this time, my friends.
Our sink is blue and we’re not talking about it.

Margret thinks I’m vain because… I use a mirror when I shave. During this argument in the bathroom – our fourth most popular location for arguments, it will delight and charm you to learn – Margret proved that shaving with a mirror could only be seen as outrageous narcissism by saying, ‘None of the other men I’ve been with,’ (my, but it’s all I can do to stop myself hugging her when she begins sentences like that) ‘None of the other men I’ve been with used a mirror to shave.’
‘Ha! Difficult to check up on that, isn’t it? As all the other men you’ve been with can now only communicate by blinking their eyes!’ I said. Much later. When Margret had left the house.