Two Ladies in Waiting

I'm ugly.

Yesterday we attempted to fit the contents of our home into one closet, one bathroom, and one kitchen.

The paint and stain cans (so many!) left over from the complete-but-for-touch-ups-entire-unit-painting-project are in the closet.  The robot vacuum is in the bathroom, along with the bottles of wine from the champagne rack.  The crystal is on the bookshelves, the books are on the kitchen counter, the booze from the bar is in the bathroom, the bar is in Robin’s hallway, the Bods is at Tully and Lulu’s abode.  And the bog’s down in the valley-o.

The built-in bookcases are draped from ceiling to floor in sheets — as are all pieces of fabric-covered furniture — in an inevitably fruitless attempt to ward off sawdust.

Yup, all this was in preparation for today — ye olde floor installation day numero uno.  Everything but large pieces of furniture, which we are paying a hefty sum to have the floor man deal with, must be spirited away from the area being floored.  Which is, exactly, the entirety of our place except for the aforementioned bathroom, kitchen and closet.

At one point yesterday, we were on the phone with our dear friend, let’s call her Uni, about our mess o’ stress. 

The conversation:

Meg:  Beef, bellyache, bemoan, bewail.

Uni:  Well, anytime you want me to come over and help with the home improvement stuff.

Meg:  Seriously?

Uni:  Yeah, I mean, I know I don’t seem like that type of lesbian, but I actually am that type of lesbian.

I declined, unwilling to spread the hell. 

Shortly after we got off the phone with Uni, Mo climbed up on a ladder to attempt to open the sliding doors of our little storage area over the closet.  When Mo discovered that she could not get the sliding doors open as they had been painted shut, she came a wee bit undone.  Now, before you think Mo has a low threshold, I remind you that although the Ladies are very much in love, neither of us are impervious to the disquiet of four weeks with our tiny home torn asunder.  I’ve been intermittently snapping at her heels for about two weeks now.  Oh, and the reason she needed to get into the area above the closet was because that’s where we keep the toilet paper.  Which I had just used the last of.

I immediately picked up the phone.

Uni:  Hello?

Meg:  It’s us.  Can we take you up on your offer, like, right now?  The t.p. is painted into the storage area, and Mo needs it.  This is a home improvement 911.

Uni:  I’m grabbing my toolbox and I’ll be right there.

Uni managed to pry the storage thing open, and the t.p. was happily freed.  In addition, she brought over beer and prevented us from killing each other. 

One snippet:

Meg:  You have three Vanity Fair’s in the house.  I want you to throw out two of them.

Mo:  No.

Meg:  Yes.  I have thrown out all of my magazines.

Mo:  What about all your yoga DVDs!  (Yes, Fair Reader, you are correct.  That was indeed a non sequitur by Mo.  But, to be fair, I do have approximately twenty yoga dvs.  Oh, um, and thirty pilates dvds.) 

Mo:  See!  There’s a box of your dvds in that cart right there!

Meg:  That box is in the cart because I am taking them out of here.  Because I am a better person than you are.

I assure you that was a much more civil exchange than that which might have occurred had Uni not been with us. 

After Uni had finished Mission: T.P. Rescue, she tackled a larger project that we also needed completed yesterday.  A few weeks ago I purchased a giant mirror to hang on the back wall of the kitchen.  (This is my attempt to enlarge the kitchen, since we can’t do any actual expansion.  Smoke and mirrors!)  The mirror is very heavy, and its hanging (in our drywall, with the mysterious metal at certain locations behind it) took both patience and skill that neither Mo nor I possess.  Thanks to Uni, it’s up and it’s lovely.

At this point Robin entered the picture.  We shuffled our bar, filled with glassware, down to her unit.  She also brought us a mass of sheets so that we could drape the bookcases, etc.  When she saw me climbing on our exceedingly rickety ladder, she ordered me off of it and prepared to run back to her unit to fetch a much nicer, more OSHA-friendly ladder. 

At this point, Robin overheard Uni and I discussing the state of our curtains.  Now, you must understand, that Robin hates these curtains.  In fact, every time she’s in our unit she finds it difficult to carry on a conversation, so distracted is she by the heinousness of the valances.  Dreadful, are they.  The photo above approximates the style, but imagine them not on a rod but stapled to a board.  A board which was then drilled into our windowsill.  Oh, and the fabric?  I’d call it an “early J.C. Penney” synthetic brocade.  Please attempt to contain your envy.

(There would be pictures of the “before” but you probably have a better guess as to where our camera is than I do.)

Uni is drawn to a challenge.  The only reason the darn drapes are still up is that I’ve never figured out how to get them down.  Even though tackling the curtains was not a necessary agenda item for floor-prep, Uni climbed on various pieces of furniture and determined that a socket wrench with a very tiny head (I’m making up most of these words because I don’t know what I’m talking about) was needed to get them down.  She didn’t have the appropriate size in her Magic Toolbox. 

Well, Robin, seeing an opportunity to ensure that she would never have to gaze upon the curtains again, returned with not only that ladder to prevent my crashing to the earth, but also with a set of ratchet thingies.  In no time flat, we were giddily throwing the curtains into the dumpster and heading off to dinner, dirty and tired.

We stopped off first at Uni’s car so that she could unload the Magic Toolbox before we walked to dinner.  In the back of her Prius was, of all things, a unicycle.  Now, I don’t expect that I know everything about all of our friends, but I did think I would know if one of them rode a unicycle.  She tooled around on it to show off her skills, and, voilà!, Uni’s moniker was born.

Rare friends, rattlin’ friends.