Days of the Bachelor

Yesenia's heading south - not to Puerto Rico (her usual destination), but to visit her sister in North Carolina, the proud mother of a 4-week-old boy. Every time she goes away - in addition to taking a piece of me with her - I get this idea in my head that I have to make some radical positive change to the house before she returns. Clean something, fix something, paint something, etc. Not sure why that is. I guess I feel like I can fool her into thinking the place is better than she remembers?

At any rate, seeing as how she's only going to be gone for - let's see - six days, there's not really a whole lot of stuff I can do in that window of a deep, structural nature, so cleaning is the order of the day. I'm thinking that the place to finally get it will be my drawing room upstairs, which is the current home to the ever-dwindling pile of roaming crap that's taken up residence in each second-floor room at some point since we moved in. Right now, it's small enough for Grover Norquist to drown it in a bathtub, but the final dealing with it requires some filing and fiddling around down in the basement (where all of the stuff will end up), so there's a few hours of prep before it can go anywhere.

I still need to do a little plastering and painting in the drawing room once that stuff is gone, but that's a project for another time (for when we have more funds available to throw at inessential repairs). The biggest issue in there is my constant inability to install outlet and switch boxes flush with the wall - the new outlet and switches are either set back a half inch of jutting forward the same. Seems like such a small distance, but it may as well be a mile for how lousy it looks. Of course, that's the type of thing that requires shutting off the power, pulling out the box, likely disconnecting all the wires and redoing it all, so you can see why I'm just thinking of seeing how well I can feather out the plaster, in this case.

D.