Sunday morning.
8:00 am.
Doorbell.†
No, no, no... wait. Let's get some background here:
Four weeks ago, I had a notice on my door, along with a release,‡ so someone could fix my deck railings,§ which look like a ramshackle country sheep fence.¶
"You'll have to be there for the first four hours so they can do some tests for leakage in the garage and house."
"Do your crews work weekends? I'd rather not missing any work if I can help it."
"No. NO weekends. NEVER. Idiot! Why would you even ask such a thing? Barbarian! Fascist!"#
So we agreed on Monday the 12th.††
You know where this is going.
In a spectacular, bruising, bloodying, life-sized game of Patio Furniture Tetris, I loaded out the deck and rendered my dining room useless for the next several days.
I'm pretty sure Manny and the Snow Removers do decks in the warmer months.
And I did more before 9:00 am than I had ever intended to do all day.‡‡
†FOOTNOTE (crossed): Preceded by many, many backup signals. I hate backup signals.
‡FOOTNOTE (double-crossed): Which I mention because I'd like to bitch about it as long as I'm bitching. Y'know, as an efficiency measure. I rewrote the release because it essentially said, "You agree to let our people in your house, now and forever, for the purpose of fixing, inspecting, maintaining bits of the house with no date or time restrictions and you agree to hold them harmless for any and all breakage or damage." I have finally discovered the practical application of being a Landman.
§FOOTNOTE (swerved): It was supposed to be fixed before I moved in. Then, after three years of asking, they let me know they weren't going to fix anything because the HOA was suing the builder for such things as wildly substandard deck rails and they didn't want to pay for anything the builders should pay for. Fortunately (since the giant set of patio furniture wasn't enough, then the planters weren't enough), the compost barrel was finally enough to trigger Murphy's Law so I could move the maximum amount of ungainly stuff into the house.
¶FOOTNOTE (paragraphed): Great for a quaint rural sheep farm. Not so great for an urban townhouse.
#FOOTNOTE (pounded): OK, her mouth may have said, "Oh, no, I'm sorry, we don't work weekends," but I'm sure her eyes said "Fascist!"
††FOOTNOTE (ddouble-ccrossed): i.e. - tomorrow, but most notably not today.
‡‡FOOTNOTE (doubble-crossssed): Hopefully getting out of Kim's doghouse in the beginning of a misery-loves-company trend.
4 comments:
Kim's doghouse can be a harsh, petty place. . . Did you see "Labyrinth?"
Crapple Crapsticks! I had those for dessert last night.
Uhm . . . you had to move a compost barrel into your house?
*shudder*
Are you going Oubliette on me, Kim? (p.s. -- Yes! Yes I did see Labyrinth! I'm guessing eleventy-thousand times. I own the DVD.)
Did you get the carmel kind or the red ant version, Moo?
Not to worry, Nathan my shuddering friend, said compost bin has never been used. You could store food in it, it's so clean.
Actually, given the stake Murphy has in this, I'm surprised they didn't wait until I had 26 pounds of rotting stuff in the thing before they told me I had to move it.
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