The Big Door Theory Part 2

Posted on | April 22, 2012 | No Comments

And then came the installation of the door handles. I, cocksure since I had fairly easily installed two other handles, allotted 15 minutes to each of the other two to be installed. An hour later I was still on the first.

Bloody complicated little contraptions, door handles. But the thing that got me wasn’t the complexity of it (as long as all those bits work, I don’t really care how), but two simple screws which were to hold the front and back handles together, connecting them through the round hole in the door. I screwed the screws in, and they weren’t for going in all the way. So I worked up a sweat and forcefully screwed a little more.

Forcing is never good in DIY, is it? If you’re forcing, you’re liable to break it, or the chances are it wasn’t meant to go in there in the first place. I was getting nowhere fast with these two screws. They resisted.

After several more attempts I uttered a loud groan of defeat, flung the screwdriver on the floor, and threw myself onto my bed.

Hubby to the rescue… or so I thought. Turns out I forced so much that the screws took the insides out of the little things they were being screwed into. There was nothing for it but to pull the whole handle contraption, switch to the other door handle that was still sitting unsullied in its packet, and start from scratch.

Except for me, time had run out. This was Saturday night, you see. My Girls’ Night In was fast approaching. And so the damn Door Handle Project still sits in pieces.

There is a reason it wasn’t finished today, and that reason was Sweetpea’s 11th birthday party. For the last two years I’ve told her she’s too old for having a gaggle of girls round for a party, and to be happy with a cinema outing and ice cream. This year I gave in. The fact that she proposed a Lady Gaga themed party had a lot to do with it (how could I resist?)

Lady Gaga, definitely NOT Sweetpea

She went all out, because she is my little actress-in-the-making and because, like her mum, she loves a good party.

There was an electric blue wig, shimmery short dress she’s had since she was 6 (so thus now very short) and a pair of my platform sandals. There was the requisite gaggle of girls, Bad Romance et al blaring at high volume, and lots of giggling and screaming. But it was blissfully hands-off for me, since (a) Sweetpea had managed and prepared the whole thing and (b) we secluded them in the guest house (ha!).

And so I got to chill and read the New York Times fairly uninterrupted. Yeh, I know. There was a door handle I could have turned my attention to. But I’m sorry, I couldn’t face it.

The Big Door Theory

Posted on | April 18, 2012 | No Comments

An impromptu DIY date night. (Yeh, remember them? It’s been a while.) We had had doors idly leaning against a wall on our patio for too long. Hubby said it was time to install them.

(Yeh, kind of ironic, no? He’s not exactly swift with his own DIY projects, my Hubby.)

Why had I put off finishing/installing that bedroom door of ours? Because I kept thinking of better things to do than hammering and chiseling space for hinges.

But Hubby was quick, oh yes he was. A master of the tools of the trade, he’d carved the necessary ‘holes’ within minutes.

Me: “Have you done this before?”

Him: “Of course.” Well yes of course. Stupid me.

Me: “When?” Said because in the 21 years we’ve known each other I do not remember him ever having handled a hammer and chisel.

Him: “At school.” School meaning High School, and he left there at 16. So it’s been a loooong time. And yet he was expert. B*****d.

Oh but rewind, rewind! It didn’t actually start there. It started with Hubby opening and closing the bathroom door and saying we had to sort that out first: already hung, but, he said, hung wrong because it didn’t close. I pointed out that it did. You just pulled on the handle and then locked it from the inside. Not good enough, said Hubby. It should close without having to be locked. Why?????

Oh yeah, I know why. Cos my Hubby, the engineer, the brilliant scientist, can’t help himself. He puts Sheldon to shame.

Sheldon from The Big Bang Theory is my new crush. Wonder why I’m loving the guy so much. P.S. I got my way. The bathroom door still only closes when you lock it. Which is fine, just fine, with me.

Meet Gail Roberts

Posted on | April 9, 2012 | No Comments

Sweet Sweetpea

Posted on | April 7, 2012 | No Comments

Sweepea, the other day: “Me and my friends have decided on the ideal husband.”

Me: “Oh yeah? Do tell.”

I am expecting a description of a mash-up of Johnny Depp (yes, the guy gets the tween vote as well as the middle-aged-mother vote), Nick Jonas, and Robert Pattison. But no.

She: “A guy with a gay brother. It’s brilliant. That way you get the guy you want to marry, and you get a guy who loves shopping and theatre as well!”

Yes it is brilliant, and it’s heartwarming to me. Bravo to our younger generation for being so gay-aware, and to pop culture for helping to make it so.

Bravo to Kurt from Glee, by far Sweetpea’s and my favorite character of the show. Bravo to HGTV and its camp designers; Sweetpea is as obsessed with HGTV as she is all her tweenie Nickelodeon shows. (And a private bravo to my two closest sets of male gay friends, whose relationships have been more stable than any hetero partnerships I know of.)

Have I shared recently just how much I’m loving my daughter? Five days in New York with my 10-year-old could have been wearing, annoying, a little boring even. But no. This is a kid who has one foot in teenagerhood, and therefore loves acting grown-up (she shops, she eats out, she’s damn good at the make-up), the other foot in girlhood, and therefore loves to be a child (she swings in the park, she buys a fluffy Eeyore, she jumps up and down with excitement). She loves writing and theatre and art. Yet she’s happy, too, spending an evening lying in bed with mum, watching a rented film on the hotel TV, and eating M&M’s.

“That’s it,” she declared in New York, shortly after visiting the Lincoln Center and me telling her all about Juilliard. “I’m going to live here, and go to to college there.”

I am praying that by the time she reaches 18 and heads off to college she won’t be sick of me, or so embarrassed by me that she gently turns down my frequent (and oh yes, they will be frequent) requests to visit her in the city - whatever city that might be –  so that we can shop, eat, catch shows and watch films and eat sweeties. By then she may have a few male gay friends to help her with a lot of it. She does want to be an actress, after all.

knackered.com*

Posted on | April 2, 2012 | No Comments

* Knackered being a British term for very, very tired.

Today was Day 2 of my “oh-God-if-I-don’t-do-something-drastic-soon-I will-become-the-size-of-a-house” regime, one which entails lots of fruits and vegetables, lots less bread, more exercise, and missing Cadbury’s Mini Eggs like mad.

I got two jump starts last night. One was that Hubby took so long to prepare the requested salmon fillet and salad that I could only eat half of it. I don’t do well with large meals at 9 o’clock at night. The other was Betty Francis (formerly Betty Draper) on Mad Men. How laughable was all that padding, and the body double they had when she got out the bath? For those not familiar with the show, Betty has, in her words to her doctor, “put on a few pounds”. But far more than a few. Times that few by twenty and you’re just about there.

“For middle-aged women, it gets easier to gain weight and harder to lose it, Mrs Francis,” said the doc not-very-helpfully.

I felt for her, even if it is just prosthetics. I, like Betty, am sadly looking at all my lovely summer dresses and wondering just what it will take to get into them again. And if you’ve ever spent more than an hour in Tucson, Arizona in the summer you’ll know that dresses are a must. When the mercury hits 100+, the less fabric and the more air circulating, the better.

But back to my being knackered. Today I set my alarm for 5.30 am in order for me to have time to both walk The Mutt and get in a Zumba workout on my Wii before taking the kiddos to school. But the remote controls wouldn’t work. After spending half an hour pressing sync buttons and changing batteries, and wanting to run into the kids’ rooms and shake them and ask what the hell they did to the Wii yesterday (but restraining myself because they were still asleep), I jumped on my bike and huffed around the neighborhood. Huffed because I was in the huff and huffed because I was breathless, because my bike was curiously difficult to ride. That is, compared to yesterday’s bike ride. Yesterday I fairly glided along the paths. Today it felt like I was climbing a San Francisco street battling gale force winds.

Hubby thinks there’s a problem with one of the brakes. I am just sick of so many things needing fixed or not working properly. You have to laugh though, and in some senses it’s helping us be more active. Our TV/media stuff are still arranged for our old sofas, one of which faced the electronics. Now that we have our beautiful sectional (with which I am in big, big lust), that faces a slightly different direction, the remote doesn’t work unless you either hold it up high and slightly angled down, or stand up and walk towards it.

“It’s like the old days,” I said to Hubby tonight, “when you used to have to stand up and walk up to the telly to change channels.”

He wasn’t impressed. But at least it makes us move a bit more.