We are back, and there will be posts galore, but not until I can shed 130 lbs. of clinging girls from my sun-touched arms. In the meantime, I'll share what might be the defining picture of the whole ten-day adventure: The view of Belize from our seats in the airplane.
Yesterday afternoon at pre-school, Victoria burst into flames. Which seemed odd. Today she and her twin are home, heating the TV room with their fevers and asking for hot chocolate with big marshmallows, hold the hot chocolate if you please. The impact of two sick three-year-olds to my day hasn't been that major and I've actually been able to accomplish much that I had intended today, if only you replace "work on the basement" with "self-medicate."
Still, the basement is coming along quite well, despite the fact for almost two months this house hasn't seen 48 consecutive hours without a thermometer going in someone's orifice and coming out with three digits of fun. The walls are up and the floor is stained, and all that is left is for me fill the spaces with hundreds of dollars of stylishly crappy furniture from Ikea, transforming this:
into this:
I took about 30 pictures of the acid-stained floor because 1) I am fairly proud of it and 2) soon I'll never see it again:
You can also see, right next to the imaginary bookshelf, the cat door leading to the furnace room, which is where we keep the litter boxes. It is also, coincidentally, the only room in the house the furnace effectively heats, effusing the entire basement with the gentle hint of warm poop like some kind of Glade plug-in from Hell.
Of course, we'd get the same effect if we heated behind the upstairs couch.
My latest to-do list, a pictorial essay:
Unpack.
Water the Chia Turtle. And re-wire our telephone jack.
Paint.
Unpack.
Shore up the back of the detached garage before it collapses entirely.
Find the rest of the blender.
Unpack. And paint.
Administer 1 tsp of acetaminophen every 4-6 hours to control fever.
Boilers explode. Boilers explode and red-shirted Star Trek extras die. These things I know from watching TV.
Television has never shown a boiler on-screen that did not explode before the episode was up, not even on HBO, and so, ever since I moved to the Northeast, I've been living with the certainty that my boiler was always just an hour away from taking out my whole family. Forty-five minutes if I TiVOed through the commercials. But, it turns out, boilers don't explode. They simply stop.
Now on the outside, there is no noticeable difference between a working boiler and a dead one. They are both an old, scary mass of pipes, gauges, and vents. In fact, the only difference I can tell is that when you are looking at the former, you are probably not wearing seven heavy coats and a bathrobe like I am now.
Yesterday, New Jersey and I had a bit of a love affair. I spent the afternoon driving some old friends up to New York State on their quest to buy an old '66 Mustang they had found on Ebay. The day was cold and as we left the sprawling suburbia that surrounds Manhattan, we found ourselves bobbing over snow-covered hills and curving through rural towns and farmland. Kathryn was at Camilo's house and the twins were sleeping in the back of the van, and by sleeping I mean jabbering incessantly. Still, despite the jabber, it was a great drive, the kind that could get even a guy like me to write a few nice words on the Internet about New Jersey.
And then our boiler broke. And all those nice words were driven from my mind, replaced instead by an argument with my wife over how often we should wake up through the night to make sure our children had not frozen to death. She wanted to set the alarm for every two hours and I wanted it set for every three. Sure the temperature in this old, drafty house could drop significantly in three hours, I conceded, but I didn't think we'd lose all the children in such a short time, just the weak and sick ones. That's nature's way. She eventually won and the rest of the night she and I took turns waking and piling blankets onto our children to keep the icy claws of death at bay.
Now this morning, a repairman is down in the furnace room, tinkering away at the scary mass of pipes, bringing it back to life, and I am up here, all but choking on the fear that he's about to run upstairs and yell GET OUT! GET OUT! IT'S GOING TO BLOW! It doesn't help that he's wearing a red shirt.
A jackhammer is the only tool my wife specifically forbids me to use. I don't know exactly how that rule would be enforced were she to catch me jackhammering, but I do know that I don't want to know. At the very least, the punishment would be swift, mean, and public. It would not surprise me if, at a company party, The Mom were to affect a convincing drunk and loudly announce my need to be called "Cocky McPenis" during sex. Or, of course, she could remain completely sober and simply tell everyone why the jackhammer ban was enacted in the first place. I won't steal her thunder here, but I will say that, if you've ever looked out in your backyard and wondered where, exactly, your main waterline was, I bet me and a jackhammer could find it in just two tries. We'd find your phone line in one.
And let me just pause a moment to tell you that, of all the lines going to your house, the one you are most going to need when a five-foot geyser of water suddenly engulfs both your husband and his rented jackhammer is your phone line.
So for about five years now I've been living under a jackhammer ban, which, it must be said, has not exactly cramped my style. Still, the ban has been taunting me of late because as I write this, I'm paying a guy an extraordinary amount of money to jackhammer the floor of my basement to rubble. And I'm up here, hearing him do it, thinking that it should be me. It should be me down there, taking out the floor, hammering everything I find back into its elemental particles. But no, one little mistake--alright two little mistakes--and all the sudden, I have to hire a contractor.
It's not a money thing, although that is part of it. Mostly it's a pride thing. It gets me right here (and you might not be able to see through the cloud of basement dust that I'm pointing to my chest) when I have to shake the hand of a person who has come to my house to do a job that I could do myself. I shake his hand and then take him around, show him what needs to be done, and halfway through I expect the man to turn me around, pat me on the head and say, "Go back upstairs, little writer-man. Go back upstairs to your baby girls and your laptop. I'm here now and I'll take care of this. No need to wring your little pasty writer hands over this big bad basement floor anymore." And it probably doesn't help that I meet him at the door wearing my wife's baby-blue flowered crocs.
But holy crap are they comfortable.
I have very little left to live for. When I was in my mid-twenties, I put together a list of the things I'd like to do before I died and now, with the new house, the last item can finally be scratched off the list: Own a beer fridge. Down in the basement of this old, drafty home, is an old, drafty fridge that is now stocked, from top to bottom, with bottles of beer. The fact that I spent both time and money doing this may very well collapse what remains of the hollow shell of my marriage, but c'mon, it's a full-sized beer fridge. Full-sized. With beer.
The fridge itself is a bit of a mystery. It was not included in the list of appliances we were to receive with the house, nor is it actually necessary since no room of this house can actually be heated over 40 degrees Fahrenheit to begin with. The old, plaster walls are all freezing to the touch and there are three windows, including one in the master bedroom, with gaps in the panes so large that two people, one inside and one out, could engage in any number of fairly traditional sexual acts with no difficulty whatsoever. Through the one in the living room you could have a threesome.
The old furnace in the basement is no help at all, preferring to spend its time and energy making noise rather than heating. It clamors on and off several times each night, shaking the house with useless clanking, like the ghost of some very, very cold Christmas past.
"Take heed, rise and walk with me."
"Through the window?"
"Are you afraid?"
"But I am a mortal, and liable to fall."
"Then let's go through the one in the living room."
Prior to purchasing this house, our inspector gave us a list of the items we needed to address. Third on the list, between "Front room is attached to main house by a single 2x4 and a dream" and "House is located in New Jersey" was "Master bedroom has no source of heat." We investigated and found the radiator that used to heat the master bedroom was now in the garage, supporting a wall that would apparently come down otherwise. At the time, I justified the lack of heat in the bedroom by assuming that this room must have gotten too hot in the winter and the removal of the heater was to establish a balance with the rest of the house. Now I realize it was because the previous occupants were yeti.
Still, and I type this with mittened fingers, I am happy to be here. For one thing, the house has obscenely beautiful hardwood floors throughout.
And since we haven't any area rugs yet, I now have a use for all those mismatched socks in the twins' sock drawer.
But really it's about the beer fridge. How many people, at the ridiculously young age of 38, can say they've finally completed the list of accomplishments they wrote for themselves way back in their twenties?
Of course, some items on the list were scratched off as technicalities, because I doubt when I wrote "Sleep with blond twins" I had meant for either one of them to be two years old, or for either one of them to have the stomach flu, or for me to be holding a trashcan at the ready.
Still, toddler puke does clean up mightily easy off hardwood floors. Especially when it's frozen.
Over the years I have read many a famous blogger regale readers with witty and charming tales of buying houses and moving, and I have decided one thing: Either they were all full of crap or they all lived a hell of a lot closer to Home Depot than I do.
One can either write about sanding a wall, or one can sand it. Both is not an option.
Midnight has found me, every night this week, paint-splattered, hand-cramped, and exhausted. So exhausted that yesterday the twins couldn't wake me in the morning. At least until Victoria found a screwdriver.
I'm just happy she used the dull end.
