The Crabby Side

Lest you think it is all sweetness and light here in our mountain house, let me confess that I woke up on the crabby side of the bed yesterday.  By the mid-afternoon, when I had worked my way out of my crabbiness (or waited long enough for the crabby tide to ebb/crest), my spouse was a bit grouchy.  We went to bed early, but then he woke up at 2:00 fretting about the unfinished state of home repairs, and we both got up for a bit.

Our house is lacking some key interior walls--key not in the sense of being necessary for structural integrity, but key to privacy and sound/light control.  In other words, sound travels and the light from TV and lamps travels, so if my spouse is up watching TV because he can't sleep, so am I.  

In an ideal world, we'd get some walls up before my classes start at the end of August.  I will have class three nights a week, which is a lot of keeping quiet in the other room time, if the walls aren't up.

But in happier news, the countertops are supposed to arrive tomorrow to be installed here.  When we ripped out the kitchen in early May--literally, we ripped it out with hammers and other implements of destruction--I didn't think it would take this long to get a functioning kitchen back.

Please don't let the same thing be true of the laundry room!

In some ways, we're lucky.  When the person came to measure for the countertops, he seemed to say we'd be lucky if we got them before September.  We're getting a manufactured product--it's not like we're waiting for the granite to be mined from Africa and shipped over the ocean.  Sigh.

Increasing my unease is the return of wildflower smoke, the hazy skies.  I don't smell smoke in the air, but I do wonder if my eyes are scratchy because of it.  It's been a strange summer of record breaking heat (not here, thank goodness) and smoke that ebbs and flows.

Is this the summer that finally convinces people of the reality of climate change?  Not likely. With each new record smashed, year after year, it's hard to imagine what it will take to convince the skeptics among us.

It's good to remember that we escaped from a house that was threatened by climate change in much more immediate ways than this one.  It's good to remember that we can do repairs and upgrades that are likely to last our lifetime and not be swept away in the next flooding event.  That's something we couldn't say in South Florida.