Puffy Pink Clouds of Insulation

It's kind of been funny to have my sister away at camp. Everybody keeps asking me what I did all week, as if I would have accomplished some great important deeds in her absence. Alas, I don't really think that was the case. I watched Casanova with my mom on Sunday, went for lots of walks, cooked nice dinners for us (Baked Chicken and Cheese Enchiladas and Reuben sandwhiches) made iced tea, went to the library a lot, cleaned the whole house, went to Bible study on Wednesday, got most of the clutter in my room back under control and spent lots of time researching for my fantastic honors project. I've been researching like a fiend, or as much like a fiend as I can research, since most of the books I need I have to order through Interlibrary loan and so they won't be coming for about another week, and I'm really afraid they're all going to come at the same time, and then I'll have to read 10 books in 14 days and I think by the time they finally get in it will be almost time for us to leave on our vacation. I'm biting my nails a bit over this one. But that's about all the excitement that's been happening this week.

I feel a great deal of pressure to make a very good blog right now, since I just e-mailed a bunch of people about its existence and so they might be visiting. Company prose, boys and girls, we might have unexpected guests. Anyway, one of the things that happened this week is that we had to clean out our spare room, my mother's former office and my current office, since I'm a very important person with an important project now and my room has no desk and my mother always works at her own office downtown. But there was a former adventure before I made it home with this spare room, involving the washing machine in the room next door, which my sister tried to operate while the hose was disconnected, and it ended up spraying water all over the floor. The water then leaked into the closet of the spare room and caused a most fragant layer of mold to grow on the carpet. So my mom dragged everything out of the closet so we could cut out the old, moldy carpet.

But that's not even the adventure. My mom wanted to get a scrap piece of carpet for the newly denuded floor from our attic, so I pulled down the ceiling hole and up we went. The carpet was tucked away in a space that was off the beaten attic track, in order to get there you had to cross a narrow board that had been placed over a trecherous land mine of puffy pink insulation that concealed the fact that there was nothing beneath you except the brittle drywall of the ceiling. Well, it was across this narrow walk that my mom had committed herself to sojourn. However, there was the additional fact that part of my sister's old bed, the really heavy row of drawers had recently been moved up to that out of the way space. Since it was too long to fit neatly, it hung out and squarely covered the end of that narrow board.

First step, my mom inched her way out onto that flimsy board and reached over this huge, spongy silver pipe kind of thing to push the drawers off to the left. Now they sat only about halfway on the board and teetered precariously as if they wished to tumble off. My mom had to inch over to the right to avoid the drawers and began to teeter herself, so near the edge of the board. I watched in breathless suspense, helpless to give any aid and wondering which catastrophe would strike first, the drawers tumbling off and falling through the ceiling to land in the laundry room, or my mother tumbling off to fall through the ceiling and land in the garage. When the tension was almost too much to bear, I suddenly heard a crack from the board. I shut my eyes and let out a little shriek, expecting the worst. But the board held, my mom snatched the scrap of carpet, and hurried back, balancing half on the battered board and half on one of the wooden ceiling timbers, inches from death. But back she came, and all was well in the land, another near death experience averted, and the people rejoiced: "Huzzah!" You'll all be thrilled to hear, I am sure, that the new carpet was laid, all the crap was moved back into the closet, and now my office all but sparkles in the newness of cleanliness.

All right, phew, this is why I don't post all that often, b/c they always end up being so long! Later, peeps, I'm going swimming!

S.