Okay, He Wins...

While I've been sitting around, being sore and proudly showing off misshapen yarn-cidents a twelve year old would be ashamed of, Laughing Boy has been truly busy. Besides the porch roof I posted photos of weeks ago, he has more recently been tearing out carpet, scraping and filling a 16x16 foot popcorn ceiling (no asbestos, so bash away!), and test painting a sample piece of wood for the 18th time to find just the right color and paint technique.

Why, you might ask? We've lived here for over six years now, and for five of those we've used the master bedroom as the world's largest hamper-and-cat-sanctuary. We weren't driven out by the sheer hideousness of the dingy dog-pee soaked carpet, or the gnarly popcorn ceiling. No, we we forced out by the noise.

We work nights at least once or twice a week, so one or the other of us can often be found crawling into bed after the sun has come up. Wouldn't be a problem for me, once I get to sleep I can pretty much sleep through anything. But LB has some fierce insomnia when it hits.

The real culprit, though, is that our So Cal ranch style house has the worlds most useless aluminum slider windows. They don't even pretend to keep out the noise of our neighbors' phone, glass bottles crashing into their recycling bin, gardeners' leaf blowers, or bi-weekly parties. I should point out that we've actually got the best neighbors ever, and it's not like they're making an egregious amount of noise. Actually, the neighbors are very very quiet compared to any neighbor either of us have ever had ever. Our windows are just the underachievers of the known world. And if we accidentally get a lull in the ruckus, the windows will start to rattle from low-flying planes passing by headed for the airport. We might as well run a jack hammer in the corner. It's not like we could sleep anyway.

So we've finally got a contractor coming by in a couple of weeks to install the extra sexy double glazed, low-E, sound-reducing windows we've ordered. I'm going to have to keep an extra bottle of Wind3x around, just to clean off the kissy marks I'm going to be planting on the glass once they're here and in the walls. And underfoot, will be a cork floor looking a lot like this:
I'd take a picture of our actual floor, rather than borrow this corner of the photo from the cork flooring manufacturer's site, but they make the floors to order and ours won't be here for another three weeks. Reminds me of the "Made To Order" daybed mattress debacle of Aught 6, but for once LB couldn't get around this one. Waiting for the floor and windows to be delivered is like krypt0n1te to Instant Gratification Woman, but I must be strong.

Maybe I'll knit the windows a scarf or something.

In the meantime, LB was apparently a little bored the other night. While I was re-knitting the same 25 rows on the left arm of my "sweater", again... and again (don't ask... bad words were used), he wandered by a couple dozen times. After about 2 hours of this (you'll notice my secret superhero identity isn't Highly Observant Woman), I absently asked him what he was doing. He looked at me funny, paused, and gave me a strange smile. "Laundry". Oh. Okay. I went back to my knit-n-swear fest. Did I mention the swearing?

He wasn't just doing the laundry. He had cleaned out the entire two car garage, which had been evenly filled to a height of four feet from wall to wall. All that's left is a thin edging of stuff, here and there. Our garage? Parkable? Oooooooooooooo.

Let's see. The score is:
LB - One porch roof, one popcorn ceiling, one wall to wall carpet, and one garage.
Panda - Um. Another scarf. A hat. And half a sleeve. And... the same half a sleeve. Again.

I think I'll practice being a graceful looser.