If we were like everyone else in our neighborhood we would have spent Memorial Day outside, taking advantage of the gorgeous weather by doing some serious work in the yard. I admit I felt a little guilty every time I stepped – however briefly – outside as I watched everyone else ripping and digging and trimming and weeding. The neighbors to one side of us were uprooting little trees that had been springing up in the middle of their flower beds, while the neighbors to the other side dug up one entire side of their front yard and put in a lovely new bed with trees and shrubs and lots of mulch.

Richard and I, however, did not lay a hand on anything to do with the yard – green or otherwise. As a matter of fact, we spent most of the day inside. I’m not entirely sure what Richard was doing – likely writing – but I spent most of the day at my computer, doing XML. I’ve got until the 6th of June to finish all the assignments for this class I’m taking through the University extension program, and they’re taking longer and longer to plow through as I work my way through the book.

We did get the requisite Memorial Day barbeque worked into the weekend, although it was on Saturday and not on Monday. Saturday afternoon we headed off to my parents’ house for one last dinner with the whole family before my little sister flew home on Sunday. It was the second time in three days we all gathered together at my parents’ house – Thursday night we had a very early birthday celebration for my dad (his birthday is actually in June, but my Mom wanted to take advantage of having the whole family in one state). On Saturday night my dad made ribs and Richard helped him grill the salmon for my mom (whose new knee, by the way, is doing much better), and my little sister the baker made brownies and trifle for dessert.

Otherwise, this has been a relatively quiet weekend, working on XML, petting the cats, doing chores. We gave the downstairs a badly needed cleaning – Richard vacuumed up embarrassing quantities of cat kibble crumbs and I scrubbed down the bathroom. I bought a pair of cute ballet flats that are almost identical to ones my little sister has, just because I liked hers so much. Richard got a new something or other for his computer that will let him burn CDs and DVDs. I made gingerbread pancakes on the electric skillet and washed a huge pile of dishes. Richard did a much needed grocery run. We even got up early on Sunday morning specifically so we could go check out the farmer’s market that runs every Sunday, year round, in a huge parking lot underneath the freeway, just to see what sort of thing they might have. Somehow it just did not feel like a holiday weekend at all. But then again, I didn’t need it to.

It has been kind of a roller coaster sort of day today. It has been getting more and more windy over the past few days, to the point where my similarly allergy-inflicted coworker and I have been waking up with swollen eyes and stuffed up noses, and by this morning my sinuses had pretty much morphed into a pressurized ball of hate inside my face. Because my eyes are all itchy and irritated due to all the dust and pollen that’s whizzing madly around in the air, I’ve been having a hard time focusing on anything. So the day just did not start well at all, and it sort of went downhill from there.

The first big emotional smack upside the head was when my little sister called to tell me that they were taking my mom off to the hospital via the ambulance because she bumped her (new, still recovering) knee somehow last night and was in excruciating pain all morning, all of which had not been helped by the fact that the pain meds they originally gave her weren’t working very well anyway. And it did not help that the visiting nurse (who comes by daily during her recovery process to check in on her) made some comments about how she might have dislodged one of the pins in her new knee, or else maybe the pain was due to a blood clot (thanks, worse case scenario nurse, for suggesting these, since my sister and my dad and I weren’t doing just fine coming up with things to worry about on our own!), so off to the hospital they went, to get her seen by a surgeon. My sister said she would call me once they got to the hospital, to let me know how things were going and if it was something bad, I would immediately head out there.

And then no sooner had I finished having *that* nervewracking conversation with my sister, Richard called to say that he couldn’t find Sebastian. He (Richard, that is) worked from home today because we needed to chat with the contractor about a few things and it was just easier for him to just stay home after that was done. So at some point he wandered downstairs to check in on the cats, and noticed that the barrier we had put in place – involving baby gate, thick plastic sheeting (shower curtain) and copious amounts of packing tape – had been breached. I noted earlier that it’s been windy; well the stairs have always acted as sort of a wind tunnel, so since the crew had the back of the house open in order to work, the wind gusted in and apparently that was more than the baby gate could take. And apparently Sebastian decided that he could not pass up on this sort of opportunity, so he decided to go for a little adventure.

Luckily Richard found him – he’d only made it as far as the back yard and wasn’t in any particular hurry. But this happened at about 2pm, which means if Richard hadn’t been working from home that day, chances were pretty high that Sebastian would not have been the only escapee by the time we got home, and I am just trying very hard not to think about what a nightmare that would have turned out to be. Needless to day, the cat barrier has since been given significant reinforcement, and I think this weekend I might even break out the hammer and nails and see about constructing something even sturdier out of that big mountain of construction scraps in the back yard (might as well use it for *something* besides killing the grass!), because I am already paranoid enough about how the cats are dealing with being locked downstairs and I really do not need to spend even more time than I already am worrying that they are going to escape.

After Richard called to tell me that Sebastian had been found and I studiously told my brain to SHUT THE HECK UP ALREADY about the worst case scenarios it was playing in my head regarding construction zones and lost cats, my sister called to let me know that my mom was doing fine. They’ve swapped out her pain meds to something that actually *works*, and while she needs to take it easy for the next few days and lay off the physical therapy, she didn’t do any lasting damage.

So tonight, while Richard is off at his writers’ group, I am going to curl up on the couch and pop a fluffy, girly movie into the DVD player and try very hard not to think about injured family members or lost cats or any other horrible, emotionally draining thing, and maybe, once I am done with my fluffy, girly movie, I can go curl up in bed downstairs and close my eyes and if I wish really hard, the wind will stop with the blowing and the sinuses will stop with the trying to kill me, and everything will turn out just fine.

There haven’t been any new pictures lately because there’s only so many ways to shoot a big pile of dust and studs. They’ve been ripping out the exterior wall of the old back porch, and earlier this week they framed out the new location for the door to the blue room. It’s a good thing we hadn’t gotten around to watering the backyard yet because the grass is pretty much buried under a mountain of construction debris.

Our little vegetable garden is still chugging along merrily, although that recent heat wave turned out to be the end of our lettuce. It was doing just fine, and we were slowly trying to work our way through enough salads to make a dent in the monster-sized heads, but then it got insanely hot and bang, without warning, every single head bolted. In the space of about a day every single head of lettuce went from compact and leafy to tall and straggly. The spinach isn’t fairing much better – I’ve been trying to pinch off all the flowers as they start to form, but the heat accelerated that process, so I suspect the spinach isn’t long for the garden either.

It’s just as well, though, since the tomatoes have all kind of exploded lately, and if the lettuce and the spinach are out of the way, they might actually have a little more room to expand without choking anything off. I am thinking that we are going to have to just give up and relocate the two little green pepper plants, though, because I fear that if we are not careful, one morning we will come out and find that the giant tomato plants have have literally trampled them. Although I am not sure if pepper plants that are flowering can actually be moved, so I am not entirely sure how to proceed at this point.

Monday night I went to an amazingly productive rehearsal for the women’s choral group, and did not get home til late, and tonight I did not go home after work, but instead headed in the opposite direction, to my parents’ house, to see how my mom (and her new knee) were doing, and also to hang out with my little sister. We ate dinner and sat around and chatted for a bit, and then my sister and I went out for ice cream, and sat outside Ben & Jerry’s and chatted, and then when we were done with that we proceeded to a local Starbucks and sat there for several hours talking. She and I are always chatting online, but IM’ing is still nothing like getting to talk face to face and I wish she lived closer so we could do this sort of thing more often.

My little sister is in town (or rather, she is in our old town) this week because my mom was released from the hospital on Saturday after her knee replacement, but she still needs a lot of help doing things like, well, everything. So she’s staying with my parents, cooking, helping my dad, and so on. I picked her up at the airport on Saturday morning and we took a slight detour on the way to my parents’ house, first stopping by my house so she can see the construction zone that is our kitchen. I also wanted her to see our neighborhood, now that everything is green and flowering and full of life, since the only time she’s been down here since we moved was for Christmas. She oohed and aahed and may or may not have made some jealous whimpers when I showed her the plans for what the kitchen will eventually look like. Until we bought this house, my little sister took first place in our family for who had the most horrible kitchen. I stole that title from her over Christmas, since not only was our kitchen horrible, we also had no working dishwasher (well, except for the human variety), but thankfully for me (and sadly for her) we will soon have the nicest kitchen in the family, and she will go back to having the worst.

We met up with my dad at the hospital and the three of us all went out for lunch, and then I left my sister there to help my dad get my mom home and drove back to Sacramento, where Richard and I decided to spend the afternoon doing kitchen-related things; namely looking at faucets and sinks and flooring. We’d originally decided to try to match the existing wood laminate that’s in place throughout most of the rest of the upper floor, but realized pretty quickly that this was going to be next to impossible. So instead we found a gorgeous hardwood that we like much better anyway, and we have dutifully passed the sample along to our contractor so he knows what he’ll be working with (and can also go order however much we’ll need once it’s time to actually lay the flooring.

The rest of this weekend, however, has been spent holed up inside. We’re right smack in the middle of a rather unseasonable heat wave, and the fact that there is a decent breeze outside still does not make it bearable out there. I am just glad to see weather reports suggesting it’s going to be much cooler next week because even though I am a delicate flower that wilts in the heat, at least I have the option of getting to stay inside with the air conditioning on, and the poor guys who are working on our kitchen – which is now stripped pretty much to the studs, and also open to the outside due to having to replace that one exterior wall – don’t have that luxury.

Today I have never been more proud to be a Californian. The California Supreme Court just legalized gay marriage, because they actually *grasp* the concept that ‘separate but equal’ is not equal at all, and that any two consenting adults deserve the right to get married, no matter WHAT their gender might be. My state ROCKS.

Richard and I sat there this morning at our respective offices, furiously refreshing the news pages and the California Supreme Court site until the ruling was posted, and then we each started just as furiously reading through the ruling, posting encouraging text snippets back and forth to each other. Wait, is this…oh, what about this…holy crap they DID IT! I sat at my desk with tears running down my face, and I thought about all the people I know and Richard knows who have now finally been granted the same rights Richard and I had all along. And I thought about my uncle and his long term partner and how unfair it was that they could never get married, and I thought about all those hateful close-minded bigoted people who will never stop fighting to mandate discrimination and I just sat there at my desk at work and I bawled. And then I sent a note to my coworkers and we had a quiet little happy squeefest online about it, and I fired off emails to my family and all over the internet you could feel the joy and the excitement everywhere you looked, and it felt good. So good. I know this isn’t the end of it, not by a long shot, especially since California’s laws are so idiotic as to allow an actual constitutional amendment to be done by nothing more than a simple majority vote on a voter-initiated ballot, so this is a fragile joy, right now, in my state. But it’s there none-the-less and right now it’s a step in the right direction, and that’s what we’re all going to hold on to, in the days ahead.

At some point after we moved into the house, I was rummaging around in one of the bottom pantry drawers, and found a hole cut carefully into the back of the cabinet, specifically to allow access to an electrical outlet. Why anyone would have a need to access an ancient electrical outlet buried behind a rather deep floor-to-ceiling pantry cabinet I do not know, but that really isn’t the relevant issue here. What was more shocking than finding the outlet in the first place was realizing that it was covered in wallpaper. Floral wallpaper. Extremely ugly floral wallpaper, to be exact.

They demolished the kitchen today, and the big pantry cabinet is gone, revealing not just one little outlet, but an entire wall covered in ugly floral wallpaper. And if you think just one wall was bad enough, I will note that this was apparently also lurking underneath all the baseboards around the room, which suggests that at one point the whole room sported this lovely floral design.

A close-up of the pattern, because it’s always nice to share.

Isn’t it *pretty*? I mean, seriously. Someone, at some point, chose that wallpaper. On purpose. Trying to imagine the combination of that floral print with the hideous brown tile with black grout just sort of makes me feel a little nauseous.

As for the rest of the demo, let’s just say that it’s obvious which group knew what they were doing. Case in point – it took three of us, armed with crowbars, pry bars and sledgehammers, nearly two hours to demolish one tiny little cabinet. It took a team of four guys eight hours to go from this:

to this:

Not only did they remove all remaining kitchen cabinets and countertops, they also stripped the dividing walls between the kitchen and the back porch down to studs, *and* they tore out all the ceiling in the back porch, as well as all the areas where they’ll be installing the new supporting beams. Here is what the back porch looks like now.

There used to be a low ceiling up there, complete with a pull-down staircase for attic access. The only way anyone’s getting into the attic at this point is with a very tall ladder. Those windows, though, are gorgeous. They’re single pane, quite possibly original to the house (the glass is very wavy, so it’s pretty old), and I cannot bear the thought of throwing them away, so tomorrow morning I will ask the contractor to please, please, save them for me. Don’t ask me what I intend to do with them – I haven’t gotten that far yet. I just cannot bear the thought of those gorgeous old windows being tossed into the trash.

And now the answer to the burning question that I know some of you have been dying to find out. Long term readers will recall that back in November I mentioned that Rosemary had started lurking in the kitchen, staring intently at the dishwasher. She would sit there, sometimes for hours, just staring at the base, for days at a time. Plus, more recently, that rather mysterious lump emerged in the wood floor directly in front of the dishwasher. So Richard and I have both been a bit apprehensive about just what might be lurking under there when they pulled it out today.

I am sorry to report that apparently the answer is…..nothing. There is nothing on the underfloor that indicates there has been any water damage. There are no holes through which some kind of critter might have been entering or exiting. It was just dusty, boring flooring, same as the dusty boring flooring that was lurking under everything else. So at that point, we really have no further clue as to what it was she found so gosh darn fascinating under there – if anything at all. After all, I have already established that these cats are very, very good at playing the especially freaky version of Made-You-Look.

Yesterday, in the continuing saga of everything-kitchen-all-the-time, we placed the official order for the appliances and handed over a hefty deposit check to get that started. We also ordered the pendant lights that will hang over the center island – a process that went surprisingly quick, considering that neither of us really cared all that much about the lights in the first place, but also thankfully quick because I’d only managed to scrounge up enough quarters for half an hour’s worth of parking, and amazingly we did not run over.
As for today, the morning started off with two hours at the permit office going through the plan check review, since we finally got the updated plans from the structural engineer last night. But it was two hours well spent, ultimately, since I left clutching our approved building permit for the kitchen. So at least that’s one more hurdle crossed (and the timing is especially apt, considering that demo starts tomorrow). I then went to work and spent the next three hours either catching up on the email and voicemail that had accumulated from me being out yesterday (I took yesterday off to be there with my dad while my mom had knee replacement surgery), and sitting in on long conference calls, after which I then shut down my computer, having accomplished not remotely anything close to what I had hoped to accomplish, and hopped back into the car to drive down to Dixon for a funeral. The man for whom the funeral was being held was one of those amazing people who was funny and brilliant and kind and generous and basically larger than life, and he and his wife had the kind of marriage that most of us can probably only dream of having – 58 years and still just as much in love and in tune with each other as when they first met.

On the way back to the office I took a quick detour by the hospital to check in on my mom, since with everything else going on this week I figured I ought to take any chance I can to stop in. She’s still mostly doped up on pain meds after her surgery yesterday morning, so I’m not sure how much of the visit she’ll actually remember later, but it was good to see her, especially because I could then provide a progress report later to my younger sister when she called this evening. We had a nice long chat on the phone and I also got to talk to my niece, who first wanted to know what replacement knees are made of (sadly, I had no idea), and then to tell me all about her Irish step dancing classes, a conversation which then rather inexplicably segued into a story about someone who found a dead bat behind their cupboards. Such are the ways of the mind of an eight year old. Heh.

This evening is going to be all about the final packing and clearing out of the kitchen and the back porch and taking advantage of one last night of having a functioning kitchen sink to do a load of dishes, oh, and also figure out how to rig up a temporary door at the base of the stairs that will incorporate an industrial strength shower curtain, an expandable baby gate, and several packages of adhesive strips and also, possibly velcro, so that the cats can remain safely downstairs for the foreseeable future. Do we know how to have fun, or what?

Before we did the whole ‘try to smash up the cabinets but fail miserably’ thing on Saturday I made very sure to take a whole bunch of ‘before’ pictures. After all, I wanted to make darn sure I documented all those charming ‘features’ we’ve grown to love so well over the past year, so I can look back on them over the next few months as we deal with a construction zone where our kitchen used to be, and remind myself of exactly why we are putting ourselves through this (If you can’t see the slideshow below, you can find the photoset here).

So I had all these grand plans about how we were going to take out the old cabinets in the kitchen ourselves. After all, they make it look so easy on HGTV (ha) and since we certainly weren’t going to try to salvage a darn thing from the old kitchen, if we had to smash them up a bit, so what.

Uh. Yeah. Not. My dad came over yesterday morning and the three of us started taking apart the smallest little cabinet next to the stove, just to get an idea of how they were put together. That’s when we discovered that even though the facing on the cabinets is perfectly hideous and poorly done, the actual cabinets themselves are very, very sturdy. Unlike stock cabinets, which are built off-site and then screwed or hung into place, these suckers were built in place, layer by layer (the construction of the cabinets, and the good quality of the wood their maker used also suggests that they are even older than we’d originally guessed – they’re not original to the house, but they’ve most likely been there for at least 50 or 60 years). There is no simple way to remove them, short of literally tearing them apart, piece by piece, with crowbars and sledgehammers. Oh, and that oh-so-lovely countertop with the hideous brown speckled tile and the gritty black grout? It’s installed over a nice fat steel frame, filled with cement. Whoever built those things had even worse design sense than I do (and that’s saying something) but he was bound and determined that once they were in, those cabinets were *staying*.

We managed to get that one cabinet out and disconnect the stove and drag that off to one side, but that was enough to make us realize that there was no way we were going to be able to demo the rest of it ourselves, especially considering the weight of those counters. So…we are going to leave the demolition of the kitchen to people who actually know what they are doing. Ah well.

Wednesday morning I took the kitchen plans down to the city. They told me that if I came in at 8am sharp there would be no line, and they were correct – I was whisked immediately to a desk to talk to one person who entered all my info into the computer and assigned me a permit number, and then to a second person who poured over my plans and asked a whole lot of questions. After an hour I left, clutching an in-progress permitting report, and a sheet of exactly one plan correction required. The good news is that it’s not a change to any of the plans; it’s only some additional documentation that is needed (because we’re removing structural walls and adding load-bearing beams, the city plan-check guy wants to see it written out exactly what type of foundation we currently have, so he can verify that our existing foundation is sufficient to handle the load). I spent the next two days bouncing phone calls back and forth between the engineer and the designer, as we all figured out just what was needed. So assuming that gets dealt with quickly (the designer said he should get me the plans back this week), we should be good to go on the permit.

This is good news because this weekend we met up with our contractor and after discussing schedules, and the amount of work that is going to be needed to the kitchen framed to the point where the cabinets can be installed, we’ve finally picked a start date. Next Monday, assuming all goes well with the corrected plans and the city building department does not pull a ‘oh, did we also forget to tell you to fix’ on me, the kitchen construction finally begins!

I have been having small moments of panic about the impending construction period, mainly because I am still not entirely sure where we are going to put everything that is *in* the kitchen in the meantime. It’s not just a question of packing everything into boxes – that’s the easy part of this whole thing. It’s the question of setting up a make-shift kitchen in the dining room; of figuring out how we can store all the dry goods so we can still get to them without creating a huge mess in the process. There is the issue of clearing out the guest room because they’re moving the doorway in there, and that’s also going to be their access to the bathroom, so anything left in that room is going to get pretty dirty and dusty and gross over the next few months. And of course there is also the issue of rigging up dust barriers in the dining room and the bathroom and more importantly, some kind of makeshift door at the base of the stairs so that, while we can continue to come and go as we please, the cats can not. The next few months are going to be extremely annoying to one particular disapproving little tortie cat (Checkers) because she is used to having the master bedroom pretty much to herself, while the rest of the cats prefer to hang out upstairs. I am already nervously predicting that some of us (me) are not going to be getting a lot of sleep for the first few weeks of this process until the cats work things out.

Ironically, the one thing I am not at all stressing about is how we are going to be handling food prep over the next few months. We already have a microwave and a coffee maker and a rice cooker and a veggie steamer. There’s an electric skillet tucked away in the back of a cupboard that is going to start getting a lot more use, and this afternoon we went out and bought a little toaster oven and some cute little pans that will let us continue to bake and broil. And Richard’s already looking forward to cracking open all his grilling cookbooks and trying out some new recipes. Really, the only thing we’re not going to be able to do for the next few months is boil anything, and to prepare for that, we’ll be cooking up a veritable mountain of pasta and stashing it in the freezer to tide us over in the meantime. We’re still working out the logistics for washing dishes, but we’ll figure something out (mainly because we’re both not comfortable with the idea of using disposables for that long a time period – too much waste).