Down Time

Indulge me for a minute, if you will. We have just spent the last few days having a wonderful family vacation with my parents, my brother and sisters, our spouses and our kids, in the beautiful sunshine of Palm Springs, and I'm not quite ready to jump back into the reality of remodeling. To be honest, the entire issue of the house and its contents were completely out of my mind while I was gone. It was nice. Both Darryl and I were aware of a level of relaxation we haven't felt in several months.

As we drove home, Darryl mentioned that he was starting to tense up. It was as if a rope was pulling our car toward a black hole into which our energy would disappear. The strange thing is (and pleeeeeease don't let me be jinxing myself right now) the remodel process is going quite well. From what I have heard, we're not running into the horrors that others have encountered, nor are we tearing out our hair at the schedule lapses. Besides the crazy plumbers (and I still have nightmares about pipes flowing backwards and sewage coming up through the bathtub), there haven't been any major issues. Oh sure, there were the roofers who thought they were doing us a favor by pulling the antenna off the roof - nobody uses those things any more, right? Except in the Vinyard house we don't have cable TV and we rely on those rabbit ears to watch broadcast stations. So they had to figure out a way to weld them back onto an existing pipe somewhere on the roof. Still, I can't spend too much energy complaining about that.

In addition, our contractor keeps telling us that things are right on track and he hasn't amended the original date he told us back in July. That's kind of weird I think. Of course, things could change in a hurry. The tile could take much longer to lay, we might have problems getting the countertop cut, the trees for the new floor might not be growing quickly enough (yes, it's a stretch, but we're still waiting for the floor to get delivered and I can't think of any other reason why it isn't here yet). But (deep breath) things look pretty good. And I'm trying desperately to hold on to that wonderful relaxed feeling I had in Palm Springs, so if I sound naive at all you must humor me. During this remodel process, I need to take any of these moments that I can find. The tension will worm its way back into the household soon enough. For now, I'm going to enjoy the photos from my vacation and possibly start chanting. Hey, whatever works.

The whole family, all 18 of us, with two parents, four siblings, three spouses, and 9 grandkids,
all wearing black and white at Roger's 70th birthday party