I Come to Work to Recover from My Weekends

*flump* and Boltgirl collapses into the spring-shot non-ergonomic office chair nicked from the conference room several years ago when the last hand-me-down chair stopped being tolerable, and takes a deep breath.

Our annual holiday party hit Saturday afternoon and evening, and was lovely and exhausting as ever. Despite the large group (~65 hardy souls) and significant number of children under the age of five, absolutely nothing sticky got spilled on the floor, and every last empty bottle and can made it into the recycling bin. While this considerably diminished the usual Easter morning find-the-weirdest-places-people-decided-to-leave-stuff quality of the next day's cleanup, I was impressed. The exhaustion came in large part from--in what is becoming an alarmingly annual occurrence--something large and structural deciding to fall down in the yard, requiring a major construction episode starting 48 hours before the first guests were supposed to show up.

In the end, the new stuff got built and the landscaping got repaired, but I ran out of time to produce two signature dessert items and ended up with the wrong ingredients leading to a substandard batch of the signature hot spiced cider, and exactly one person noticed--that would be me--all of which served to remind me that the point of the whole deal is to reconnect with old friends and share hospitality with new ones and not send anyone home poisoned. And by those most important standards, it was a rollicking success.

The Sawdust Diaries

I just wrapped up 72 hours of home repair, and yes, I am counting hours spent sleeping in the total since they were also consumed by (1) thinking about sheetrock and (2) being sore. The main casualty was my beloved 20-year-old circular saw, which breathed its last in a puff of burned bearing grease smoke while hacking through the inch-thick cement stucco that was holding the windows hostage. Sniff, sniff. Amazingly, though, a shiny new Skilsaw ended the mourning pretty quickly.

Bloodletting? Not nearly as much as expected, and mostly limited to small punctures at the far extremities. Do not touch my fingers this morning. Seriously. I also managed to drop a broken window on my leg, but since it did more skidding than slicing, I ended up with what looks like a bad shaving incident rather than something requiring stitches. Oh, and a section of fence fell on me and knocked my beer over, and then the wind caught the tarp we had put up against Saturday's sprinkles and snapped the (surprise!) rotted fencepost it was tied to, which then, of course, also fell on me.

My dad, who was there to help and walk me through intricate things like sawing windows out of cement stucco, provided me with the genetic predisposition for general carpentry. Unfortunately, he apparently also included the gene that greatly increases the likelihood that things will fall on your head while you're in the middle of your projects. Thanks, dad!

All in all, a very productive weekend that got the major lifting out of the way. Coming up next on This Week in Sheetrock: taping, mudding, sanding, mudding, sanding, cursing, mudding again, throwing mud knife through new sheetrock, more mudding, sobbing, collapsing in heap.