Winding Down

You know when you’re on vacation and while you are having a nice time, it’s time for the trip to end? Sometimes when this happens you feel a little like you are betraying the people, place or thing involved, but in reality it is just time to go home.

I reached that point this morning when one of the damn toilets stopped up. If there is one thing in this world I hate more than anything is hearing that the better-half has been summoned to his mother’s house to un-stop a toilet. This happens more often than you might think. So, when it happens to me, I’ll be damned if I’m asking for help. It isn’t a hard thing to do but it annoys me to no end. I always feel like it is such a waste (heh) of my time standing there with the plunger wailing on some bit I can’t even see.

Since now I’ve broken bad on the situation here, I’ll continue. The house we’re renting this week is perfectly pleasant but since I’m now in a mood (and it is still early), I’m going to bitch and moan a little. The house is outfitted in what some people might call crate furniture, but being from the Richmond area I call it This End Up Furniture (I don’t know if that store existed in other cities or not but it was kind of big for awhile and then went bankrupt). The furniture is semi-blonde and very sturdy. I think you could pitch one of the love seats off the second story balcony and only the cushions would fall off. I suppose this is the sort of thing you look for when furnishing a rental unit. I don’t know about you, but while sturdy appeals to the practical side of me, the comfort level does nothing for the part of me that loves to lounge while reading. There are two love seats and one couch. I’m five foot six and a love seat is not a good place to lounge. The couch has been co-opted by the better-half and he has to make a nest so that his long legs have somewhere to go.

Now that I’m on the uncomfortable aspect, let’s move to the master bedroom. The bed is also This End Up and has drawers under the bed for storing a bunch of nothing. Again, I understand the practicality, but the sounds that bed makes when you roll over are like something out of a horror show. It is impossible to sneak into or out of that bed. Last night I woke up around 2:30 and heard the better-half snoring loudly upstairs (on the long couch also akin to a medieval rack). Normally, I may have crept up the stairs to convince him to come to bed, but instead I just moved over into the lumpy middle and silent part of the bed. I woke up again at 3:33 (from a dream involving a creepy devilish man–no doubt the creaking bed helped conjure that image) and at 4:30. When the A/C unit comes on it is like a truck just pulled into the room and that’s what woke me at 4:30. At 7:11 (the clock is right next to my pillow), the better-half was taking his sinus medicine in the master bath and I asked him if it was time to get up. He said no and rolled into the creaking bed. I laid around for a little while but there’s just no silence when there are two of us in the bed so I got up and told him to try the middle.

I’ve been reading for a while now and thinking about how what the house really needs is someone with a can of WD40 and a screw driver. The bar stools at the kitchen counter are wobbly as are the fading Adirondacks on the porch and deck. The WD40 will fix all the creaky doors and, hell, I’d spray it on the bed even though I know it wouldn’t actually help the bed, only my thinking about the bed.

Tomorrow we begin our trip home and although I love being here, it is time to go.