2007-11-12 - 5:20 p.m.

!!!!DWOIP!!!!! and other useless information about my day.

Folks, it's unbelievable but true. After two sets of roofers, and as we plow into our second season of Vancouver rain...THE DWOIP HAS RETURNED.

K and I are really trying to be patient with roofers tracking tar and glop and dreadful smells of turpentine,tar, and floor polish, and day upon day of noise, hammering, scraping, and crap all over the carpets (thus the source of our "Christmas present" - a carpet cleaning - from the landlords...ahem). The roofers have gone. The DWOIP has returned!!

We called the landlords this morning and we actively FEAR what this means, in terms of opening up ceilings, more disruptions, and the tracking through of more crap that we ultimately wind up having to clean up.

Where does one draw the line with a leaky roof? My parents live in an old home and it once took them 2-3 years to discover the source of a water leak. I have some understanding of how complicated this can be for a house owner. But at the same time, can you really expect a tenant to be paying a competitive rent through this process? And seriously, if we are offered one more gift to placate us, I am not entirely certain what I will do or say. I think I will might just politely hand it back - the gifts are nice, but they are not fixing the problem. Argh.

***

And now some random tidbits:

I just finished an alumni interview for my alma mater, which took me roughly 5 hours (getting there, 2 hrs with kid, getting home, another hr futzing with the crappy alumni webpage that kept deleting my summary text). Next year I know better than to accept more than 1 interview. The kid was very pleasant and very talented (he gave me a CD of his music, which is very west coast folk/rock). I liked him. But really, I should have thought twice before accepting three interviews - it's quite a time sink.

**

Yesterday, after eating a third of a carton of Haagen Dazs ice cream for lunch.... I looked over and saw two near-rotten avocados on our vegetable table and decided that I had to make guacamole. This very rapidly branched into an entire Mexican soft taco meal complete with refritos, spicy ground meat, chopped tomatoes with cilantro, and two kinds of salsa, for which I earned endless amounts of grace points from K ;-) (give him cheap Tex-Mex and he's putty in my hands...).

Tex Mex is easy but involved. Lots of things to grate, chop, puree, and cook. The kitchen looked like a tornado had run through it. Of course, herein lies the beauty of those grace points - he cleaned up everything... Well, actually, I really needed him to clean because I had a couple of those contractions again - the painful ones this time. I relaxed and they have not recurred - I even ran for the bus today without incident. Nevertheless I will tell the doc about them tomorrow evening.

**

In related foodness, I woke up at 6am this holiday morning to blustery winds and rain - another Vancouver pineapple express - and I chose to stay in bed and read a book while both cats and K slept around me. It was very peaceful, until I developed a full-on craving for bread pudding. I've never cooked - or EATEN - bread pudding before in my life. But it's what I wanted, dammit. So I came downstairs and baked one up - strategically using up three slices of stale white bread and two overripe bananas in the process. Wow, it was good. K benefited once again from the mad (c)ravings of a pregnant woman.

**

K is definitely 'co-pregnant.' You can't tell from his belly (he thinks he's developing one but in my opinion he still has to work to cast a shadow). It shows up in his diminished language skills. All of a sudden, K is forgetting words, or distractedly beginning detailed conversations about "they" or "it" or "the guy" or "the thingie," where I have NO IDEA who or what "they" or "it" or "the guy" or "the thingie" could possibly be. It's a little bit strange. He's either co-pregnant or he's turning into my mother... I'm guessing it's the former, as the latter would be TRULY strange and unsettling. Anyway, I'm not that worried, as eventually, I figure out what the topic of the conversation is so that I can continue along. Must be particularly odd for him, though.

**

I'm thinking of staying home tomorrow and camping out in a chair to devote some VERY necessary hours to grading. At the moment I'm at a loss for the perfect place to sit and grade. I think I know the perfect chair for this...but it's in the wrong room. Does this sound vaguely like an excuse to avoid doing something I don't want to do? Hmmph.

Okay okay okay. I'll go grade now.