The house, the house, the house. That's all we do, and all we talk about, and yet somehow progress is elusive. No, that's not true. The dry rot under the back porch has been fixed, and the brick relaid, so now we just need some stucco repair and the drainpipes reinstalled. And then we can finally get rid of the porta-potty that's sitting in our front yard—although the gardeners and UPS guy will be disappointed.
Inside, meanwhile, is stuck in neutral. We were supposed to get our furniture delivered this coming Tuesday, but it just got pushed to Friday. I understand that this is the definition of a first-world problem, but I don't care. I want carpets! And I want to stop eating at the uncomfortable kitchen table! And I want to have people over and be able to show them around without having to say, "Someday, there will be a table here. And a chair here."
We did have one interior breakthrough: the contractors rotated the kitchen island, which had always felt 90 degrees off. Electrical wires ran through two of the legs down into the crawl space, which meant that once the island was turned, we were left with two holes in the floor. MacGyver would be proud.
·················
I was so pleased with myself for fixing the bird feeder in the backyard, because I mainly do the day-to-day maintenance stuff and Adam handles the repairs. But I figured out a way to make the thing work, trimmed the nearby plants to foil the cats who prowl our yard, talked to the pet store staffer about birdseed for a surprisingly long time, and rejoiced when the birds began noticing the feeder and adjacent birdbath.
I knew squirrels are tough to discourage, but I still can't figure out how they manage to get up there. (They wait till I'm two feet away to leap to the ground.) Recently, we've reached a detente: I fill the plastic cone, the squirrels pick out all the sunflower seeds and scatter the rest of the seed everywhere, and the birds swoop in to clean it up.
·················
I've forced myself to start reading more. I had stopped because I read on and off all day for Siteline, but I'm always trying to get away from my screens, and a bunch of books bought early on in the pandemic keep staring at me. Two I'd recommend: I wasn't excited about the prospect of reading Maggie O'Farrell's novel Hamnet, but it ended up being a delight, even if the grieving wore a bit thin. And Ben Lerner's The Topeka School was the most ambitious novel I've read in years. I won't say I enjoyed it, per se, but I was enthralled and impressed by it.
·················
We went to L.A. for a night, just for something to do and to eat at a different restaurant (Rustic Canyon, which was having an off night but still beat almost everything in Santa Barbara). The hotel—the Viceroy Santa Monica—was all about Covid protocols: no housekeeping, no room service, no sharing the elevators with people outside your household, and so on, and every unoccupied room had a "sealed for your protection" tape across the door. Except ours.
·················
Me: The bubble wrap on the living room window seat—did you move it from the office?
Adam: No.
Me: Then where did it come from?
Adam: The office. [Pause.] So I guess the answer to your first question was yes.