so that's where all the shoes keep going

~MB~

we need to do this every weekend...or never

It's what we say as we lie there, groaning, at the end of every weekend when we've trashed a different set of muscles than we trashed the weekend before (my sore score: calves, thighs, lower back, knees, his: all of the above plus forearms and shoulders) and wondering how badly it will hurt to roll over and turn off the light.

I stood at a party with a bunch of other moms a while back looking at their stunned faces because I'd just said that putting in a hardwood floor with one's husband is romantic.  Consider, I'd said, the kids are in bed, the air compressor is humming, you're working things out together, you're dead tired and sore because you've been slogging along for 12 hours straight, you're both in your grubbiest clothes, and you're together.  

I don't think they got it.  

Last time we put in a hardwood floor we used 5" wide boards.  Here's a photo of that loved and left floor for comparison:

We thought 2 1/4" strips weren't that much smaller than 5" strips.  We thought that 450 square feet wasn't that big of a room.  We thought that we were so, so strong. 

Well, we were only wrong about the first two.  There's a huge expanse of beautiful oak floor in the next room to prove it to us.  But I'm left wondering, as I slide deliciously across the living room in my socks, what parts of ourselves we'll trash next weekend, after we've healed up from this weekend's fling.  And what will we do for romance?  You know, building bookshelves sounds like a great date. 

~MB~

200-year-old fish

This is where I've been living lately:

We began refinishing this old piano before we had children, on the grass in the front yard of our apartment building.  Each piece that we could take off was carefully lacquer-thinnered, steel-wooled and tung-oiled.  But what about the rest of the piano, the non-removable parts?  

In apartment after apartment we couldn't risk ruining the carpet.  When we began to move into and out of houses, it was always hauled straight into the living room, never into the garage for refinishing.  And the friends who came to help us move it always went away laughingly requesting never to have to help with that beast again.  

And so this poor neglected baby has sat, half-refinished, for over a decade now.  I began to play it several years ago, after a fashion, teaching myself to play "Dixie" and "Shortnin' Bread" and "Go Down Moses". But it was out of tune and beginning to break inside a little after all the abuse of children and repeated moving. 

I took off the front a while back to find out why a key was sticking and noticed something I hadn't seen before:

A tuning date.  We didn't have it touched in 20 '09.  Gulp.  I knew that what we'd seen under the old finish was beautiful mahogany.  I knew that when it was tuned it sounded deep and rich and lovely.  But I didn't know we were hauling around and abusing an antique over a hundred years old.  

The older children began to take piano lessons recently, and the broken keys and awful lack of tuning wouldn't do.  A quiet old man from across the county came all the way out to our place and spent the whole morning gluing and tapping and turning screws.  It was all I could do to keep the little boys off his tools and out of his way.  

And now, at last, with boxes and boxes of white oak floor waiting, we have carpet that we can ruin with impunity.  The streaked mahogany is coming back to life beneath my hands, released from black, cracking lacquer a century old.

The lacquer itself is ending up in some unwelcome places:

One of the children asked me yesterday if I'd said I had 200-year-old fish under my nails.  I blinked, lost, for a minute, then burst out laughing.  "Oh!" I realized, "I said one hundred year old finish."  "Oh," was the disappointed reply, and I had to admit that that sounded a lot less interesting than the other.  

New casters are ordered to replace the piano's broken, rusting wheels.  The rest of the tung oil goes on today.  We will probably have to have that nice old man out a couple more times to shore up things that we aren't quite gentle enough with.  And so, with a silent promise to take better care of it, and fingers crossed that children who don't understand will at least try to be kind, I lean over and whisper to it quietly, where nobody can hear: How 'bout it, piano?  Ready to go for another hundred?

~MB~

not my kinda game

Overheard from the living room this afternoon:

"Will there be guns in this game?"

"Yes! And gymnastics!"

Suddenly I was glad I had not been invited to play.

~MB~

keywords

Here, in this little place of ours, I would venture to say I know most of you.  I have a tidy little "readership" of friends and family, and a few friends that I've made through this site or children's fashion workshop.  So, hi, everyone, glad to see you here where I put a few of my mind-cobwebs.

It's always fun to see what brings strangers, though.  What are the keywords that people type into a search engine (Does anyone even say "search engine" anymore?) that land them here among us and our ramblings?  

Most of them I had no idea would be "popular" when I wrote them, and I'm continually surprised when they're my top pages from year to year.  

Such as second year onions.  Apparently a lot of people have the same head-scratching experience I had with those. 

Also, who knew that domesticated pegboard was something that people needed so badly?  I have tons of people looking for "pretty pegboard" or "paint pegboard", "frame pegboard" and so on.  You're welcome, world!  The pegboard, for the record, received a coat of gray-blue paint and white on the frame and plows onward, holding sewing supplies like a champ in our new house.  

My offhand comment about the button lamp brings a whole lot of friends to see me.  Don't worry, friends, the family survives The Long Winter! (But just barely.)

And, oddly enough, there are always people wondering whether Behr Parisian Taupe is a pretty paint color.  I maintain that it's as boring as the day is long.  Better than horrible, sanded-off wallpaper, but only just.  This week's keyword is "behr parisian taupe paint is gorgeous" and if you're still here, dear keyword-typer, I humbly submit that you're dead wrong. Love you!

Always there are variations of "mother bird" (hi!) and "does father bird feed chicks" (not unless mother's extremely sick) and "baby birds leave nest" (simultaneously: oh, heavens, no! and how soon?)  

"seed tape for mother's day" is a sweet idea, you're such a good child. 

But I have to say the most fun is the set of keywords that came to me in Cyrillic.  I'll not ruin it by typing it out phonetically here, and alas, I don't have a Cyrillic keyboard (as somebody obviously does) but I know enough Russian to know that it says "little boy with flowers".  In Russian.  Now I know I have arrived.  

~MB~