My poor husband.  My poor, over-worked, hardworking husband.  I say this with not even trace amounts of sarcasm because the poor guy’s become the de facto workhorse here at Casa de Mitchell thanks to my delicate condition.

I’m nesting in a bad way, and the only cure is not more cowbell but rather more sweat!  More projects!  Painting, sanding, scraping, caulking, re-arranging!  And it all must be done now!  How can we abide in a house with off-white door frames?!  What will the baby think when he comes home and the caulking around the bathtub is coming off?  Horrors!

Wes’ very generous (and talented, and funny) brother came over on Friday and Saturday to install our new windows and I have but one word for you: GORGEOUS.  Who knew our backyard looked like that?  When we look out the window in our bedroom, we can see things.  Things that have heretofore gone unnoticed thanks to the musty windows that had stood the test of 20+ years.

I’ll take a picture of the inside to show you later, but I can’t show you what the outside looks like yet because the trim around the windows has yet to be painted.  Apparently caulking takes time to set and dry?  And you can’t speed it up just by being hormonal and demanding?  And sometimes your husband can’t just dry caulking with his mind-powers, even if you get really good and grumpy about it?

Or something like that.

In an effort to sate our painting lust, Wes scraped the old paint off our exterior door frames and re-painted them.  It makes a big difference!  It’s amazing how less derelict your house can look without peeling paint coming off the doors.  Duh.

Wes is a good sport about it all, never complaining when I greet the end of one project with a list of several more.  I assure him that eventually the nesting will stop, when our baby is home and I’m too busy drowning in laundry and diapers to worry about house projects.  He nods, smiles, and doesn’t believe me at all.

It was a perfect storm: Erika left work on time and just thought she’d stop at the gas station to fill up her tank. The gas pumps were empty, but the car wash was doing a roaring trade in soaps and waxes, so Erika thought she would just be able to pop in and out and go home to her husband, puppy, laundry, and un-made dinner.

Thirty minutes later, Erika realized she was a fool. A great, big, impatient fool who wanted badly to go home but couldn’t because the old lady at the cash register, whom Erika suspects may have fouled up the gas station’s computer by trolling soap opera websites and picking up a nasty virus or two, couldn’t get the credit card reader to work and thus had to have everyone pay in cash.

While Erika stood in the line that wrapped around the perimeter of the convenience store, she thought about non-stabby things like puppies, chocolate brownies, and not jumping behind the counter to run a quick virus scan and get things back into business.

In retrospect, I suspect that the little old lady kicked the wireless router and needed nothing more than a simple power cycle but, then again, I could be wrong.

On the road again after thirty minutes of standing-in-line-reading-cheesy-fridge-magnets bliss, Erika was on the road again. Alas, her smooth sailing was not to be, because she got stuck traversing the roads with an obsessive lane-changer who insisted on switching back and forth between the lanes every few feet to no apparent avail or point.

Adding to Erika’s growing stabbyness was the notable lack of caffeine in her system, the mountain of laundry she had to face upon coming home, and the dinner that sat, uncooked, in the cold cold fridge.

By the time Erika came home, she was a veritable powder keg. All it took was some mis-placed cheese on the part of my husband and we were off to the crazy-wife races. I ranted, he endured, and then I went upstairs to brood about how life without coffee is practically not worth living, about how inept convenience store clerks cost the world entirely too much time, and how obsessive lane changers deserve nothing more than to rim their tires the next time they parallel park.

Perhaps tomorrow will dawn a bright, happy day when I am not detoxing from my caffeine addiction and the Thing That Does Not Suck will be brilliant and bring mirth and joy to all involved.

Then again, maybe the only Thing That Does Not Suck will be the post I don’t write about how much I loathe trying to quit drinking coffee. I guess the only thing left to say is stay tuned and hope that my caffeine withdrawal doesn’t land me in jail for using excessive force on hapless convenience store clerks.