What a glorious day this started out to be! No, wait. Let me back up a little bit.

What a terrible night last night was! We've been working on this stupid bathroom for days and days now and there is still no end in sight. It doesn't matter how hard you work and how much you do, remodeling projects have a way of multiplying before your very eyes. And often behind your back. There are innumerable evils to endure when you decide to remodel something, that's all there is to it. Last night I hit "the end." The part where I just want to scream or cry or run away, or do all three at once. I've been working and working and working, but every time I finish one project, three more appear. It wouldn't be so bad except that we were feeling like we were getting close to wrapping this thing up. Deferred hope maketh the heart sick...and the Hornes frustrated and irritable. That was me last night: frustrated and irritable. The kids were already in bed when it hit, so James was the lucky one to field all of my irritated babblings about this dumb bathroom and how it's just never... going... to end.

Due to the heavy fumes in the bathroom that had spread to our bedroom, James decided to sleep on the couch last night. (Or perhaps it was the irritated wife ranting and raving in the bedroom! Ha!) He's exrememly sensitive to such things and had been coughing and hacking throughout most of the evening. He knew he'd never be able to sleep in the bedroom, so he moved to the living room. I, on the other hand, have been exposed to a whole lot of heavy fumes in my day and most of them carry fond memories for me in one way or another. Don't bother me a bit. (Or perhaps they make me irritable...?) Anyway, I had the bed to myself last night, so I plopped myself right in the middle of it and spread out as far as I could. James is a pretty serious bed hog and I'm usually struggling to maintain 18" of the bed as "my own," so I made the best of being able to stretch out. It was great! The first enjoyable thing that had happened all night.

This morning was wonderful. I heard the kids get up, but since James was in the living room they took all of their early morning requests and babblings to him. I heard him tell them that their Mom had been working very, very hard this week and was very tired and that they were going to let her sleep in. WOW!!! What a wonderful husband I have!!! (I had been ready to take a baseball bat to him the night before, but no matter--) So sleep in I did. When I finally woke up, wrapped up in Granddaddy's fuzzy robe, and stumbled into the living room at 8:30 all of the kids were dressed, their beds had been made, there were freshly baked mixed berry muffins on the table and nice, soft music playing. ?! Better than Mother's Day!!! What a wonderful morning!!! And what a wonderful husband!!! I'm so glad I couldn't find a bat last night--I would have missed out on this terrific day! ;-)

We ate our breakfast and had devotions, then I told the kids to go play outside for a little while so I could paint the inside of the cabinet doors for the bathroom. Everything was going well and I was feeling blessed and cheerful, even though I was still in the midst of bathroom projects. I was humming along to the music, smiling, and painting away when suddenly I heard, "~GASP!~ Oh, nooooooo!!!" The scream had come from the bathroom and I could tell by the agony in the voice that it was truly a heartfelt and pained, "Oh, nooooooo!" I dropped my paintbrush and rushed into the bathroom to find...

James standing in the middle of a small, dark pond that was all over the bathroom floor. A small dark Special Walnut Minwax Stain pond, that is. Yeppers. He was working in there and set the can on the floor for just a second, turned around to do something, stepped back and ~ker-plunk~glug~glug~glug~ there it went. All of it. This is the bathroom we've been working on all week long. The bathroom that we've been changing absolutely everything in... except the floor. The tile floor and the big, nice bathtub were the only two things in the entire room that we were planning on keeping--"No need to change those. The tub is huge and neat, and the tile floor is sooooo cool--now there's a floor that's going to be great for the way we decorate!"

As you can see, the grout is supposed to be a light brown color. And large portion of it is now a very, very... well, Special Walnut kind of a color! When I saw the catastrophe (and the agony on James' face) I grabbed all of the cleaners I could find and flew back into the bathroom to get to work. We sopped up the pond with a roll or two of paper towels (last rolls--gotta get more soon!), then poured bleach and Comet and Oxy Clean all over the blackened areas and we grabbed some scrub brushes and got to work. After about 30 minutes we mopped up all of the cleaners and discovered that we had accomplished... nothing, of course!

Now, I have to say... as sad as it was that our nice tile floor was ruined, way deep down inside of me I was aware from the very beginning that this was one of "those things" that God uses to bring balance to our marriage. I am continually doing stupid things--big things, little things--just really dumb things. I have accidents of all natures on a regular basis and I forget and lose most anything of relative to major importance. James is the complete opposite. He so very seldom has accidents or forgets or loses anything at all (important or not) that sometimes I wonder if I married a human being or a machine. So when things like this happen it brings a sense of peace and wellbeing to me as an individual, and it brings a degree of balance into our marriage. If he would have been in any condition to hear it, I would have told James that he should be more like me. I mean, when you flub up all the time then it's no great shock when you pull "a big one." But for a guy who never does dumb stuff, it just about does him in when "a big one" occurs and he was the culprit. I spread my mistakes out evenly throughout the course of my life. James seems to store them up and then *wham-o!* he'll pull "a big one" and then have a heart attack over it. Like the time he set the diaper bag down in the parking lot and drove away... and we were on our way to the airport to fly to Pennsylvania... just after 9-11 and there was no way to get anywhere without proper ID... and we didn't realize the diaper bag was missing until we got to the airport... ~Ah, yes~ I love that story. (I hopped in the van and zoomed back to the motel and found the diaper bag still in the parking log, mugged, but with ID still intact!)

Anyway, it's been one of those days around here. We did the best we could to recover from the tragedy and then I looked up and saw James dabbing paint at the doors I had been working on earlier. "Are you really sure you should be doing anything with paint, James?" Tee! Hee! How fun it must be to to married to a fun-loving, understanding wife like me! ;-)

James had to run to the hardware store, so I decided to work in the bathroom for a little while myself. One of those "innumerable evils" I mentioned earlier is the loathsomeness of wallpaper and it's accompanying border. I mean, how hard can it be for some smart person to invent a paper that will actually stick to the wall like it's supposed to?! All of my hard work from a couple of nights ago was starting to peel up all over the place--in some places huge chunks had started pulling away from the wall. So I decided we should get some extra wallpaper paste and try to glue it back before we had naked walls and strips of paper laying in piles all over the floor. The wallpaper actually went back into place pretty well and some of the top edge of the border was willing to comply, but the bottom edge (which is "bumpy," not a straight light) isn't sticking anywhere. And on the two places where I tried to glue it down, it just made it worse. For real--it's curling up more fiercely than before! So I decided to make a truce with it. I agreed to leave the bottom edge alone if it would just not get any worse. We'll see if it will hold to it's end of the deal. Ha! In a bathroom, where it's going to be all steamy?! ~sigh~ Mom... help?!

James got a really, really cool faucet for in the bathroom and worked for the longest time trying to get it installed this afternoon. I studying the instructions for a while, too, and all we can figure is that there must have been a flaw in the design. Yet another roadblock. Just what we need today! Ha! But James is pretty good at being ingenuitive (well... sometimes!) and worked out an ulterior plan that turned out great! I was thoroughly impressed. So we now have a sink (however not caulked yet--I'm scared to death to do that!) and just a few seconds ago I saw him carry a nice, clean, new toilet into the bathroom, so that should be up and running shortly, too. The cabinet doors are about dry, so they'll be put on this afternoon as well.

Someday we're going to finish this bathroom, despite how fiercely it opposes being transformed into a decent room. We will not be bested by this dumb little 8x12' room, no siree!!! And one of these days, when we do win, I'm going to post pictures. Expect them about two months from now.

;-)

More to come, I'm sure.