Wilson
The upstairs floor of our house is a shambles. The stock pop cultural story of the home improvement job that is meant to take thirty days extending into six months? That us is forming shape of things.

This all began with my mother's unilateral decision to replace the wallpaper in the upstairs water closet with paint. Wallpapering a water closet might not have been the best idea from the get-go, but the wallpaper has been in place for at least two decades & has withstood the passage of time & the inundation of humidity in fine style. Nevertheless, Mom wished for a change & duly set about removing the wallpaper. She declined my repeated offers to spell her on wallpaper removal duty, asking me only to fetch supplies & assist her in cleaning up afterward. She then asked my father to patch up the walls with Spackle, the deal being that if he did this she wouldn't ask for his help with the actual painting.

Things began to go wrong even before the wallpaper was removed. They were both intend upon removing the reservoir from the toilet, to clear away the wallpaper behind. "Why?" I asked, since no one can see behind the reservoir? Neither had an answer, but remove the reservoir we did. In the process, the corroded pipe that connects the toilet to the house's water supply gave up the ghost & leaked; there is now visible water damage to the ceiling of the kitchen, the room directly beneath the upstairs W.C. The pipe was replaced, new sealant was applied around the base of the toilet, & the rest of the wallpaper was removed. This happened over the weekend a fortnight hence. Instead of setting about holding up his end of the Spackle-for-painting exchange, my father decided to do nothing. Naught was accomplished last weekend because my parents hosted their pinochle club: Saturday was spent in preparation, my mother cooking & my father clearing the stacks of Vast Right Wing Conspiracy claptrap that constitutes his mail; Sunday was a day of rest, since the festivities kept them both up long after midnight, well passed their habitual bedtime (they are in their sixties, after all). For most of the past week my father was again busily engaged doing nothing. The bathroom looks odd without the wallpaper, but it looks odder still without its main mirror, which sits in the hallway outside my bedroom.

Yesterday, my father & I final began to patch up the walls. I'd offered my help over a week earlier in a bid to goad him into action. I patched up the walls with Spackle while he disassembled the shower & torn some corroded metal supports out of the walls above the plastic shower cocoon. When I asked him what that had to do with painting the room's walls blue, he mumbled that it had to be done. Today, we were to sand the walls, smoothing out the rough patch work; two rounds of patching & sanding were estimated to be necessary before the walls would be properly smoothed out for painting. But instead of sanding & showing me hos to sand properly my father is currently engaged in hammering a hole in the wall near the floor, routing out "corrosion." This is the single best reason not to ask my father to do anything: he doesn't know how to "do" anything, his default behavior is to overdo things. He doesn't want anything to do with redecorating the W.C. in any event; so, I genuinely do not understand his mania for continually expanding the project instead of just getting the original work done & put to rest.

How long should it take to remove the wallpaper from a room that is perhaps five feet wide by ten feet long & then paint said room some or another shade of blue? Four days? Five? I hold out very little hope that the water closet will be put back together by next Thursday—three weeks after the work commenced—, when Where's Teddy? & his parents arrive for a visit to coincide with my birthday. Two days after Where's Teddy?'s arrival & while he is still here, The Squeak & The L.A.W. will arrive, to start a week-long stay by my wee niece. Neither an upstairs shambles nor home improvement work underway is what you want when you have a toddler & a baby staying in the house.

This Week in Motorsport
Last night, I watched a recap of the Acropolis Rally, Round 7 of the F.I.A. World Rally Championship (W.R.C.). Rallying is madness, & I think I want to see more of it. The next round of the W.R.C. isn't for two weeks, & there might be another week before it is available to me on Discovery's H.D. Theater channel, but in the meantime I hope to read up on the sport & familiarize myself with the broad overview of drivers, manufacturers, & traditions.

The Rebel Black Dot Song of the Day
Nigel Godrich, Jason Falkner, & Justin Meldal-Johnsen, "Bass Battle" from Scott Pilgrim vs. the World: Original Score Composed by Nigel Godrich (T.L.A.M.)