Progress on mad maison, both the house and the blog, has slowed a bit due to my October business travel schedule. Over the course of one month, I will have flown over 20,000 miles. Traveling for work has its perks (you get to see colleagues you normally wouldn’t, and in the case of my most recent travels, I’ve gotten to see customers as well, which is always fun), but it is always grueling. There’s no sleeping in to get over your jet lag, very little decompression time, and the knowledge that your “regular” work will be waiting for you in exponential quantities when you eventually get home. And I can tell you, even when your house isn’t perfect, you miss it terribly. Even though the water pressure here in my UK hotel room is better than the mad shower, I still miss home. And of course, there’s the guilt I feel about taking Mike from his hometown to the city by the bay, only to leave him alone to scrape wallpaper and care for our cats. Of course, he’s a trooper and happy to help, but my guilt persists anyway.
When we were originally planning to transform my father’s childhood home into mad maison, we were comforted by the notion that two of the rooms (our bedroom and the living room) didn’t have wallpaper. We were wrong. They have the worst kind of wallpaper–insidious, hidden under layers of paint, and unevenly applied over badly cracked plaster. We’ve repaired the walls in the living room, and Mike has been tackling the bedroom inch by painful inch. It’s taking every ounce of steam, DIF goo, and elbow grease Mike has to get the wallpaper off, but he is making progress. Until then, we’re still living in a serious state of transition and we’re eager for that to change. I’m also eager to actually scrape by Mike’s side when I return from Europe this weekend.
They may not be slippers, but they are red. Perhaps if I click my heels in them I'll be home again.