I posted some more pictures from our adventures in Texas earlier this week. I totally need one of those writing chairs. I promise it would allow me to post only the best electronic prose to this forum. I would have added more pictures I not so sneakily took from my iPhone but the upgrade to 2.0.2 trashed my phone so I lost all my notes and photos from a corrupt backup file. No more running Christmas list and no more pictures of 16th century globes or Edgar Allan Poe’s writing desk.

This has been an incredibly long week, one that I’m not even sure when it started. I spent nearly all of Saturday working only to get on a plane for Texas on Sunday. Wednesday started at 3:30am local time in order to make our 5:30am flight back home. That whacked out my entire sleep schedule. Given the timeline of this week the house has gone completely to seed and is littered with dirty cereal bowls, tumbleweeds of dog hair and boxes of books. I’m hiding in the office in front of the computer because if I look around the house at all that needs packing/cleaning/sorting I may just sit in the floor wringing my hands.

We would hire someone to pack our home for us except that a) it costs approximately $856,742 and b) I don’t want other people “messing in my goodies.” My mother is perhaps the queen of shooing others away from her goodies and has remarked that someone throwing away her belongings was the only unforgivable act in her eyes. As my mother’s daughter, I can’t imagine someone coming into our house and packing the nine Splenda packets in front of my keyboard to carry to our new home nor can I imagine someone else deciding they were disposable. Perhaps I should get my mother to pack my medicine cabinet, dishes and piles of knick-knacks since she is the one I can trust the most with all these treasures amongst trash.

The new house is basically done except that we have to put the bath fixtures back after the vinyl flooring was installed and call about two transition strips from the hardwood to vinyl downstairs. Our tentative plan is to move next week over Labor Day weekend. To be optimistic about it, I suppose moving gives an opportunity to take stock of one’s life and decide what is really important or not, Splenda packets and all.

Oh, and it’s not just you. Rich snickers every time my mother or I talk about messing in our goodies.

We’re in Austin, Texas for the next few days for meetings. Since our previous trips here were under 24 hours, it was hard to do anything other than show up, give demos and leave. This longer trip is giving us a chance to explore the territory a bit, as it were.

One highlight so far has been dinner with Super Fred (to the Max) and his lovely wife Lori. We met at Matt’s El Rancho where I had an underwhelming mojito but the world’s best Tex Mex meal, complete with a large dish of Bob Armstrong dip. It was nice to sit on the patio, catch up with friends in the warm summer breeze and enjoy a ton of corn chips and cheese. I had Matt’s Special Tex Mex dinner and I highly recommend it.

On the way back to the hotel, we passed by the Genie Car Wash (with the Magic Touch) and I was compelled to get a photo. After a bit of a crappy Saturday and a long flight to Texas, this evening helped bring the status of the overall weekend up to “pretty ok” from “utter suckitude.” To top off the weekend, my parents sent an email that our neighbor at the new house mowed our lawn for us with his riding mower. I’m looking forward to moving.

While uploading some video of our hardwood floors to Flickr yesterday I noted that since the entire downstairs floors are off limits, it would at least mean my father would have to take one day off from working on the house.

We met the contractor at the house today to make our final payment on the job (more on that maybe tomorrow - I’m still pissed about it all). As we were walking to the car, my father mentioned to Rich that he left the master bedroom window open so he could climb up onto the side porch roof and then in that window to get access to the upstairs without messing up the floors downstairs. You know, so he could work on some stuff last night while the floors dried.

I’m not sure if I should buy Daddy a ski mask for Christmas or at least make sure the local police station has his picture on their wall with the label Not A Burglar.

There was a time in my life as a kid when I honestly thought my dad should be president. He had plenty of political opinions and since he always seemed to do everything with our family’s best interests in mind, it didn’t seem like a huge leap of faith that he would do the same for the rest of America.

This Saturday we pulled up to the front of our new house and as soon as I opened the car door I could hear my father shouting at contractors in the back yard. Somewhere between learning to write in cursive and the moment I stepped out of that car a few days ago, I realized that maybe my father wasn’t cut out for politics or public office.

After things died down a bit (and the contractors left in a huff), I gleaned that my father’s rage stemmed from the HVAC guy nearly trashing our entire cooling unit and frying the thermostat by hooking up the wrong wires despite my father’s demands for him to stop. But one thing my father would have learned had he pursued a career in the public eye is that being right doesn’t really make people listen to you when you’re purple-faced and yelling about relays, 220 volts and your previous 25 years of experience. Just ask Howard Dean what a bit of over-exuberance gets you.

To say that the last 76 days with Enterprise Builders has been tiring would be an understatement. My father has waged a campaign against the atrocities of shoddy workmanship, poor communication, and utter disrespect for our house and the craft of carpentry. But in this 11th hour, when the punch list is less than a dozen items long and we just want them out of our house, he doesn’t know when to quit. He honestly can’t imagine that if someone is wrong and he points it out that they might just blow him off or purposely sabotage him or the project out of spite. My father’s heart overflows with compassion and empathy but he has a hard time really understanding how the rest of the world works, for better or for worse. It’s like living with My Favorite Martian, only not everyone can see the antennae on Daddy’s head.

My father mentioned last week that the only way to deal with the owner of Enterprise Builders and his irrational demands ($12,000 quote for our porch, $4000 change order quote for removing roof shingles that didn’t exist) is to disengage from him and the whole situation. He calls it “being more like Ronald Reagan,” in that he believes one of Reagan’s talents in office was to act casual in the face of scandals so that no one could possibly find him at fault. (I told you he had strong political opinions.) But not two days after his prophetic statements, he was on the phone with me freaking out because Donnie told him that Bert said Bill said they couldn’t paint the bathroom because my father was being too picky about the sanding and they’re going to blame the whole project on him.

“You’re not really getting it that Donnie’s just talking out of his ass to get a rise out of you and it’s so easy to do there’s not even really any sport to it?”

My father has thrown himself into this project with all his energy and to send him away at this point would break his spirit. It’s been priceless to have his help and supervision while Three Stooges Construction renovate our home. But goddamn, I just don’t know how many more days I can listen to how vinyl sheeting is destined to pucker or rip, our heating bills will be outrageous because of inadequate insulation, our carpet choice is too expensive, the master bath is 3″ too wide and we’ll kick ourselves if we don’t have two medicine cabinets. Optimism have never really been one of his strong suits.

My father may have made a horrible president and he certainly wouldn’t have made any money as a contractor. He doesn’t know how to be anything else other than my dad and thankfully he’s still getting good employee reviews from that job after all these years. It’s the one job you can do well by not knowing when to quit.

I could update you on the house but it’s a little discouraging so we’ll save that for a day or so. In the meantime, let’s look at all the photos I took this morning while the guys played paintball. I was the official photographer of the event (all 5 of us) and I borrowed one of Rich’s many orange shirts to make it obvious that I was “not like the others” and shouldn’t be shot under any circumstances.

It was lots of fun. I may be inspired to carry a gun marker next time, but I was happy to just have a front row seat to all the action and get to experiment with the camera. Now I just want a new lens even more … maybe Santa will bring me one.

Click the picture to view all the photos in the set.