I know that for the rest of you out there, the words “contractor” and “hell” go hand in hand already. However, for me, the eternal optimist, the one who is always expecting to be pleasantly surprised by human nature, I refused to buy into this stereotype. Until now. Suddenly I have turned into a shrill housewifey wench, the image made complete by suburban address, dog, and child. Oh yeah, and the Volvo. But enough about me, or us. This is about the contractors.

Where to begin? Well, first, I can begin by saying that Mike’s mom’s diagnosis was confirmed and now the whole family can move forward, more knowledgeable about everything. It doesn’t make things peachy keen, but at least we all know what we are dealing with.

Lily - Day 5 of being sick with a “cold”. Why our pediatrician didn’t do a nasal swab for the flu on Monday, I do not know. Mike and I finally tired of being told we are paranoid first time parents, so we just called the doctor again and said that something was not right. Her fever was still high (Mike misheard me and told them she had a 107 degree fever - when he meant 101.7 - you can imagine the reaction the nurse had). He told us to take her to the ER at St. Mary’s. We had a great ER peds doc there and he quickly diagnosed the flu. Thankfully, no “pee-new-monia” as he said. I guess there is a major outbreak happening in Richmond right now - she was the 4th child this morning diagnosed with the flu. We took her home and tried to get her as much rest as possible with all the CONTRACTORS here. She was doing a little better tonight - she actually played and smiled a couple of times. Not seeing her smile since Saturday has been really hard, not to mention seeing her so listless and obviously feeling terribly . . .

However, this was her last Sunday on her birthday - so cute!

So back to the rest of the story. We’ve been having troubles, to put it mildly, with our home renovation project, which entails adding french doors to my office, ripping up and replacing all the carpet, and putting Pergo down in the kitchen and half bath. So we are smart and we hire “professionals”. First the french door dude (a subcontractor from Lowe’s) shows up and he sounds exactly like Roscoe Pecoe from Dukes of Hazzard. He looks exactly like Boss Hawg from same. He even showed up wearing camouflage suspenders and I saw plenty of crack while he was here, and I’m not talking about the drug. His “2 hour job” took 2.5 days. It’s still not right. In fact, as I sit here writing, I hear Mike on Eternal Lowes Hold for Amber, the door woman who took the order in the first place.

So the carpet comes in, and Mr. Carpet Dude (who, by the way, has the BIGGEST mullet I’ve ever seen) begins to lay the carpet on Monday. If you don’t know what a mullet is, you can check out here. 
Anyway, so he’s got a mullet, big deal. He can lay carpet, right? He shows up with his girlfriend, who is missing most of her teeth, and a 20 year old kid they refer to as “Q” (which always made me think of that weirdo on Star Trek, and the fact that I associate him with it proves I am a huge geek myself). Many problems begin, including, but not limited to:

- constant talking, even when I close my office doors. They continue to bust through them anyway
- critiquing the french door install, while Boss Hawg is still here doing it
- smoking insane amounts of cigarettes in my garage, to the point I’d swear they were doing it in the house, it smelled so bad
- toothless girlfriend picks up every knick knack I own and comments on it, including spraying my linen spray all over the hallway because she wants to see what it smells like
- mullet boy tells me every legal altercation he’s had in the past 5 years, including the fabulous information that he currently has no driver’s or business license

At this point, you might be wondering how I ended up with such professionals. I will tell you - the buying club we belong to recommended them, so I take no responsibility.

After being thoroughly annoyed by the mullet carpet crew, they tell me at the end of the day that I have defective carpet. Mullet Boy gets on the phone with the buying club and cusses out a girl who works there, who happens to be very nice. She hangs up on him. This means that my carpet can’t be finished and they leave with tack strips everywhere and our house torn apart. It wasn’t really their fault, but it was less than ideal.

Meanwhile, Pergo Man starts laying the floor. He and Mullet Boy had originally formed a partnership, but had since had a falling out, and currently hate each other. They begin to argue almost immediately. Mullet Boy wants to steal the quarter round part of the job from him - Pergo Man gets mad. I find out that I was shorted 84 feet (!!!!) of quarter round and start calling around again to find it. Then I find out two cartons of Pergo have been destroyed by some angry UPS driver. I call around again. Mullet Boy blows out our circuit breakers 6 different times by trying to run some huge buzzsaw thing in our garage. He blows out a lightbulb that we spent 3 months trying to replace (don’t even ask about that story). Pergo Man spends a lot of time talking and little time laying the floor. He also magically raises his rate per square foot, but I become the Shrill Suburban Beeeoootch and he reverts to Originally Quoted Price. Pergo Man, you guessed it, does not finish, and comes back today to finish the job.

Both Mullet Boy and Pergo Man were supposed to be here at 8 AM. We take Lily to the ER around 9. They are still not here. When we return at noon, exhausted and stressed out, we find our house much in the same condition as it was when we left. MB (Mullet Boy) and PM (Pergo Man) are barely civil to eachother. PM wants to use MB’s saw - MB refuses. PM has brought a friend along to help, who is coughing up a lung. Meanwhile, MB’s toothless girlfriend is wandering around our house. Actually, a better adjective would be “staggering”. She is moaning with each step “MMMM. OOOOOOOOH. AAAAAAAA.” I try asking her if she is okay, and she just smiles and continues to moan. I ask MB what’s up with his woman, and he tells me she’s just sick with the flu. She then nearly does a swan dive down our (uncarpeted) stairs. Mike loses it and tells everyone who is sick to get the hell out of our house. This was right after Toothless Girlfriend tries to touch Lily. Lung Hacker and Toothless Girlfriend are removed from the house - Mike tells Lung to go sit in the car for the rest of the day and he tells MB to take Toothless home where she belongs. As soon as they leave, I begin to freak out, because I have just about had it. It was apparent to all of us, including my father, who held the fort down while we were at the ER, that Toothless is on some major drugs. So I have a wacked out druggy wandering around the house while my daughter is sick with the flu and I start wondering how much jewelry has been taken while I was gone.

Turns out, as MB tells me later, Toothless took too much anti-anxiety meds (like 5 times her normal dosage) and was totally out of it. Gee, that makes it all better. PM runs out of Pergo and tells me that although I measured correctly, I should have known to add 10% overage to my order (duh, stupid me!). I then spend an hour faxing back and forth to a local company trying to get them to charge my credit card over the phone after jamming my scanner with it unsuccessfully trying to copy it. Then Q (the helper, not the Star Trek guy) has his unemployed 24 year old girlfriend call me to discuss home based internet businesses because somehow he got the idea that I had one, and that it was okay to give out my phone number. You can imagine the tone I had with her.

Closing time for MB - carpet is still not laid. There is a bare strip of wood in our bedroom and carpet fragments everywhere. It’s 4 PM - time for beer. So he splits, but not before asking me for over $1000, the total amount we owe him, right then. I tell him he’s not getting it before the job is finished, but that I’ll pay him a percentage. He then tells me he’s taking 20% of PM’s job cost because he “referred” PM to me. PM gets really angry and they get up in each other’s faces and start yelling at each other in my kitchen, while I’m feeding the baby, about who is right and who is wrong. I start dreaming that Mike is with me, or better yet, that I am in the Bahamas with no one I know. I finally snap back to reality and tell them to shut up, and give me an itemized list of who is getting what. I pay MB what I said I’d pay him and he leaves. PM gets upset because he wants to lay the quarter round and thresholds, and he’s mad at MB because he “stole” that part of his job from him. He wants me to call MB and tell him I want PM to lay it. WHATEVER. Then he gets into an intricate discussion with us (Mike is home by now) about what a “T connection” is and how it works. We really could not have cared less. They continue laying Pergo until 7.30, at which point Mike and I are almost passing out because we couldn’t cook dinner with them in there (oh yeah, Lung Hacker is back in the house).

SO. The end of the story: we are waiting on our carpet, the rest of the Pergo, and for Boss Hawg to come back out and clean up the mess he made of the french doors. Just put me in the nuthouse. We haven’t even started decorating for Christmas and right now I’d rather just crawl in a hole. I know this will be funny soon - in fact, it’s almost funny now - but I seriously lost it today a couple of times. When PM and MB came back to me for about the 7th time today to tell me “Girl, you’re going to seriously flip out NOW” (this time to tell me we ran out of Pergo), I just said “Quit explaining it to me and tell me what I have to do to fix it.” Quite rude.

Mike says we are never buying a house that requires this level of renovation again. I think I agree. Either that, or I’m going to hire a project manager to oversee renovations because I just can’t hack it with a 1 year old under my care, especially one with influenza.

I’d love to hear your contractor horror stories if you have any. You can e-mail them to me at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address). In the meantime, I’ll be here - overseeing - until the day I am rich.

UPDATE: I forgot to mention two things.

1. PM prematurely removed the toilet, thinking he’d finish the half bath today. He ran out of Pergo, so now we have a pit in the middle of our bathroom. Anyone want to squat???

2. Lily got massive diarrhea from the antiobiotics today - prescribed erroneously by Peds Doc #1. She blew out her diaper and jetted out a stream of the stuff, then proceeded to roll around in it. She soaked her sheets and mattress pad. I ripped it off the bed and tried to throw it in the laundry, only to find that Mullet Boy had left the carpet uncut by the laundry room door and it was impossible to gain entrance to it. I had temper tantrum number 3 at that point, including cussing the laundry room door and Lily’s “ineffective” diaper.

Okay, some funny stories to report. First, today was the second day in Lily’s first year of life that I wanted to quit my job as a mother. 2 days out of nearly 365 isn’t bad, considering my previous life - my “want to quit my day job” ratio was MUCH higher. Like, 170 out of 365. The first day I wanted to quit motherhood (and literally remember saying outloud, “WHAT THE HELL WAS I THINKING???”) was in week two of Lily’s life, day 9 - nursing was a nightmare. My nipples were cracked and bleeding and I couldn’t get things just right, and I remember it being 4 AM and sitting in the guest room, crying and looking at Lily and saying “Why can’t you do this right???” as if tiny baby like she was could understand, let alone do anything about it. It’s kind of funny in retrospect. For all you breastfeeding mommies out there: you are all my heroes.

So, day two of hating motherhood . . . I helped out at my parent’s today. After I nearly had a stroke because my dad’s computer was messed up yet again, Lily decided to flat out refuse to nap. Not only refuse, but she stood in her pack and play screaming at the top of her lungs. She also entertained me on the 30 minute drive this morning by exercising her lungs, even managing to scream over the top of NPR. I pretended not to hear it.

After nap 1 was a bust, I was hoping for a nice long one this afternoon. All of our stress levels are high - I’m fighting some nasty cough thing and we’re anticipating an active week - so when nap 2 began to go by the wayside, and it was apparent Ms. Lily was not going to sleep, I got creative and went in there. I laid down next to the pack and play and tried to pretend I was sleeping on the floor next to her (it wasn’t all that far from the truth). Next thing I know, I feel something hit my head, and I look up. Lily is peering over the top of the crib and throwing her pacifier, followed by a stuffed animal, directly at my melon. I handed the binky back and pretended to sleep. “TINK.” It hit my head again. I hand it back. “TINK. THUNK.” Binky followed by bear. This went on until round 11, when I decided I had had enough and made haste out of the room.

She screamed all the way home, but you know what? She’s sleeping blissfully, and peacefully, in her crib right now, and the sight of her sweet face (with the big, red puffy eyes) is enough to make me forget my day in “No Nap Hell”.

Oh yeah, and while I was leaving a voice mail for a client who was having an emergency, she simultaneously fell and hit her head while someone rang my doorbell. As I rushed for the doorbell, I pulled the phone off the desk and ripped the receiver off accidentally, then tripped on her cart and fell on my face. I’m going to have a drink now.

For our anniversary, Mike gave me a spa package - a massage and a pedicure. I finally went to Legends today for both. The woman (Rocio) who gave me my pedicure came from Columbia one year ago - this is Columbia, South America - not Columbia, South Carolina. I decided to try out my crappy Spanish on her and she was very tolerant. She corrected me (“Ella, not El”) and I corrected her (“I am 50 years old, not I have 50 years”). It was a lot of fun. One of the things she was telling me in Spanish was that everyone she runs into in America thinks that everyone from Columbia is either a drug runner or drug lord. She is very irritated by it and I told her to get used to it - I can’t tell you how many times my mother has been asked, by those who know of her Mexican genealogy, if she is a maid.

The other woman working there, Kathleen, was listening intently to our conversation. She griped at one point about how she had to leave California because no one there “spoke any damn English and it is extremely annoying”. Later, I asked Rocio if they had hurricanes in Columbia. Kathleen interjected, “Yeah, it’s called the federales.” I knew immediately what she was implying, and Rocio figured it out from my face. The two of them started in on each other with me trying to translate/mediate. It got pretty ugly, but I really felt for Rocio, and I wanted to punch Kathleen in the nose for giving foreigners yet another reason to think we are really dumb. You’d think we’d work at it. It’s especially ironic considering the conversation I had with Rocio (in Spanish) was about that very issue . . . but Kathleen apparently hadn’t picked up enough “annoying” Spanish in California to understand that.

The whole thing sort of put a damper on the fun of the afternoon and I was even more self-conscious about speaking Spanish after that. However, I got Rocio’s phone number and e-mail address and I’m going to invite her to a bunch of Spanish Academy & Cultural Institute functions. She’s single and looking for love! She doesn’t want to marry a Hispanic, however . . . so she’s taking classes to improve her English. I was teaching her some new words - you should have heard her trying to pronounce “earthquake”. Apparently they have those in Columbia but no hurricanes. Thankfully I knew what the word for hurricane is in Spanish. She sounded as bad saying “earthquake” as I do when I say “Zanahorias”. We’re a match made in heaven.

Lily stayed home with her grandparents and was well-behaved today. She’s eating well and sleeping, and the combination of the two generally guarantees a good mood. We’re all just waiting around for her to take her first steps without the assistance of the cart . . .

We all had a nice weekend, enjoying some good, crisp Virginia fall weather. Lily is cutting another tooth right now, and it’s making her miserable whenever she puts something in her mouth (which is all the time). She seems to be better this morning. I’m going to try to take a picture of her fangs next time I have the opportunity.

Mike and I saw “Kill Bill” this weekend - it was great. Critics be damned, I thought it was just as interesting and groundbreaking as Pulp Fiction - but that’s why they make the big bucks and I don’t. This was your free movie review. Let’s face it - any movie probably would have been great because we were out at night on a Saturday at a movie. It isn’t hard to impress us.

As much as I am not a fan of our neighborhood, they do have a Halloween parade, which should be fun for Lily - they bring in a firetruck and let the kids wander around in their costumes causing a ruckus. I just try to remind myself that we moved here because of Lily, not because I was in love with our neighborhood. And I shouldn’t complain - it’s pretty, the house is nice - I just don’t like the cliques here, and I feel like I’m back in high school and I don’t fit in. At least in the city, no one fit in - because there was nothing to fit into! It’s just a lot more diverse where we used to live. The feeling I have most days is reminiscent of how I felt when I moved from Ann Arbor to Raleigh. The only word to accurately describe it would be “sterile”. I went from a multi-cultural, hash-bashing, politically charged, coffee-shop-on-every-corner city to Raleigh. If you haven’t been to Raleigh (at least the section I lived in), well, let’s just say it’s the anti-Ann Arbor. I don’t think I saw an African-American the entire time I lived there. And my neighborhood smacks of that. I fear one day I will wake up with a mini-van in the driveway - after all, I already have the seasonal flag. I don’t have that much farther to fall

We did it for Lily . . . we did it for Lily . . . repeat after me.

For those of you living in states that have just been hit by a natural disaster, word of caution: don’t show your homeowner’s policy. Just by a fluke, I needed to shop ours - but no one will write our policy because in 2000 I had the misfortune of losing my brand new diamond out of my ring. This will forever haunt us, I’m sure. Basically most of the companies I talked to today said that they are not writing any new business unless there have been no (zero, zip, zilch, nada) claims EVER on your policy. Again, I ask the question: what is the purpose of insurance if you can’t use it??? At least with life insurance, when you finally get to use it, they can’t come back at you and tell you they’re canceling your policy - but only because you are already DEAD.

I’m just mad at insurance companies today - all over Richmond there are smashed cars and people who can’t pay to have the trees removed from their yards and claims adjusters running around rampant and the whole thing just sucks.

Needless to say, we’re stuck with Prudential, who cancelled our automobile policy after 4 perfect years with them because Mike had an accident. That’s another story, however.

I’m just so excited about my photo capabilities now! Ask and you will receive. Now I can keep this updated with better pictures . . . or at least, that is my goal. Hey Risa and all of my other family members - send me some pics so I can share them with the world. Risa in particular, I’d love everyone to see what satan looks like in dog form.

Bad Mommy.

So this morning I start dressing Lily to find that I am completely out of wipes (including my emergency stash in the diaper bag), and diapers. I had one lonely diaper left, so thankfully I was able to change her. Included in the list of things I am “out of”: dog food, green beans, bath soap, clean clothes. My dishwasher wasn’t working this morning either, but my dad was able to troubleshoot it over the phone and it’s working again. I felt totally disorganized and out of it - the hurricane is still affecting me. I feel like I can’t catch up on work or basic household tasks. I think a lot of people feel the same way. I dropped Lily off this morning at my parent’s hotel and ran off to Walmart for a lightning fast shopping trip, which is the way to do Walmart - because if I have no time table, I spend lots of money there.

I think I’ll eventually get my act back together again. Today, though, I’m going to the park while the sun is shining. And, Lily is blissfully sleeping right now - her first morning nap in two days.