It was and truly. It was my beautiful bride’s birthday today. So the kiddos and I surprised her with (among other things) what she wanted for her birthday… a new vacuum cleaner!!!! This to replace our classic model that we’ve been hanging on to for the last 5 years or so. You can tell it’s a classic, by the way, from the classic Sleek Wooden Support Structures that adorn its sides. They don’t sell ’em like that, you know, no sir. You have to custom-build them baybees!!

Anyway, this new vacuum aquisition could not have come at a worse time, as I was just preparing to stain the custom wooden paneling a lovely dark cherry oak finish–you know, to complement the high polished red look and all. *sigh* I suppose that I shall just have to find something else to improve upon in our fair home.

Incidentally, for those with a challenged sense of humor, there was sarcasm in the above lines. I’ll leave it for the reader to figure out where, exactly.

So, back to our story…. Yesterday, Lynn got so excited about her new Tool Of Cleanliness (TM) that she vacuumed the entire house, all the while commenting as to how amazing it was and how much brighter our green carpet looked!! =:) Oh–that and how disgusting our carpet was, showing me every bucketful of carpet fuzz, dust bunny colonies, and dog hair as she emptied the bagless vacuum’s dust-bunny catcher out repeatedly.

I felt challenged by this intense display of activity in my bride and responded by touching up the paint job on our newly installed $700 cellar door (which reminds me, I need to take pictures of what the finished product looks like!!). She’s a beaut, though, let me tell you!! And whilst I was wrapping up my painting foray, I got this crazy idea (this is where our story begins to take a turn for the worse) that we should tackle the wallpaper-removal job we’ve been putting off for months in our kitchen.

I hate wallpaper. As a matter of fact, should I ever meet the inventor of wallpaper, I shall be forced, purely out of my desire for justice and fairness to mankind in general, to punch him/her straight in the nose.

My wife, however, had it on good authority that if we rented a wallpaper steamer/remover for $25/day, that we would only need said machinery for an hour or two at the most–it was THAT good, said she. Well sir, let me just tell you, that it was not all THAT good. Good, yes. All that good, not so much. It took us from 3:00 p.m. until 11:30 p.m. to emerge from our kitchen battlefield scarred, bruised, sore, and without wallpaper in our kitchen. So we celebrated by being complete morons and staying up far too late (2:00 a.m.), knowing full well that we had to get up at 8 the next morning (this), for a completely full day of festivities, hour+-long drives, and frivolities galore. I present to you, the reader, that perhaps we are not at times all that much more intelligent than our children, who have also displayed this lack of intelligence.

So we arrived at home at 6:00 this evening, having been gone the day in its entirety, and I responded to my complete exhaustion by launching into a 3-hour long CAT-5 wiring session involving phone jacks, long sections of chain, a 10-year-old boy with skinny arms (who was remarkably chipper after having been woken up several times to join in the war on silly wiring practices), and a very confused cat.

But now at the end of my chock-full-o-fun last 2 days, I can look back on the same with a sense of satisfaction at having spent some really quality time with my beautiful wifey and children, at having waged a successful military campaign on ugly wallpaper in one’s kitchen, at having almost finished with the outside cellar door project, at having done some exceptional home improvement/wiring work, and at now being completely exhasted and needing a good 10-hour sleep but only leaving myself with the possibility of getting 6.

It was, honestly, a great weekend with my family. =:)