Men at Work: The Rant

Welp, another weekend is over, and the kids are back in school. Finally.

So here I am in my nice quiet house.

Quiet, that is, except for the incessant banging noises emanating from whichever house on my block is having construction done to it.

This is nothing new, of course, because construction noises have been the soundtrack of my life since we moved here. From where I'm sitting, I can see the six houses across the street. In eight years, five of them have undergone major renovations or additions.

Only one house has been left alone, the one belonging to R. and P. Naturally, R. and P. are my favorite neighbors. While we've lived here, there has not been a single Porta-Potty parked on their front yard. This may well be a record for the neighborhood, and, as a token of my esteem, I'm going to leave them a basket on May Day. It's the least I can do to express my appreciation.

But to make up for R. and P., I have neighbors who are constantly tweaking there house. It's the Jocelyne Wildenstein of houses. Apparently the owners' quest for the ultimate in McMansionification will never end. So far they've added a new entry, a three-layer stone and brick facing (in different shades of beige and brown so that the house resembles a gigantic German chocolate cake) dormers, columns, a new roof, Botox, microdermabrasion, collagen--it's basically unrecognizable as the boring "Colonial" it once was.

More proof--if any is needed--that I'm in an evil humor today? I typed all that in, even though I'm 90 percent sure that we'll be joining the addition/renovation crowd this summer. And that we'll probably be screwing up local traffic patterns and blighting the landscape with Ye Olde Porta Pottyes and dumpsters for months and months and months. Heh heh heh.

Serves them all right for torturing me all these years.

So ... speaking of hammering ... here's a weekend update. Aside from Saturday night's Loud Dinner Party, (where I got hammered--get it?) not much happened, mostly because my husband spent 8 or 9 hours every day at the office, so basically, who had a weekend? My children, that's who.

The cry went up: "Woo hoo, let's watch Saturday morning cartoons! And play GameCube! And hit Mom up for comestibles every two hours! And refuse to get dressed until lunchtime! And refuse to go out anywhere at all! Not even a toy store! Or McDonalds!"

And Mom, because she was TIRED because her husband has been OUT OF TOWN or AT WORK for WEEKS now had no powers of resistance and went along with this extremely boring plan. So Mom sat around and played with her laptop. Mom read every blog out there. Yes, yours. And yours, too.

Thank you for keeping Mom out of trouble during the longest four-day weekend in history.

But now! The children are at school! And no one will bother me for hours! The phones won't even ring! Because I just ripped them all out and flushed them down the neighbors' Porta-Potties! Yay me!

So how was your weekend?