Boy, it’s been a long week already. Well, at first it was a long weekend. And I don’t just mean a “long weekend”, I mean a looong weekend. You know it’s a long weekend when you do more work at home than you usually do at the office. And then we tossed in a looong week just to keep the flow going. And I don’t think it shows any sign of stopping.

It was a long weekend, but it was also a productive weekend. I crawled under the house to hook up some plumbing for the bathroom project, and we now have a working shower pan. We don’t have walls or flooring or anything, but those are minor details. All you really need for a shower is water coming from the ceiling, and a hole in the floor.

Then we set to work ripping out the old nasty carpet in the house. This carpet had seen a long and hard life even before the cats came, but once the cats had decided that knocking over plants and using the spilled potting soil as a litter box was a fun pasttime, the carpet’s fate was sealed. And the carpet was a rusty red in color, so there turned out to be a few hundred other well-hidden, non-cat-related stains to go along with them.

The carpet had to go. Which meant the living room furniture had to be moved into the dining room. Which meant a good deal of the dining room furniture had to be moved into the spare bedroom. And there’s a pregnant lady in the house. Which means you know who had to move all the furniture. We peeled back the carpet, revealing the extremely nasty view above and creating one of those Oh-my-god-we’ve-been-living-on-top-of-this? moments. The carpet was summarily chucked, possibly to be turned in to a big bonfire but more likely just to be taken to the dump. Then the floors had to be scraped, cleaned, plucked, pruned and vacuumed, and then painted with Kilz stain blocker, to trap in whatever stains had worked their way down through the carpet fibers, through the padding, and found a nice comfortable home in the floorboards. That was finished about 1am Sunday night, letting me pretend to get a good night’s sleep for work first thing on Monday.

Monday involved moving the living room furniture back, which took longer than it seems like it would. The next step is to move the rest of the dining room furniture somewhere, so that the dining room can get the same treatment in time for our dinner party on Sunday. Yes, we’re having a dinner party to show off our newly-bare, white floors. That’s how empty our lives are.

And just in case we didn’t spend enough time channeling Bob Vila this week, we had a childbirthing class up in Reno last night. But I had to work late at the Lake Tahoe office, so by the time I was ready to go we had a half hour to make the 45-minute drive to Reno. Through rush hour traffic. Luckily we weren’t the only ones that were late, so it wasn’t too bad. But Viola likes to be everywhere fifteen minutes early, so she was fuming. And then we got to learn all kinds of things like how big 10 centimeters dilation really is, and the fact that the bag of water is basically the baby’s urine, and lots of other nice stuff that doesn’t help Viola’s feeling of Get-this-thing-out-of-me-right-now!!

And that brings us to today, where the running total of nights in a row where we’ve gotten to bed after midnight is currently sitting at 5. And that might serve to explain a little bit why I haven’t been writing too much this week. Zombies don’t write well. We’re hoping it will all turn out well in the end, when we have a nice clean house and a new baby. And after the baby comes, I’m sure it will be a breeze to break the staying-up-past-midnight record. “Only 5 nights?” we’ll say. “Those were the days.”