The Stitch

I have about a half hour before Elizabeth wakes from her nap and starts kicking the walls to let me know that if I don't come rescue her immediately, she will tunnel her way through the plaster and set up small cult within the walls of our home.

I miss blogging and when I don't have time, the voices start telling me to do strange things, like eat entire tubs of Fluff, or create art from dryer lint. Blogging is my release and without it, I do nutty things.

This past week I realized two things:

A) I am the worst roofer on earth
B) I'm an idiot

Let me explain revelation B first.

Back at Christmas, I spent a large amount of time shopping on eBay for dollhouse goodies. My niece Bryanna had received an enormous dollhouse mansion from her grandfather, and needed to fill it with tiny Barcaloungers, miniscule forks and patterned paper floors. It was incredibly fun to buy this stuff, and I excitedly whispered to Brian, on several occasions,
"I wish I had a dollhouse!"
"I would love a dollhouse of MY OWN"
"Wouldn't it be FUN to build a dollhouse??"
"Someday I will build a dollhouse so I can buy tiny Barcaloungers for myself!"
"Oh, Brian, look at THIS dollhouse!"
"Oh, Brian, look at THIS itty-bitty Barcalounger!"
Oh, Brian, look at THESE teeny, tiny, little forks!"

Who told him to listen to me? Whoever told him to listen to me should be punished severely, because HE LISTENED, and wound up gifting me for Christmas, a perfectly adorable dollhouse kit that any idiot could assemble in two evenings with a hot glue gun and some masking tape.

Any idiot but ME, that is.

The first problem I encountered was that the dollhouse directions referred to the FRONT of the house as the BACK of the house. Personally, I think that the FRONT of the house is the open area, where you play. Apparently I am wrong. The FRONT of the house is actually the part that you look at, but never play with. It's the part where the front door lives. Go figure.

Once I thought I had wrapped my feeble mind around that notion, I started to apply wallpaper to the walls.

However, because I actually had NOT wrapped my feeble mind around FRONT and BACK, I papered HALF of the walls with the wrong paper. The upstairs bedroom had two walls with the correct paper on it, but the wall that divided the bathroom and the bedroom was backwards. The bathroom wallpaper was stuck in the bedroom and the bedroom wallpaper was stuck in the bathroom. I conveniently did the same thing to the livingroom/kitchen wall.

I tore the paper off and I redid them, but only after I bought new wallpaper. I didn't buy enough to factor idiocy into the wallpapering equation.

At that point, I had commenced swearing, muttering under my breath and using a hammer to get the pieces to FIT TOGETHER. ("Kit," my ass. These were not perfectly aligned puzzle pieces, they were roughly-hewn "close estimates" of what perfect alignment SHOULD be).

The wallpaper wasn't sticking, and when it was sticking, it was bubbling like it was coming down with a nasty case of leprosy. After I had finished papering, I started to assemble the walls (with my trusty wall-beating hammer), and realized that I had &*(^I*%^ing reversed the wallpaper AGAIN. This time on the OUTSIDE walls. I slapped on a new sheet of wallpaper from the remnants and announced, "DONE IS GOOD, DAMMIT!"

This was when Brian exacted a bit of revenge on me. A few years back I bought him a PS2 with a handful of games, so that he could "relax" after a hard day's work. Instead, he would sit in front of the television, screaming at the game in frustration. I asked, "Why do you play these if they're so stressful? Shouldn't this be FUN?"

Brian peered over the top of the dollhouse and asked simply, "Aren't you the same person, who, a few weeks ago said, "I would love to make MY OWN dollhouse!"?"

If I could have throttled him, I would have. However, my hands were glued to the dollhouse walls, rendering any type of strangulation impossible.

Finally I finished the major house construction. All that remained was decorating and applying shingles. The shingles required painting, so I left those for a sunny spring day, when I could quickly hose them down with some pretty, toxic, flat black spray paint. I decided to tackle the bathroom kit I had excitedly purchased three days after opening my Christmas gift.

NOTE: Never buy dollhouse accessories that bear the word KIT on the label. You have to have atomic eyesight and non-stick fingers in order to assemble these little bastards. I do not have atomic eyesight or non-stick fingers.

The only glue that will hold these tiny pieces of plastic together is super glue. Try to imagine me, Queen of the Clumsies, trying to super glue a tiny little faucet (roughly 1/16th the size of a paperclip) onto a tiny little lip of a tiny little bathtub. Once I reached the point of tears, Brian had to use a pair of needle-nose pliers to yank the now-permanently-glued tiny little faucet off my enormous, bumbling pointer finger.

I was able to assemble all the little pieces together, but it took about 6 hours, and by the time I was finished, I had resolved to NEVER AGAIN buy ANYTHING with the word "KIT" on the label.

never. ever. ever.

Last weekend was the first weekend that the wind was not gusting the neighborhood's collection of plastic lawn furniture through the backyard, so I decided to paint the shingles and finish this project once and for all. I set up newspapers around the yard, laid out the sheets of wafer-thin shingles and sprayed them down with flat black paint.