"This is KAOS: We don't 'Ka-frickin'-boom' here"

We are back living in our house full-time but, if possible, we are more disoriented than even we were when we were commuting across town from my parents' house.

For instance: to prepare a meal, first we have to locate dishes and cookware. Then wash them, because they are covered with drywall dust. The washing's in the utility sink in the basement - still no water in the kitchen. Then we cook, bringing food up from the basement fridge and around from the breadbox and food-prep stash in the dining room. Then back to the dining room - the long way, because the door between the kitchen and the dining room is still blocked, and I'm not sure why. Then there's washing up. My back is KILLING me from bending over that utility sink.

And Oh yes, I know, cry me a river, I'm going to get a brand new way-classy kitchen out of all this and I should just shut my yap. We are listening to The Long Winter in the car and holy Jesus the Ingalls family is down to bread and water, huddled in the dark around the cookstove in the kitchen, burning straw because there is no more coal or wood, with at least another month of winter to go. That is not us.

But man, I'm telling you, we are getting funky in the head from all this. Today? No wait this deserves its own paragraph.

Today my husband ran over his laptop with the car.

And didn't realize it.

I mean, mornings around here are even more messed-up than dinner: first of all, there's me, no help at all, virtually catatonic until about 8:00 a.m.; and there's NO socks, I think we left two dozen pairs of boy socks over my mom's; and the milk is in the basement, and the cereal is who knows where, and you have to wash the bowls and locate some spoons if it's cereal, and if it's oatmeal, you have to unplug the rice maker and plug in the microwave. I don't even know what Bob has to go through to make lunches - I haven't made a lunch since Mao's first week of school three years ago.

And now there's snow.

So today, Bob was taking the kids to school because I had to be at work at 9:00 and before that I had to have a high-level conference with the contractors over, I shit you not, drawer pulls and weatherstripping. People were running late because our Zhou decided he had to count to 300 before getting out of bed. (NOT incipient OCD - I am sure that if someone had noticed that he was lying in bed counting, and asked him to quit that and get up and get dressed, he would have been able to do so without going into a screaming fugue state.) Oh and then somebody had to poop.

Eventually though, they were off. Bob took the minivan, because the Civic was mired in the mud and snow and ice at the bottom of the driveway, and besides the kids hate riding in that car, it looks like a cross between a gym locker and a file cabinet. He was going to stop back to help me pry the Civic out of its icy berth before we both headed off to work.

While he was gone, I had my drawer pull summit with Contractor Mike. When we moved on to the weatherstripping around the front door, I noticed Bob's gym bag and work bag sitting in the snow where the driveway meets the sidewalk. I call him on the phone.

"Did you get mugged at the end of our driveway twenty minutes ago?"
"What?"
"You don't seem to have managed to have gotten your gym bag and work bag all the way into the car."
"Oh you're kidding. I had to go back inside for someone's lunchbox and I must have walked right past them."
"I'll go get them - you'll run 'em over if you pull in the driveway, where they are now."
"..."
"..."
"Oh my god -"
"Do you think - ?"
"Did you feel a bump when you pulled out?"
"I did."
"Because - I've seen a laptop after it's been run over by a car, and - well it looks pretty cool actually - the screen gets all saggy, but..."

So I fetched the bags in and it was hard to tell. There was no tire track, nothing was visibly squished, but I didn't try to open the laptop. I thought at most he'd caught part of one of the bags, but not a direct hit.

Turns out, yeahhh, he ran it over. When I talked to him later though, he said, "But you're never going to believe it, it started right up!" He hooked it to a projector and was cranking along on his spreadsheets and proposals. I advised him to a) order a new laptop and b) save anything he could salvage to a flash drive immediately. I also said, "Note to self: buy more life insurance for Bob." He thinks I'm making with TEH HUMER when I say that and to that I snort "Sure thing, Seizure Boy."

We have got to get this project DONE.