The Aerie

Heavy Lifting

A weekend of hauling and lifting just past. The remodeling project is reaching the "flooring" stage, meaning that the boys' bedroom and the master bedroom both have to be emptied of all furniture. Having lived in this house for just about fifteen years, there's a lot of crap accumulated in various places.

In the boys' room we had to get all the toys and dirty laundry off the floor, followed by computer desks, dressers, and then the bunk beds. Started some last weekend and Friday night, finished on Sunday. Upstairs in the master bedroom we've only begun by boxing up our library full of books. Tonight will be my wife's office knickknacks, shelves, and eventually desk. After that I get to take apart the bed and haul it out to the garage, and we get to spend some a few nights sleeping on a matress on the basement floor, underneath the octopus-furnace among the spiders. (Just kidding, our basement is actually rather nice.)

I also had to work on my application to the University, due next Thursday. I haven't been thinking like a college academic for a long time, so my draft of my application was returned with a million very pointed comments. Then my spouse, the PBK English major, took her pen to it. What remains now is a densely-scribbled sheet of thorough discouragement: I think there was a "the" on the second page that didn't have any comments or corrections.

Went out last night to work on my application, and decided to have a "Juicy Lucy" for dinner. Matt's Bar is a little hole-in-the-wall of maroon vinyl booths and wobbly tables that benefits greatly from the Minneapolis smoking ban. It's very easy to picture the place blue with smoke. The menu is merely a plaque on the table offering everything ala carte: burger, fries, drinks, etc. After a long wait, the burger is delivered wrapped in wax paper, still sizzling off the grill, with warning to watch out for the cheese. It was, actually, very very good - so good that I ordered a second one. With grilled onions and pickles it was a real treat!

The rest of the week features more of the same, moving, cleaning, preparing for the remodeling to wrap up sometime in the next three weeks. And finishing up my application to see if I'll someday complete my degree.