Today (well, for the nine minutes that are left of it) is Will’s birthday.  We started celebrating it yesterday with one of his work friends whose birthday is the 19th and today, as a birthday gift I promised to not nag or complain about how much time he was spending playing WoW.  I gave him a couple of other gifts too, of course, but I think it was this one that he appreciated the most.  Sometimes, apparently, a dude just needs a day to sit back and play games on his computer without his wife saying “oh my god I haaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaate that damn game.  Whyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy do you have to spend alllllllllllllll daaaaaaaaaaaaaaay on it?”  Who knew?

In addition to his “nag-free” day I gave him a tie and a couple of other video games that he’s been wanting.  One is a replacement for a game that he already had but that we haven’t been able to find, no matter how many times we turn the house upside down looking for it.  I admit that I was a little selfish here and bought him the editions that play on the PS3 instead of on the computer.  Even if his attention is focused on the game and I am blogging (or working or reading or crocheting or knitting or whatevering) at least hopefully now we’ll spend some time in the same room, dammit.

Thankfully, he really liked his gifts and we did have a nice Denny’s cooked meal for dinner and honestly?  I found the day to be pretty peaceful.  I vacuumed our living room, did a few dishes and then curled up and watched my Netflixed Ally McBeal DVDs and every forty minutes or so would go in and give Will a hug or scratch his back or just love on him for a minute (get your mind out of the gutter) but NOT nag.

It was a nice way to end a kind of hectic and irritating week.

First there was the flu/blahs that kept me in bed all day Tuesday.

On Wednesday there was an ill fated trip to the DMV during which we only realized AFTER we got all the way there that we forgot to bring the proper documentation required to renew Will’s license and then that evening there may have been a kind of big argument that started about, well– a certain person’s certain friend whose attention may or may not border on the whack side of okay and ended up being one of those clear the air fights that, by the end of it is more about “and you never put your butter knife in the sink, you always leave it on the counter!”  Every couple has one of these every once in a while–it starts about a specific situation that has been sensitive and tiptoed around for a while and finally comes to a head and before you know it, all of the stuff you say you don’t really mind becomes fair game to shout about.   By the end you’re fighting about whose feet smell worse and whether or not one of you actually understands how the flushing mechanism on your toilet works and you’re both laughing but the next day you wake up feeling raw and fragile and still have to spend a couple of hours crying into the furry belly of your cat.

Of course, I couldn’t really spend Thursday licking my wounds because Thursday was the day that Will was cooking his company’s Christmas “Potluck” stuff in our kitchen all morning and the day that the staircase leading to our apartment got ripped out leaving us with no structurally sound and convenient way to leave our home.

What’s that?

Yeah.  On Wednesday we found a note stuck to our door “tomorrow we will be repairing your staircase for wood rot, we apologize for the inconvenience.”  I don’t know a lot about construction or wood rot, but to me that sounds like “we might be replacing a couple of your steps” not “we are going to completely remove the staircase that allows you to get from your front door to the rest of the world and take all damn day to put it back.”

Around 10ish we started to hear banging and pounding and air compression guns and, because I’m too short to see out of the peephole in our door (which was installed by the same guys doing the staircase) I asked Will to take a look and see what was going on.  Will looked through the peephole and said “yeah, we don’t have any stairs anymore.”  Then he pulled over the cat litter container so I could stand on it and look and sure enough: no stairs.  No way of getting to the parking lot from our front door.

This meant that Will had to climb over our balcony and I had to hand him the 20lb Turkey, the 10lbs of mashed potatoes, the 11×17 pan of stuffing and the medium saucepan full of gravy over our patio railing and then he had to carry them all the way around our building to get them to the car so that he could drive everything in to his work for their “Potluck.”

(I put that in quotations because, apparently, about half the people who came to eat food did not actually bring anything of their own to share)

He came back a couple of hours later so that we could go back up to the DMV (and then to Sonic afterwards to buy me a burger for lunch) and you know what?  There was no way I was going to go over our balcony and leave our apartment unlocked for half the afternoon.  So I? went out my front door and demanded that those construction/buildy guys let me use their ladder.  And when they tried to talk me into going over the balcony like Will had done?  I told them that if they weren’t going to set up that ladder for me that I could go ahead and do it my damned self, so they should just get out of the way.

I see no reason to be nice when I’m tired and GREATLY inconvenienced.

I was also not about to make these guys’ life any easier.  I mean seriously.  They installed our peephole so high that even Will has to stand on tiptoes to see through it rendering it USELESS when I’m home alone.  They left me without a working front door when they were switching our front door a few weeks ago and decided to up and leave for lunch without telling anyone (after we had been PROMISED that such a thing would not happen by our property managers) and then instead of simply replacing the two steps that needed replacing they ripped out our entire staircase and then put it back a single step at a time and almost trapped us inside our apartment for the day.  What if there had been an emergency?  What if there had been a fire?

Oh and the staircase that was supposed to be completely finished by Friday afternoon? Saw NO work on Friday at all.  The railing? Is being suspended by caution tape from the staircase above ours because they didn’t finish bolting the thing in before they left on Thursday and the whole thing is going to need to be painted and if it is the same guys that do it I predict they’ll do the whole thing at once which means we’ll have to choose between walking in wet paint or going over the balcony again.

Every week or so we get another reason to find a new place to live. Does anybody out there have a house in the area that they want to rent to us?

Friday, thankfully,  was pretty uneventful, which was kind of nice after the beginning of the week’s hoopla.

Saturday morning was pretty leisurely and then in the evening we went to the joint birthday party for Will and his friend.  The people throwing the party (one of whom’s birthday was Saturday) are big drinkers and I know they were looking forward to getting Will sloshed and sure enough, they were having him down jello shots less than ten minutes after we got there.   I didn’t drink and instead spent the evening off to the side of the action talking with one of the other people who doesn’t drink and having a grand old time talking about babies and child development and laughing our asses off at pretty much everything until it was time for her and her husband (and new baby!) to leave. Then I played on my iPhone until we left a couple of hours later when Will was sober enough to drive home.

Today is absolutely the best day of the week–having spent it calmly and lazily at home and celebrating Will’s birthday (he keeps telling me what a great birthday it has been so I feel like a very successful wife).

Incidentally, how did the week before Christmas get here so fast?!? Didn’t Will and I just get married, like, two minutes ago?