Bad as I am ...

... I'm still here. What a week it's been.


Sunday, I dragged SF around his second home & garden show in as many weekends. We picked up a coupon for handyman work that looked like it would be useful for a couple smallish jobs we needed to have done.

Monday, I called the handyman company.

Tuesday, they sent a guy out to work. The two jobs we had were fixing two pieces of exterior trim and one sagging interior drywall ceiling panel. When I moved the bookcase out of the corner so the workman could work, however, I found --

Mold.

Mold on the inside corner corresponding with a rotten piece of exterior trim. We spent an agonizing four hours while we waiting for the handyman to get to the part of the job where he cuts away the interior drywall, so we could see how far the mold problem had spread. He told us a horror story about another house in our neighborhood that they'd "gutted" because the homeowners ignored the mold.

Meanwhile, SF is crushingly busy at work and trying to deal with construction work in the room next to his office while trying to get ready for (a) company and (b) a weekend away.

Finally, it was time to cut the drywall. We learned something: if you spill a glass of water behind a bookcase, move the bookcase and dry the wall. It sucks, but it doesn't suck as much as having drywall done. Turns out the mold came from inside the house -- an isolated incident where the wall must have gotten wet and not dried properly.

All this, of course, made me think I don't deserve a child after all, because the moldy corner was exactly where we'd have put a crib if we had need of a crib. Melodramatic, yes, but that's the way it works.

Yes, I plan for my someday-child to sleep in a moldy corner of the house. I'm surprised the Humane Society doesn't come and take the animals away, because clearly I am not fit to keep a houseplant healthy, let alone a mammal.

Mold, on the other hand ...