It has been hectic around these parts, to say the least.  With my parents and brother arriving in four days, CB and his dad have been busting their butts to get the bathroom as close to finished as they can.  They’re doing an amazing job and once it’s done I’ll be taking some pictures to show you a bit of a before and after (I’m pretty sure there is a before pic floating around somewhere).  In the meantime I have been cleaning like I have never cleaned before…and I mean that seriously.  As a kid I was pretty adept at getting out of any kind of heavy manual labor and I was equally successful here until this week.  Suffice it to say I snarked, we exchanged words and I was properly put in my place.

So now I’m cleaning and making lists and receiving more lists of cleaning stuff and getting to bed before midnight this week is looking fairly impossible.  I’m also typing with a severe White Spirit induced headache so forgive me if my coherence is weak.

So where was I…oh, yeah, my wisdom.  See, here’s the thing.  CB and his dad typically work together in the bathroom and they do so in Dutch so I rarely understand more than small fragments of the conversation.  That leaves me pretty much by my lonesome while I’m puttering around doing the other things that need to be done and so I find myself doing what I did while I was living alone.

I talk to the cats.

And they are more than happy to hang out in the kitchen while I stumble around muttering and asking them where stuff is or what I should do next.  For example, I had several things to do before my class at 4:00 today.  I got most of them done (dusting and reorganizing the book shelf, vaccuuming the floors, dusting any surfaces I missed while dusting the day before).  I was also supposed to do a money transfer from CB’s account his dad’s but when I looked for the piece of paper with Cabanadad’s bank account number it was gone.  I looked through the garbage, in both rooms, through numerous piles of paper (if you live in Belgium you learn quickly NEVER to throw away any paperwork, regardless of how useless you think it might be) and I couldn’t find it.  I felt really badly and I sent an instant message to CB telling him I’d lost the paper and we’d have to ask for the number again.  Then I took several dishes and some garbage downstairs with me to the kitchen, as I’d planned on mopping the floor.  Once I got there I realized there are still several piles of random stuff that needs to go to the attic and the floor was not doable yet.  That’s when I saw the recipe for paella that CB had jotted down off the internet last night.  On a hunch I flipped the paper over and lo and behold, there was the bank number!

“See!” I cried to Rex and Luna, “I’m not losing my mind, dammit, he’s losing it for me!”

They didn’t really appreciate the amazing gravity of my statement so I told them I would blog it.

And here it is.