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Last night was not a good night and the dreams were not sweet. Tomorrow my spouse is on a 6 am fight and we were supposed to move things into our new basement apartment this late afternoon so I could get unpacked and move in tomorrow.

The morning started with a headache with dizziness (spouse) and the foggy, heavy feeling from a bad night’s sleep. Both of us were, as the young people say these days, “stressing.”

We each have cars full of stuff to move into the apartment and both were not the right things. The apartment is ready but not. Some of the things we have for the apartment made more sense 4 months ago when we were starting on this project than they do now. As always, retrofitting something that does not fit brings headaches. I went to bed with a $600 dishwasher retrofit heart-pain and got up with it. I spent an hour yesterday at our local Ace Hardware trying to figure out what would work for the plumber. I went back to the house last night and fiddled with the plumbing for the better part of an hour to make sure that at least some of the things I had were right. This morning I started again in the box store town near us at the “not-Lowes” box store since the plumber had sent me there. Four very nice people and 45 minutes later I still did not have all the pieces that were needed to make the plumbing system that was drawn on the piece of paper I had.

Thankfully, the all important single piece we needed we had. The rest was retrofitted and as usual, did not fit so well. Nonetheless, as I told my contractor tonight, we can deal, I’ll put a put a bow on it and pretend it was supposed to be that way.

It made me think of Julia Childs was reported to have said, “If our souffle falls, put a cream sauce on it and serve it like it was supposed to be that way.” I tried to find the quote and I have a feeling it is an apocryphal saying. I did find a few on a website celebrating her 100th birthday with 100 sayings that made me smile at the end of a physically and emotionally hard day. –

61. The best way to execute French cooking is to get good and loaded and whack the hell out of a chicken [a wall or door or floor or bathroom tile…]

62. With enough butter [silicone calk, putty, nails…], anything is good.

63. One of the secrets of cooking is to learn to correct something if you can, and bear with it if you cannot.

I won’t make light of this last quote. It is wise beyond even 100 years. we are trying to bear with things that we cannot change and correct what we can. We are still on the roller coaster. Each up and each down has its own cost. You can ride the coaster to the bottom of the problem and bear with it or you can ride the problem up to the top of the track and spend money making corrections.

Today we decided that taking one more day to make corrections and clean up loose ends was best. I cannot tell if that was truly the top or the bottom of the roller coaster track.

With the house, as in life, the difficulty is in telling  the location of the roller coaster car.