What gift do you get your general contractor when he passes his state licensing exam? especially if you thought he was already licensed? Oops! I could've sworn I asked that question!

Demolition is ridiculously dusty, so I found a cooler on craigslist, and bought a flat of water, a gatorade variety pack, and a boxed set of Kudos at Costco. Would've gotten the rice krispee treats, but I KNOW what would have happened to those!

God, there really are not enough hours in the day...

This week may not have been the most stressful one in my life, but it was definitely in the top 10. Thank god I started a new job to get away from it all!

The new job seems cool. It's only supposed to be for 1 month, but could go longer if I can stand the commute to Napa. The good news is, I can also work from home. At least it would be good news if my home wasn't a construction zone. But, I'm getting ahead of my story...

Working for a catalog company is fun. It's like shopping all day. I even get to put stuff on sale. Sweet!

I got a tour of the "merch room" where they keep a sample of all the merchandise. It was like walking into the coolest antique store ever. Their buyers go all over the place to find unique stuff that matches their style. I'd love to give you a sneak peek of some of the new items -- like this cool bike from Amsterdam that just came in on Friday -- but I'm still feeling out implicit rules. The guy I'm replacing took it for a spin, although he got spanked for it later. Since it was his last day I don't think he gave a sh!t one way or the other, though.

I would remind you what company it is (since my alter ego deleted the earlier post about it, oops), but my new boss mentioned she has google alerts for the company name, and for the famous (in Napa anyway) TV chef founder's name. Turns out foodies are avid bloggers. Who knew? Anyway, e:enknot,77's many points about the Internet being an all-encompassing small world, and what you say here may never go away, hit home with my paranoid alter ego. That's all I'm going to say about it. My alter ego can start her own journal if she wants to, haha.

There's a helluva a lot more I wanted to tell you, but I'm out of time. Peace out, peepniks.

When they demo'd my walls we discovered there's brick behind them. Who would have expected that? Not necessarily a good thing, but I guess if the house burns down, my neighbors will be fine. I'll be roasted in a brick oven though. Oh well, saves money on cremation later, haha.

It's been a while so thought I'd show you a quick walk-through. This was before they broke two transom windows though. Oops.

I realize this may be hurting myself unnecessarily, and who knows if I'll even stick with it. But I decided I should cut myself off from communicating with certain friends until this renovation project is finished. Obviously, it's weighing heavily on my mind, and I wish I could just talk to some people (ok, my ex Mark, if you must know) about it. But I know it's totally not fair to do that.

It's so weird to be in a position where the most critical thing to me is something I can't really talk to anyone else about.

A new twist on painted ladies

Oh man, what a week. If you can't rely on the internet, who can you rely on? Don't answer that.

Between email not going out, email not coming in, and outgoing email bouncing back, I don't know what I've said to whom any more. Maybe I should forget about email and just stick to blogging, haha.

Speaking of alternate forms of communication, here's a blast from the past. I tried to send it to e:Paul when the internet was having a Bermuda Triangle day. We had been chatting earlier when the conversation turned to -- what else -- cell phones and operating systems. So when I happened upon this email from days gone by while I was spot-checking whether the emails I had saved for whatever reason in Mac Mail made it safely into Thunderbird, it was funny to see it again in the context of our recent conversation. Besides, it's cute as hell.