My life is made up of routine. When you have a good routine, you hardly ever have to think about what you are doing because it just happens because of repetition. It is like the air that I breath.
But when that routine is interrupted, I’m like a guppy out of water. Spring causes me a lot of stress because it has so many instances where it snaps that routine in two, forcing me to actually think about what I am doing.
Case in point: Daylight Savings Time. Twice a year I have to adjust to either an extra hour in a day or one hour less. Do you know how much that screws up my system? It’s like having jet lag without having to get on a plane. It takes me a good week to feel like I don’t have vertigo anymore.
Spring is also the time when I break a seven month relationship with the woodburner. I no longer have to haul in wood and feed the hungry belly of our main source of heat in the cooler/colder/frigid months of the year. It’s like a double whammy of Daylight Savings Time because I now have an extra hour in the day that I don’t know what to do with. By the time I’ve figured out how to use that time and get into a decent routine, it’s Fall again and the cycle starts all over.
The latest tail spin to my life is the bathroom remodel. To save major bucks, we (as in Rick) are doing all the work ourselves, starting with building the vanity.
People, this thing is a piece of work. Rick’s talent with building things is beyond words.
However, there are a few bugs that we are working out… slowly. First off, the drain in the sink isn’t exactly right. When he designed this masterpiece he wanted it to be unique (like everything else in our life) and have one of those above counter basins. None that we looked at tripped our trigger so the only option was to find a bowl that could be turned into a sink. Simple enough. Just seal the crap out of it and you’re done.
The only difference between these types of sinks and the “drop-in” ones is that there is no overflow safety, which means you have to get a drain to match. Follow where I’m going here? Yep, the drain mechanism we got had two huge holes on the sides for overflow. So in order to actually use the sink until the new drain came in (one minus holes) was to wrap a bunch of tape around the holes and pray to the sink gods that it wouldn’t leak. Well, that sorta kinda worked for 6.2398 seconds. But that’s what empty ice cream pails are for, right?
Where the routine part of this little story comes in is that the design of this piece is so far out of normal that I can’t seem to get my barrings around it. I stand in front of the thing and have a huge counter where a sink should be. I get up in the middle of the night and blindly reach for the glass to get some water and grab my deodorant, because that is where a glass has been for 13 years. It takes me twice as long to brush my teeth because I have to remember that the sink is on the right and grabbing things are not the same distance away anymore.
Don’t get me wrong, I absolutely love the new vanity, it’s just going to take a while to get used to it. I’ll eventually remember where my water glass is and learn how to control the water in the new faucet. It will become second nature to brush my teeth again and get used to the new arrangement under the sink. Life will get back to a blissful routine.
Now, if we ever move the toilet there could be a real problem.
