Jen and I marshalled all our strength this weekend and made a major push to finish up about thirty projects around the house. In no particular order, we got these accomplished:

• The linen closet is finished. The door is hung, shelves installed, trim painted, and towels, bedding and excess bathroom stuff is stored neatly inside. Still to finish: finding a new carriage bolt for the antique glass knob I found in my “from-the-old-house” drawer.
• The guest room is finished. The color is on the walls, the new roman shades are hung, there’s art on the walls, and with the exception of a small section of cap molding, it’s all ready for guests.
• The bathroom has been reconfigured, cleaned up, and looks twice as big. Jen’s next job is to strip the ugly border from around the cieling.
• The Summer Work Staging Area, AKA the huge pile of tools in the atrium, has been relocated to the basement, and
• All our outside plants are repotted and living happily in the atrium.

There’s a bunch of other crap we accomplished, but it’s too boring to list here. I’ll post pictures of each room after Thanksgiving, when we do the big reveal While-You-Were-Out style. Other weekend highlights: Dropping one of the new pictures on the radiator and exchanging it for a new one at Target (me), peering at Jen’s sinus cavity CAT scans on our very own X-ray light; trying out a Chipotle burrito for the first time (synopsis: decent food, lousy menu—burrito, burrito, or…burrito?); getting Penn the Medicated out of his little house and down into the living room, where he tried to EAT THE ENTIRE SCRATCHING PAD, which was covered in catnip; visiting Stellan Heazlett and giving him his Kong In a Thong (he was unimpressed); and visiting a nursery bankruptcy sale and finding two plastic potting tables for sale at $45/ea.

Shame On A Nuh. Our friend Dave, an old college buddy, once bought an album from the Wal-Mart, that wonderful retailer that considers it its civic duty to censor albums it deems offensive. This album was the mighty debut from the Wu-Tang Clan, and he would drive around Baltimore with the album in his car, rapping along with the lyrics. It was a few years later, with great surprise, he learned that the lyrics had been altered by the Megalo-Mart to remove the racial slur, replacing it with a more “palatable” nonsense word. For years, he’d been quoting the Middle-America approved alternative. R.I.P., Dirt McGurk.