I’ve moved on to the next phase of this illness, the one which involves great big gobs of green stuff that shouldn’t exist outside a Petri dish. My body creates this? Good God, man, that’s awful! I can’t believe I’m still breathing after hacking this stuff up. Sleeping was only marginally better than last night, although I let Jen dream in relative peace by herself by exiling myself to the upstairs bedroom. Because having a squirming, coughing, sneezing slug laying on a plastic-covered mattress next to a light sleeper is a recipe for marital dischord. (That’s right, the plastic is still not off the IKEA mattress.)

In other news, the guy who inspired me to have my Scout retubbed is selling his for the low low price of $10.5K. When I think about all that I’m going to have to do for Chewbacca in the next ten years, I’m tempted to take out a loan and just buy this one, because it’s got just about everything I’d want already done (except those nasty wheels, and the half-doors have to go). But I’d rather have a new kitchen and the domestic harmony that a new kitchen would bring instead of a great belching, gas-guzzling truck right now; someday in the future I’ll have that truck as well.

I also added another pie-in-the-sky house project to my list during the slower moments of a meeting this morning: a plan to add irrigation to the greenhouse. It should involve nothing more than an afternoon with a couple lengths of copper tubing, some PVC, four valve bodies, a propane torch, and a drill. I’m also thinking about plans for adding gutters to the garage and building a raised platform for one of our rainbarrels so that the captured runoff would flow via gravity into the irrigation system through a battery-powered on/off valve. But that’s another afternoon and a whole other set of plans.

The irrigation plan gets put behind the 492 other, more pressing concerns around the house, not the least of which is rewiring the back bedroom. (No, Baby, I haven’t forgotten.) Once I can wear a dust mask without fear of covering the inside of it with green snot, I’ll get to work on that.