This Place Makes Me Sick (or, The Dangers of Book-keeping: A Cautionary Tale)

I need to apologize to all the people who have sent me wonderful letters, as well as the occasional advertisement (more about that in another posting) or manuscript, and haven't heard back from me. I've weathered two catastrophes in a row in the past week, and I'm just now getting back on my feet.

First, my family made me go to Disneyland for a few days. Please do NOT send me letters about how wonderful Disney is in your opinion. Please do really REALLY not send me letters about how much you adore Epcot Center.  Epcot is in Disney WORLD, which is in Florida, which is not in California. And if you're a big enough Disney nerd that you feel a strong urge to correct my spelling or capitalization or word division of Epcot or Disneyworld or anything other Disney terminology I've just typed, please do us all a favor and go measure how high that big golf-ball looking thing is by jumping off the top of it and counting how long it takes you to hit the ground. Thank you.

Anyway. I had to go to Disneyland with my family, because it's a tradition in my husband's family to go to Disneyland every year some time in December, because December is the month when Disneyland is the most crowded and heaven forfend we miss THAT. Just to show you what a joyful holiday mood I was in while I was packing: the reading material I decided to bring included a copy of the book of Job and a biography of the woman Ted Hughes starting making time with when he was still married to Sylvia Plath, which led to their breakup and Plath's eventual suicide, which led in turn to this other woman's eventual suicide in exactly the same manner Plath employed.

My husband knows me well enough that he arranged for me to spend most of our "family vacation" time alone in the hotel room, with the room service and the bathtub and a lot of chocolate and books and my laptop and strict instructions not to combine all of those at the same time. Even I can look forward to a day or two of that.

Except that my husband and his family also arranged for some people to come into our apartment while we were gone to tear up some of our carpeting and replace it with "wooden" flooring. (The quotes are because we actually got laminate. Don't tell my classy friend Siobhan, who actually keeps track of what kind of wood her various floors and doors and closets are made of.) The reason that this construction work wasn't unmitigatedly good news for me is that the flooring was going in our front room and hallway, which contain six full-size bookcases and eight half-size bookcases. The tops of all of these bookcases are also covered with books, and the half-size bookcases in the hall are about six inches off the ground and so also have books stored under them. And all of these had to be packed away so that the shelves could be easily moved around by the guys putting the new floor in.

Look, I like books, okay? You don't have to try them on, you don't need to buy batteries for them, and if you drop one in the bathtub by mistake, the worst thing that happens is you have to buy another copy of the book. Unless you're me and the book is Pride and Prejudice, in which case you already have half a dozen copies and can perhaps spare one or two. Or perhaps not. But I digress.

The point is that I spent the two days before our alleged vacation packing lots and lots of books into lots and lots of boxes. Quite aside from the work aspect of it, this was an emotional experience for me. I hate packing my books away. What if I never see them again? I kept trying to think of ways we could just bring them all with us. I kept hugging them and crying. I kept reminding myself that we were only going to be gone a few days, and I wouldn't be spending all or even most of that reading, so maybe now wasn't the best time to consider starting the Pevear-Volokhonsky translation of The Brothers Karamazov and maybe I should just put it in a box and get over it, already.

By Sunday afternoon, when my mother-in-law showed up all chipper and excited about driving with us all the way to The Crowdedest Place On Earth, I was an absolute harridan. I kept stumbling across more stuff I had to pack away. I had to make weird babysitting arrangements for our poor pet lizard, who had to stay home, mute witness to the destruction to come. I had to comfort my son, who was crying about leaving his lizard. I had to tell my husband to shut the hell up and stop singing parodies of Disney attraction songs ("There's so much that we share/Even our underwear!") I was, not to put too fine a point on it, a wreck.

Why do they keep bringing me to this place? Even when I haven't been worked into screaming bansheedom, I'm a horrible Disney-goer. I snarl and roll my eyes at everything. I whine. I sneer. I write letters to Amnesty International about the fact that everyone who answers the phone at Disneyland is forced to end the conversation with the phrase "Have a magical day!" I'm as much fun to be with as a six year old in a bank. And yet somehow apparently the trip just wouldn't be right without me.

So. We lived through the vacation. We headed home. I was nervous. I kept trying, in my inimitably chipper fashion, to imagine what the worst that could happen would be. I decided that the workers hadn't managed to get keys from the management company -- they often don't have the keys they should -- and nobody had contacted us, and we were going home to a house full of boxes of books and exactly the same floor we'd left behind.

I'm an apartment dweller. I don't have much experience with home remodeling, because if we could afford that kind of thing, we wouldn't be living in a danged apartment, now, would we? I didn't realize that the worst thing that would happen was -- and those of you who have survived this kind of thing are already nodding and singing along, because you know the words to this particular song -- they hadn't finished the work yet. Of course not. And they hadn't let us know that, since our apartment was torn up and the bedrooms were blocked off and full of everything that usually lives in the living room and hallway and even the refrigerator was utterly inaccessible, we couldn't spend a single night here until they did finish.

I'm tired. I don't have the energy to describe the sleazy-sounding message we had from a man named Stan Levy, who is the manager of A-1 Flooring in Los Angeles (not that I want to warn you away from doing business with him or anything) and who called us ten minutes after they closed (just in case we had any ideas about calling back and asking for details) and left a message about the fact that they hadn't been able to finish the work as they'd expected to, since they'd run long from the very first day of work thanks to the unevenness of our floor. I don't have the strength to wonder yet again why Mr. Levy couldn't have let us know any earlier -- say, before we left our hotel to come home -- that we had no home to come home to. I certainly don't have the gumption to give you an accurate description of some of the messages I left before we left home to find another hotel. And I won't even attempt to tell the tale of smuggling a lizard into the elegant hotel (expenses to be repaid by the management company, who will hopefully tear them directly out of Mr. Levy's anatomy) that was the only place that had any rooms left on such short notice on the first night of Hanukkah. (We brought him with us because Mr. Levy's employees thought that balancing stuff on a glass tank, especially a glass tank with heat lamps on it, was a terrific idea.)

The reason that I'm low on energy is that I've spent the last several days learning what kind of cleanup is required after a job like what was done on our place. Putting the books back, though a major job in and of itself, was almost the least of it. Apparently Mr. Levy's employees -- did I mention that he manages A-1 Flooring, in Los Angeles? -- aren't instructed to treat an apartment in which people are actually living any differently than a vacant one. Our chairs and curtains are saturated in dust, because nothing was covered up while work was going on. The carpeting that we do have left is going to have to be steam cleaned, at least. And after three days of frantically cleaning and feeling horribly guilty about the fact that my son's bedroom was still such a health hazard that he couldn't sleep in it, I got the worst sinus infection on record. I'm in the kind of pain I used to be in all the time before I figured out what I was allergic to and learned what I should and shouldn't do to keep my sinus passages well and happy. You know -- back before we did the one thing that is supposed to help the most with a condition like mine:  tear out the carpeting.

In a year or two, this will all seem worth it. In a day or two, I may even feel better and be able to get back to work. In the meantime, I deeply apologize for being so behind on everything, and promise to catch up as quickly as I can.

Thanks for letting me vent. If I can ever get into my kitchen again, you're all invited over for celebratory three-chocolate brownies.