I'm Baaaaaaccccccccckkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkk!

I have had an extended absence due to a new house, great new clients, and an overwhelming urge to not pay my bill for website hosting. Maybe I have no readers left after not putting anything on here for so long, but those who have checked in have seen this:

This Account Has Been Suspended
Please contact the billing/support department as soon as possible.

It's like being called down to the principal's office for putting a condom on a classroom doorknob, or throwing a soda can at a student but hitting a teacher instead, or upsetting a sub so much by refusing to go to the principal's office that he went not once but twice to get a note from her requesting my presence and then her actually coming down to fetch me. Ms. D, I am very sorry for the grey hairs I caused you. I hope you are able to make money off the book you can write about the crazy ass morons you babysat there. But she had more patience with me than any other person in the world, and it's because of her that I am here, happy, healthy, and able to not have to purchase my toothpaste from the prison commissary.

I just simply had a massive brainfart about the payment for this site, dental exams, showering, eating things that don't start with Pop and end with Tart. I have been in a wallpaper-countertop-flooring-miniblind-babyshit brown paint-moving coma of sorts for several weeks. The payoff has been worth it and the 26-year-old house feels like a brand new one, albeit with arthritis and sometimes anal seepage. I have a few more things left to do before feeling like I can show it off. Namely, the card reader is somewhere in the fifty-three boxes of things still left unpacked, and I couldn't put new pictures up even if I had them stored in the camera. I'll instead regale you with some before photos of the well-maintained Mormon abode that we bought, and the pithy comments you have missed so dearly, like when you give up coffee and realize you not only miss the caffeine and the taste, the coffee shits were oddly satisfying and life just doesn't seem right without your legs falling asleep to the aroma of French-roast poo-poo perfume:

The front of our well-priced 4 bedroom, 2 1/2 bath, 2 car-garage home. For several months, I would click on this listing and always be reminded of why we hadn't gone to see it before, which would be the following reasons:

The entry made me feel like watching "Golden Girls." There was a magazine rack of Depends sitting by the door, just in case you wanted to get into character.

Before we moved in and started painting in our attempt at exorcising out the demons of outdated taste, our view of the front door. Mower insisted we keep it. I insisted he shove it up his ass. You'll see soon who won that battle.

There is absolutely nothing in the dining room that has not been removed, replaced or painted, with the exception of the highly offensive and non-working intercom system, which we are allowing to stay because the nursing homes for outdated, useless electronics are still filled with Ataris, 8 tracks, and Beta Max machines. We're hoping to get the intercom system it's own private wing soon. The pink valances were craigslisted for free, since I could not in good conscience make someone pay for them. That disservice was already done to the previous owners.

The formal living room with exactly one outlet that the light switch worked for. The burgandy shades and blinds weren't bad, but since we weren't planning on this room being the bordello, we went ahead and craigslisted those as well.

How they managed to get their couches to match the miniblinds, I will forever wonder. Or was it the miniblinds were matched to the couches? Was it a buy one, take this other one off our hands because no one in their right mind would possibly want matching blinds and couches unless they were colorblind or OCD sale?

The kitchen. Oh, the kitchen. The dishwasher, microwave, and oven were new, which was nice. The JennAire cooktop was slightly decrepit, the wood inhabited by some very sweet cockroaches that offered me a hit off their crack pipe when I opened the cabinets, and the formica countertops seemed to be swaying to the beat of "Dancing Queen" when I touched them.

A nice feature of the house--a bay window in the breakfast area dutifully outdated by the wallpaper and matching, yes, matching window treatments. The wallpaper has stayed because Bubba likes the fruit and veggies on the border, which didn't look so bad actually when compared to this across the room:

There was a list of repairs/upgrades/updates to the house and the "custom mural" was listed among them. A friend heard that there was a custom mural on the wall and he spent a couple minutes trying to convince me not to paint over it, that it could be worth money to cut out the wall around it and sell it. We pulled up this picture and the look on his face went from boyishly excited at a new adventure of discovering an unknown treasure to the same look I imagine was on the face of the first person to be the test subject for a colonoscopy.

The master bedroom. I have to admit, I would not be surprised if the bed was actually two twins put together under one cover. The door has a locking doorknob. As in, with a separate key that was left on the wet bar downstairs. Because nothing says trust, love and how important kids are to a nice Mormon family than locking all that out.

The master bathroom with two closets, a toilet room, and another mural. On the tile. In the shower. It's like I can shower in a rainforest without the mosquito bites on my chest. Oh, wait, that's just my natural boobs. I actually cannot shower in the tub yet due to a toilet being in it. Although the guys who have seen it like that are amused and inspired to insert a toilet in their own shower so they can do the three S's at once--shower, shit and shave. The tank is a handy place to store your razor and shaving gel as well as your gimp's wet suit for those water sports you pretend you don't like.

The largest of the secondary bedrooms, blandly decorated to make sure the bed would not ever be looked at as a place to procreate.

I can't look at this room without giggling. It had baby blue walls, an outdoor hunting/wildlife preserve theme on the border and matching window treatment, and the stale smell of Ejaculate From Frustrated Teenage Boy With Few Friends Outside Of Comic Books, a longtime favorite scent of Mormons, I'm told.

This was the study, the secret portal of porn that tantalizingly taunted the horny but faithful boys in the next room. I am just assuming based on the stains on the carpet, not from first-hand knowledge. Get it, first-hand? Hahahaha.

The hall bath, brilliantly lit by globes inspired by exotic dancers. We kept the wallpaper because when we trip on acid, it's really cool.

The marble in the hall bath. It gave me a bad trip and I had nightmares of marshmallows encased in stone swirling around me, threatening to take me back to the seventies. AAAAGGGGHHHH!

The laundry room even had a border. How cute. Because nothing brightens up piles of dirty undies like birds on flags.

This picture contains most of the reasons why we bought this house. New roof and new siding, although not our first color choices, meant we didn't have to fix that at our expense. The A/C unit was kept clean and free of bushes and mold growing over it, the garage is separate and has room behind it for a shed or a whipping post, half of the fencing had been replaced, and there was plenty of space for this dream come true:

The whole reason for the hellish several weeks of 100-miles-per-day put on the truck and shuffling the kids from school to townhome to new house to townhome was to see the look on their faces when they saw what was in the backyard. They were ecstatic, and I felt so lucky to be their mom as I watched them play on their playground.

Of course, we're going to take it down next week so they don't think anything lasts forever, but until I crush their dreams into fine powder not unlike cocaine, they can play on it.