So, we’re having the house tented for termites on Friday. I’m not freaking out about it, because it’s a fact of life in South Florida. If you own a house, it’s just a matter of time. Sooner or later. Whatever.
Life now revolves around the house-tenting. And packing away food and figuring out where to go with it all. No one in a 5-mile radius has any freezer space. I give all credit to where it’s due, though – MJ. He gets manic about this kind of stuff – sort of an adrenaline rush in reaction to perceived crisis. If I’m ever pinned under a cement mixer, I know he’ll lift it off me just like those old stories you used to hear about panicked mothers lifting cars off of their children pinned underneath in an adrenaline spurt. Same thing. He packed up the bar and all the wine over the weekend and took it to Miami Shores. Forty-five minutes away. I thought the whole point of not staying with my mother through the ordeal was to avoid making long drives back and forth with stuff from the house. I have visions of a termite conversation: “Hey! Where’s the booze?!?” “I dunno, George. I looked everywhere – 2 miles in every direction. They must’ve moved it all out of neighborhood.” “Damn!” Priorities, you know.
We will be spending the weekend in a “recreational vehicle” parked in our driveway. I admit that I balked at first. I believe my initial reaction was “You’re kidding, right?” I came around, mostly because – well, while I may not show it – I’m just as paranoid as MJ is, with all the stories you hear about people breaking into homes that have been tented. I know he thinks I’m blase about bad things that go wrong, and that I don’t care, but that’s not true, you know. It’s just that most of the time I figure that he gets upset enough for 2, so it would be a waste of energy and counterproductive to join in the pity party. Or maybe it’s because he’s so freaked out, I feel like I don’t have permission to freak out, too. One of these days I’m going to really freak about something at the same time he does and see what happens.
And so, it will be MJ, me and the cat in a tin can for 3 days, 4 nights.
I will be spending the majority of Thursday traumatizing the cat. I have to take her to the vet for shots “because other people will have rented this RV before and taken their animals along and we don’t know how well it’s been cleaned and we don’t know what the other animals might have left behind.” Our buddy, Shawn, the electrician will be stopping by to hook up the RV to the house current because I refuse to pay $3 an hour plus a gallon of gas (at $3.59 per gallon) per hour to run the RV’s generator for AC. I freaking refuse. And I refuse to do without. Period. Did I ever tell you how I kicked off my peri-menopause after Hurricane Katrina because we had no AC for over a week and I was literally beet-red constantly to the point where Shawn lent us a portable generator because he felt so freaking bad for me and freaking Homestead got their power back before we did?
Maybe it won’t be so bad. Uh huh. I told MJ not to turn off the main computer in the house so we can get reception through the DSL/wireless connection to the laptop, and still have internet access. “That’s all you really care about, isn’t it?” Well, yeah. But I ain’t gonna say so out loud.
