I was just reading Steven Johnson’s blog and admiring his publicity schedule. I’m not impressed. Let me describe to you my last Wed. through Sunday.
Wednesday evening I arrive home at 7pm from the McMaster Text Analysis Summit. Isabela is still awake to greet me because I’ve been gone since Sunday. I feed her a bottle and put her bed. I rest.
Thursday I wake up and study for my final exam for a few hours while waiting for the person who is fixing our ceilings to arrive to finish fixing our ceilings. I wait some more. He arrives at 2pm to tell me that he can’t work becuase he doesn’t have the right paint. I’m about to leave to go to a meeting at Maryland to see Jean Daniel Fekete. I have set up a babysitter at UMD for this purpose. I return home that night to feed the baby and put her to bed. The ceiling guy is still there. He leaves at 9 pm. I carry to the basment no less than 13 cans of paint and throw out 5 bags of trash (John, who bless his heart was taking care of the baby while I was in Canada was not taking care of trash . . . or dishes . . . or laundry, it turns out). There was 1 inch of dust in every bedroom. I went to bed in denial.
On Friday, I baked a cake, cleaned the house, washed all the laundry and didn’t do the floors. I left during rush hour to pick up my best friend, her husband, and their baby from Dulles. We got back and drank some beer. John was scrubbing the floors. I went up to clean the bathroom while John made burgers. We ate crappy taboule from Whole Foods.
On Sat. I woke up first and mopped the floors. While Ed and John took the babies to Mt Pleasant and Dos Gringos, Becca and I went for a run in Rock Creek Park, we went to the church for a rehearsal for the Baby’s christening. I went to pick up my Dad from National. John was painting the porch. We met at the Washington Hotel for lunch. We visited the National Musuem of American History and saw the Ruby Slippers and the Puffy Shirt. My sister and her husband their baby and my cousin and her mother came over and we drank wine and then we lef the three babies with a babysitter and went to eat Mussels and steak and fries at Bistro du Coin. We came home and sat and talked while the babies slept and my sister and her husband and their baby left and my bestfriend’s husband made a Kahlua drink with a dove bar and a glass of milk. We went to bed drunk.
Sunday I woke up at 6 and got out the ziploc bags of baked goods I had baked two weeks before and set the table with a paper tablecloth and paper plates and plastic forks and separated a bunch of yellow flowers into three vases.