Digression! Digression!

These past few weeks have been a hectic lot for the family Wilson. Irrationally deemed unfit to house a grandmother of 80-something, the Wilson Flat has been undergoing an excessively drastic, and equally hasty, overhaul. Being the last active member of the family capable of astonishing feats of strength and skill, I have been tasked with the majority of these overhauls.

The heavy lifting, the careful maneuvering and the inevitable and tragic deep cleaning bother me little, but the painting. Oh how I loathe the painting.

In the beginning I was excited! But I was young, naive even. I was content to wile my days away painting a house, for I was a clever person with quite a clever plan. "Why," I said to myself, rubbing my hands with glee, "if Tom Sawyer could whitewash a fence and have fun, what's to stop me from having the time of my life painting and entire house?!"

Well you see, it seems that when Mark Twain first penned Tom Sawyer it was in an era much different from today. Children in Mark Twain's time were constantly embarking on madcap adventures, repeatedly faked their own deaths, spoke in a constant southern drawl, and, above all else, were incredibly gullible. But we now live in a new, much more painful era. The children in Twain's time certainly weren't incredibly fluent in martial arts. Nor were they ever in possession of a cell phone with which to immediately and conveniently contact the police. And they positively had no such inklings of how to abuse the vague wording of the child labor laws of the 1930s to apply to the unlawful acquisition of whitewashing employees.

God damn Flynn Effect.

Luckily, the house and its unrelenting grip upon my free time will soon be over. All that's left for tomorrow are a few touch ups of yellow, a base coat of white on the hard to reach spots near the roof and the final coat of chocolate cherry (yum!) on the trim. The incredible amount of satisfaction that I will soon feel spurs me onward. A lesser man would've died long ago. But I am no lesser man.

I am a man, who when explaining things, quickly and predictably spirals downward into the abyss of colorful language and blatant hyperbole. I am a man who says to himself, "well then, now that that Mark Twain tangent is over, I can resume writing normally," only to immediately return back to his narrative styling to start yet another story. I am no lesser man.

After all, what sort of lesser man would be so dedicated to catching an overthrown huck, that he would eventually half lay-out, half sprint directly into a pole, and subsequently have a humorous set of artistic renderings made to detail his path to glory? I'm going to venture a guess here and say not many.

A brief side note, today my mom and I decided to plunge headfirst into the dangerous waters of pesto sauce and noodles. My consensus? Quite tasty actually, I'm unsure of why exactly it took me so long to go about sampling what pesto sauce had to offer. I also wish I knew what exactly was in pesto sauce so I could avoid any chance of being incredibly sickened by the ingredients in some sort of humorous fashion (see also the okra-jalapeño debacle).

Returning back to the original topic (the remodeling the house one, not the whole lesser man thing), the house actually looks pretty respectable now. After living in the unkempt wasteland for so long, it's a nice change to see it all clean. Ahh cleanliness and order, how I've missed you.

The current tally for the great house reorganization '07 so far: repainted exterior, three walls of one room primed and painted, wood flooring laid down in the aforementioned room complete with decorations on both the wall and floor, an absurd amount of cleaning throughout the house and I think some other things that I can't really remember and probably aren't all that important to this list. Considering my father's been gone over half the month of July, and both my mom and I work part-time, I'm quite pleased with our progress.

Here's hoping my grandmother still has her eyesight.