Flirtin' with dirt

Today, I decided, was a great day for a good Spring cleaning. Not Spring, you say? Freezing your tush off somewhere already? Sorry! No really, I am. But here, flowers are blooming, it's a great time to plant a garden, and most important in my motivation...I have to live here and there is no one else to blame if it looks like hell.

I'm sure the telephone repair guy thought it looked like hell when he came by today. Finally, someone to check out what is wrong with my phone! With much hearty laughter (think Ace of Cakes guy), it came down to this: nothing was wrong. The phone I was using was a bad one. The two that died, well, that wasn't from the phone company's end. This was all very nicely said as he checked my dead phone a few times before he put it down with a slight shake of his head. "This is very rare, this," he said and laughed uproariously when I mumbled, "Sure it is, it's mine."

Would the phone company buy me a new phone and he could take mine, due to its rareness? No go. BUT, he did promise me the infamous grey box to go outside the house. "You need the grey box," he said sternly, no laughing matter this. "What is the grey box?" I asked, wondering if it would turn out to be like other things...things everyone in the world seemingly knows about but me. "The grey box, it protects the phone connections to your house, from the thunder." Well, his English is 1000x better than my pathetic Spanish. I knew what he meant and I wanted that grey box. I'm going to get it too...when he has one on his truck. Soon.
I'd already swept and mopped and gotten rid of a lot of the cobwebs and was semi into a nap before he got here. But there is nothing like a stranger in your house when it looks like it was bombed to get you moving again; his truck door hadn't shut before I was back at it. So while visual peace and tranquility don't completely reign here (and won't until hurricane season is over), some serious headway was made. Now it just looks like there was a sleepover with ten 13 year old girls, minus the makeup factor. I can live with that.