In the end, I didn't have the heart to make Elvis go out for dinner. He had ham sandwiches, and I didn't bother fixing myself anything. Can't hurt. He spent the evening channel surfing, while I surfed the net, which I really don't do much of anymore, so it made a nice change.

Wednesday, I went for luch as planned, plus to the PO to pay the phone bill and various other errands. Elvis was all for it, said I needed time out of the house. Which was true, but also allowed him to play solitaire on his laptop and channel flip to his heart's content.

Martha, Angie and I went to L'Agnello. I usually have pizza there, but since I figured we'd go out for pizza for dinner, I ordered something different. Filet, cooked perfectly (fairly bloody, but warm in the middle), buried under a pile of ruccola and shaved grana cheese. Perfect. We split a liter of house wine instead of ordering a bottle.

A bit of window shopping, then Angie wanted to introduce Martha to Guido. I wasn't sure if Martha would be up to it, but boy was I wrong. Guido is not really a waiter, he's more of an experience, and not necessarily one appreciated by all. Martha, however, had a ball. Guido was himself, meaning that within minutes we all had "gigante" glasses of wine and a complete buffet on our tiny table. You can tell Guido that there's enough, but you might as well tell his chihuahua for all the good it will do you. And if you don't eat it fast enough, he's right there to spear up pieces of cheese on toothpicks and feed it to you. Good fun, although he swooped in and refilled my glass (with very cheap prosecco, unfortunately) while I was on my cell phone and distracted. Which was nice of him, I suppose, but I really wish I had watered the plants with it instead of drinking the damn thing.

At 7:30 or so, we left. Angie to meet her husband, Martha to drive to the airport to pick hers up (and I really, really wish I had known that before I took her to meet Guido, or I would have vetoed that plan pronto. Luckily, she seemed to be holding her wine well-- I'm used to Angie and Maggie at this point, and they can't.) I headed home to clean up after the plumbers.

This is when the day went downhill really fast. I opened the door to find Elvis on his laptop at the kitchen table. Which was in exactly the same spot it was that morning, marooned somewhere towards the center of the room. Forgot about that pretty quick, though, when I saw the wall.

They had not, of course, plastered it up as promised. Instead, they taped up flattened boxes to cover it. Twelve of them. They're not even white! They're brown, and the tape used is white with red writing all over it. And it's already peeling away from the wall.

Not terribly attractive. Not attractive at all.

And Elvis just sat there and Let Them Do It.

The wall units had been shoved back any old way, and they're not even screwed together anymore so they're far from stable. Also, I suspect that when they were pulling them away from the wall, they just tried to yank them apart, at least at first, because I tried to fix them myself, and the screws are stripped.

And they didn't even try to do anything about the hole in the bathroom.

Middle Plumber is no longer my new best friend.

And I have to live with this crap for two months.

So, I said to Elvis once the red mist framing my vision started to subside. Now we clean.

"Clean? But it's eight o'clock. Surely you don't want to do this right now."

You'd better believe it, Buster.

Elvis refused. Wanted to go get something to eat, as I'd been trying to get him to go out for dinner for days. Except, after Guido force feeding me at happy hour, I'm wasn't hungry. What I was was furious, and sick and tired of all this plumber shit. What I wanted was to put my house in order and get back to normal life.

Well, as normal as it gets when you have giant brown boxes taped to the wall.

So, Elvis went out for dinner. Unlike me, he doesn't really mind going to restaurants by himself. I stayed home and cleaned the wall units, which used to be white but now were filthy. I dusted and swiffed. I mopped, which took forever because I had to change the water in the bucket every five minutes. Somewhere in there W got back and slunk into the bedroom to hide. Oh, and I proceeded to polish of a bottle of red wine that I'd opened a few days ago. I had it down to a science by this point. Mop section of floor. Move bucket. Move ashtray. Move wine glass. Refill wine glass when changing dirty water in bucket. Repeat.

Finally, at about ten-thirty, I was ready to start unearthing the couch and putting things away.

And that's when the phone rang.

It was Juan. Seems a bunch of folks were going out. A friend of ours is leaving Friday, and going back to England. Elvis hadn't gotten the email because he had been off sick from work. Did I want to go?