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It’s apparently a bad year for animals here at the house.

Ten months have passed since we lost Bella, and the reality that she’s no longer sitting in the dog room throwing everyone her creepy side-glances hits me on and off.

Only a few months after that, I found myself wide awake at five in the morning during one of my rampant stretches of insomnia. While I thought about how Cheerios undoubtedly taste better in the middle of the night, I heard wild commotion outside our bedroom window followed by a bone-chilling shriek I doubted could have come from a living creature. By the time I landed at the porch door, our 18 year old anger-ball of a cat Zoet was dead on the floor.

I had affectionately nicknamed her “Church” when E and I first met, after the buried and reincarnated cat from Pet Cemetary . My first introduction to this little furball came in the dead dark of E’s apartment kitchen, where I was jolted by a wraith-like drawn out guttural attempt at a meow. I turned to find this cat standing motionless on the kitchen table boring holes in me with her completely deadpan, unflinching stare. Since she died during the winter when the soil was frozen, she was retired to a black Hefty bag in our second freezer to wait out the cold months next to a few boxes of fried rice.

Just as we dug her hole on the side of the house, our sixteen year old cat Sebastian found himself about to give up the ghost. His hopelessly obvious nickname “Fatty” came from a giant gut he swung beneath his body when he waddled anywhere and that, along with his black and white sectioned fur, led to even more obvious cow-resemblance comments.

He was also an amazingly sweet cat, so the decision to put him down when he became constantly lethargic, half immobile, and completely incontinent was expected but unbelievably sad. He’s been more “one of the dogs” than anything, and spent the evenings head-butting our golden retriever and grooming him as best he could with such a height difference. We’re thankfully a maximum one-cat-per-freezer household, so Fatty is taking up Church’s vacancy while we clear room to bury him outside next to her.

In the end there’s a bit of poetic justice, as instead of butting up against some fried rice, Fatty is surrounded by stacks of frozen Angus burgers and some gorgeously marbled strip steaks. I honestly can’t think of anything he’d want more.

With every good intention imaginable, we’ve had some flavor of table and chairs in this corner of the family room since we moved into this house. Though instead of a consistent place to either eat dinner or sit and make fun of drug-addled celebrities when we have company over, ninety-five percent of the time our table and chairs functioned as a mail bin or coat rack.

So, our Saarinen repros got thrown on craigslist (reaping an assload of money), and Munchkin Corner breathed its waking breath. At least now I don’t have to cringe every time one of our friends called our table and chairs “Jetsons furniture”.

The first order of business in furnishing any young boy’s fantastic toy extravaganza: find a LEGO table. A quick glance at the hundreds of dollars some places wanted for what amounted to a little short stack table with plastic plates on it immediately violated any notion I had of buying one.

Coincidentally, my eBay trolling wife almost immediately found a Pottery Barn Activity Table in perfect condition and snagged it for 39 bucks. With the table retailing for almost $350, somebody lost their shirt on that one.

The next step is to prime and paint it, and epoxy enough building plates to the top surface to create a nice, sturdy LEGO wonderland for our little midget.

We’ve already had to pull up the red area rug we covered the floor with, as he would run his metal shopping cart up to the edge of the rug and scream at the top of his lungs when it stopped dead in its tracks. But add in a hand me down IKEA bookcase, a whacked out scary, nightmarish painting E found at a tag sale, and the first iteration of L’s play area revisions has begun.

I noticed this afternoon that winter and summer have generally run together for me over the past few years. Being in my early thirties, I work a full time job, year round, and don’t have definitively marked seasonal boundaries signified by things like school letting out or long winter breaks. Aside from the bump up in degrees Fahrenheit, July may as well be May or September. I’m busy enough that I haven’t quite ever been conscious of specifically what time of year we’re in.

My son, however, knows exactly what time of year it is. While I tend to have grown up worries about things like the pipes under the house, the tree that needs to be taken down, the shifts in the foundation from Texas weather fluctuations, he is conscious only of how long we let him stay in the pool, or how wet he can get us if he manages to get ahold of the hose.

As a parent, I fall into the trap of hovering and being too restrictive. Underneath that is simply the desire to protect my son from mishaps that can unwittingly cause harm (or cost a lot of money). Despite those intentions, a major early lesson staring me in the face is the need to let go, and let out the leash. It’s more difficult than it sounds, I’ve discovered it takes practice on a conscious level. The payoff is the expression on his face when he discovers something wonderful or experiences something new.

Though I’m sure every parent has had well-meaning rules they’ve enacted for themselves related to their parenting style (that probably last about as long as “I won’t become my parents”), I’m resolving now that if I succeed at nothing else, I would hope I just don’t grow him up too quickly.

In starting work on our office, I replaced a medium sized portion of sheetrock, and put up new door casings. After letting the plaster set, I needed to sand everything down. Foregoing the small sanding bricks, I always opt for the larger pole sander heads, as they do the job more efficiently and with less effort.

The problem with joint compound is that with any sanding down, it immediately goes airborne and covers everything. The solution is a makeshift sanding “tent”.

The enclosed space helps catch all the dust and keep it isolated to the plastic-contained portion of the room. As long as I head straight for the shower afterward, I don’t seem to get plaster dust anywhere. Well, almost.

We’re knee deep in the depths of summer here in Texas, and that means the start of many indoor projects. We still have a ton to do on our Project House, from baseboards to trim, to fixtures, outlets and larger. After the intensity of the kitchen remodel, we’ve taken a long break from anything resembling work on our home. Things also got busy, and we suffered from either a lack of time, money, or both.

Now things are calming down, and we can stop and smell the roses (and hopefully the sawdust and lacquer).

In an effort to get rid of a lot of what hasn’t worked, we began trolling craigslist and eBay for things that would. E made some incredible finds. We paid obscenely low prices for our favorite 1950s and 1960s dressers and credenzas (or as our friend Wes refers to them, “that boring Mad Men shit”).

Our front room is starting to resemble a furniture warehouse, as we try to make room elsewhere for some of these great scores.

First stop on the project train? A room-by-room, whole house purge of items. I’d love to go through with big black trash bags. I’ll settle for E’s stock of Rubbermaids.