On Friday afternoon, just as Sears arrived with all of the appliances, I quietly slipped out of the house into a waiting Town Car and was whisked off to the airport. Escape! In order to get a few minutes to breathe (to breathe non-dusty air, anyway), I had to go away. Far away. So my colleague Jamie's wedding was the perfect excuse - and it was in Idaho! Coeur D'Alene, which is a beautiful place. The wedding was fun, the hotel room was lovely (view of the lake), clean and quiet, and it was really nice to be away from the chaos for a couple of days. Unfortunately, I'm now in Canton, MI, having stopped in Detroit for a day for a meeting on my way back from the West Coast, and honestly, I'd much rather be in my dusty, crazy house with no kitchen than in this Fairfield Inn on the highway. Oh well. I'll always have Idaho.... Apparently my family has been reading the blog and some have expressed disappointment that I haven't been posting. The bottom line is, I'm just too tired. Every week night is something - shopping for shower fixtures, synagogue meetings, picking out paint colors. And weekends are all house, all the time (when I'm not decamped to Idaho, that is). I have to say, though, that I think things are going really well. The electricians are out, the plumbers probably have only a few more days, and the painter starts Monday. We actually bought almost all of our paint last week - some 15-16 gallons to start. Paint color is something that Adam stressed about early on in the process, as he thought that the house would end up looking muted and all "Martha Stewart" if I had my way with color. However, when it came time to actually make decisions, we've managed to agree on most of the colors and each of us has compromised some on certain rooms. Like I agreed to Adam's desire for the bright orange color for the office....though I have the feeling that when it's up on the wall Adam might not be quite as enamored of it as when he saw it on a wall in a magazine. (And, in the end, we did buy most of the paint from the Kmart Martha Stewart line, upon my sister-in-law's recommendation - which even Adam admits isn't all that bad for Martha Stewart.) Painting will start on the 2nd floor, and with any luck we'll be in the master bedroom by the end of the week or the weekend. But I'm not sure what we'll do about Joey, because even if we can move from the 3rd floor, he can't - it's just to messy and dusty in the house still, and I don't trust him not to run out the door with all the people coming in and out. I hate to leave him on the 3rd floor by himself. But I might want to have a bed off the floor and a bathroom on the same floor more than I'd hate to leave Joey alone upstairs. Poor cat. Just a few more weeks, I hope I hope.