This time two years ago I was living in Iowa City, Iowa, deeply embroiled in the mess that in retrospect resembles nothing so much as a present day Dust Bowl evacuation, spending inordinate amounts of time on Craigslist looking for a place to live in California, a job in California that would pay the rent, and any kind of drug illegal or otherwise that would get me through the whole ordeal. The amount of suffering I went through to acquire a two-bedroom, cat-friendly house or apartment with parking for under $2k in a location that wouldn't make me fear for my life every time I stepped outside to get my elitist NYT would fill a novel. But I did it and now it's all over and done with and I only bring it up on those very rare occasions in which I'm on the losing end of an argument with my boyfriend.

All of this is to say, we have a lovely little yellow house in Berkeley that has been very good to us and has given us such little grief that when a small chunk of it recently fell off, it wasn't a big deal to contact our landlord and set up a time to fix the problem, which involved water and clay and possibly earthquakes.

What I want to know is why this little re-cemented step:

Involved this much equipment:

(please note that this portion of our garage is usually barren save for Snowflake the Disagreeable Bicycle)

WTF? I'm pretty sure those are wirestrippers (how I know that is another story entirely).

And finally, the truest sign that I am a bad girlfriend (as Allison so often points out) is that my initial response to this was, I can't let him put of my sight for five minutes, can I?