The Devil's Dance: Two Steps Forward, One Step Back

It's progress, but we're way behind where we'd like to be. Fidge got poisoned, so I had to baby-sit (is it really baby sitting if it's your child?) Gideon while she waited for Allegra-D to get out of her system.

What is even worse is that I am indirectly responsible for Fidge's poisoning. The last two weeks Fidge has developed a really nasty rash. And it keeps spreading. Not poison ivy. Not hives, not pox, not a bite or anything else anyone could name. Finally, she went to the doctor and he didn't know what it was either. But, this didn't stop him from prescribing her Allegra-D, one of those stupid "miracle" allergy "cures" the pharmaceutical companies keep churning out. I guess when in doubt, assume its an allergy and bill their insurance.

Apparently, he gave her a dose high enough to treat a sperm whale. I not sure what exactly it did to her, but it didn't sound pretty. Something about a droopy eye and the other was dilated so wide that determining the eye color was a challenge. Fortunately, she sweated it out and got back to normal without visiting the ER. Nice.

What makes it even better is that Fidge finally figured out what was making her skin breakout, The Devil Queen. She's been scrubbing a lot of the walls and painting them for us, and she thinks she has an allergic reaction to the stuff. As a hypochondriac with a well developed collection allergies (oak pollen, old books, molds, dust, etc), I'm at a loss to account for what is getting to her. Maybe it's the paint?

So, since I was tending to the young master, I didn't finish off the master bathroom, the dining room ceiling, or sundry other projects. Even so, things must be going the right way. For the first time since the Norman invasion of England, my wife came home and was thoroughly excited by how the house was looking. And, another sign that times are changing, Gideon has stopped calling the Devil Queen "Monster House" and now calls it "Yellow House." That has got to be good, right?

Here are some pictures of what we knocked out over the last few days with a lot of help from friends, family, fiends, and hired help.

First we have our new cherry wood floors.

Second, a heavily primed master bathroom ceiling.

Base boards in the living room.

More base boards and window trim.

The dining room nearing completion. Note, more base boards.

Here is the pantry door and trim. We've decided to leave the beadboard walls and ceiling unpainted. We may go back and oil or clear coat the wood, but like the bare board look a lot.

Cabinets in the pantry. The counter top is left over cherry flooring. The weird strips to the left will be painted or stained to make them less noticable.

And we've been cleaning the place up too. Liz, our itinerate painter, wanted a good bit of our left over building materials, so Fidge hauled a truck load of that to her this weekend. This was a great relief for us. The Devil Queen is getting close enough to completion that all the construction materials, tools, etc need to find a new home. A lot of that has been ending up on the porches, and that just isn't cutting it anymore either.

We also traded Kenny some left over electrical supplies for work on the house, yet another good deal for everyone involved.

Anyhow, more to come. I've got six or more posts in the works to catch up on everything from the last week or so.