So about this apartment. The truth is, I'm not here very often. Most weeknights I get home late, tear out my contacts, and pass out with a book on my face. I haven't given much thought to sprucing up the place, because really--who cares? I already have a couple hundred uses for my dwindling energies that fulfill to the fullest. Like yesterday, when the boys and I went to a seminar on how to make pop-up Christmas cards. Robert got right to work on one of those radial-snowflake deals, and before you knew it he had finished the collage he entitled, "Warning! Naked Guy!" It's an abstract, so it's perfectly safe for family viewing. Although if you look closely, you can see that the periphery is lined with cut-out butt cheeks.
Nudity has always been a staple of the Robertian funnypedia, but it's lately soared to greater echelons of high-larity thanks to the book he's reading, in which a naked kid rides the school bus. Robert rides such a bus each morning, and if I get an urgent/perplexed phone call from his school this week, I can't say I'll be surprised.
Anyway: I've lived here around six months, and it looks much like the day I moved in, except with a few dozen more books strewn around. And until Friday night, I was content to leave it this way for the foreseeable future.
But then we watched March of the Penguins on DVD, and TwoBert was impressed by all the dads who keep the eggs warm, under a ridge of belly fat, during the harsh winter months. He saw all the manbirds huddling for warmth like smokers outside an OTB and said, "Daddies keep their babies warm! Just like you!"
It suddenly dawned on me (yes, I've been very slow in this point) that this isn't a flop. Every other weekend, it's a home. It needs the comforts of home. So maybe it's high time I buy that couch, and hang those pictures, and maybe even get a TV. (I understand Renta is getting a Wii for Christmas, an issue over which I am pointedly ambivalent.)
There wasn't much chance to shop for big-ticket items, but I did finally manage to rent the Rug Doctor and scrub eight years of grime out of the Oriental rug in my living room. I agitated and sprayed for a good 90 minutes, and out came buckets of dark, viscous life-gravy, each one darker and viscouser and gravier than the last. My rug is now soft and clean (and beige!), and perfect for rolling around and pretending you're a penguin egg nuzzling under your daddy's gut.
