Stomping Ceilings

Mothers Day, post K. I celebrate by sleeping late then head over to the house as usual. I’ll quit early today, too. My girls are fixing dinner for their grandmother and me.

We’ve found someone to tile the master bathroom: “Ricky” from Argentina. Ricky doesn’t speak English, and my Spanish is very, very rusty. We try to communicate, and phrases from all the wrong languages keep popping into my head…French, Arabic, little Spanish. Once, I was fluent. I resolve to get some Spanish CDs and listen to them in the car as I drive back and forth to the house. I think New Orleans’s Spanish-speaking population is here to stay.

Ricky will be coming back to start doing his thing on Wednesday, so we’re in a rush to get everything ready for him. Today I’ll stomp the ceiling. The bath wasn’t ready in time for Clarence from Atlanta when he did the other upstairs ceilings, so I’m doing it. In repairing the ceilings in my office and the powder room, I already mastered the stomp brush, that high-tech piece of equipment that makes you feel like a chimney sweep from Mary Poppins. Personally, I prefer smooth ceilings, but the other ceilings in the house are “stomped,” and as hard as walls are to smooth, ceilings are worse.

Getting the master bath tiled is a Big Thing, because once it’s tiled, we’ll be able to lay the wood floors in our bedroom and move the surviving furniture that’s clogging the other bedrooms back in there. And then, with just a few other things, we’ll be able to move into the house. There will still be much left to do—not a single room in the house is actually *finished*, but at least we’ll be home.