Well, it was a long and busy extended weekend. Lisa was down in Madison visiting her folks, which I took as an opportunity to completely clean and organize the apartment. This included unpacking the boxes and crap piled on the dining room table and built-in, disassembling our temporary steel-pole “bookshelf” and replacing it with a spiffy low bookshelf from Elements, hanging as much art on the walls as possible, and recycling the Christmas tree at NRG in Minneapolis (home, incidentally, to the biggest pile of recyclables I’ve ever seen). That may not sound like much, but I took down the tree Friday night and didn’t finish cleaning until 20 or so minutes before Lisa came home Monday evening.

I also had the vacuum cleaner start on fire, which was kind of annoying. (It took me almost a half hour to get he smell of burning plastic out of the condo.) Strangely enough, it wasn’t the first time I’ve had something like that happen. Maybe I’m just destined to hire help at some point. Or die in a catastrophic vacuum cleaner explosion. Who knows?

The condo feels more livable now, and more like home. We can walk from the kitchen to the living room to the bedroom without having to navigate around piles, and it’s the first time since we left the apartment in September that I can say something like that. Heck, all we’d need to do is get a large plasma television and we’d be able to use our unit as a model for the other condos for sale here.

Well, maybe not. But I’d like to think so.

Anyway, one of the fun things about the weekend is I didn’t tell Lisa what I was doing. She expected me to take down the tree, but wasn’t expecting me to finish moving us in. As the weekend progressed I told her I left the tree up because the recycling place was closed for the weekend, that we wouldn’t be able to pick up the bookshelf from the warehouse until Wednesday, and that I’d decided to clean my desk only to have it explode papers all over the living room. None of that was true, of course, but I felt OK misleading her a bit as the reality of the weekend would become self-evident the moment she walked in the front door. (I like to think of that as “delayed truth.”) Besides, it’s easier to impress someone when you artificially lower their expectations beforehand.

I also bought her a new guinea pig, something I’d intended to do for Christmas before weather and schedules intervened.

Lisa’s general reaction to the condo and the pig could be described as “positive,” but any more detail in that area would be running the risk of traumatizing friends and coworkers who read this page.

Happy Tuesday. More later.