A completely lackluster bathroom about to change:

Gross, huh? You might notice the black and gray and various discolored spots and think, “Does she ever clean?” It’s not mildew and dirt, it’s evidence of decay–Rust, holes, cracks, places where all shiney shower surfaces meant to repel water have disappeared.

And, so it begins, nothing is left but 100 year old beams and frame.

These two are my favorites. Destruction and old structure surround the glistening, unsoiled, brand-spanking new commode.

For this last one, imagine a quiet house at blackest midnight on a cold and extremely windy night, with gusts rocking trees and houses, eliciting creaks and groans and mysterious portents. Now, imagine yourself alone, seated, with new floor just below you and your flank literally exposed to gaping holes leading to a dark and cavernous cellar. Fucking scary. (Not half as scary as this morning, when I took a quite groggy 7:30 a.m. pee and realized one of the siding guys from outside’s construction was down in the basement doing something. Woke me up, and creeped me out.)

Here’s a helpful hint for better living —

Never, ever drink a lot of coffee while your bathroom is being destroyed. Especially, if you don’t have an exit strategy.

A window’s been removed in the bathroom for ventilation and the plumbers are supposed to return with a toilet, but no actual time frame was provided for normalizing the area. I can’t leave with a burglar-ready open window and no way for the contractors to enter (since I didn’t yet give them a key).

I can’t remember if the cafe only one block away has a restroom, and I’m afraid to travel too much further away without knowing what’s up.

If there is any benign force in the universe, I won’t be reduced to hovering over the kitchen sink.

Rousted from bed at 7:30/8 a.m. (might as well be pre-dawn for me) with the handy loudspeaker reminder it’s street cleaning-car towing day.

Not long after and definitely before my final shower, boom the contracting guys are here to start fucking up my bathroom. Only there is what I hope to be the only problem to arise — no key to the cellar where all the plumbing and shit lives. A few frantic phone calls to the other contractors, the siding and windows guys, and the key will be en route in a half-hour or so.

My morning ablution is thus saved. Thank fucking Christ.

Fresh out of the shower and before any kind of caffeine the “demo” guys are here. Demo as in demolition, or as I mistakenly called it “destruction” when I had to call in to contracting HQ. They weren’t sure what to destroy, and they were pretty eager to do it all and start without instructions. But, the head contractor team guy shows up just in time to save my bathroom door and a few other things (like the radiators attached to a gasline, boom).

Crowbars, hammers, pick axes and all sorts of actually recognizable weapons of mass destruction were hauled into my hallway, and next thing my toilet is literally flung out my hall window.

Now I’m drinking coffee, a tad more lucid, and listening to some demo guy (kind of ghetto fun chat involving pregnancy, emergency c-sections and a six-year license suspension) while they take turns swinging sledge hammers. Waking up and letting strange men start going wild with crowbars requires faith.

Faith that, yah, that is what was supposed to happen. Most importantly, faith that someone else will indeed come by with a new toilet.

The purging of crazy ass piles of shit continues at my house of crazy. In today’s episode, I removed a bunch of junk from my bathroom to make way for tomorrow’s wrecking ball.

(I also took some pictures of my delapidated bathroom, because I love me some before and after photos. Among my web list of things to do is an electronic version of the scrap book I made for my mom with the befores and afters of her fire-gutted house and its rebuilding. The book, complete with sarcastic comments and witty observations about the fam was a big hit at Pat’s wake, which is both sad and a propos. She would have been laughing at it too, I think, with a crowd that sized egging her on.)

Anyway, the point of this post is that in clearing the bathroom I found ant spray and ant traps. I don’t recall having an ant problem worthy of that firepower.

However, I do watch a lot (really A LOT) of forensic TV shows. I learned that some ant traps contain warfarin, a blood thinner.

My conclusion, in the absence of an ant outbreak recollection, is that clearly I was planning to kill someone (an ex-boyfriend perhaps) by diabolically thinning his blood and then shanking him with a butter knife. The knife would be dull, but the bleeding would be endless. Of course, the trauma of this as far as I know failed murder attempt caused a blackout, which is why I have the poison, but don’t know why.

Either that or a lot of ants aren’t that memorable over a 10-year period of living somewhere.