Topsy-Turvy

There's nothing like a good old home improvement project along with a computer malfunction to set your world topsy-turvy. Sand and I embarked on a remodel of our kitchen about two weeks ago. It's something we've been talking about for years. It's not really a big project, except of course if you have no idea what you're doing. Then every step is a major learning process. The biggest part of the project was the relocation of the the island that held the sink and dishwasher. We wanted to move it one foot out and seven inches to the left. I know that doesn't sound like much, and in fact I was afraid that we would go through all the work and find out that it really didn't make a difference. None-the-less, Thursday a week ago, with the encouragement of one of our friends who worked construction for years and years, we began tearing apart the island and moving it to its new location leaving us with no kitchen sink.

Concurrently, as a still inexplicable result of World_IPv6_Day, our home computers were locked out of Yahoo, Bing and most Google functions. While we still had gmail, we could not blog, leave comments on other peoples blogs, do any searches or even pull up the Google homepage.

We were, in a word, disrupted. I am dealing less well with disruption as I get older. I can remember being young and having no set ways or no place that was mine, so life was where you found it. Those were the heady (and irresponsible) days when the first thing you did when you woke up was to remember where you were and who you were with.

I really don't have any desire to go back to those days. I like knowing where my toothbrush is, and I like knowing that the things I will do today are not likely to hurt me. It could be very easy to look at my life and judge that it is boring, but I would argue that is practiced, a skill set honed by careful choices; yet  an inordinate number of those choices seem to involve the availability of the kitchen sink and, increasingly, internet search engines.

We got the island moved to its new location (after much swearing and sweating) and were able to hook up the old sink while we wait for counter tops and new sink to arrive. The new space seems luxurious, better than imagined, and after a great deal of research, I was able to track down the internet problem -- had to switch to a different DNS. So now I can once again google "how to install new kitchen sink" and be prepared for the next step in the remodeling project.

Life is returning to normal.