After seven weeks of hard work, we finally said "enough" yesterday, stopped what we were doing, prepared food for a few dozen friends and family: held our Open House.

There are projects left unfinished, of course. For example, Kris would like her pot rack hung in the kitchen. She'd also like me to fix my work on hanging the kitchen light. I spent a couple of hours assembling the light yesterday morning, but ran into the barrier of my own literal-minded direction-following.

I follow written directions to the letter. I do this with recipes, I do this with directions to places, I do this with assembly instructions. So, when I put the light together, wired it, and hung it, I was shocked to find that there were several feet of excess cordage. None of the instructions had said anything about trimming the chain and the cord to the required length.

"Those are bad directions," confided Lisa, a technical writer. "The number one rule of technical writing is that you always assume the person following the instructions is an idiot."

Great. But she's right — if I was thinking for myself, I would have known to trim things. I just assumed there'd be a step that told me to do so, if needed. Now it'll take me another half hour or hour to fix my mistake.

But I'm not going to do that for two weeks. We're taking two weeks off from the house. We'll do no work on it. After two weeks, we'll attack our projects with renewed vigor.

To celebrate our new house, we invited friends and family for food and fellowship yesterday. In my mind, this was going to be a day to laze around on the lawn, chatting with people, enjoying the August sun. In reality, I gave house tours constantly from the moment Chris and Cari arrived around one, until I stopped for a hot dog and a glass of white wine (bad combo, I know) at around six. Then I gave more tours. It was a pleasure to share our house — I'm proud of it — but by the end of the days, my eyes had glazed over, my mouth was numb, and my brain was fried. I was beginning to forget who I'd told what!

Our guests seemed to have a good time, though, and that's what counts. The adults joined the various insects (ants, bees, and flies) in milling around the food; the kids ran and screamed and played pirates and threw balls and plunged onto our brand-new six dollar slip-and-slide. This photo of Harrison, slipping and sliding, comes from Mac:

I was grateful for Sabino, who ran to the store to get us more water, ice, and soda; and for Dave and Karen, who, sensing our weariness, took responsibility for grilling dinner. It was a relief to sit down — if only for fifteen minutes — and socialize.

As part of my time off from the house, I'm actually going to take time off from this weblog, too. I may not take the entire two weeks off (could I really tear myself away that long?), but posting will certainly be sporadic for a while. Talk amongst yourself. Or, better yet, go outside and enjoy the last best part of summer.

On this day at foldedspace.org

2005 — A Day Off   I took the day off work yesterday to catch up on life, a task at which I was only moderately successful.

2003 — Scuttled   In which my desire to blast the scurvy French from the sea is thwarted by a bug.

2002 — Piss and Pain   Middle-aged over-weight men who have not been exercising regularly ought not play team sports. Such as soccer.