My Bar Mitzvah Renovation

 I started this blog almost thirteen years ago to the day. 

In 2007, while we were still residing in the North Jewish Ghetto, we decided to embark upon a major home renovation that would upend our lives for about two months. While the kitchen was being torn out, walls removed, and floors replaced, I decided to use Facebook as a way to keep my mom, who was snowbirding in Florida, updated on the progress. I would post a few pictures every day and I would add some glib story about how the mess was affecting our lives. Within days of those first posts, I began receiving comments from friends and family. People forget how much fun Facebook comments were back then. It was goofy and connective, a wee bit of fun to pass the time,  not at all like the dumpster fire it can be today. Even so, I decided to move the daily renovation posts off of Facebook and onto this space on Blogger. It offered me far more flexibility than Facebook could back then. I never foresaw using this space to brain dump other musings but that is exactly what occurred.  Over time, and long after those renovations were completed, this blog became an online journal for me. I never really cared all that much if people read it because it was a way for me to express myself, even if people didn't agree. My space, my opinions, and everybody else be damned. 

My postings here have fluctuated over these last thirteen years. I have used the space as a travel journal for a myriad of trips, a sharing area for vegetarian cooking successes and disasters, a political venting arena,  and I've even had a go at trying my hand at amateur movie critic once or twice. I have enjoyed the writing challenge and I have rarely regretted anything that I've posted. I have gone on posting binges and have also gone months into a posting desert. And...I'm good with all of it.

So, on this the Bar Mitzvah of my blog, I find it incredibly amusing that I am once again posting about a home renovation. The symmetry is painfully obvious and needn't be discussed and if I had planned it to be this way, it wouldn't have happened. 

Yes, we are doing a minor refresh of our newish space...four years after moving in...in the middle of a global pandemic. There is a lot to unpack about that sentence but suffice it to say that when we planned to finally do some upgrades to our downtown condo, we didn't anticipate the entire world shutting down because of a plague. We aren't knocking down walls or shifting living space but we are doing a full painting of the place, some upgrades to the bedroom, and a complete gutting of the powder room which I have always loathed and described as a "French provincial apiary". (The previous owners had stencilled some kind of wasps on the wall. It gave me swarming nightmares every single time I walked into it.) 

But a minor refresh is also very displacing, even at the best of times. This is especially so when you simply don't have any space to which to be displaced and you have to maintain a safe distance from all workers. (Yes, everybody is masked all the time!) We discussed the possibility of decamping to a downtown hotel but, you know...global pandemic. Our comfort level isn't quite at the "let's stay in a room where hundreds have stayed before and possibly coughed on the pillows" degree of calm. We may yet get to that place if our living and working together in a small spare bedroom surrounded by all of our dislocated artwork and the granddaughter's toys become too much of a strain on a thirty-five-year-old marriage devoid of all filters. The original plan from the contractor was for them to work on one area of the condo at a time and allow us to rotate around the space. But that idea seems to have flown out the window along with the last remnants of autumn as they clearly want to get in, finish, and get out of here as quickly as possible. 

Global pandemic!

Oh...did I mention that they have shut off the heat and hot water in our building today because they are installing a new boiler system? 

Global pandemic in a condominium.

And so, we are hunkered down together in a room with no windows, no working television, masked whenever we need the kitchen, handwashing at an accelerated rate, smelling like a gymnasium after a group of adolescent boys because we can't shower, and desperately hoping that we don't kill each other in our sleep before we have had a chance to revel in the extermination of the wasps. Like everybody else celebrating a Bar Mitzvah this year, we are doing it in a new and decidedly different way. 

Keep you all posted. In the meantime, here are some Bar Mitzvah photos.

Enlarge that last photo and check out the stinging insects.