Wrapped Attention

I spent the day up and down a 32' extension ladder, up and down pump jack staging on the west side of the house. House wrap, step one before window installation. Wrapping a house single-handed is not pleasant but not impossible. Typically, one person wields the hammer-stapler and the other holds the roll of wrap. Doing it by yourself requires cutting the wrap roughly to length and rolling that length up into a less cumbersome package. When you're standing there up 25' on staging (the wind is blowing; it's always blowing when it would be helpful if it didn't) one hand on a roll of wrap, one hand holding the leading edge where it needs to be and the other hand grabs the hammer-stapler and whacks in a single staple. That was my day. But the west side is covered with house wrap.

Called Eric at Viking to find out the status of the window order. A week ago I handed him a list of windows and half expected him to send me an official list and cost before the order was processed. He thought it was a go. Which it was in a sense. I expected an official printed version of the list I'd given him along with a final cost. When I asked him how the window order was coming, he said, "It's all set. Done." I had asked him about lead time and he just thought that this was the order. Which it was, sort of. I just thought I'd be able to double check it before it went through. Michelle and I waited for the e-mail to come with the $$$ at the bottom. We'd made so many changes since our initial inquiry two winters ago that I had only an educated guess at to cost. I knew it was going to be something less than $15,000. I guessed $14,500. Michelle guessed 12 something. Much to my surprise the whole thing came to $11,400. Apparently, the changes we made were to our advantage. The windows will be ready in a month. We're going out to dinner with Molly and Eric tonight as a thank-you for taking care of our cat for the winter. We'll celebrate our windfall of roughly four grand. All that means is that we'll run out of money less soon. Yesterday, I went to the lumber yard to pick up a few things to keep the process moving, and my credit card was denied. Denied? Then I thought: I've be charging up a storm lately and not paying any attention to our limit on the card. I didn't even know what it was. So I called Amazon Visa and explained the situation and I got an extension of credit in a few minutes. Maybe they're hoping that we'll start making the minimun payments instead of paying the balance every month.