The last few weeks have been a nightmare, only partly due to the kitchen remodel.

Three weeks ago, we agreed on the various contract revisions and I signed my life away. Meanwhile, Akhnaten opened at Oakland Opera Theatre (http://www.oaklandoperatheatre.org), and I was spending much of my life in the pit. The week before last I spent in North Carolina taking a class for work, and I returned home for five nightmarish days of catching up on the work that had piled up while I was gone, three more operas, and packing up my kitchen, music room, and dining room. Then I packed myself and left on a mini-vacation to New England with Bufflehead (http://www.bufflehead.org), the Northwest morris clog dance team for which I play trumpet and tuba. We were performing in the 29th annual Marlboro Morris Ale, which was great fun, and I spent a few extra days touring New England afterward.

While I was gone, demolition began. The kitchen is now down to the studs, and a few forlorn appliances are lurking in the corner of what was the music room and will become the dining room. The dining room is a messy pile of whatever I couldn’t quite get to packing away, the hallway is the pantry, and the half bath’s sink, a refrigerator, a microwave, and a tea kettle are now all I have to call my kitchenette. It feels like I’m camping in my house. This morning I attempted to scramble eggs in the microwave (something I used to know how to do) and produced a grayish puck that was only barely edible.

The cats have been sequestered upstairs in the master suite, which I’m thinking of as their apartment. They’re fairly comfortable, and both David and I are making a point of hanging out with them in their apartment, but understandably, they’re unhappy about all the chaos. Norton expressed his displeasure on my bed. Argh. Can’t say I blame him, but washing all the bedding is not how I planned to celebrate my return home.

Jon came over today with Cabinet Guy’s drawings, and we went through them and compulsively double-checked every possible detail, since these are the drawings he’ll be building from. Checking cabinetry measurements seems easy on the face of it, but you always have to add half an inch for sheetrock here, 3/4in for underlayment and tile there, and so on, until you don’t trust your instincts on anything anymore and you need to draw everything onto the studs and the subfloor just to make it concrete enough to understand.