I couldn’t blog yesterday because things have been insanely busy. You’ll understand why in a moment. There’s a lot to tell.

First off, Thursday morning two painters arrived at 7:30 a.m. to strip the “popcorn” ceilings off and starting painting the interior of the house. We were ready for that and had gotten two bedrooms cleared out, with floors sealed, so they could start there. The process involves covering all the walls and floor with plastic sheets, then spraying the ceilings with water and scraping the popcorn gunk off. It makes an enormous mess.

Then they wait for everything to dry, mask the trim, doors, and windows, and spray the new ceiling finish, then the paint. Then they hand-paint the rest and clean up. While they were doing this, Eleanor was still debating the final color (of Emma’s bathroom) with me and Jack the Painter Boss.

At 10 a.m., Bruno and Leila showed up. There’s a big backstory here that I don’t have time to go into, so here’s the short version: they are Airstreamers from France who are visiting the southwest for a month on vacation. For the rest, do a search on this blog of the word “bruno” (in the search box at right).

We all visited for a while, which was challenging and yet very interesting because of the language barrier. Bruno speaks fairly good English but he has to work to find the right words. Leila understands most of what we say but doesn’t speak much English. I understand some French but at the speed they talk I only got a few words, and Eleanor speaks her own particular dialect of American English that even I don’t understand often. (I call it “Watertown”.) So Bruno did most of the heavy lifting in the conversations.

I took them out to Saguaro National Park for a look at the desert plants and the great views, and told them about our native plants and animals: various cacti, mesquite, jackrabbits, desert rats, snakes, etc. It was a good break for me from the stress. This week I’ve been falling badly behind in work because of the house project, and I was facing a new website that didn’t work properly plus last-minute Spring 2008 magazine problems, plus rapidly-mounting expenses on the house, and a parade of contractors with questions. So a walk in the desert with friends was the right thing to do.

In the afternoon things really got hairy. The phone started ringing. I heard from the guy who measures for window shades, the guy who measures for kitchen cabinets, the scheduler for the gas plumbers, and several business callers. In between phone calls and writing down appointments and “to-do” items, the painters told me it was time for us to move everything in the living room (all of our belongings that had been moved down from Vermont) into the two finished bedrooms so they could destroy, um, I mean “scrape and paint” the rest of the house. Moving the stuff is a two hour job for two of us — which I know because Eleanor and I have moved it too many times already.

I was in one of the newly-painted bedrooms vacuuming up bits of plaster in preparation for this move, and the power suddenly went out. But no breaker had tripped. And the power outage was seemingly random. The light in the bathroom worked, but the fan didn’t. The outlets worked in one room, but not the light. In another room, one outlet reported “hot/ground reversed” but the others were dead.

So here we are at 4 p.m. with dozens of boxes to move, the power out in half the house for no apparent reason, and the knowledge that Bruno and Leila were going to meet us at 6 p.m. for dinner. It was time for triage. I called Handy Jerry to come over and look at the power problem. Then our neighbor Mike conveniently popped by to see how things were going — big mistake on his part — and we recruited him to help. He brought over a dolly and helped move boxes.

The electrical system in the house is a bit scary. The breakers are mostly mis-labeled, and there is definitely a loose white wire somewhere, which we have yet to find. We poked a hole in one wall and found a rats nest of wiring that probably met code back in 1971, but …

At 6:15 we sent Jerry home to think about it. By this time Bruno and Leila were sitting in the Airstream using our wi-fi, and the boxes were finally stacked in the middle bedroom. We went out for dinner at a Tucson tourist trap (and had a nice time with Bruno and Leila, who were very pleasant) and came back at 10 p.m. to get on our hands and knees and seal the dining room and living room floors. Emma fell asleep on a mattress on the kitchen floor while Eleanor and I were working. We finished around 11:15, cleaned up, secured the last of our belongings, and collapsed into bed.

And as I got into bed in the Airstream, Eleanor looked at me from the kitchen and said, “No blog tonight?”

Today, the painters showed up at 7 a.m., six of them. Eleanor was up first this time, so she let them into the house while I set up at the laptop to work out bugs in the new website. It is now mostly operational, which a few bugs that should be worked out by Monday. We have six online columnists right now and will have ten by end of next week. We have four great travel blogs feeding into the website on our “community” page, plus we’re testing a new Airstream photo site. There are a lot of other features that will be launched in a few weeks, too. Want to take a look at the beta site?

The house is filled with plastic and orange tape today. I can’t even get in there so I’m staying in the Airstream and trying to reduce my two week backlog of email. Handy Jerry came by but he couldn’t do any more than retrieve the tool bag he left last night. Dig-Safe dropped by and marked our power line in the backyard (it goes right under the grapefruit “lemon” tree) in preparation for the gas plumbers next week. Handy Randy visited too, to collaborate on plans for windows, bathroom tile fixes, etc while I was still in my pajamas this morning. Eleanor went out with Emma to place our final cabinet order (kitchen and baths) and research a few things. This is all we can do today. The house belongs to the painters and we are all just waiting on them to finish disasterizing the place.