Here's the book that I shamelessly ripped off the title of this post from. (Photo: Amazon.com)
While I was out of the house circling my lovely world on this past Saturday morning, my partner decided it was time for us to begin remodeling our upstairs bathroom. That’s fine, it needed it–especially since some parts of that bathroom haven’t seen sunlight since Karl Rolvaag was governor of Minnesota.
Yes, that is a toilet and a wallpaper steamer in the shower. (Photo: circlelovely)
Phase 1: Happy Destruction.
So, we set off on the work together, happily tearing apart our upstairs bathroom. At first is was a lot of fun. We were tearing off the wallpaper with an almost idiotic glee. We tore up the linoleum with a fervor that quite frankly frightened us a tad bit.
In some ways, the happy demolition that we did in our bathroom represents the time in Minnesota’s history during the Ventura and Pawlenty administrations. Ventura inherited a large budget surplus and decided to give Minnesotans refunds rather than invest the money in Minnesota’s infrastructure or do something else productive with it. Pawlenty’s draconian approach to balancing the budget tore through Minnesota’s quality of life faster than we tore through that bathroom wallpaper.
At about this point, all the fun had worn off and we were coming to grips with what we had done. (Photo: circlelovely)
Phase 2: Grumpy Terror.
Once all of the damage was done to our bathroom, it started to sink in that we had probably bitten off more than we could chew. The sheer magnitude of the problem (which was our own doing) was settling in, and it was quite unpleasant. It became obvious that putting in a new floor was not as easy as it seems in the abstraction. Wallpaper adhesive had also pulled off *some* portions of the paint, and so we had loose paint that needed to be sanded down as well. Since we only have the one shower, we couldn’t take a shower until we got the new floor put in and the toilet re-installed. And so…you guessed it…we were hot, smelly, and in utterly foul moods as we begrudgingly worked together on fixing the mess we had made (to be fair, my partner handled it all much better than I did).
Kind of difficult to take a hard look in the mirror at yourself when there is no mirror. (Photo: circlelovely)
The political parallel to this second phase is all of the political jockeying and mud-slinging back and forth by the two major parties over the MN budget shortfall. They both blame each other for not compromising, even though it is the failed policies of one of those parties (Republicans) that largely got us into this mess in the first place.
Apparently, Henry Hastings Sibley used this same nut and bolt to secure the handle on his farm plow back in 1862. Someone thought it would be a good idea to also use it to secure our toilet to the floor. (Photo: circlelovely)
Phase 3: Last Ditch Effort to Avoid Catastrophe.
So, with midnight drawing near, we made one last push to finish up the floor and get the toilet out of the shower so that we could clean ourselves off and we wouldn’t have to go to work the next day smelling like grim death.
Well, apparently nothing brings two people closer together than the prospect of unthinkable catastrophe. For us, it was the thought that we might not have a functioning shower (we did get the shower working, by the way). But, what about our elected officials? You would think that the specter of a government shutdown would be enough to frighten the GOP legislature into compromising and working with the Governor. Yet, from the looks of it, it appears that a government shutdown is exactly where we are heading.
Let’s just hope that the Republicans don’t keep Minnesota’s bathroom toilet in the shower.
