The cabinets are not where the store thought they would be. They are still on a truck headed west. They are anticipated to be here Friday, but will not reach our place until Monday or Tuesday next.

There is plus and minus to this: the plus is Jane can finish the painting without hindrance and at a slower place. Understand, I have offered to wield a roller, but she states that, given my hand isn’t the steadiest, she wants to do the edging; and that after that, the roller part is her dessert, which she doesn’t want to give up. So I remain the Agent of Destruction: if something wants ripping out, down, or up, or if a board wants to be cut—it’s mine. But the drawing of cut-lines, the measuring, the painting, the figuring, is all the resident Agent of Art and Construction.

So that’s the plus. Jane is getting really tired and I can’t pry the paint away from her—my pony, she calls it, as in, “Keep shoveling! There must be a pony somewhere under all this poo…” And we get to rest a little.

On the other hand, the minus is—we’re going to be lucky to have countertops by Christmas. We ARE slotted in, because we bought them on sale, early, and we are in queue for installation. But certainly not for Thanksgiving.

I am not even sure we will have everything working for Thanksgiving, except the fridge and freezer, which have to stay plugged in: not sure of a sink (again) or the dishwasher.

So…I am promising Jane her ‘chicken with mandarin oranges and cinnamon’ for Christmas, not Thanksgiving, and I have made a reservation at Clinkerdagger’s, the restaurant that overhangs Spokane Falls. Snagged one of the last reservations for Thanksgiving noon, which will give Jane her turkey with trimmings (I’m, I finally discovered, allergic to turkey, but not chicken)—and me something else nice. With traditional desserts. And no dishes to wash. We’ve never holiday’ed-out like this, but it seems like Jane, after all her work, deserves something better than I’ll be able to put together in Chaos Central.

This isn’t a boo-hoo. With the wonderful kitchen that’s taking shape, there is no boo-hoo. Except about the schedule. We’ll at least be able to put away most of the stuff from the living room floor before Thanksgiving (it looks like a bad case of hoarding, and some stacks are as high as my head)—and we will be fine! But we are giving ourselves a little bit of R&R.