Sweaty palms

When Jon pulled up with the four big palms Wednesday morning -- actually, two twin Christmas palms -- it was clear that their giant root balls weren't going behind the fence, where they belong, without some adjustment.

So we removed the two sections of fence on either side of the gate.

Sounds easy, if you leave out the giant rocks that kept getting in our way excavating the knee-deep holes.

Their jackhammer finally prevailed -- but I still felt as jittery as if I were running it. That's because Wednesday was also my court appeal date on the window issue.

Our lawyer, the sweet and brilliant Wayne, was in court on a separate matter, but stood at my side as I made my case to Judge J. Jefferson Overby. The city lawyer made his points, but without much vigor.

And despite my trembles and sweats, the judge was uncharacteristically kind: He agreed to consider the case afresh, weigh the facts and get back to me with a decision. He could veto the windows, approve them or kick the case back to the Historic Commission -- but at least he didn't rule against me outright.

"You can be cautiously optimistic," Wayne said after court.

Dum spiro, spero, I told him -- but his Latin wasn't great, so I had to translate:

While there's breath, there's hope.

Blessings

One of the first things I wanted to do when we got in -- really in, without a ton of ladders and ham- mers -- was to hang the hamsa Lou sent.

It's an ancient symbol of blessing, used by Arabs and Jews alike, and stretching beyond both of them into the mists of time and belief.

This one is inscribed with a Hebrew blessing, asking for peace and joy in the house.

And sure enough, a blessing rang the doorbell Monday morning: Arnold, back for a Key West visit.

I showed him around the place -- changed a bit since his last time here -- and neither of us could stop smiling.

A few hours later, it was even better. Arnold brought Mr. B back for a quick tour, and Brantley kept saying what I think a million times a day: "It's beautiful!"

We're in

Finally, on Thursday, Durwood came by early to inspect the gas shutoff -- and within an hour, Carolyn called me from the Building Department to say that our Certificate of Occupancy was ready.

It's conditional, expiring in October, and I had to post a huge bond to cover tearing out the windows, but . . . I'll take even partial victory. I picked it up, made a quick run to the apartment for some things I'd need to spend the night at the house, stopped at Fausto's for a bottle of champagne (ex-Mayor Jimmy hugged me on hearing the news) and went home -- how sweet those words are, at long last -- for a victory dance.

The landscapers were putting in even more of their spectacular wares -- lady palms, foxtail palms, dwarf Madagascar date palms; and I'd post more shots of the garden progress, but our order for a DSL modem fell somewhere in the crack between the old BellSouth and the new AT&T, so I'm typing from a dialup line in the upstairs bedroom, crosslegged on the big bamboo bed.

But typing with a smile.

There was another victory dance when Waste Management hauled off the outhouse, after about the 12th call. We closed the day with martinis at Mangoes, where Franko Richmond was playing piano brilliantly as ever.

Friday I had early coffee on the porch, and then we met with the alarms guy, changed our voter registration, changed our postal address, changed our driver's licenses and had a little meeting with the lawyer, who said he'd be there with me Wednesday when the magistrate hears our appeal on the windows.

As you can imagine, there's lots to do to shut the apartment down and get the house fully arranged. I'll post more when I can.

We didn't pass gas

Durwood, the plumbing inspector who also does gas lines (I guess because it's all pipes) was there just after I got to the house Wednesday morning.

It was our last bit of inspection before a Certificate of Occupancy, and the propane folks had already been here around 7 a.m. to hook up their gauges to show there were no leaks in the line.

Perhaps fine for you and me, but not for the Building Code here. Durwood said we had to have an emergency cutoff near the cooktop -- not, as I suggested, a turn of the valve at the top of Suburban's propane tank. He said Suburban forbade that, and he'd come back when we were ready.

I called Suburban, as you might imagine, and they sent out Adrian, who called another helper and said that if we had any sense we should turn off the tank valve if need be, and took the cooktop apart and found his predecessor had installed the emergency cutoff under floor level and deep inside the cabinet. So he put in a new cutoff, and we figured out where it would hit inside the island cabinets, and I called Matt, the electrician, to borrow his zip-cut tool so I could carve out a big, honking access hole.

Matt arrived just after inspectors' hours were over, and we cut through until we found the cutoff, and I called the inspection in yet again. It's probably Thursday.

During the day, the window washers were there, and the landscapers, as well as the gas guys. All of them wondered why I hadn't run up Duval Street screaming and brandishing a kitchen knife.

Actually, good question. Stumps me, too.

Not so fast

"And we move in Tuesday," he said. Yeah, right.

It seems the inspector didn't file a final pool electrical confirmation, so the whole thing has to be done again. And the gas company didn't get their work inspected either (didn't know it had to be, but silly me).

So . . . I hightailed it to the building department with the electrical final, but Carolyn couldn't get the inspector on the phone, so she scheduled the regular electrical inspector, Terry, who's well known as a tough guy.

He came through the door, saw the signed permit, said he'd call in an approval, made an appointment for his gas inspection Wednesday morning -- and turned right around. So much for tough.

Carolyn, meanwhile, let me know she'd have the Certificate of Occupancy ready as soon as the results come in. Did I say yeah, right?

Connections

I did a Hail Mary call very late Friday hoping to piggyback on our pool guy's call for his final inspection -- so the house could get its final approval -- and earlier in the day had called Southern Bell (no, BellSouth; no, AT&T) to have them string a line to the house so they could plug it in on our existing number. . . .

And there was Gary early Monday, not exactly bright on a showery day but happy to get wet from either sweat or rain to get us on the network. He had us dial-toned within an hour.

As he left, a city truck pulled up, and an inspector came up our walkway. It was JC, who had last seen our project a full year ago, when the pool was freshly dug. He was here for our final inspection, but after several calls back to the Building Department -- talking with the head of the department, the clerk who handles inspections, and Diane from the Historic Commission -- he told me we lacked a contractor's call for the final pool inspection, on top of the bond with HARC for our windows, which he thunked his knuckles against to prove their substance.

I trotted to City Hall to provide the bond. Diane was there. Turns out she's a licenced inspector, besides being the city's architecture czarina, and she said she'd come by to get us cleared for everything except her windows.

True to her word, she was there within another hour. We passed everything, and she called in a report so we could have our Certificate of Occupancy by sometime Tuesday.

After she left, our having discussed the house, Ref, old timbers, new switches and the history of Key West, I stood in the living room and sang the Doxology.

And after "Praise God, from whom all blessings flow," I sat down and started to thank:

-- Ref, Shawn, Arnold, Dollie, Mr. B, Nathaniel, Gregory, Deco, Dave, Frank, Kurt, Li'l Shawn, Rhino, Charles and about two dozen other carpenters who have given what they have to our home.

-- Matt, Dennis, Steve and Charles, who made the electricity happen.

-- Ida, Carol, DeWitt (I still have to find out if he was born in our house, as he suspects) and Jorge, for the water.

-- Kenny, the sumbitch, for his conch-timed HVAC work.

-- Chris and his wizard crew (with Chip fired and rehired during the year of our project) for our pool.

-- Dan Ace, and Javier, for our beautiful roof.

-- Roy, an amazing painter and a truly honest man, and Darren and Joe, for our colors and textures.

-- Hank and Ray, who gave us bathrooms beyond belief.

-- Vendors like Dennis, Mark, Laurie, Thomas and all those clerks at Strunk and Home Depot, who never lacked a smile.

-- Too many neighbors, friends, passers-by, blog-readers, guest-house visitors and others who always provided a word of encouragement.

-- And always -- ever, always -- Robert, who coaxed every nickel out of every account we have to get the checks written that have made magic happen.

Praise him all creatures here below. Praise him among the heavenly host. Praise Father, Son and Holy Ghost. Amen.

And we move in Tuesday.

Good fences

The jatropha I mentioned the other day is the farthest right plant in the picture, and I'll forgive it for dripping tiny red blooms into the pool.

You can see the fishtail palms at the left, flanking the outdoor shower along that side of the house.

All weekend we watered the plants that the landscape guys put in -- and they're beautiful already.

The big help along this end of the pool, of course, is the green wall both our neighbors have created. There are big red hibiscus at the edge, and then the wall rises into palms, various tall shrubs and even a poinciana or two.

And as for the fence: I've become so attached to its pretty face that I'm sorry we're going to have so many plants in front of it.

Pineapple surprise

We've been doing things around the house all weekend -- washing towels, cleaning floors with all the stuff Jim and Charlie sent us, putting in sod for the swale (required by the city, so we're ready for Monday's inspection), putting on the pool safety cover (ditto), and on and on.

And late each afternoon I noticed a strobing pineapple on the stairwell wall by the upstairs guest bedroom.

Turns out that when the late-day sun hits a sill in the dining room just right, and the light bounces up through the dining room fan blades, and hits the pineapple cutouts along the loft railing. . . .

You can see it here, but it's even weirder to see it flashing as the blades turn.

Gnarly

Upstairs this morning, to help the safe guys deliver their extra-heavy package, I noticed the amazing texture in this wall edge Arnold put between the small air handler and the loft.

The light caught it just right -- but the intensity of the day caught me.

Before 10 a.m., we had the two safe guys, four landscapers, two window-washers, three audio guys, one pool inspector, three pool guys. . . .

I felt like Clem Lane, the legendary city editor of the Chicago Daily News, who described his job as "being nibbled to death by ducks."

But at least we passed the second of three pool inspections (No. 3 comes Monday, perhaps along with the general inspection), the pool fountain tile got finished, a few dozen plants got into the ground (including a lovely jatropha and some amazing fishtail palms), the TV sound got straightened out -- and I got exhausted.

Batting .750

It felt like the College Boards were coming this morning -- final inspections on the electrical permit, the mechanical permit (HVAC, mostly), the plumbing permit and the permit for the deduct meter, which gives us a break on water that won't enter the sewer system (pool, gardens).

Matt (who's never failed an inspection), Dennis and Charles arrived to button up a few things before the electrical guy got there -- and wouldn't you know it, I had two light cans out of their sockets and in hand when he arrived, switching out some wall-washers for eyeball lamps.

Denny had already mounted the bedroom roof to mount the last of the missing fixtures, a spotlight for the little fountain at the end of the pool.

I gasped when I saw him on the roof and was glad that Matt hadn't seen his son so precariously hanging on for a swan dive into the pool. But soon after, Matt was out ordering Dennis onto a ladder instead of the roof.

And my fears about the electrical and mechanical permits were for naught: flying colors, in this case green and pink.

Derwood, the plumbing inspector, came by and looked under sinks and into crannies, and all was well. He passed the house system just fine. Then came the deduct meter -- which, he noted, measured water volume in cubic feet rather than gallons. No go.

I called Mrs. Roberts, who I think came as close as possible for her to a curse: "Oh, my."

I'll have to see whether that can block a Certificate of Occupancy, which would let us actually move in to the place.

In the middle of it all, the insurance appraiser came by, to attach some hard dollars to the soft spots this house occupies.

Robert, who kept incredibly busy cleaning bathroom tile and bringing cabinets back to life, was beside himself: He wants to move in this weekend, but for that we need a Certificate of Occupancy and we still have pool inspections scheduled for Friday and Monday, to go, and then the final Big Inspection, with a Historic Commission component we know we'll flunk but have already agreed to post a bond for.

So this weekend isn't going to happen, and it was about as crushing for him as the Historic Commis- sion's rulings on windows have been for me.

So we went down Duval a bit to Crabby Dick's, had drinks and dinner, entertained by a very chatty maitre d' and a Brazilian waiter, and slouched to the apartment for yet another few nights before we get to sleep in a house that looks lived-in, but echoes empty because we're following the law.

Add plants, subtract trash

Mrs. Roberts, who runs the company doing our plumbing, called in her always-polite voice this morning to tell me she'd requested a city inspection tomorrow, carefully laying out for me the permits and documents I'd need to have on hand.

That was about the time Jon and his crew drove up in two big trucks with some other fixtures: one of three loads of plants from the growers near Homestead to make our house a home.

He'd spent a day up there last week tagging various greenery for us, and it was exciting to see the first raw materials for our gardens: ferns, aralias, buttonwoods, ixoras, plumbagos, palms and a huge bird of paradise or two. Now he and his guys spent several hours arraying it all along our rear deck and jammed behind the gate outside the den door, so it wouldn't wander off before it's in the ground.

Zachary, who works up the street at Duval House, was walking by: "Man, I love it," he said. "You're installing a jungle."

Three familiar creatures emerged from the foliage: Matt, the electrician; Paul, the audio guy; and Hank, our tile man. Matt was there to button up in preparation for his inspection, also Thursday; Paul, to bundle wires and cables; and Hank, to acid-wash our bathroom tile and install towel bars. I'd told him he was the only one I really trusted to drill the beautiful stuff he put in.

The dump people finally got there to haul off our third 10-yard container of scrap, cartons, crates, boxes, straps, excess packaging, rocks, sand, debris and other assorted wastes. We're still waiting on the truck to take away the construction toilet, which is past its prime in every possible way.

No revival

The rains came

All weekend, we smelled the fires in Georgia and north Florida.

Sunday morning, looking down Simonton on the way to the house, it was almost as hazy as a Smokies morning -- but the haze was pungent with burning grass, not smooth with mountain mist. My eyes stung.

That's so rare here, in the land of clear ocean breeze.

And Monday -- when we were waiting for just about every subcontractor you could imagine -- the sky lowered as Robert cleaned up kitchen cabinets, bringing out the glow of cherry, and I got the pool balanced and machined down a light switch and routed out the back of a cabinet in the upstairs closet for some plugs.. . .

There was the sound of rain on tin.

It's something I've heard a good deal, but it was new to Robert. He moved to the porch to watch it fall, feel the spray around him, see the deck wood turn from gray to rich red-brown. And finally, he learned what a tropical rain felt like. He didn't realize that it was a year, almost to the day, when Ref made our roof happen.

As the downpour passed, we went to Abbondanza for dinner: lots of garlic and peppers, lots of shrimp, a bottle of Amarone, lots of pasta and every joy at being here.

Starting to glow

Sorry about the missed day there, but frankly I was just too tired -- and a bit downhearted, which I didn't particularly feel like inflicting on the world.

But with a productive Saturday and Sunday under our belt, the lights are on again, like these in our bathroom (which now has hot water and a flushing toilet, mirabile dictu).

Matt, the electrician, had said the crew would have to be on another job Saturday, so their call while I was at Strunk's picking up a cord for the washer came as a surprise, though not as much of a surprise as the one they got when they used their key, came to the house to work and set the new alarms off.

I told them how to disarm it, high-tailed to the house and we had a productive morning buttoning up fixtures. Chris delivered the pool equipment (which we used Sunday to vacuum, and which we installed all the hooks for).

Then balancing the pool, firing up the chlorine generator, figuring out its system controls (a degree in electrical engineering would help), fiddling with fixtures, sourcing Venetian blinds for the first-floor windows fronting the street. . . .

It was a blur, though one that included turning on the oven for our first hors d'oeuvre (quiche -- how predicable) and marveling at the new TV before vegging out in front of it.

Baby steps to domestic bliss.

Closer

Another day, but this one without a picture because I just didn't have the time.

Again, start at 8, cleaning up after the stove installation. Then grind down some light switches so they'd fit in our plates, then put up plates, then put up more plates, then a trip to KMart and Home Depot and lunch at The Conga Cafe, formerly 7 Days -- still a great picadillo sandwich -- and then various errands trying to screen our den door from the street, and then Deco and Dave came back to get the washer and dryer attached and up to code.

They got them attached, but the code part would have to wait till early in the week. They have 20 yards of concrete to pour in the morning, and we all thought 9 p.m. was a good time to call it a day.

Deadline dash

We're hoping to get our final inspections next week, and you might have sensed a bit of impatience in the last few days about workers not showing up. Our days have started before 8 and ended after 6 -- often with little done by anyone but us.

But today was a lesson in being careful what you wish for.

In order, we had:

-- Seven irrigation guys, digging trenches for lines, and then roughing the lines in.

-- Five landscapers, getting our planting beds ready.

-- Two gas guys, running the line to our cooktop, and then hooking it all up to our brand spanking new tank and, since the electricity wasn't hooked up to the island yet, testing it with a Bic.

-- Four electricians, finishing up fans, undercounter lights, more switches, the shutter over the laundry, the water heaters.

-- One potter, delivering the dinner set we'd ordered. Turns out Elizabeth grew up with our electrician as a surrogate dad.

-- And at the end of the day, Dave and Deco, exhausted from their regular job, installing our undercounter oven now that the gas line to the cooktop was in place.

So today was 8 to 8, and we crept to the Mexican garden just up Duval for dinner. There were two tables of loud, drunk tourists next to us, and when the waitress gave us a locals discount I laughingly accepted it as combat pay.

Hope sprouts eternal

I'd never given it much thought, but I can now tell you that having "File police report" as the first item on your day-planner is not auspicious.

Officer Valdes did hid best to make it pleasant, taking down the description of the wicker chairs, stools and table that had been stolen from our porch overnight, right down to the blue ticking.

He laughed when I said samaritan decorators may have borrowed the old set to repaint and reupholster it, and he said nice things about the house.

After that, less eventful stuff: the gas guys didn't show up, nor did the plumbers, the electricians or the long-lost HVAC guy. Robert got a little dubious about calling for inspections by the end of the week.

But, with security in mind, we did finish installing all the countersunk anchors in the deck for the pool safety cover (required here, if you don't want to install hard-wired alarms on your gate doors), and I started putting up our smart security system inside the house.

A tiring day, so dinner from Fausto's -- but while I was on my way to the apartment with it, I looked up and noticed fresh, bright green leaves on the mahoganies that had shed so prodigiously last week.

And later, tiny sprouts on our plumerias -- finally. Others around town are already in glorious blooms, but our bare stumps week after week led me to think ours hadn't survived.

I'll take any reason for optimism I can get.

Eclectic, electric -- they're tastes

When Robert and I agree on a piece of art, it's like alpha and omega doing the tango in fine step, so I seize on it.

Thus it was in the co-op gallery next to the space on middle Duval that used to house Patty's Blue Heron Bookstore.

It's where we ordered our island china from Elizabeth, the potter; and while we were in there I noticed a six-watercolor image, "Key West Skies," that I liked a lot.

Robert liked it, too -- and it was almost the right size to cover our electrical box, in the living room thanks to the building codes, right in your face at the foot of the stairs. But it was a few inches short.

We tagged the piece and found out when the artist, Christine Black, would be in to do her share of shop-sitting.

I went in when she was there and confessed our philistine wish that she'd add another watercolor panel, remat the whole thing and reframe it, to cover up our electrical panel.

No problem. And three days later, there was her septych, which five minutes later was on our wall.

I can't help but think that somebody could make a fortune offering up good art framed to cover 18-by-40 openings.

She made history

I saw this bumper sticker, which still makes me grin, on a big truck parked on Elizabeth.

And I instantly thought of its truth relative to my friend Marylou -- Bootsie -- who had sent me an email.

She was being ill-behaved, because she was boasting a bit, but with such a great message.

I hope she'll forgive me for quoting parts of her note to me.

She had gone into Berkeley from her home in Sonoma for a publisher's reception because she'd been included in "Feminists Who Changed America, 1963-1975," a scholarly publication from the University of Illinois Press, under the aegis of the Veteran Feminists of America and the Pioneer Feminist Project.

And sure enough, there she is on pages 194 and 195. Her note:

I found my listing and gulped back the tears. I felt so absolutely validated to see myself in print, seeing it as an entry in a most respectable reference book, validated me in a most special way. What I've done doesn't seem to me particularly phenomenal, but seeing it like that. ...

PS: I was given a name sticker calling me a "biographee" and seeing this, all these young women had me sign my entry on their books. "In sisterhood, Marylou" i scribbled and felt like a movie star.

No, a maker of history.

Above, beyond and brighter

Given his nature, Robert thinks everything should have been finished 13 weeks ago, bless his heart.

Of course things don't work that way, and he is adjusting to that fact bit by bit. But he is finding out a few other things, too -- like the reasons I treasure so many of the people I've been working with for the last 15 months.

Our electricians, Matt, Dennis and Steve, provided him with a living lesson on Saturday.

There they were -- on a Saturday, as they were carefully gracious to remind us -- hanging lights, installing switches and making sure that our house was so many steps closer to becoming a home.

Our chandelier, which had last added to the light of day so long ago and far away, in our Chicago apartment, was a particularly humbling case in point.

It lay disassembled in a box in our Tennessee attic until last summer, when Robert and some very patient friends put it together, identified and replaced missing crystals, and carefully repacked it for our dining room here.

"We'll have it together in an hour. I know how to do this," Robert told Matt last week, as Matt went through issues of weight, power supplies, chains, linkages and the cord cover we'd ordered up through the sewing shop here. Robert, meanwhile, pulled out surgical gloves for us to use, to avoid getting skin oils on the crystals.

Matt, remember, is the kind of guy who wires bus barns with 440-volt power supplies.

So there were the electricians bright and early Saturday, humoring us as we tried to put it all back together, while they were pulling wire, punching in our smart switches and doing their best to make sure we'd never get electrocuted by the pool light.

Dennis and Steve were getting our little rooms electrified while Matt got on the very tall ladder to offer us various heights, link by link, and he brought in the big stainless-steel snake to draw the chain he hand-wired through the Japanese fabric sleeve like a film played backward of a python shedding its skin.

"I can't tell you if it's pretty," Matt said. "I can only tell you if it's wired right."

He sells himself short, but what he means -- and you can take it to the bank -- is that no job he works on will ever endanger your life, which is pretty much the best you can ask from an electrician.

Of course that doesn't mean he isn't above giving Robert a ton of grief about the surgical gloves -- but he did use tissue paper to hold one of the arms after the breaker arced off a few dozen times when we were testing the circuit: After wiring the ten branches of the old Viennese piece by hand, he had to take it all apart to find the single light whose wires had somehow jiggled loose into a short circuit.

Six or seven hours later, Dennis and Steve were still juicing up our house room by room, and Matt was still dealing with chain, crystal, Robert and me.

Dennis and Steve left about 5, and Matt was still making sure our porch light glowed for our very first real guest -- for cocktails; remember, we still can't really live in the house.

And when our friend Gene, from Atlanta, showed up at 7:30, Matt was still on the job in the guest room upstairs, changing out a pesky switch.

Write whatever odes you will to the Rembrandts and Renoirs of the world. My vote goes to Matt, whose art guarantees that my house is less likely to kill me. He paints his canvases in copper wires and line loads, and does it smiling with wry grace on Saturdays.

End-of-season clearance

Free, for the sweeping, a billion or two leaves.

The walkway to our apartment is under a big, old sapodilla, and there are big, old mahoganies all along Simonton, on the walk to the house, so I've been having flashbacks to Illinois autumns for the last few weeks as my flip-flops swish through swaths of fallen leaves.

We're coming up on the end of the dry season -- rainy starts at the end of May -- and this one has been even drier than usual, which I think accounts for the heavier-than-usual leaf drop.

Some of the mahoganies are in sad shape, and city workers took down one ancient giant between City Hall and the Building Department this week.

When I first saw the tree permit taped to the trunk, I assumed it was just for pruning. When I saw the old thing reduced to mere trunk, I gasped. And a day later, there was nothing but a small mound of mulch. Mahogany in a wood-chipper. Thomas Chippendale is weeping, and my feet crackle through his dry, fallen tears.

Why we love dark pools

Hang it, smooth it, fill it up

I guess it's always this way toward the end, so it's probably a good sign that it was a busy day.

And it was divided among three audio-visual guys, two plumbers, five pool plasterers, four electricians and two homeowners pulled in 14 directions at once.

On the A/V front, Trevor and Paul hung the digital flat-screen, and brought in another guy to help with most of the speakers, and all of the sound-control switches in each room. I actually got to plug the TV in -- from a drop cord -- and got the media equivalent of a dial tone. A measure of success.

On the plumbing front, Ryan and his helper trenched a bit for our irrigation line, considered the possibility that they'd reversed lines on our water heater No. 2, presented me with a bill, went away for lunch and never came back.

On the pool front: Oh, my! They mixed, sweated, plastered, smoothed, sweated some more. First a subcoat of mud, then the black Diamond-Brite, flecked with quartz. "This is gonna look real pretty in a couple of years, once it's etched out," said Harold. Like most of the others, he'd come down from Ft. Lauderdale for the job.

The pool started filling about 2, the gray of the curing finish turning to black underwater. By 6, it was almost up to the steps, when the surface area would increase and the fill speed would decrease -- rapidly.

On the electrician front: They came in teams of two, and a few hours later had hung 1.5 fans, out of 5 remaining, installed the deck lights, put in the first of our smart switches (dimming wonderfully, though still none linked to The Big System), energized the fridge and juiced up a few of our outlets.

Meanwhile, Robert made two trips to Home Depot and tried to keep up with phone messages. I hung Grandma's picture, fetched lunch from the Bodega, put up some shelving in the office nook for the A/V stuff, vacuumed up various dust, did the liaison thing with A/V, plumber, pool and electricians, and went home pooped.

. . . Where the message on the answering machine told me the building permits in my name were ready, which means I'll be able to call for inspections when all those subcontractors say yes.

'Round midnight, with Robert in a deep snore, I went back to the house to check on the water -- it was up to the first step -- and my right toe became the first to take a dip in the pool.

Eight tiles short of a fountain

Oops.