Weekend? What weekend?

Well, it's Sunday night and Mr. Brilliant and I have just called it a weekend on two straight days of aggravating, back-breaking, seemingly endless work as we clean up from what I fear is just the first of many 9" rainfalls as climate change continues inexorably while Karl Rove tells Sheryl Crow not to touch him.

At first it was kind of fun, with me shlepping armloads of vinyl records and cassettes and VHS tapes upstairs where Mr. B. spent most of yesterday with his back encased in ice after ridding a 13 x 24 room of sopping wet carpet on Friday, so that he could decide what to keep and what to throw away.

And by the way, if anyone wants a vinyl copy of Bruce Springsteen's Greetings from Asbury Park, Jefferson Airplane's Volunteers, or the highly collectible recorded-at-the-wrong-speed Billy Joel debut Cold Spring Harbor, e-mail me. It's yours. In fact, if there's anything on vinyl you've been looking for, let me know and I'll see if it's in the pile now in the garage waiting for household cleanup day.

But as we pulled more stuff out of the family room into the laundry room and the industrial tile floor that I thought was intact started showing ominous signs of curling up at the tile edges, I knew we were in for a long haul. So much of today was spent building metal racks to put audio equipment on for the time being and prying up floor tile. The good news is that there are no caged alligators underneath it, but there are some settlement cracks (which are to be expected) and some nasty rough spots where someone put down a lot of leveling compound which has now turned into soggy clay. But the good news is that the more tile we pull up, the less damp it smells, which makes me think that there was some nastiness under there dating from Tropical Storm Floyd in 1999.

Of course this is also a good opportunity to trash the 1970's vintage bar that we will dismantle next weekend and the audio rack that's been falling apart for years and dates from an old boyfriend's condo back in 1982, before I even knew of Mr. Brilliant's existence. So while I'm spending like a drunken sailor, might as well reward Home Decorators Collection for sending me catalogs all these years and buy a new audio cabinet and a decent liquor cabinet. The removal of the bar will also give me a nice corner for yoga and other workouts. Then of course there's the patching of the ceiling from the Infamous Squirrel Invasion Caper and the World's Ugliest Kitchen to finish dealing with, and it never ends.

Good thing we have our health, though I suspect both of us will feel more like 100 than like almost 52 by tomorrow morning.