It�s particularly embarrassing because, right now, the East Coast is in the throes of a horrendous heat wave, with the heat index soaring over 100. Monday was a holiday, after July 4, but it was too hot to actually do anything outside. Instead, I spent the day inside recaulking the tile floors in my bathroom. They�d been in need of it since I moved into this house some four years ago. In fact at our house warming party, on a tour of our house a friend who is a floor layer by profession told me to caulk those as soon as I got a chance. I kept putting it off, however, until the inevitable happened. Last week my oldest daughter left the shower curtain out in her upstairs bathroom. The water flooded onto the floor, down into the gaping crack where the caulking had gone bad, and collected in a pool above the kitchen ceiling, where it eventually dripped through. Now I have two cracks to fill, one with caulk, the other with spackle and that will entail repainting the entire ceiling. Why is it that all those platitudes and old proverbs we heard as a child and made no sense suddenly become true once you have kids? You know, ones like �Don�t put off until tomorrow what you can do today.�

The new caulking took the better part of two days. First I had to remove the old stuff. Since these were ceramic floors, the old caulk was actually limestone mortar. I had to use a chisel and sharp knife, taking care not to chip the existing tile work. Where there were loose tiles, I had to scrape the old glue off them and re-glue them into place. Next, I took some premixed latex mortar and squidged it into the cracks. Since some were very deep and wide, I soon ran out and had to run to the hardware store and buy and extra large size tub of the goo. Eventually, I squeegeed the mortar with my index finger trying to scrape as much excess into the grooves as I went. You then have to come back in fifteen minutes before it sets rock hard and wipe off the excess. Finally after letting it dry for another 15 minutes, you have to come back and polish the thin film of mortar that remains with a dry cloth. I also had to rebuild and re-glue a number of tiles around the bathtub, which sits on a raised tile-covered platform.

It sounds tedious and boring. During the more frustrating times I thought how nice it would be to have the money to pay someone to come in and do this. If I took calculated an hourly rate for my time based on how much I make a year, it probably would have worked out to have cost the same amount.

But there was something nice and tactile and non-stressful about it in an odd way. You see, I work with computers and people and right now we�re under a huge amount of pressure to get a new system into operation before the fiscal year. (We missed by the way.) Tempers flare; people complain about the long hours; everyone is stressed out to the max and is vocal about it. To be sitting in a quite room, all by myself, listening to the radio and just working with my hands instead what I normally do with my mind, is such a luxury!

So even though the extreme heat is probably the result of global warming, today I am thankful for it and this wonderful season we call summer.

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