Uh... Good morning

I am very calm this morning. "Bob" and "Slim" got here just before 6 am this morning to start working on trim and baseboards again. Maybe I'm not calm -- maybe I'm still asleep.

All I know is after spending the weekend talking and thinking and talking some more... We have decided that we have been victims of panic for the last couple of weeks. I suppose it's the weeks and weeks and months of little or no progress that finally began to eat away at our nerves. However, we had to finally sit back and realize that it isn't our lack of progress alone that makes us feel crazy.

We took a ride down the beach on Saturday. Construction down there is moving at a snail's pace. There are a few new foundations - a few new frames going up -- but the houses that were started several months ago haven't shown too many changes for the amount of time that has passed.

It made us stop and think: Are we being singled out? Is there something happening to us that truly signals a problem between us and our contractor specifically -- or is all of this nothing more than a symptom of the greater problem here on the post-Katrina coast? We're leaning toward the latter.

It doesn't make it any less irritating to wait .... But it's less stressful accepting (or re-accepting) that things are going to take much, much longer than we'd like.

And so... We're willing to continue giving Dean his chance to make us happy and fulfill all of his promises. Eventually. I still think he should have left the sign though...