The night it rained and the day it dripped everywhere!

Call it a woman's hunch or over-reacting as most men think of it. But when Mohit told me that he was going to be away for a night on a work trip to Bhubaneshwar, I knew i will find those 48 hours extremely difficult to manage in the house. I tried to convert the overnight trip into a day hop but only got scolded in return and the 'Can't-you-run-this-place-without-me?' look. Run I did, in the literal sense.

The anxious hours of running a new house without the master of the house in the game started off well with most of the pack of workers turning up on duty. On the downside, it just meant extra work hours of my unproductiveness.  More people to keep a check over, more chores to assign, more calls to make to finalise designs and more reporting to do. When me and my pizza settled down at 9:30 pm, the furniture guys had finally left after pounding my head and every piece of wood in the house and the kid had just slept. But that's when someone else decided to turn up and that too in full glory. It was the Rain Gods knocking on heavens door.

The rains came and just kept coming. I wandered like a mad woman in the house checking for nooks and corners of leaks. I found a slightly flooded basement and small puddles in some entrances. Some firefighting and extra hours of reporting to the master later, midnight came with lesser rain. i felt assured that the rains wont do any damage to my house now. We were on a task to face the first rains of the new house and looked like we would survive well.

I guess it poured all night because i finally dozed at 2 am. I put my foot down from the bed at 8 am and SMS'd the Master: Me and the house survived the rain. And that was when I noticed the wet socks by my bedside and Navya's shoe floating around. I jolted up and my mind was now working overtime. Finally I got the courage to inspect the bedroom and realised we were in 2 inches of water. Me, the bed, the heater, the carpets and everything else. What happened later was pure firefighting. But we did survive. The basement was a little flooded too but we did survive. We swept more water from the first floor to the ground floor than what the God sent down on us that night but we did manage to survive.

P.S I also now preach that the floor wiper is perhaps the most handy tool any house should have.
P.S.2 Is unproductiveness a word?

The most unproductive job on the planet

Everyday someone asks me how far has the house come along? And I tell them we are settled and functional but still a month to go. Then again, the second question that comes is what do I do all day? My answer is always the same; I have the most unproductive job on earth. And time just flies away in this non-productive state of mine. How, you ask? 

All day long, I watch over plumbers, carpenters, masons and electricians. They ask for inputs, I give them my piece of mind, but they do what they want to. I request them to follow instructions but they do what they want to. I scold them when later the job is not satisfactory but they still do what they want to. I am just a stationary factor in their lives currently who appears out of nowhere in each room and just chooses to watch them. That's how unproductive my job is.

I simply watch as the workers go about doing their chores. I try to impose authority by telling them who is boss but they still go about doing their chores. I spend hours just watching them like a shadow but they still go about doing their chores.

At the end of a standard unproductive day, I inspect who did what and report to the Master of the house. The Master who had earlier given everyone a daily to-do also receives hourly and sometimes bi-hourly telephonic reports and queries on the job. Sometimes I also report through emails. Perhaps that is when I become productive. All that heavy reporting. Apart from this, if you ask me, I do nothing at all the whole day! I simply stand and stare as the rest of the world does their productive jobs....

A Lazy R