Bloody complicated little contraptions, door handles. But the thing that got me wasn’t the complexity of it (as long as all those bits work, I don’t really care how), but two simple screws which were to hold the front and back handles together, connecting them through the round hole in the door. I screwed the screws in, and they weren’t for going in all the way. So I worked up a sweat and forcefully screwed a little more.

Forcing is never good in DIY, is it? If you’re forcing, you’re liable to break it, or the chances are it wasn’t meant to go in there in the first place. I was getting nowhere fast with these two screws. They resisted.

After several more attempts I uttered a loud groan of defeat, flung the screwdriver on the floor, and threw myself onto my bed.

Hubby to the rescue… or so I thought. Turns out I forced so much that the screws took the insides out of the little things they were being screwed into. There was nothing for it but to pull the whole handle contraption, switch to the other door handle that was still sitting unsullied in its packet, and start from scratch.

Except for me, time had run out. This was Saturday night, you see. My Girls’ Night In was fast approaching. And so the damn Door Handle Project still sits in pieces.

There is a reason it wasn’t finished today, and that reason was Sweetpea’s 11th birthday party. For the last two years I’ve told her she’s too old for having a gaggle of girls round for a party, and to be happy with a cinema outing and ice cream. This year I gave in. The fact that she proposed a Lady Gaga themed party had a lot to do with it (how could I resist?)

Lady Gaga, definitely NOT Sweetpea

She went all out, because she is my little actress-in-the-making and because, like her mum, she loves a good party.

There was an electric blue wig, shimmery short dress she’s had since she was 6 (so thus now very short) and a pair of my platform sandals. There was the requisite gaggle of girls, Bad Romance et al blaring at high volume, and lots of giggling and screaming. But it was blissfully hands-off for me, since (a) Sweetpea had managed and prepared the whole thing and (b) we secluded them in the guest house (ha!).

And so I got to chill and read the New York Times fairly uninterrupted. Yeh, I know. There was a door handle I could have turned my attention to. But I’m sorry, I couldn’t face it.

(Yeh, kind of ironic, no? He’s not exactly swift with his own DIY projects, my Hubby.)

Why had I put off finishing/installing that bedroom door of ours? Because I kept thinking of better things to do than hammering and chiseling space for hinges.

But Hubby was quick, oh yes he was. A master of the tools of the trade, he’d carved the necessary ‘holes’ within minutes.

Me: “Have you done this before?”

Him: “Of course.” Well yes of course. Stupid me.

Me: “When?” Said because in the 21 years we’ve known each other I do not remember him ever having handled a hammer and chisel.

Him: “At school.” School meaning High School, and he left there at 16. So it’s been a loooong time. And yet he was expert. B*****d.

Oh but rewind, rewind! It didn’t actually start there. It started with Hubby opening and closing the bathroom door and saying we had to sort that out first: already hung, but, he said, hung wrong because it didn’t close. I pointed out that it did. You just pulled on the handle and then locked it from the inside. Not good enough, said Hubby. It should close without having to be locked. Why?????

Oh yeah, I know why. Cos my Hubby, the engineer, the brilliant scientist, can’t help himself. He puts Sheldon to shame.

Sheldon from The Big Bang Theory is my new crush. Wonder why I’m loving the guy so much. P.S. I got my way. The bathroom door still only closes when you lock it. Which is fine, just fine, with me.

Me: “Oh yeah? Do tell.”

I am expecting a description of a mash-up of Johnny Depp (yes, the guy gets the tween vote as well as the middle-aged-mother vote), Nick Jonas, and Robert Pattison. But no.

She: “A guy with a gay brother. It’s brilliant. That way you get the guy you want to marry, and you get a guy who loves shopping and theatre as well!”

Yes it is brilliant, and it’s heartwarming to me. Bravo to our younger generation for being so gay-aware, and to pop culture for helping to make it so.

Bravo to Kurt from Glee, by far Sweetpea’s and my favorite character of the show. Bravo to HGTV and its camp designers; Sweetpea is as obsessed with HGTV as she is all her tweenie Nickelodeon shows. (And a private bravo to my two closest sets of male gay friends, whose relationships have been more stable than any hetero partnerships I know of.)

Have I shared recently just how much I’m loving my daughter? Five days in New York with my 10-year-old could have been wearing, annoying, a little boring even. But no. This is a kid who has one foot in teenagerhood, and therefore loves acting grown-up (she shops, she eats out, she’s damn good at the make-up), the other foot in girlhood, and therefore loves to be a child (she swings in the park, she buys a fluffy Eeyore, she jumps up and down with excitement). She loves writing and theatre and art. Yet she’s happy, too, spending an evening lying in bed with mum, watching a rented film on the hotel TV, and eating M&M’s.

“That’s it,” she declared in New York, shortly after visiting the Lincoln Center and me telling her all about Juilliard. “I’m going to live here, and go to to college there.”

I am praying that by the time she reaches 18 and heads off to college she won’t be sick of me, or so embarrassed by me that she gently turns down my frequent (and oh yes, they will be frequent) requests to visit her in the city - whatever city that might be –  so that we can shop, eat, catch shows and watch films and eat sweeties. By then she may have a few male gay friends to help her with a lot of it. She does want to be an actress, after all.

Today was Day 2 of my “oh-God-if-I-don’t-do-something-drastic-soon-I will-become-the-size-of-a-house” regime, one which entails lots of fruits and vegetables, lots less bread, more exercise, and missing Cadbury’s Mini Eggs like mad.

I got two jump starts last night. One was that Hubby took so long to prepare the requested salmon fillet and salad that I could only eat half of it. I don’t do well with large meals at 9 o’clock at night. The other was Betty Francis (formerly Betty Draper) on Mad Men. How laughable was all that padding, and the body double they had when she got out the bath? For those not familiar with the show, Betty has, in her words to her doctor, “put on a few pounds”. But far more than a few. Times that few by twenty and you’re just about there.

“For middle-aged women, it gets easier to gain weight and harder to lose it, Mrs Francis,” said the doc not-very-helpfully.

I felt for her, even if it is just prosthetics. I, like Betty, am sadly looking at all my lovely summer dresses and wondering just what it will take to get into them again. And if you’ve ever spent more than an hour in Tucson, Arizona in the summer you’ll know that dresses are a must. When the mercury hits 100+, the less fabric and the more air circulating, the better.

But back to my being knackered. Today I set my alarm for 5.30 am in order for me to have time to both walk The Mutt and get in a Zumba workout on my Wii before taking the kiddos to school. But the remote controls wouldn’t work. After spending half an hour pressing sync buttons and changing batteries, and wanting to run into the kids’ rooms and shake them and ask what the hell they did to the Wii yesterday (but restraining myself because they were still asleep), I jumped on my bike and huffed around the neighborhood. Huffed because I was in the huff and huffed because I was breathless, because my bike was curiously difficult to ride. That is, compared to yesterday’s bike ride. Yesterday I fairly glided along the paths. Today it felt like I was climbing a San Francisco street battling gale force winds.

Hubby thinks there’s a problem with one of the brakes. I am just sick of so many things needing fixed or not working properly. You have to laugh though, and in some senses it’s helping us be more active. Our TV/media stuff are still arranged for our old sofas, one of which faced the electronics. Now that we have our beautiful sectional (with which I am in big, big lust), that faces a slightly different direction, the remote doesn’t work unless you either hold it up high and slightly angled down, or stand up and walk towards it.

“It’s like the old days,” I said to Hubby tonight, “when you used to have to stand up and walk up to the telly to change channels.”

He wasn’t impressed. But at least it makes us move a bit more.

I don’t mean to sound like a scene from the Sound of Music or anything, but I adore this team of year in Tucson. The smell of orange blossoms is happily overpowering, and the wildflowers look ace.

Now I should be tearing into the garden, pulling up weeds, planting flowers and summer veggies, and frolicking in the… wait a minute, there’s no grass to frolic in. There used to be but Hubby and I took the moral high ground and decided to be desert rats and let the grass die. Only problem is, we haven’t done the paving we said we would to replace it.

I used to be good at this, I did, I did. There was a period of a couple of years after Munchkin was born when we would put so much TLC into the pots and plants – and even tended a whole veggie garden that once overflowed (although admittedly the birds got the best of it). And I “got it”. I got why my dad got so into gardening.

How things have turned. I’m so embarrassed by the state of the back yard – a dustbowl, a weedy sight, a place of neglect and broken toys – that I can’t even post a photo of it.

“Do you do landscaping?” I asked Ms Fix-It a while back, thinking I might cleverly transfer her skills and help in DIY out into the garden. She said no. Damn.

I keep telling myself things will be better after this weekend, after the 14th Annual Race for the Cure that I’ve been heavily involved in, a cause I’m still committed to despite all the shenanigans at Susan G. Komen’s HQ.

Our Race is on Sunday and Komen Southern Arizona is 30% down on where we want to be – where we need to be – to make the grants to pay for free screenings and help with cancer treatment for women in our community. (Not signed up already? Join us!)

Yes, after this weekend there will be time….. won’t there? Hubby and I woke up again, looked at each other and said, “Friday again?” Yup. Long days, short weeks, months, years.

And what I’m talking about are the kinds of scenes that played out at Munchkin’s soccer match at the weekend. Here was a team of 5-year-olds getting well and truly slaughtered, and it didn’t surprise me in the least. They followed the ball aimlessly, followed each other up and down the field, failed to run fast enough after the other team, and therefore left their goal area totally open. And whenever the coach asked who wanted to sit the next session out, lots of hands went up. The kids had little interest – unlike the parents.

There were cheers whenever one of our team got near the ball and, more importantly, cheers and attaboy/girl comments when they didn’t. “Good job!” they shouted after one child who had failed miserably in goal came off the field for a rest. (There were lots of rests; the game was split into 5-minute play times, and after each there would be a changeover in players and/or a water break.) Whenever the other team scored a goal – and I lost count at eight; ours scored zero – a huddle of parents from our team came out with  comments like “You did awesome, guys! You’ll get ‘em next time!”

One woman screamed so high and loud on the sidelines I thought she might turn blue and fall over. She was urging her daughter to “turn it around!” (the ball, because some of the kids on our team didn’t even know which goal they were aiming at), “get the ball!” and “run!” It was irritating, but at least she seemed anxious for her child to succeed. The others treated their kids as demigods on the field, lathering them with praise that was, to be brutally honest, simply not deserved.

I know, I know. “They’re only five,” I hear you saying. But really. How is it healthy for a kid to walk off a field after doing a crap job, to be showered with praise? Mollycoddling? Indulgent? Just a bit.

I felt like screaming too, not to join in the unworthy praise, but to shout at Munchkin to stop with the clever little dance he does where he runs just fast enough to seem busy, but deliberately avoids any contact with the ball. I wanted to shout “Get a bloody move on! And the goal’s in that direction, by the way!” But once, a while ago, when Hubby shouted a few suggested moves/tactics to the team, he got told off by the coach. “That’s my job, ” he was told.

Any anyway, there was no point. I could tell Munchkin would rather have been digging a hole in our back garden, or turning some toilet roll tubes into a boat (and then trying it out in the bath). Big deal. I don’t care much for sports anyway. What I DO care about is parents pumping their kids up like that, giving them a false sense of accomplishment and pride.

Call me mean. Call me miserable. Call me British. I have a feeling I will never qualify as one of these “soccer moms”.

Next she’s back to being a little kid again. But then I suppose that’s the definition of Tween: in between kid and teen.

So it’s been during our trip to the Big Apple. She ran me ragged shopping Saturday and part of Sunday then put on a grim face when we did something faintly educational (which was only a trip up the Empire State Building, not exactly pushing the intellectual envelope). The last two days she’s begged me to go to the playpark in Central Park. And today she spent the last of her spending money on a big fluffy Eeyore. Confused? I certainly am.

I am LOVE-ing seeing NYC through my girl’s eyes: big, bright and buzzing. And I am loving that she loves the same scenes as I do. Black might be New York’s favorite color, but the home and clothes stores are going bright, bright bright.

(both snapped in Crate & Barrel).

We stopped off at Radio City Music Hall. She: long face again. Me: assurance that if she’s going into showbiz, which is her ultimate dream, she needs to see in front of and behind the scenes of one of the finest theatres there are. And she got it.

She got the opulence: an OTT light fixture in an elevator, just.. because.

She, too, thought the art deco ladies’ loos were fabulous:

(Original 1930s, folks!)

And check out the extra room in the loos that justified its name as, not Restroom, but Ladies’ Lounge:

What did the “ladies” do in here? Have a quick puff and a drink during Intermission? Rearranged their hair? Whaaat?

But anyway, much as I could live here permanently, my wallet can’t really handle it, especially with Ms Sweetpea on my arm. “Can we get a cab?” she wails at every corner. We will arrive back a little fitter, because yes, we walked. And walked. And walked. I made her. She sulked. Until she found something else to purchase, and then she was happy again. My fickle, funny, topsy-turvy, fascinating and sweet Sweetpea.

Crazy days. Crazy daze. Mary Poppins and The Lion King here we come. Me, I’m looking forward in the first instance to a sleep on the plane. Stayed up till 1.30am hunting for theatre tickets I’d put in a safe place. And then they weren’t in the safe place. And they weren’t in safe place #2, nor safe place #3. But I talked nicely to the Ticketmaster man today on the phone and he assures me there will be tix at will-call and not to worry.

My parents left today and that might have something to do with the madness. I regress to a 12 year-old in their company and not only want to raid the biscuit tin (cookie jar to you Yanks) but I also do stupid things. Like said loss of tickets, and like scraping their rental car whilst backing out of the car port yesterday. And dreading telling pops cos I knew he’d be mad, just as he was when, the day after passing my driving test, at age 17, I took the front bumper off his car with some bad reversing in a car park.

My parents will miss me and the dog and the kids, but they will not miss our shambolic home environment. I know they will not miss that the hook and eye I put up (rather proudly) on the inside of their bathroom door only sometimes works. They won’t miss trudging over a dust bowl back yard (grass all but gone, ready for drastic landscaping but I’m spending the money on jetting off to the East Coast instead of on something sensible) from guest house to main house to use the loo, because the one in the guest house has been under construction for years now.

They won’t miss the strange goings-on: that the dishwasher sometimes misbehaves and, because it’s not fitted properly, tips forward and looks like it’s going to fall out of its slot. Or that yesterday as I tried to send an email from Sweetpea’s computer, I sniffed the air and asked whether someone had just applied strong ointment to a strained muscle. In fact it was the smell of smoke emitting from the computer. Those kinds of thing only happen here.

I did have a grown-up moment this week, though, when our new sofa arrived. The downside? The store ordered a custom-made sectional that was the wrong way around – that is to say, left-armed rather than right-armed.  The upside? I prefer it to the rightie I ordered. It’s in a totally different place in the living room, because of course a leftie would have had a different placement, our living room not being very huge. But it works so much better than what we had in mind. Nevertheless, I ranted at the store and sighed and feigned upset, and accepted a $200 rebate for their mistake. Cha-ching! Hey mum, do I get brownie points for that one?

You’d think it wouldn’t be a relaxing escape, but man oh man, take the little kiddos out of your life for a few days and the day-to-day
exhaustion of catering, school runs, taxi-ing to classes and fending off a thousand “But why?” and “But why not?” questions a day, and your life is
blissfully calm and rejuvenating. (That’s “But why?” from Munchkin, as in ‘How does this thing work’, and “But why not?” from Sweetpea, as in ‘Why won’t you buy that item for me?’)

Time: that thing that is NOT on every parent’s side. Time to hit the hotel gym every day (impressed? I am too). Time to read a whole
newspaper. Time to stop and stare at art/shop windows/monuments/restaurant menus/views without tugging on the sleeve. Time to go to the cinema and not
hurry back for the babysitter. To sit for an hour and a half in a café and launch deep into a conversation, and sustain it and not be interrupted. To say
**** it and blow a couple of hundred dollars watching the Oscars in a club with good food, stand-up comedy and a bottle of Prosecco.

I grew up in a series of very small towns in rural Scotland. Misplaced?  Just a little. Once I turned 18 you couldn’t see me for dust, and ever since have lived in cities: Edinburgh, London, and now Tucson. Here’s a quotation I saw, blown up on a large billboard at Battery Park, that sums me up:

But I missed the kids, of course I did. And when Sweetpea cried down the phone midway through our break because she missed me, my heart
hurt.

Now we are back, and work and the house beckon. There is a door to attach to the space in our bedroom doorway. (Munchkin is thrilled to
have his on, finally. It got so bad he constructed his own, with a big bit of cardboard.)

There is a bit of wall to prime and paint where Ms Fix-It and I pulled out a cupboard in the office. Ms Fix-It! My mentor and my crutch and my kick in the backside. Without her I put things off. Now, rejuvenated, I pledge not to. Not till parental fatigue kicks in again and I just can’t lift myself off my 9pm collapse-on-sofa position to do a thing. When will that fatigue kick in again? I give it, ooh, about 48 hours.