The floors are finished. Hallelujah! Silence reigns.

Glendon Road is just too far from groceries, the gym and the hardware store for shopping on foot. Downtown is full of chi-chi restaurants, gourmet food shops, art galleries and emporia selling tourist traps and high-end clothing for ladies and gents, but if you want a three-pound bag of oranges, a dozen perfectly ordinary eggs and box of All-Bran, you have to go to the huge shopping centre on the edge of town, where Staples and Canadian Tire are also to be found. And of course, Stratford has no allergist (he's in Kitchener), no Volkswagen dealer and no Apple Store. So today, we bought a second car, primarily for Edmund's use -- certainly, to his taste. It's a Kia Soul, a boxy Korean runabout with a fire-engine red paint job. I hadn't intended to increase our carbon footprint by a whole extra car with this move, but if we have only one I will basically never get to the gym. So as of next Wednesday, we will be a two-car family again.

So I have to get busy on unpacking the books so we can put those two cars in the damn' garage, where the 2-cubic-foot boxes are stacked chest high. But before I can do that, we need bookcases to put them in. And before the bookcases go into the library, its briefcase-brown and putty-grey walls need a serious paint job. I can't remember the last time I saw a house with such dire bedrooms. Edmund's office is a Pepto-Bismol pink as of now, with a greyish mauve in the closet, and the guest room is gun-metal grey. I ask you, who does that? A grey bedroom? I'd cut my throat by February if I had to spend the winter in a grey bedroom.

But every painter in Stratford is working flat out right now. I must join the queue.