I'm ready.

I have company coming this next week, so I spent this past weekend getting the guest room into shape. My ex and I, as you may recall, had been remodeling the house so the upstairs was in a bit of disarray. Our remodeling has been a series of steps that start with demolition (removal of all plaster and lathe), rewiring, replacing windows, sheetrocking, taping and mudding, texturing, painting and then finish work that might include such items as baseboards.

My upstairs consists of 4 rooms: A bathroom, the south room, the east room and the north room. The upstairs bathroom is done all the way up to painting while the south and east rooms have been textured. The north room, however, hasn't even seen any demolition yet, so it became a catch-all room for not only all the tools used throughout this process but also any large items that didn't seem to have a home anywhere else. My goal for the weekend was to turn the south room into the guest bedroom and to clear out the north room so that I could begin the demolition when I have some time.

I spent the morning moving clutter and tools and neatly lining them all up by genre: painting stuff here, drywall stuff there, etc. Then sweeping and mopping and moving the excess sheetrock to clean around it. I was a busy bee. Eventually, the north room came down to me, some sheet rock and the punching bag and its stand.

The punching bag and I have quite a history together and it all started when my ex's nephews came to live with us for a year. I noticed that they all seemed, as I imagine is pretty typical of teenage boys, to have some anger that needed to be worked out. Big Nephew played football but after football season, he seemed to take his aggressions out on Little Nephew since there were no longer opposing team players to hit. I got creative and suggested that we get them a punching bag, thinking that it might prove useful for me as well, both in working out aggression and in toning my arms. I'm always up for some arm toning.

When I suggested it, the ex said sure, that'd be a great idea, so I ordered the punching bag and some boxing gloves. They arrived and I relied on him, as I was wont to do, to hang it somewhere where we could all smack the crap out of it. He resisted, though, coming up with a reason why it couldn't go here, or there, or anywhere. There was talk of it going in the basement, but no. And how about in one of their rooms? Again, no. Well then, surely it can go in the garage. Astoundingly, this was met with a yes but then it was winter and the garage isn't heated so the punching bag was relegated to a closet for the time being to be dealt with later.

Well, qu'elle surprise, later came and went and the punching bag did not get hung. It is heavy, after all, I was told, it can't just hang anywhere. But surely it could hang somewhere? By then, of course, the nephews were gone and it was just me who still wanted to use it. I was pretty clueless as to how exactly to do that on my own and he, while paying lip service to understanding and promising to figure it out, had clearly blown it off as irrelevant.

And then one day, he came home from work with good news for me: "I've found someone who will take that punching bag off your hands for you!" he told me with obvious pride. Someone at his work wanted it, and he'd offered to give it to them since all it was doing at our house was taking up space. I put my foot down and told him that he could not give it away, that I really did want to have it hung somewhere and learn to use it. I was so annoyed but not surprised, as giving away things is both a virtue and a vice of my ex's generous personality. Just come by sometime in the summer and he'll be sure to give you some of the green beans I've grown, picked and cleaned from my garden. Even if he doesn't live here anymore.

In an interesting gesture designed to, perhaps, make peace on this issue, the Christmas after I didn't let him give away my punching bag, he bought me a stand for it. This signaled to me that he was never going to hang it but that I might now be able to find a way to use it. I was quite pleased to spend my day assembling the stand and hanging the bag from it, trying to figure out how exactly one uses the boxing gloves and punches the bag. I told a friend of mine at work about this whole deal and he suggested that I get wrist wraps, which I did and was promptly ridiculed for. Why on earth was I taking advice from that guy? What did he know? Typical dismissing of anything I found out on my own without his advice, but my work friend did use to box and my ex never did.

For a while, the bag and its stand were in the living room and I tried to figure out how it all worked but then it was deemed "in the way" and one day when I came home from work, it was gone. Moved to somewhere out of the way. Which meant, basically, disassembled and stored in the north upstairs room. Which is where it hung out until this weekend.

But it's all set up now and I'm thinking all I need now is a nice picture of my ex with his sweet young girlfriend to tape to the bag and I'll be all set.

Oh, and the guest room is ready too.