Yesterday was a flurry of electrical excitement. All day two young men sawed through drywall, snaked wires through walls, fiddled with boxes and connections, and by late afternoon we had new kitchen lighting, up-to-code outlets and wiring in the living room and dining room, a new outlet on the living room floor where we can plug in lamps under the couch instead of coiling extension cords all around the room, and three working, grounded outlets in my study. This means that most of the house's horrible, scary-looking, tangled, 1940s-era wiring is finally a bad memory . . . not all of it, but certainly the bulk.

What a huge relief. We're both so glad to have this done. Wiring is not a romantic renovation, and it's expensive, but now I can actually plug a vacuum cleaner into a living room outlet without tripping a breaker.

While the electricians worked, I perched variously in the back room or outside in the garden, beetling away at my editing project and my teaching syllabi. I ended up getting a ton of work done, despite the uproar. So today I can take a bit of time to do some post-electrician cleaning, bake bread, do some writing,  listen to playoff baseball, make some stock from the bones of the pheasant we had for dinner last night. Yes, I did impulse-buy a pheasant a few days ago at the meat market, and it turned out to be delicious, though the cooking process was odd. I served it with roasted red-flesh potatoes (my father's, and they were gorgeous), kale, artichokes, and little pheasant-liver toasts . . . Frenchier than my usual cooking style but it all came out well.

Meanwhile, Tom gazed at the bright new kitchen task lights and mourned, "They show up all of the mistakes in my sheetrocking," and I gazed at them and mourned, "I thought I was cleaning the backsplash better than I really I am." Apparently, new luxuries create new miseries . . .