I know, I know...I've been lackadaisical in my posting habits.

It's this house thing. It turns out to be kind of a lot of work.

You've got boxes. You've got painting. You've got a roof that has to be scaled.

I did in fact spend about six hours on my roof on Sunday, liberating my atrium from the corrugated plastic ceiling the previous owners cruelly installed, turning our little atrium into some bizarre sweat lodge. It had to go.

So I bravely climbed to the roof, armed only with a power socket thingy and my mighty ratchet and entered into battle. Six hours later, scratched and bleeding, pecked by psychotic morning doves within an inch of my life, I had succeeded in freeing half of my atrium from the shackles of plastic suffocation.

OK, I wasn't really pecked by morning doves, but I could well have been. The little jerks have been circling our property, menacing us with their nestward intentions. We made the mistake of allowing morning doves to nest on our balcony a few apartments back and were rewarded by a vast sea of cute little bird feces all over our $39 IKEA patio furniture. And we don't want a repeat of that.

So I plan to spend my weekends shaking various garden tools at the birds, and if that fails, I will get a court order to stop their would-be tenancy.

Let's see how they like Johnny Law.