I spent the day yelling at my kids today. I wasn’t feeling especially mean-spirited or anything, I just had to holler to be heard over the construction noise outside our house. What’s that? You didn’t know we were having construction done? Yeah, me neither. But the homeowners’ association’s construction guys seem to be replacing the trim outside our house this week.

They dropped off a letter back in September saying that they were planning to do some repairs at some time in the future, probably on a Monday through Friday between the hours of 8AM and 5PM, or possibly other days and/or times. We were told to remove all personal belongings from “the area” (though we weren’t told which area that was), because they WOULD damage anything in their way.

The letter’s right, they really will damage anything; last summer when they replaced our backyard fence, they painted our vegetable garden. Because we didn’t move it out of the way.

So today at 9AM a guy rang the doorbell to ask me to let him in to our patio area “for work.” Yeah, okay. I’m game. But first I had to run around the house dumping out bags and purses in search of the key. By the time I opened up the patio gate he was chatting on his cell phone in my driveway, so he didn’t get to it right away, but when he did, it turned out that “for work” meant “spray paint patterns on the exterior walls of the house and then disappear.”

Hours passed. I started to wonder whether I had authorized an elaborate vandalism scheme, and whether you can report vandalism when you essentially invited the spray-paint-wielding fellow in. But before I could resolve that dilemma, he returned with a whole crew and set about doing I have no idea what. It was very loud. There were saws and hammers involved. The kids watched the action through the windows (though the construction folk did not, as a group, seem to appreciate the audience). My understanding is that they’ll be back tomorrow. Which could mean any time between now and the new year, most likely during daylight hours.