I just "celebrated" another birthday. I say "" because it is never, ever a celebration for me. Even as a child I hated the attention. Mom would plan a party and I would get a nose bleed. But while the steady progression of time is a definite downer for me, I do enjoy cake. And the only time I get my favorite--Piggly Wiggly white cake with lard icing--is  September 17.

So there's that.

We waited until last weekend to "celebrate" at the cabin with our daughter. Poor kid...she knew the mood de jour would be all "I look like the crypt keeper." As if that wasn't bad enough, she also knew she was signing up for a working weekend, hanging tongue-and-groove boards under the roof. But she made the trip anyway. With the three of us, we really made headway sealing up the roof overhang. And she made the crypt keeper happy.

Also on the cabin to-do list:  installing, taping and mudding the master bathroom green board. The taping and mudding was my job, and I did it extremely well. I really like doing it; the paste is easy to apply with a spatula, and it reminded me of the white icing on my birthday cake.

Unless you've lived without sheetrock in your bathroom, and I pray that you have not, you will just have to imagine how wonderful it is to have even the modicum of privacy which a bit of sheetrock affords. Some may think green board is just for protecting walls from moisture. Some may even think that its sole purpose is providing a vertical surface to hang wallpaper. And these thinks are true. But in the wee hours of the morning, when my dreams take me to watery places where the sound of H2O comes crashing against my subconscious, it is beyond description how nice it is to pee into my Luggable Loo (a $20 gray paint bucket with a plastic toilet seat and lid) behind a REAL WALL.

No door. Not yet. And the rest of the bathroom is wide open. But there is a private corner that is all mine, at night.

Also on our punch list last weekend was finishing the grouting between the master bathroom tiles.

Most of this work had already been done on a previous trip, but there was a small space that still needed grout squirted in the seams. The grout comes in a tube and is applied with a squirt gun. You just squeeze the trigger and grout magically goes into the seams between the tiles. It's a little messy; grout spills over onto the tops of tiles and needs to be wiped with a damp cloth, but it's fun. Like Play-Doh, only thinner, stickier, and available in decorator colors. We chose Pearl Gray. Doesn't that sound rare and special and like something you could make jewelry out of? I kept calling it Battleship Gray which PW kind of liked, being a Navy man.

But when I finally stood up to survey my work, I found a lot of Battleship Pearl Gray smeared like cancerous patches all over my legs, fingers, elbows, cheeks, and everywhere else I scratched without thinking. Maybe more on me than on the floor. I can't be sure. What I do know is that I needed a bath. Besides the Navy-Doh, my sweaty corpus was dusted with saw from the aforementioned tongue-and-groove work. Yes, a hose shower from the frigid well water was just what I needed, but definitely not what I wanted.

I think PW took delight in my extra grubbiness because as a birthday surprise, he got an instant-on shower sprayer.

Make no mistake: It is NOT a shower. There is no privacy,  and you have to bathe outside in your bathing suit. If you want to wash your hair, you must lean your soapy head over the railing and hose off all that lather onto the red clay below. But the hose water, hooked up to a propane tank, is deliciously hot coming out of that Ritz-Carlton-esque shower head.

I felt like a queen. A queen who finds spiders in her jammies at night, but a queen nonetheless.

So this weekend when we return to Cold Mountain, we will have a dried-in bathroom with still no working toilet (just my trusty bucket.) We will have green board up and ceramic tile down. We will have a good portion of the soffit work complete with a good portion still left to do. And thanks to my thoughtful husband's birthday gift, we will have hot water.

And that, my dear friends, at this point in my aging life, is reason to celebrate.