After the great spurting coffee-pot-explosion sound followed by coffee all over my kitchen walls, after not one but two instances of smoke filling my apartment, after the drilling and the reverberations of metal on metal at four in the morning, today I watched the sun set in a blue sky over Park Slope’s low, blushing brownstones.

I’m not exactly sure when the madness began, really. Maybe it was last Friday, when Maud and Vio and I went to dinner at a lovely little joint in the East Village. Post–eggplant rolls, post-risotto, post-capuccino, post–piling into a yellow cab back to Brooklyn and a visit to the twenty-four-hour Korean grocery to feed Maud’s Chunky Monkey desires, all of a sudden it was three in the morning and everyone was staying over. We roused around noon Saturday and headed out for food, which seems simple enough, really, but when you have a Maud and a Vio and a me, somehow a little brunch plan turns into an hour-long stroll in almost-springlike weather through several Brooklyn neighborhoods before we sit down in front of the best salad niçoise ever (anchovies, marinated raw tuna) at Bar Tabac on Smith. Somehow it was decided we’d go watch a movie, but after twenty minutes with Mr. Moviefone, we were still undecided. And it seemed so clear to me what needed to be done, so I said: If y’alls come buy a television with me, we can rent DVDs. So: P. C. Richard on Flatbush (“I’ll take that Sony Wega and a cab, please!”); followed by some tough French-girl TV-carrying; followed by putting the yellow plug in the yellow hole, the white plug in the white hole, and the red plug in the red hole; followed by a visit to the local video place; and then we were watching Minis zooming all over the place in “The Italian Job.” After a candle-lit dinner break, the very excellent “Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown.” That Almódovar, he’s good.

Finally, in the early hours of Sunday morning, after playing Charles Trenet serenading us with “La Mer” several times on repeat, we fell to sleepy sleep.