Are you there, readers? It’s me, Mrs. Tittle-Tattle. Summer is in full swing and you know what that means: renovations. I’ve decided that maintenance is a full-time job, and that applies to both home ownership and our personal mortal vessels that need constant tuning up and tweaking. Summer’s essentials are not just the flirty sundress and Anthelios sunblock—they are the jackhammer and the scalpel. While many of you are lounging by the pool and beach, using my column to swat flies away from your fruit salad, those of us left here on Park Avenue are contending with summer co-op drilling and banging. Summer work rules in some buildings can make staying in your apartment like living through the Blitzkrieg. If your upstairs neighbors are doing work, you had better get out your camera now and take some photos of the way your ceilings looked before they started to cave in.

Although we had not planned any renovations in our own apartment this summer, this is the year that all our appliances decided to break down. Even though we put in top-of-the-line appliances when we gut renovated eight years ago, nothing works anymore. We are basically experiencing system-wide failure, resulting in constant excruciating calls to service people, which is something they could have used in Gitmo to get those terrorists to talk.

And of course they have to come back multiple times, because the first guy had no clue what he was doing. So I have to set aside another day to wait between 9 and 5, when I could be doing something productive like getting a bikini wax. If one more appliance malfunctions, I am going to completely lose it, move into the Carlyle, and let my apartment become like Grey Gardens—without all those cats. Somebody please invite me out to your Hamptons estate so I can forget about my apartment problems and listen to you kvetch about beach erosion and how the humidity screws up your salt shakers.

And naturally, at the same time the apartment falls apart, so does the face and body. Everyone knows that summer is the time when ladies slip away for a “vacation” and come back looking “rested and rejuvenated,” claiming it was just the fabulous romp they had in the South of France that made their thighs disappear and their necks reappear. I have been holding out on having work done on my face, but it’s getting harder by the day. The stress of having to deal with inept servicemen all day is deepening my lines and turning my hair white, so even if I wind up with working appliances, I’m going to need a total overhaul myself.

However, I realize that I can actually put off that maintenance work for a few weeks, since I won’t have to make an appearance at school and have all the mothers whisper with barely-suppressed glee that I’m really starting to look my age (probably the worst thing you can say about another woman). I can let my hair frizz out as much as it naturally will, wear completely unfashionable but comfy clothes and shoes, and generally let myself go, because nobody is around to care. Formerly snooty salespeople are actually helpful because so few shoppers are there (unless you go to a touristy venue, and then they ignore you when the Japanese tour bus pulls up). My friend Vanessa said that one neighborhood restaurant, where she is often shoved into Siberia, starts giving her front tables and the Italian royal treatment (complete with double-cheek kissing) during the summer months, but once September rolls around they act like they don’t know who she is. She only puts up with this shoddy treatment because she loves their pasta and she also has low self-esteem.

And not to be forgotten are all those fantastical summer resolutions I make every year and break as often as the New Year’s ones. Once the kids are busy in camp, I swear I will re-organize my entire life and miraculously morph from being a scatterbrained mess to one of those perennially pert ladies you see on TV who tell you how to cram years’ worth of crap into a few brightly-colored boxes with ribbons. I keep telling myself I would feel better if I stuffed those overdue medical bills into a toile-covered file thingy. And those school application forms would look great tacked to a cheery bulletin board, next to the Ativan prescriptions. Just imagining all this makes me break into one of those huge smiles you can only sport when you haven’t had anything tightened yet.

But then I crash back to reality. And as I schedule my third washer/dryer appointment, and get a massive headache from my neighbors’ re-tiling, my brows will scrunch up in pain, aggravating those pesky epidermal crevices. I’m still not sure which will need to be replaced first: the dryer or my face.