Does anyone know how many people are murdered each year during home renovations? Offhand, I’m guessing about a million. And most of them probably had it coming.

My partner and I are remodeling a couple of bathrooms in our house. (If you saw them, you’d wonder why we waited this long.) To be clear: we’re not doing the work ourselves. Although I assisted my father in all manner of home building projects as a kid – “assisted” being a relative term since I mostly just sat on a cardboard box eating Ding Dongs and recapping episodes of Wonder Woman – this valuable how-to information apparently went in one ear and out the other, because I can barely turn a screw without requiring an instruction manual and emotional support. (My employees may disagree on my ability to turn a screw.)

And my partner, who actually has a lot more common sense than I do, is, in this case, also useless. We have to call a handyman to replace toilet seats and security light bulbs on the roof (the security lights are on the roof, not the toilets – never mind).

I’ve always called my other half a Useless Mexican, since he’s third generation American and speaks less Spanish than I do, but I now have to add Useless Home Renovator. Really, what’s the point of marrying a Mexican if he can’t build anything? (Oh, I’m sure he has any number of “Useless [insert noun here]” labels for me as well, but fortunately he doesn’t blog, so it takes him a lot longer to spread the slurs around.)

But I digress.

The irony of this situation is that not only are we not doing the work ourselves, but we haven’t even begun the actual demolition and reconstruction process. And that’s usually the point – when people have to shower in the back yard with a hose, or scrape tile dust out of their crack – that they begin to scream and cry and consider the legal ramifications of shooting someone with a nail gun.

34 times.

No, in our case, it has been the process leading up to the point where construction begins that has been fraught with challenge. Because redoing a bathroom from scratch requires agreement on décor style, layout, tile, lighting, vanity and fixtures. And each of those elements, I have discovered, gives the other person a delightful, even welcome opportunity to comment on who you are as a person.

And who Sandy apparently thinks I am, as a person, is a bully.

Now, don’t misunderstand. It’s not that I want my way, come hell or high water – I just want my way and I want everyone to be happy while I’m getting it. Is that too much to ask? Is it too much to expect that others just sit there and shut up and let me make my exquisite design choices? I have extraordinary taste (just ask me), so they (my partner) can rest assured that the room in question will be handsome and tasteful, if they (my partner) would just back off and let me pick everything out. It’s really the outcome that will make everyone the most happy.

And by everyone, I mean me.

You’d better start drawing the police tape around us now. You can find the bodies buried under the beautiful new tile.

It’s me, again – Otis, your highly evolved and wondrously humble link to the exciting world of angelic/human intervention. I say “intervention” because, much like that A&E show with the soccer mom crackheads, we spirits spend most of our time trying to get you people to STOP doing things. Amazingly, you all don’t generally seem to have a problem getting off your butts and doing stuff, it’s just that you always seem to be doing the wrong stuff – like bath salts or liters of vodka or barfing up your lunch. I don’t know what is in the water down there, but you guys seem to LOVE making yourselves feel like crap.

Okay, that’s not true – I DO know what’s in the water. I know a crapload of stuff, I’m just trying to be modest and make you feel like I’m on your level so we can bond. Truth is, of course, that I’m not on your level, but I once was, although that was thousands of years ago. (Actually, time doesn’t really exist, but I’ll save the quantum physics for a slow news day.)

Sorry, I’m getting ahead of myself. Since I’m new to this blog and you may be new to the whole concept of angels, or spirits, or really any life form beyond those badly designed human ones, let’s start from the top.

Oh, before I get into the whole Guardian Angel business, I should probably mention that Eric, the guy who normally writes this blog, thought I was being really presumptuous when I criticized God’s creation of humanity.

“Are you kidding me with this?” he said when he read my comment. (I post these blog entries for him to read before they’re released to the general public so that he can feel like he has some control, which, trust me, he’s really big on.) “You can’t go around criticizing God’s creations, that’s super arrogant.”

“Sure I can,” I responded. “He appreciates the expression of opinions. Up here, disagreement is exhilarating. Besides, I’m only criticizing the human body. What a piece of crap.”

“Criticizing God’s work just makes you sound snotty. And jealous.”

“I’m not jealous of those second-rate spacesuits. Those things suck.”

“Spacesuits?” Eric said.

“Well, that’s what human bodies basically are – containers that hold the spirit. And I’m sorry, there really should be an exchange policy, because those things wear like shit.”

“Stop being crude.”

“You say shit all the time.”

“I’m human,” Eric replied. “You’re supposed to be more evolved, or whatever.”

“It’s just language. And frankly, the word communicates rather effectively, doesn’t it? Look at a 90-year-old human body and tell me that thing purrs like an 18-year-old’s. It doesn’t. That is some f’ed up wear and tear.”

Eric harrumphed. “I give up.”

“By the way,” I added, “remember what I said about God wanting you guys to call him Lloyd?”

“I can’t,” Eric replied. “It just sounds weird.”

“Weird, shmeird,” I said. “You’re only upset because it takes all the air out of cuss words. Lloyd-damn just doesn’t have the same ring, does it?”

“I don’t say that word.”

“Yeah, you’re saintly,” I chuckled. “You should be sitting at the right hand of Lloyd.”

At that point, Eric closed the blog, so I’m not even sure if he read the rest of my entry. So, as a professional courtesy, I’ll save the rest for next week. Lloyd knows, Eric will have something to say about it.

This website has a “guest blogger” in residence for a bit. (It’s hard to say no to someone who can watch you go pee.)

See the entry below.

I’m not trying to be all Christ on the Cross or anything, but sometimes, I’ll tell you, it’s hell being a guardian angel.

This one client of mine, Eric Poole (who’s kind of a piece of work, not that I’m judging or anything, but let’s face it, I see everything he does) whose blog appears on this website, is busy trying to finish his second book. As an enormously evolved and, if I say so myself, quite attractive spirit who is charged with the care and protection of a number of lesser-evolved souls (don’t get me started on how much lesser or we’ll be here all millennium), I could see how stressed he was. After all, his last book was published two years ago and he’s only 75% finished with the second one. He’s not exactly setting any land speed records.

“What is taking so freaking long?” I said when I appeared to him in physical form around 2:00 a.m. one night.

“I have a gun,” Eric said, bolting upright in bed.

“No, you don’t,” I replied. Not that it would matter – kinda hard to shoot a spirit. (I know, I should appear in the middle of the day at his office or something, but it’s so entertaining watching humans freak out – it’s really one of the perks of the job.)

“Who are you?” he said, his voice trembling.

“I’m Otis, your guardian angel,” I said wearily, “and you’re not writing War and Peace, here. What’s the holdup?”

“I work kind of long hours at my job,” Eric said, fishing for a baseball bat that he did have under the bed.

“Join the club,” I replied.

“And I write a blog,” he added. ” There are only so many hours in the day. Don’t you know all that?”

“You write like one blog entry every two weeks. And it’s not like you have kids. What do you do when you get home at night?”

“Again,” he said, “isnt that something you would know?

Such attitude for a Level 3.

“You think I’m just sitting up here watching The Eric Show?” I replied. “I got a lot of channels to flip through. I’m not watching you go pee.”

“Well, that’s…good.”

“Alright, look,” I said with a sigh, “it’s my job to get you out of scrapes. And boy, have I. You really need to stop reading your email while you drive.”

“I only do it at stoplights!”

“Uh-huh. How’s about I step out of the other-dimensional shadows and write the blog for a while? Would that help you get that book finished before 2014, for Lloyd’s sake?”

“Lloyd’s sake?” Eric said, still fishing wildly under the bed as though I couldn’t tell what he was doing. “Who’s Lloyd?”

“Oh, that’s God’s nickname.”

“Doesn’t a nickname normally refer to an attribute, like Spaz or Fat Ass or Wombat?”

“Are you calling the Almighty a fat ass?”

“No, I just mean –“

“He nicknamed himself. He just thought Lloyd sounded more fun, you know, more accessible. God’s kind of a loaded word.”

“Well, then why doesn’t he just go by Lloyd?”

“Oh, it’s the whole branding thing,” I explained. “There’s so much material where he’s referred to as God. It’d be like Kleenex trying to change their name to Snot Rags.”

Eric finally stopped flailing around under the bed. “So you’re saying you’ll write my blog? How exactly does that work?”

“I’ll just make the entries magically appear on your website. What, I can stop a semi from running into you but I can’t operate WordPress?”

“You know,” he said, “I always believed there are spirits around us. I once saw the ghost that inhabits this house I used to live in. The house was built by Carl Laemmle for his son, and the son -“

“Yeah, I was there, listen, you’re not my only customer, can we wrap this up?”

“I just never thought I’d see another spirit, much less a guardian angel.”

“Well,” I replied with another well-earned sigh, “ta-dah.”

So, for a while at least, until Eric finishes that second memoir, I’ll be enlightening you with my own angelic brand of wit and wisdom. A lot of you have expressed interest in knowing the meaning of life and why good things happen to bad people and whether angels have lady parts. So here I am to explain it all for you.

You’re welcome.

Few things in life make you feel as delightfully violated, as deliciously desecrated as having your home broken into. It’s like being date raped without the festive flirting and roofies.

Several years ago, my partner and I returned home from Chicago, exhausted from a nine-hour housewarming party the night before. (What can I say, that house requires a nine-hour party. Imagine if Kelly Werstler, Elton John and Dr. Suess had an interior design orgy. And then blew themselves up.)

When we walked into our own, less opulent (by a factor of ten) house, nothing seemed amiss. We stumbled down the hall to the master bedroom and threw our suitcases on the bed.

Suddenly, we noticed that several drawers were open, as well as the closet doors. And some of my watches were flung across a chair. I walked into the master bath. The medicine cabinet was open, and a couple of pill bottles were lying on the vanity.

Did we leave in a hair-on-fire hurry? I didn’t think so.

And then, in positively Columbo-like fashion, it began to dawn on us.

We rushed through the house, looking for signs of forced entry, finally finding the door they had entered through. We were panicked, in denial, horrified, angry – we’d been robbed, ROBBED I tell you!

We flew from room to room, taking inventory. Nothing seemed to be missing except a small amount of cash I had stupidly left in a drawer as a welcome gift to ransackers, and a bottle of expired Vicodin which would probably still do the job if you’re a hillbilly snorting it off the hood of a Chevy pickup. (Their standards tend to be a bit lower.)

For a moment, we were kind of insulted. I mean, what, we’re not good enough to be stolen from? True, neither of us wears jewelry, we have no high-end electronics, and we don’t collect Precious Moments. There’s really not much to take outside of a lot of used furniture, which doesn’t tend to fence well since it can’t be displayed in the lining of a coat or on a tie-dyed folding table on 42nd St.

Then the rage part set in again. How dare these monsters violate our space? How dare they think that they can just come in and browse, like our home is a Supermarket Sweep episode?

But as we replaced things that were askew, and called the police, we began to realize something: there was no broken glass. No ruined door frame. There was no spray paint on the walls or feces on the floor. (Friends of ours had a burglar take a dump on their living room floor, clearly commenting on their taste in decorating.) They had not taken whole chests of drawers and emptied them in the middle of rooms, or pulled food out of the refrigerator and left it rotting on the counter.

They were, more or less, courteous. And I really appreciated that.

Don’t get me wrong, we subsequently fortressed the place like we were about to be invaded by the Huns. Security system revamp. New deadbolts. Security doors. New outdoor motion detector lighting. Bear traps set randomly around the grounds.

But I understand that sometimes, people feel the need to take what isn’t theirs. Let’s face it, the chasm between the haves and the have nots in this world grows ever wider and deeper. Although nothing about stealing is right, I must say, if you have to break into someone’s house, it really helps if you act like a houseguest.

And, as the victim, in the venge-filled moments that follow the discovery of such an act, it really helps if you can find that one little kernel of good fortune – the part that could have been worse.

‘Cause it makes stepping into a bear trap when you’re coming home from work a lot less painful.