Forget the budget and all those other bills due for final votes this week.

When the House meets Wednesday, it could have some real fun taking it to Gov. John Lynch over vetoes he signed last week.

The parental notification bill on abortion, repeal of the state minimum wage law and a bill barring enforcement of local fire codes on residential sprinklers are all working their way toward veto overrides.

Not to mention the possibility, again, that Speaker of the House William O'Brien could pull the right-to-work veto override out of his sleeve.

There's no doubt about how the parental notification and minimum wage bills will go, since both passed the House and Senate by veto-proof majorities, more than two-thirds of those voting.

The sprinkler bill advanced entirely on voice votes, so no one knows where the votes break out. O'Brien says Lynch would force up new-home prices with his veto.

Builders, who are hurting in the real estate downturn, pushed for the bill, citing costs of sprinkler systems. Fire protection officials opposed it. The state fire chiefs group gave Lynch a pat on the back for his veto.

“The important point is not the fire suppression system,” the chiefs said, but the “attempt to strip local control away from local voters, something many of these elected officials campaigned against.”

Chiefs had better prepare for another fight. Senate Bill 91 was amended last week as an identical sprinkler ban and is likely to be approved by the House and the Senate this week.

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The budget bill is due for an up-or-down vote this week.

And while House and Senate negotiators were digging through hundreds of pages of detail, Senate members of both parties were annoyed that O'Brien had left town to meet with people at conservative think tanks in Washington, D.C.

House policy director Gregory Moore said O'Brien checked in with the NRA, the Cato Institute and the Heritage Foundation. He had also planned to meet with the National Right to Work Committee, but ran out of time in his schedule.

Democrats in the House first raised the absence issue Monday. They claimed he skipped town at the climax of budget work to raise money for the national right-to-work group after arguing that the New Hampshire effort was home-grown.

Sen. Chuck Morse. R-Salem, was pleased with the final budget package, which the Legislative Budget Assistant's Office said Friday spends $10.2 billion in total. That's about 11 percent less than the current budget, which expires June 30. It's $500 million less that Gov. Lynch had proposed.

However, Morse was clearly angry that when O'Brien got back from his trip, he said a 10 cent cut in the tobacco tax had to be part of the package. The Senate refused to vote on the cut two months ago.

Morse was fed up when a thick package of House budget amendments were dropped on his desk Wednesday night. Morse said he had no time to review them and was ready to call off talks for the day. He grew even more annoyed when he found out House members had been drafting them for a week but never said anything.

“We're getting amendment after amendment that could affect everybody in this state, and we haven't debated it. This is absolutely wrong,” Morse said. “This is no way to govern the state of New Hampshire.”

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Two years from now, the state will have an $11 million surplus, if you believe the Legislature can predict fiscal matters two years in advance.

But it's an even closer shave than it seems. That counts about a half-million in surplus from this year, and another half-million over the next two years. All the rest — fully $10 million — depends on the sale of the former Laconia State Prison in the next two years.

Laconia and Belknap County get the rights of first refusal on the properties. We'll see how eager local taxpayers are.

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The curious crop of proposed bills for January grows curiouser. One bill bars some state workers from wearing “fragrances.” We're not sure whether that means perfume or aftershave, and Rep. Michelle Peckham, R-North Hampton, didn't return phone calls when we tried to find out.

Rep. Brian Murphy, R-Rye, wants to declare brain power a New Hampshire resource. Why not. Maybe we should drill to find more.

There are bills that would bar political party employees, lawyers and their spouses from serving in the Legislature. Speaker O'Brien, a lawyer himself, may have something to say about that.

Rep. Greg Sorg, R-Easton, also a lawyer, wants to make the Legislature the only body that can decide whether a legislative act is constitutional.

There are retreads, too. Lowering the dropout age to 16, requiring the attorney general to sue over federal health care reform, decriminalizing marijuana, right-to-work and several changes in collective bargaining law.

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Committees of conference negotiated compromises on 34 House and Senate bills last week.

Among them is a version of what was known as the “Ward Bird” bill, which gives judges more sentencing flexibility in cases involving firearms. It also liberalizes state law on the use of deadly force.

The bill, SB 88, was shaped in part over concern that Ward Bird of Moultonborough should not have been imprisoned for displaying a firearm while yelling at a trespasser at his home.

Other major bills coming to a vote on Wednesday include SB 52, a change to the Justice Reinvestment Act that gives the parole board more power over which prisoners get early release and the length of imprisonment if the offenders break parole; HB 25, the capital budget that allows $88 million in bonding for a range of construction and maintenance projects, including a new Manchester liquor store; HB 542, allowing parents more power to pull their children from school programs to which the parents object; and HB 337, freezing education funding at current levels rather than moving to levels set in the formula lawmakers passed three years ago.

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Tom Fahey is State House bureau chief for the New Hampshire Union Leader and Sunday News. Email him at tfahey@unionleader.com.