And Thus Ends Another Weekend

of suffering.

But, hey, I'm only 25 cents away from the cashout. Big money! No whammies! Big money! Big money! STOP!!!

Today was a day that started out so well. It started out with me coming downstairs to the basement to see what The Mrs. was up to and hearing her talking to her mother on the phone about how she absolutely hates the Clydesdale brown paint because, "it looks like diarrhea."

To which I replied, to no one in particular, "cha cha cha," because that's what I do when someone says "diarrhea."

I should not have noted to The Mrs. that I thought they called it Clydesdale cuz it looked like horse poop. She festered on that all night long.

Upon further inspection, we also decided that the ceiling needed a second coat, and that we didn't like that the paint for the walls was semi-gloss. I goofed that one up. I normally buy flat, but this house is painted all shiny, and The Mrs. said she wanted the easy clean-up of shiny paint as opposed to the need-to-paint-over-it cleanup of flat. I had said, "Maybe an eggshell." The Mrs. said, "Is this paint eggshell?" I said, "it looks to shiny for eggshell. I think it's semi-gloss."

So I bought semi-gloss. Mistake.

I found the old paint cans in the garage; they were eggshell. So, The Mrs. and MaxieC went traipsing out to the hardware store to get a new color of brown in eggshell and another can of the green, also in eggshell. So, really, this goof is costing like two gallons of paint and effectively no time, as I'm only putting on one coat of the eggshell. Unless it turns out that the old brown shows through the new brown, which I doubt will happen.

I painted the ceiling pretty quickly once I convinced HannieC that her help was making things worse. Then I made up for that by letting her paint a whole bunch in the closet, since if you mess that up, no one cares. She tried cutting a wet edge. I had to wash the brush out when she was done. Man, that closet took like 2 hours to paint, even with the two of us. It's one of those things that if I'd had a spray gun would have been painted in about 5 minutes, since I was painting everything white - walls, ceiling, trim. But we were using brushes and rollers, and there were lots of shelves.

Out of order storytelling: I painted the ceiling of the master shower first, this morning. The saga of the master shower has now come to an end. They had to tear all of the tile out, since they couldn't match the old color, which added another $1k to the bill. The shower door was installed Friday afternoon. The total on this job was about $9k, not including paint. Tomorrow morning, we should be able to take our first showers in the master shower in a couple months. And we can fire up the body wash. I hope it's nice.

I finished up painting at about 3:45. HannieC finished about an hour before that. I cleaned up the brush and roller, and headed for the steam shower. The Mrs. saw me and said accusatorially, "Are you done painting for the day?"

I replied, "Yes. I've got a lot of other stuff that needs to get done, and I don't have enough time to finish any of the walls if I were to start now."

She harrumphed.

I hit the shower.

Afterwards, I wanted to go run the rose clippings and tree branches through the chipper. They had been sitting in piles for weeks, and I wanted to get rid of them before it snowed (which might be tomorrow - though I see accuweather is now saying 35 degrees and rain). But The Mrs. had other plans. She needed me to string up Halloween lights in the back tree, which I did dutifully. Then I got out the chipper.

I hates my chipper. I never should have bought this thing. It got somewhat chaotic reviews, with a lot of people loving it and a lot of people hating it. I hates mine. It spends more time jammed than it does running, and the disassembly process to clear the jam is very time consuming. But I tried to focus on the positive while I was out there. I said to myself, "Self, lookit me! I'm making my own mulch! I'm recycling my yard waste into a beneficial weed barrier! I'm practically a Democrat!"

Of course, a Democrat would hire an illegal - oops, undocumented worker - to do this for him. Democrats are fearful of power tools.

After an absolutely horrible time with the chipper where I had to clear a jam roughly once every three branches and also had to endure a cold drizzle (about 40 degrees), I was done. So I got out the lawn tractor and mowed the back lawn. That made me happy again. Still does it every time.

I actually got stuck in a ditch with the tractor today. I had to help it along by pulling on the fence next to me. The old tractor could really use some lockers. Or a limited-slip at the very least. I also got to run with the headlights, as it started to get dark before I finished. It didn't get real dark, just early dark. But enough that it was tough to see what had been mowed and what hadn't. The headlights really cleared that up. The Mrs. took a picture of it, but I dunno where the camera is.

And with a top of the head that looks like that, can you believe she's single? Well, OK, it's kind of a round head, and a lot of guys look for a woman with a flatter one...

It was cold enough that I had to wear gloves when I mowed the lawn. I wore leather work gloves, mind you, not prissy little biotch ski gloves, so my hands still froze. They just didn't freeze up so badly I couldn't steer.

I bet HannieC a quarter that she would knock over a paint can while we were painting. She won that bet, though she rather promptly dumped a can of Diet Cherry Coke onto the floor. Luckily, the floor was covered with a plastic painting dropcloth that contained everything.

That is all.