July 2004

July 6, 2004: Joey's hijacked medication cart, no matter how loaded, is Just. Not. Enough. to handle our latest screw-up.

We're discussing our options, and currently, the most attractive option appears to be shooting ourselves.

It's all just too much to bear, and we can't bring ourselves to post the blow-by-blow account of the shame and horror on the web just now... Flogging ourselves in private is quite sufficient. We'll talk about it... *sniff* *sniff*... when we're... *sob*... ready.

To top it all off, desperately needing a break from hysterical self-flagellation, in between contemplating the merits of cyanide vs. sleeping pills, we wandered out to check on the pool. As if our sorry, pathetic lives weren't sorry and pathetic enough, we discovered a dark lump on the pool cleaner hose:

Gaaaaaahh! Why, oh why have the gods forsaken us? That @#$%^ pool cleaner was expensive, and we neeeeeeeed it. It frees up a good couple of hours each weekend to work on the house, that we'd otherwise spend hand-vacuuming and netting gunk out of the pool. What fresh hell ruptures a pool vacuum hose out of nowhere, and spews dark crud out of it?

Upon closer investigation, we discovered that the the lump of dark crud consisted of this:

Motherf@#$$%&. A toad. A @#$%^ toad. Sunning himself in our pool.

WE don't have enough time to sun ourselves in our pool (what with the time taken up with self-flagellation, and all). And this @#$%^ shows up, plops himself down, and starts soakin' up the rays, with his eyes half closed, like he doesn't have a care in the world.

Come to think of it... he doesn't. It's not like we got his rent check this month, and it's already the 6th. @#$%^.

So we evicted him, Useless Toad that he was.

Really, no offense meant. After all, he was, actually, a toad. And he, abso-frickin'-lutely, was useless. And, you know, we didn't get that rent check he promised us...

July 14, 2004: Okay. Deeeeep Breath. Exhaaaaale...

Didn't work.

Okay. Another really Deeeeeeep Breath.

Big EXXXXXXHAAAAAAAALE...

Naw, that one didn't work either.

S'ok, though, because we think the self-prescribed Valium/Xanax combination we bogarted off Joey's med cart is kicking in. It's taken us a week of experimentation to come up with a dosage combination that works, but we think we've finally found it. Enough Valium to fell a horse, combined with enough Xanax to bring Sasquatch to his knees, and if we top it off with a bottle of '97 California Cabernet and a couple of shots of cheap tequila, it works for a few hours. We'll write fast, before it wears off, and talking about it becomes... *sob*... once again, too much to bear...

Are you ready?

The paint color didn't work.

No. It really didn't work.

In fact, it was tragic.

No. It was worse than tragic.

It was...

Ugly.

There. There it is. We've said it, we've admitted it, and we'll spend the rest of our lives in therapy trying to overcome it... After we get out of rehab.

Our social workers tell us that the first step is to acknowledge our mistakes, and so, in the spirit of healing, we'll detail below how it all went so, so wrong...

For those of you who were with us last Spring, you may recall that in April 2003, we began tearing off the old asbestos siding on our house. We were so excited to actually uncover the original wood clapboards!

Turned out, they were a bit shabby. Okay, they were a lot shabby, and we spent most of September, October, and November last year replacing them. We finally called the project to an end last season in December, because it had just gotten too freakin' cold to continue work on the exterior.

We were disappointed that we couldn't get the whole exterior done last season, but we recognized that we'd bit off more than we could chew, and we were totally psyched to pick it up this Spring. We worked our way through interior projects all winter, and dreamed of what the exterior would look like once we got working on it when the weather warmed up.

Mostly, we were psyched because we were Set To Go. We already knew how to bust our way through replacing clapboards and trim, and we'd already agonized our way through the Worst Part: We picked the Perfect Color for the exterior of the house-- a deep, warm New England Grey.

The process wasn't pretty, we admit. We taped up tons of paint chips, and went through no less than eight quarts of test colors to splotch all over the house to evaluate it in different lights during different times of day. You can check out last year's Journal entries from April 20 to the end of the month for the agonizing blow-by-blow. We had icy cold greys, greenish greys, greys that paled to the color of a drowning victim, even greys that morphed into a sickly shade of purple. All the time, energy, and paint splotches were worth it, though, because we ended up with the Perfect Grey, bought twelve gallons of it, custom-mixed, and stored it in our entryway out of the winter cold, to get started this Spring.

We got some priming done last month, and so we decided to get started on the finish coat. Yeeehhhaaah! It was time to actually see a bit of what we'd worked for a year to get to. So we opened up a can of finish paint, and while I kept on with the primer, The Kilted One painted the north studio wall.

Now, to hear him tell it, he brushed the paint on a few clapboards, and thought to himself, Well now, that looks a bit brown. Then he painted a few more clapboards, and thought, Well, that looks really brown. But he kept painting, and after he finished the wall, he took a step back and thought to himself...

"Well, that looks like Sh**. Brown. In fact, it looks like sh** brown."

About then, I finished priming my side of the house, wandered around to see how things were going, saw the Kilted One stepped back to admire his handiwork, and turned around to see this:

I was... speechless. When I recovered my gift for words, I turned to him and said:

"That looks like sh**."

"Yes," he replied, "Sh** brown."

Oh, Sh**.

The Perfect Grey that we'd splotched all over the house, looked at from every conceivable angle, in every conceivable light, evaluated against eight different test quarts, and finally bought twelve gallons of...

Looked like sh** on the wall. Literally.

We tried to deny it, tried to rationalize that it'd look better when it dried, it'd look better in a different light, but the more we looked, and the longer we waited, the worse it got, and we finally had to face the fact that it didn't matter how much time we'd spent agonizing over the color, how much money we'd spent on quarts for test splotches, and how much money we'd ultimately spent for the twelve gallons of exterior paint...

We could not live in a sh** brown house.

I was devastated. I'd done everything right-- taped up paint chips, narrowed down our choices, and gone back and forth to Sherwin Williams for eight different quarts to splotch on all four sides of the house to determine which was the right color. I found it, bought twelve gallons of it, and after all that... it looked like sh**. I had no idea what to do.

So the Kilted One took charge, piled my crushed, broken-down body in the truck, and drove us back to Sherwin Williams. He plowed through the walls of paint chip displays while I cowered whimpering among the wallpaper books, grabbed ten grey chips, and dragged me out of the store into the sunlight.

He shoved five in my hand, took five in his, and proceeded to evaluate them, shuffling them around, discarding some on the pavement, while I stood there dumbfounded.

"This is the one," he declared, grabbing a chip out of my cold, dead hand, and went back in the store. He had a quart mixed, and shoved me back in the truck before I could scream for Joey's med cart to save me from my misery.

Forty five minutes later (twenty minutes home, ten minutes to grab a brush and a paint can, and fifteen minutes worth of painting) we had this:

Son of a bi***. Grey. The Grey! The Grey that I'd been looking for, hoping for, agonizing for, and spent $400 in paint for. Except that the $400 worth of paint I'd found wasn't The Grey that the Kilted One found.

Didn't take long for us to beat a path back to Sherwin Williams for multi-gallons of the Kilted One's Grey, which is now sitting in our garage waiting for next weekend.

Can't wait to get it on the rest of the house, of course, because it's absolutely Gorgeous.

As for me... anyone seen Joey? I heard he hooked up with some guuuud stuff, and I reeaaallly need a visit from the Candy Man...

Meanwhile, anyone need twelve gallons of Sherwin Williams, quality exterior paint in sh** brown?

July 18, 2004: I'm better now. Much better.

After arriving home, eating an entire cheesecake, evaluating the state of my life, and crying my eyes out until they bled... I'm better.

Y'all will also be happy to know that I've also approached, analyzed, accepted, and completely embraced the fact that Valium. Is. Not. Candy.

And I've reordered my life accordingly. Red wine works just as well, and, as a bonus, is much cheaper than prescription medication.

Work on the house had to continue, of course, but my fragile psyche couldn't quite face the spectre of a paint can without fracturing into a million shards of psychotic glass, colored like triangles, shaped like blue, and sounding like creamy pink English roses.

But hey, there's still much to be done around here, so pass the Cabernet and point me towards Clapboards!

We still had a mess of nasty looking clapboards on the front of the house, that we delusionally thought we could save, but ultimately faced reality and recognized that it was a hopeless cause:

Absolutely Perfect! A project to keep the exterior renovation moving, all the while avoiding the dreaded P-word. C for Clapboards? Check. M for Mitre saw? Check. T for Tape measure? Check. And no mention of P-p-p...paint. Anywhere.

So we set to work. It was slow, exacting work. Occasionally painful, veering into excruciating. But we made progress!

We ripped off all the questionable clapboards:

And started replacing the molding around the windows, and ripping out and replacing rotting trim boards:

It took hours...Cutting and shaving the clapboards to fit up against the new trim, fabricating dutchmen to extend the sill to accomodate the wider trim, working the new dripcap over the window, and getting the new trim board flush with the old.

And this little beauty almost had us tearing our hair out:

A simple 2 x 8 under the front door to replace the rotted one we'd taken out in powdered crumbles. Should have been an easy fix, except that the subflooring underneath the entryway jutted out into the space. After much effort with the reciprocating saw to smooth the rough edges, and judicious use of the router to ease the trim board, we got it to fit. Another hour gone.

A few more hours replacing clapboards we could get to without dragging out the ladder, and we ended up with this:

Lots still to be done, but also lots accomplished. It was incredibly slow, painstaking work, but also, Oddly Calming. Getting into the rhythm of measuring, cutting, fitting, re-cutting, shaving, and re-fitting each board into place...and finally (and probably most importantly!) stepping back at the end of the day and seeing something Done.

Prozac... wha' ? Who needs Prozac?

We're in the Zone...

July 21, 2004: Having recovered from my temporary mental state of preparing to stroke out at the mere sight of a paint can, and having been talked down from my mental ledge where Sherwin Williams was the ultimate embodiment of 99 varieties of evil, we started painting again.

We were aided in this part of the project by the youngest member of our household, who, upon being informed that we'd actually be Painting! this day, grabbed a paintbrush, found a can of primer, and set to work:

What a kid. At six years old, aside from playing with Barbies and watching Care Bears videos, her favorite things to do in life are to spray cleaner from squirt bottles all over the house and wipe it up, and to pick up a paintbrush and paint any surface she can reach.

God bless her. If our plans for her to win the Nobel Peace Prize (the Nobel Prize for Literature would be a satisfactory, if distant, second) or become an astrophysicist fall through, she can make a boatload of money and actually support herself running a cleaning service or painting houses.

Come to think of it, she'll be about ready to buy a property of her own around 2020-- anyone got any good leads?

With all three of us working, we got a lot done. The six year-old Astrophysicist Housepainter primed and painted everything she could reach, I stepped in to get the five feet above that, and the Very Tall Kilted One finished it all off up to the roof line:

We got the trim finish painted in Sherwin Williams Bright White (very pretty) and the Kilted One's Grey is going on smoothly and looks great.

Hallelujah! Looks like we've finally got a finish color that has legs! It looks better and better the more we do, and the house color drama appears to be Over. Now it's just a matter of getting it on miles upon miles o'clapboards.

As for me, I am definitely Better. I've solidly traded Valium for Cabernet, I've stopped channeling Randle McMurphy at the mere sight of a can of paint, and the random twitches have subsided.

The cheesecake, however, was good. Really, really Good. I don't have to give that up, do I?

July 28, 2004: We hadn't planned on writing this entry.

Last week, we plowed through priming and painting a pile of clapboards and trim, closed up the cans, washed the brushes, stashed everything in the garage, and updated the website, all in preparation for being off-line and on a mini-break this weekend until the first of August, because we were planning on having a ton of family and friends over this week to celebrate our daughter's Sixth Birthday.

She's a great kid-- she cheerfully pitches in to help with the renovations everywhere she can, stays out of the way when it's not safe for her to be in the middle of things, and the only thing she asks in return for the daily concessions she makes living in the middle of a year-round construction zone is a Huge, Honkin' Party.

Ahhh... a break! It's hot, it's muggy, it's been raining at all kinds of inconvenient times, we've been working like dogs on the house all season, and we've got an excuse to hang out with family and friends in the yard for a weekend-- it's a No-Brainer.

She's a Party Girl, and her birthday party is Her Thing. So we go all out, once a year. We get the property in spit-shiny perfect shape, spruce up the pool and deck, put up tents to shelter buffet tables groaning with food, set up a full bar, order enough balloons to levitate the house, decorate the grounds, and invite tons of friends and family over for a good, old-fashioned, all-day garden party.

We were both working at opposite sides of the yard, in the middle of our yearly Party Prep, when, out of the middle of nowhere, we were completely swamped by an ungodly loud BUZZING HAZE. Buzzing so loud, and a grey mass so thick that, as hard as we tried to beat a path toward each other, we couldn't do it, and we couldn't hear each other across the yard yelling "Wha? What the &%$# is this?!?!"

After a few minutes of seriously pathetic, totally ineffectual sign language, we managed to direct each other's attention to look up at the same corner of house at the same time, and through the haze, we saw this:

We stood there completely dumbfounded, because we knew that there was no rational explanation for the fact that this particular corner of the house should be darker than the rest, and moreover, that it should be absoluely Shimmering with activity.

And as we stood there, surrounded by the haze, unable to move, we were able to focus, and discerned this:

Now, we've been together for almost ten years, and we're mad for each other. Even so, we occasionally run into Communication Issues, where we just cannot understand what each other wants to be done, and cannot agree on what has to be done to move this project forward. It gets ugly, and we retreat to our seperate corners to simmer there until we can hash out a solution that will work for both of us.

But this?

Was not one of those times.

We looked at each other, our eyes meeting in mutual horror, and instantly realized that whatever was going on with this huge swarm of bees, we didn't want to be around to see it. So we simultaneously beat a path to the nearest door inside, and about fell all over each other to be the first ones through it. Not one of our proudest moments, maybe, but we both got inside safely, with no broken bones in evidence.

We regrouped in the the family room, cowering, and debated what do for an hour. Who were they? What did they want? Would they demand for us to take them to our Leader?

Eventually the buzzing died down, we mustered up the courage to poke our heads out the door to figure out what was going on, and saw this:

They were gone. Completely GONE. GONE... inside the house.

*Sigh*. We thought we were starting to conquer the bees. We got rid of the bees nest in the first floor kitchen wall last November, and have been zeroing in on the location of the nest somewhere inside the roof of the tower bumpout:

And now we've got another nest to eradicate.

The party went off without a hitch. The bees behaved, they stayed inside, and everyone was able to mill around and have a good time eating, drinking and swimming. Thank heavens for small favors.

Even so, we have to admit to becoming a bit disheartened and frustrated by the bees. The only way to prevent them from nesting in our house is to get the siding repaired and get it caulked, primed, and painted, but it's hard to get it done when the bees keep moving in and making impossible to work on certain sections of the house.

Not to mention the fact that we're increasingly beginning to feel as if we're living in a B-horror flick.

Guess we know what next weekend's project is going to be. Bee location, and bee relocation...

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