The Life of Riley is a weekly post that details my activities since I ended a thirteen year career as a corporate drone. These posts are usually long, personal, and geared more for my own memory than the reader’s entertainment.

Sunday (Day 490): Used Lingerie?

We watched The Good Girl in the morning, which was the least bad Jennifer Aniston movie that I’ve seen (excluding Office Space). We talked about house stuff and I ended up a little overwhelmed by all the things that needed to be done. One of those things on the list was to look to see if we could get furniture on the cheap, so while #1GF! showered, I looked up dining room tables on Craigslist.

In my searching, I somehow found someone selling lingerie that was only worn once. Really? Is there a market for used lingerie? I don’t think I want to know. I don’t even care if the person selling it merely thought about wearing it, I can’t imagine the people that are waiting to jump on that bargain. Are they dead broke and need to work out a new rental agreement with the trailer park supervisor, or are they dudes with thick glasses and a Myspace page? Either way, I don’t need to know.

We went over to the house to measure and see where furniture would fit if we ever get to move in. It’s something that we probably should’ve done a long time ago, but we’ve never actually been close enough to done on this project to consider it. While we were there, we found some paint issues, a small issue with some rafters that had been replaced, and noticed that weren’t sure what the dining room light fixture was centered on.

We left there with a pretty good idea of what sized dining room table would fit, so we headed over to Circle Furniture to see if they had anything that we’d like. I never heard of the store before, but they seem to be a small place with more modern (and slightly expensive) furniture. We generally don’t like to talk to salespeople, but a saleswoman got us into a conversation, and she was so nice that it didn’t enter into our minds to brush her off. It was a lot different than going into the larger stores.

We went to an early dinner at a nearby restaurant simply because it was close and we hadn’t eaten all day. While we were waiting for our food, a balloon man came by. He seemed a little out of place for this particular restaurant, and he was going up to tables full of adults, which was a little weird. I’m into goofing off, but I’m a little too old for balloon animals when I’m eating dinner, so I warded him off as nicely as I could. He seemed like a good-natured guy, so he laughed it off and didn’t make the situation tense, which I appreciated.

Monday (Day 491): Gold Monkeys With Ruby Eyes

I opened the house and called the contractor about the rafter issue that we found the day before. He was willing to replace the rafter in question, but explained why it was like that, and I didn’t think it was a big enough deal to make him redo it. I called the door guy and left a message for the electrician. I headed over to the house to point out some of the paint issues to the painters. The painters were supposed to finish up Tuesday, but they told me that they needed to push their schedule off a day. The contractor called again and asked that the appliances be delivered, but I told him that I wasn’t sure when the painting would be done, so I didn’t think it was a good idea.

I left the house and headed over to the building department because we still didn’t physically have the new building permit that we applied for a few weeks back. They had it at the desk, and wanted $35 for it, but I asked that the fee be waived since I had already had a permit issued for the full price of the job. They agreed and gave me the permit, which was good of them.

#1GF! was long gone by the time I got back to the apartment, but when I finally walked in the door, I noticed that she had left some googly eyes on the couch to make me laugh. It worked. I did. I was laughing not only that she put the eyes on the couch to make it look human, but also at the thought of her laughing as she set it up. I was smiling to myself when I finally sat down to get the weekly LOR post cranked out.

I usually field a few calls related to the house every day, and it’s rarely because things are going smoothly. Usually, problem calls outnumber calls from friends or family, so every time I hear the phone ring, I know it’s more likely to be business than fun. My ringtone has been Slayer’s “South of Heaven” for a while now, but I’ve recently noticed that every time I hear it, I’ve become trained to think things are going to suck rather than things are going to ROCK!

My phone was ruining Slayer, and that was not acceptable. I changed my default ringtone to a midi version of the Knight Rider theme that I put together with the Aodix Sequencer a few months ago. If I get averse to Knight Rider, who the hell cares, but I’m not going to let my phone train me to be Slayerphobic. I assigned the Slayer ringtone to a former coworker who only calls once in a while because he is one of the few people who calls me who both deserves, and would appreciate, having a Slayer ringtone assigned to him.

Later in the afternoon, I had to meet one of the contractor’s guys at a sub shop to drop off a check. I started trouble by saying something like, “Here’s your check, punk.” As he was pulling away, he told me not to work too hard. If you’re going to dish it out, then you can’t expect to be exempt from getting a little something back. That said, I didn’t follow his advice and headed home to write until 9:30 PM.

It’s funny, but I sort of do work hard on this site for no good reason than to entertain or inform you folks. I don’t have a good reason why except it’s always really cool when a reader comes forward to say hello. I’ve met more people that way and you never know when one will send me a 23 pound solid gold monkey with ruby eyes. Or maybe, when I die, on my deathbed, I’ll receive total consciousness. So, I’d have that going for me, which would be nice.

Tuesday (Day 492): Checks Brought To You By The Letter G

We got up at later because I was still having a problem with my knee, and wanted to give it a break from the gym. When 6:15 rolled around, I felt like I was sleeping in. Listen to how f’d up that is: The guy without a job nor kids feels like he’s sleeping in when he gets up at 6:15. I’ve never been a type A personality (I’m maybe a B-/C+), so I can’t imagine what the hell is going on. All I can come up with is that it shouldn’t be long before I’m getting up at 4AM to have a bowl of prunes and yell things at the TV that start with “In MY day…”. Send help (but not between 9PM and 12 AM because Matlock and Murder, She Wrote are on back to back on the Hallmark channel.)

I went out to unlock the house, and on my way out the door, #1GF! called after me. My jeans are a little long because, despite being six feet tall, I have short legs that are in between sizes. Rather than looking like I’m waiting for the flood waters to roll in, I buy them long. When I’m at home, I cuff them to avoid walking on them. It’s logical, right?

When I leave the house, I sometimes forget that my pants are cuffed. Add cuffed jeans, black hair, and the fact that I’m almost always wearing a black or dark blue t-shirt, and I inevitably hear the same warning when I leave the house: “Hey, fix your pants, Bowser.” What can I say? Dip DaDip Da dadip da dooo? Look, I told you before to send help.

When I got home, I checked stats and e-mail until 10AM. It’s starting to take so long that it seems like a waste of time, but I still like to seek out every person who links to me and add them to my feed reader. I figure if someone links to one of my pages, there might be something interesting about them or they might be on my wavelength. I keep track of my linkers and try to see if I can add one of their posts to StumbleUpon or something as an anonymous reward. From a time management standpoint, it’s a resource intensive and doesn’t really produce results, but it’s something that I like to do because it seems like a nice thing to do. And I don’t do a hell of a lot of nice things for people.

Once the stats were checked and the feeds were tucked into my reader like strings into a child’s pocket, I tried to plan out what errands needed to be run for the house. I stared at a growing to do list on a piece of scrap paper and tried to figure out what needed to be done first. I eventually realized that the planning was locking me up, and decided to attack things randomly just to get in motion. I figured that I might get less done without planning, but the planning was preventing me from getting anything done at all.

I got moving and I looked for my headphones for my walkman/phone, which I seem to have lost in the last week or so. I got immensely irritated because if I didn’t have my music, there was no buffer to keep my frustration toward all the big butt aisle blockers at the supermarket in check. I eventually stopped looking because getting a checkmark on my list was more important than having music to prevent me from assaulting a big butt aisle blocker or two.

I took the garbage out (check) and then headed over to a local home improvement store to buy knobs for the kitchen and bathroom. It’s not easy to get knobs that match drawer pulls perfectly unless they’re from the same company, but I needed another checkmark to prove that things were still moving forward. I got the closest finish I could find and bought 26 knobs (check). There might’ve been closer matches somewhere else, but I needed a checkmark.

I went to the supermarket to get another check. I happened to have thrown an old Gap t-shirt over my regular t-shirt because it wasn’t cold enough for a sweatshirt. When I got to the deli counter, the lady asked me sort of sarcastically if the G on the front of my shirt stood for god.

I thought it was an ironic question for an atheist, but I still felt a little weird about her sarcastic tone. I might not go for the god angle, but I don’t have to personally subscribe to things to validate them. I don’t think that belief systems are invalid if they help you get through life. I always think of the old Perl adage of TIMTOWTDI, which is a mantra among Perl hackers that points out that There Is More Than One Way To Do It. In coding and life, there are many ways to get to a workable solution. I think people can believe in whatever they want if it makes their lives better. I started believing I was a writer, and things got better for me, so who’s to say someone can’t do the same with an all powerful something or other?

I told her that it didn’t mean god. It was a $2 Gap shirt. I wasn’t trying to be an ass and I was smiling the whole time, but I added that there were a lot of words that began with G. I don’t know why I said that. Later, I thought. Hmm. I wonder if she went through words like gay, geek, G-sus, gangsta, or gorilla. I hope she didn’t think gorilla. I don’t want to have to worry about getting drugged and tagged while shopping for fruit. [thwunk] Shit. Not agaaaa. [thud]

When I got home from the market, I called the door guy about the stain for our door because it was supposed to have been delivered by now. He told me that the stain that we picked was actually a color for a pre-finished door, so we had to pick another one. That meant going through a bunch of colors and getting them over to #1GF! for approval. Once she called me back, I sent the new color back to the door guy who said that he’d order it. I still didn’t have the stain in hand, so I only took a half a checkmark on that one.

I headed over to the house to talk to the painters about painting the baseboard heat. They hit me up for $200 to paint them. I didn’t like getting hit up for extra money considering they would’ve had to paint the wooden baseboards if the heaters weren’t there, but the painter said that it needed special paint. I reluctantly agreed because I just wanted the job to keep moving.

I went to the library get myself a book, but spent 30 minutes wandering around before leaving with nothing. The only reason that I left was that the odds kept dropping that I would actually find a book and I felt like I was wasting time on non-checkmark related activities. I went home and wrote until 7:30 and #1GF! made dinner.

Wednesday (Day 493): Too Much Faith

I wrote all morning and went to see the painters at lunch. They said that they’d be finishing up Wednesday, so they were packing up. I could see that they clearly weren’t done, so I pointed out a few spots that had so little paint that you could clearly see the paint underneath. The painter said he’d take care of the stuff so I moved on.

I called the contractor about a piece of base cap that wasn’t put in our back stairs. We knew that there’s no way to get the molding that’s in the house without custom making it, so he asked me to head over to a local home store and pick out something that I thought would be close enough. I was frustrated with the amount of painting that was left, so I wasn’t too psyched about adding something else to the list, but logically, I couldn’t argue with it.

I took a picture of some base cap and headed to a big home store to see if I could match it. I found an exact match, so I knew that I took a picture of the wrong molding. If I took a picture of the old stuff, there would be no exact match. I headed back to the house, took a picture of some of the old molding, and found one of the painters sanding paint off of a floor that wasn’t scheduled to be sanded by the floor guy. I saw more money going out the door, and my frustration level rose even higher. I was ready to pop, and I didn’t want to make a scene, so I left before I could. I headed back to the home store figuring that I’d deal with the issue later when I was calmer. When I compared the picture of the old base cap to the molding at the store, the closest match was the base cap that I had picked a half hour before. I just killed an hour. I was not psyched.

I went home to get some writing done, and #1GF! called to ask if the stain for the door had shown up. I had forgotten to call the door guy to ask where the stain was, and I sort of popped. I didn’t pop at #1GF!, but I flew off the handle about how the job was starting to resemble the way things went before we got the new contractor. After I hung up, I dove into some writing to take my mind off of things.

Once #1GF! got home, we went to the house to do a final walkthrough to make sure there weren’t any issues with the paint. All the paper pulled up and the house cleaned out, but there was paint on the floor in three rooms (two of which weren’t scheduled to be sanded), there were drips everywhere, a few walls got completely missed, and in one room the paint was bubbling off the walls. I absolutely hit the fucking roof.

I called the painter and asked if he was done. He said that other than any punch list items we might have he was. That’s when we had our first argument and I got aggravated like I haven’t gotten aggravated in a long time. I scheduled a meeting with the painter for Friday so that we could show him all the issues. I had done this a few times with the old contractor, but I was pissed that I was having to do it again with someone who came with a recommendation and wasn’t cheap.

I called the contractor to get his take on things. A couple of times that night, I got calls from both the contractor and the painter saying that they were concerned with the number of issues that I found, and they both assured me that we’d all find a way to make things right. Unfortunately, the end that was in sight seemed like it was moving off once again.

Thursday (Day 494): “Special” Paint And Special Requests

I decided to blow off everything and work on a remix of a track from the latest Brad Sucks album, Out of It, because I thought it would distract me and give me a little break from the house. I didn’t actually come up with anything, so it didn’t work out like I planned.

I called the electrician and told him that I needed to reschedule with him because the painting was falling behind. He was understanding. The contractor called me and wanted to drop by the house to see the paint issues. I’m sort of detail oriented when it comes to construction, so I’m sure he wanted to see how much of the issues were my perception and how many were legitimate. I met him over at the house and he walked through and agreed that it wasn’t me. The issues were not only legitimate, but they were obvious.

I went home and played with remixing more because being in the house for a mere ten minutes wound me tighter than I’ve been wound in a while. With the old contractor, that happened all the time, but it hasn’t happened since the new guy has been on the job.

At night, #1GF! and I went to the house to make a list of what was wrong. I like to put painter’s tape on mistakes because I have a hard time finding them again if I just write them down, but #1GF! was afraid that I might overwhelm the painter. I didn’t pick out every little issue because I didn’t really need to. There were enough major issues that we would just put a piece of tape to indicate an entire wall had problems.

By the end, #1GF! was so pissed that she wasn’t worried about the amount of tape. While we were going through one of the rooms, I found a can of Rustoleum, and figured out what the “special paint” was that went on the radiators. I wondered whether the guy really thought that I would think that Rustoleum was somehow special or whether I got duped out of a couple of hundred bucks. I just shook my head and was in no mood to speculate about someone else’s motivations.

Even though I was fully prepared to cook, the house took a while to go through, so we decided to get some pizza. Pizza on Thursday. I’ll bet we ordered a Greek salad too. Yea, we did. When we went into the shop to pick up the order, we overheard the guy in front of us say that he had placed his order online. What’s that you say? Online PIZZA? Welcome to the modern world, I guess.

We talked to the lady about the online ordering process, and she mentioned that they used to have a special instructions section but had to remove it because people would try to order specific types of olive oil or freshly grown herbs. She said they still have the occasional issue where someone will click every single checkbox on the page and then not understand why they get a sub with three types of mustard on it.

The pizza was unusually perfect, but it didn’t help matters. Once I get stuck in battle mode, I find it incredibly difficult to get out of it. I ended up getting a pretty poor night’s sleep and woke up instantly on several occasions thinking about the paint issues.

Friday (Day 495): More Paint Issues

I worked out in the morning and got a quick post out before going to the house to meet with the painter about the paint issues. The disagreement blew up into a full scale argument. I’m not getting into it, but at one point one of the painters asked me who was responsible for a pile of garbage sitting in the middle of one of the rooms. I didn’t expect him to clean up the pile, and the question wasn’t pertinent to the discussion about the paint issues, so I wanted to shut it down. I said I wasn’t sure, but picked a dead can of Rustoleum out of the pile. “Is this yours?” I didn’t pretend that he was responsible for the pile, but I wasn’t about to let him act like he had no part in creating it.

The argument ended with one of the painters saying something like, “You know we could say, ‘I don’t need this shit’ and walk right out of here.” I said, “You’re right. You could. On the other hand, I could look at you like I did with the last crew of painters and tell you to Get. The Fuck. Out of my house.” I paused. And then very nicely said, “But I don’t think anyone wants that.”

I went home and remixed a song almost all day. The painter called and actually asked me for more money. I had held up my part of the contract and paid on time, and the painting was done poorly. How that entitles someone to an early payment is beyond me.

At the same time, my host suspended my account because I was using 12% of server resources. My traffic was actually lower than it had been all week, so I didn’t understand what was going on. The tech told me that I had called 30 minutes before to get my site unsuspended. I had actually called exactly two weeks and a half hour ago to get my account unsuspended because of a Digg rush, but I hadn’t called that day.

The only explanation that I can come up with is that someone read an old note in my host’s help queue that was never marked resolved, and suspended my account thinking it was current. They eventually reinstated my account and I turned on caching just in case there was a legitimate issue. I didn’t take any of my frustration out on the help desk guy (because help desk jobs suck), but it seemed like a screw up on their end.

At night, #1GF! and I went to the house to look at the paint issues, which still looked pretty bad. I said I’d go talk to the painters the next morning and we headed out to get some dinner. On the way to a local restaurant, the contractor called to find out how things were going. I told him what was going on, and he said that he had a piece of molding to show me. It was almost 8:30, but he asked to meet me over at the house to show it to us.

What contractor meets you at 8:30 at night just to show you a piece of molding? The kind you recommend to anyone you can. He brought his wife along, and we all stood around talking for an hour or so. I actually laughed enough that I doubled over a couple of times. They eventually had to take off because standing around a half finished house probably isn’t the most fun thing to do on a Friday night. #1GF! and I went down to our local restaurant for dinner.

Saturday (Day 496): Kaiju Paint Battle

I had to go over to the house in the morning because the contractor had a question about the molding he showed me. I had to go over to talk to the painter anyway, so I headed over early. The painting issues had me would so tight that I practically slid the EVO up onto the grass when I was pulling up.

When I got to the house, the contractor was actually recreating the molding to make it match the hundred year old molding that isn’t made anymore. That’s the kind of shit that I’m talking about. I call the contractor and say there is no molding on the attic stairs, and he doesn’t argue with me. He says “no problem” and not only brings his guys over to install it the next day, but figures out a way to match hundred year old molding. You can’t buy the kind of recommendations that come from doing things like that.

Things were going a little too well, so he pointed out a couple of spots where the molding had been inexplicably removed by someone. I asked one of the other guys to make sure that it had been removed rather than never installed, and he showed me where it had been caulked to the wall after installation. Who takes molding?

Then, the painter showed up. Both the painter and I were on edge from the other arguments and it showed. I asked him if he knew what happened to the molding. He didn’t. I had no proof if he did or didn’t, so I dropped it. We then started talking about the issues in a room where the paint was bubbling off the walls and it everything blew the fuck up into another argument. Despite the fact that the contractor and two of his workers in the house, you could hear a pin drop when people weren’t yelling.

The argument was pretty much that the painter felt that he had fulfilled his contractual obligations on the job, and I had a very expensive but poorly done paint job. Once it ended, I went back to the contractor who was working on the stairs.

“You want some of this.”

“Nope. Not me.”

He had the look in his eyes that almost seemed impressed, nervous, and amused at the same time. I talked with him for a few minutes before taking off.

I was relatively fired up when I got home, and had random moments where I’d want to punch something. #1GF!’s friend was in town from Florida and wanted to go through Boston, and I didn’t think that I was going, but #1GF! thought I was. I thought it was a girls’ day, but I realized that the odds of the three of them finding their way around town was pretty low, so despite feeling like I might be a little punchy, I thought that it would probably be better if I went along to provide a little bit of direction.

I don’t go in town much anymore (for non Bostonians, going into Boston is usually referred to as going “in town”.), because it’s usually a pain in the ass thanks to parking, traffic, tourists, crowds, etc. We headed over to Faneuil Hall to meet up with her friends, but they were still on the road, so I walked #1GF! over to Haymarket, Boston’s weekend open air vegetable market.

If you’ve never walked through it, Haymarket is sort of neat. You’re in the middle of the city and very close to both the highway and Faneuil Hall, yet you’re in an open air vegetable market. Everything smells good and the prices are insanely low, but because you’re in the city, the vendors lack any country charm. A lot of them don’t have enough patience to keep them from yelling at each other and customers. I think I heard one yell, “JUST BUY IT ALREADY! COME ON! FOR CRYING OUT LOUD!” at a customer who was holding a tomato and completely unfazed. As we walked through, I kept hearing #1GF! behind me calling out prices in amazement. “Five tomatoes for a dollar? [pause] Ten peaches for $2? This is unreal.”

As I was smirking at #1GF!’s reaction, her friend called, so we met her among the street performers that cover Faneuil Hall and Quincy Market like mold. She had brought another friend who was originally from Chicago, and everyone was hungry for lunch. If you don’t count Guinness as a food, the only place I’ve ever eaten in Fanueil Hall is at the takeout places in Quincy Market. The area is touristy and overpriced, so the restaurants don’t really have to cook anything good. I have the same feelings about the neighboring North End where they drown everything in garlic so that Midwestern tourists can claim to have eaten Italian food there.

I led the three of them around the outside of Quincy Market, but they didn’t see anything that appealed to them except for a group of sailors. When we walked by Abercrombie & Fitch, they had a hairless, half naked dude standing in the doorway posing. I made note of it because Abercrombie has now officially dethroned Hollister as the gayest store on the planet. Sorry gay people. I feel I have somehow insulted you. Maybe I should say that they’re the most gayly magnetized store on the planet? I have no idea.

#1GF!’s friend wanted fried clams, so we headed over to the Union Oyster House. On the way over, something odd happened. For me to know if a girl is flirting with me, her shirt has to be off and even then she’d have to tell me “I’m flirting with you” so I don’t think she’s just European or something. For me to be able to pick up that someone is checking me out is pretty much impossible.

I think I might’ve gotten some of the gay magnetic field stuck to my shirt while walking by Abercrombie because as we were walking down the street, a guy checked me out. And it was not a little checkout. The guy actually went out of his way to look around another dude to run his eyes up and down me a couple of times.

“Holy crap, honey. A gay dude just checked me out!”
“How do you know?”
“He looked around another dude and then did this to me [looks over #1GF! head to toe like a piece of meat].”
“Wow. That’s definitely checking someone out alright.”
“Well, if I noticed, then you know it had to be pretty blatant.”
“Look at you. You go girl.”

We headed to the Oyster House, but the wait was an hour and the woman at the desk seemed to hate her job, so we headed to a place a couple of doors down. We had lunch, and #1GF!’s friend’s friend said how funny the Boston accents sound. Of course, I had to thicken my accent as it only comes out when I’m pissed as hell or talking to people I knew as a kid. I also had to tell them my favorite Bostonian phonetic spelling, “PSDS”. Say it fast. You’ll get it.

After lunch, the ladies got some Dunkin’s, and we walked down to the wharf. They tried to get me into a picture, but of course I kept goofing off and ruining it. We went over to the North End to Mike’s Pastry to pick up some desert. Mike’s is always mobbed with tourists who don’t know what they want or what to do. There’s less of a line than a crowd and if you aren’t a little assertive, you’ll end up standing there all day.

The girls went down one of the sides of the shop and got in single file, which I found pretty amusing. You don’t have to push anyone around or be rude, but the secret to Mike’s is to go through the middle and move into any hole in the crowd that gets you close to the counter. You can get served in about two minutes, which I pretty much did. When I got close, the girls were still in the back somewhere. I yelled over to #1GF! to see what they wanted.

“A cannoli?”
“One each?”
“No.”
“Just one?”
“Yes”
A chocolate one or something?
“No. A plain cannoli.”
“[my accent thickens up] One cannoli? That’s it? A single, plain cannoli? Really?”
“Yes. One cannoli.”
“Nope. Not happening.”

The little old lady behind me started saying “One cannoli? They can’t have one cannoli!” and giggling with her friend. I hammed it up a little to give the tiny old ladies a little laugh.

When I got to the counter, I ordered a plain cannoli, a lobster claw, a chocolate covered cannoli, and a bag of pizelles. We walked over to The Greenway, which is the park that resulted from putting the roads underground in the Big Dig. We ate, and I acted like a goof because that’s what I do.

We went back to Quincy Market so that the girls could do some shopping for souvenirs because a trip doesn’t exist without proof. #1GF! and I waited out in front of Faneuil Hall, and the UMass marching band showed up. The whole band showed up. Do you have any idea how big the UMass marching band is? Neither do I, but there was enough of them to fill the stairs that lead up to City Hall Plaza.

Once they passed, we watched a bunch of guys dancing, and they kept making those jokey racist type comments during their act. It would be like “You are going to see a black guy running… without the police behind him and he’s going to jump over these people…” and I just didn’t dig it. I’m white, and I didn’t like the act because I thought a bunch of black guys were making racist jokes about black guys. I’m not sure if that makes any sense, but that’s how I felt.

Mostly the act was a lot of waiting for nothing, but there were a couple of awesome freezes. There was a girl in the crew who had attitude like she could dance, but she was so wack. I can’t tell you if “wack” is still used by kids today, but there is no other word that would describe her dancing better except perhaps wiggidy wiggidy wack. If #1GF! knew what wack was, she would’ve said the same thing, but she just said that she could do better. I haven’t seen moves like that since the last wedding I went to.

#1GF!’s friends had to leave, and once they were gone, I heard the UMass band playing somewhere in the distance, so I dragged #1GF! over to see it. The whole band was crammed between Faneuil Hall and Quincy Market, which is a decent sized space unless you’re a full marching band. We watched them do a Stevie Wonder medley, which I was pretty happy with.

As I was standing there listening to the sheer volume of this band, and watching how much fun they were having, there was a brief moment where I thought, “Man, I should’ve been in band. As nerdy as band is, it really looks like they’re having fun. I wonder how many flutes there are in there… Mmmm band camp.” From there, I sort of drifted off and stopped paying attention.

Because it had been so warm, when night fell, it felt a lot later than it actually was. It felt like it was nine, but it wasn’t even seven. We headed to the house to scrape down one of the rooms that had bubbling paint. The painter made it seem like the paint just let loose from the wall when we had our last argument and that the room full of bubbling paint wasn’t his responsibility because it had been improperly sealed by the previous painters. I figured we could go over and skim the paint off in an hour.

An hour of scraping later, we had a one foot patch of paint removed. I started to realize that the painter had skimmed off paint and joint compound because the paint was firmly stuck to the wall. I have no idea why the paint was bubbling off the wall, but the paint wasn’t all giving away like he indicated. I felt like an idiot.

I gave up and we went home, having created a bigger mess. I was paying a guy a lot of money for a job that was looking like it was going to require another painter to complete. I really had no idea what I was going to do, but I was getting tired as hell of it. Needless to say, I didn’t sleep well once again.

What I Learned

• People will sell anything on Craigslist.
• Small furniture stores have a different feel than larger ones.
• Sometimes the only path to done is to stop planning and start doing.
• Googly eyes make inanimate objects waaaaay more fun.
• TIMTOWTDI applies to more than Perl.
• The UMass marching band is really big and really loud up close.

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