Home: July 2006 Archives

Reason #412 why I know I'm old, my friends don't jump at the chance to help do home improvement for pizza & beer.

Alone or not I still like painting, which is what I'm doing today and what I will probably be working on until Wednesday. Painting was my first real job that I stuck with in high school; I did a lot of it in high school & college.

I miss the guys I used to paint with, especially the embarrassingly lewd offers they would shout to women in other cars while we were driving to a job site. Everyone on the crew, except me, smoked pot constantly -- I think it kept the paint fumes down. Coincidentally, our little crew almost never finished a job correctly. At the least we almost always left the circle around one light fixture unpainted -- almost like it was our signature.

The funniest thing that ever happened was the day when our boss went back into a huge apartment complex to touch up something we forgot. He accidentally got off the ladder only to realize that he put his foot into a five gallon bucket of paint. We came looking for him after he had been gone a little too long, only to find him fuming trying to wrap up his foot in a drop cloth so he could walk out to the van. I laughed so hard when I saw what had happened, I felt light headed.

Painting is one of the most satisfying home improvement projects. It doesn't cost much but makes a huge difference in a reasonably short period of time.

I hope I can get my house whipped back into shape for poker on Friday.