Shooting up the Wallpaper

As I may have mentioned, my wife is seven months pregnant. She’s the fittest-looking pregnant woman you’ve seen, except for that pregnant lady we met yesterday who just ran eight miles…

Anyways, as part of the baby prep work, we’ve been accumulating stuff of a teeny-tiny nature. This fetus now has more clothes than I do (although I’ve got more shoes). She’s also got her designated corner of my bedroom for her crib, which currently contains her stroller, and I tore down the doors of one closet to transform it into a changing area. A whole area just for changing diapers. Yay.

It is this area that I’m writing about-- I painted it a couple weeks ago, hung up a valance last week to conceal the shelves at the top of the closet, and yesterday the missus and I hung some dinosaur wallpaper at eye level. It’s the Nojo Back in Time design, if you want to take a look. The wall is blue, the valance is red. It all works.

But hanging a wall border that’s all one piece on the inside of a closet isn’t the easiest thing to do. Especially if you’ve never hung wallpaper before. But MrsB and I are capable people, and we had it up, and level, in a couple minutes. However once I reinstalled the lamp that goes above the changing table which is below the border (I had fun drilling giant holes through walls for that bit of home renovation, since there aren’t any outlets in my closet) the imperfections of the wall came to light (ha!). Air bubbles under the wallpaper were noticeable too.

So we started rubbing the holes down with a wet sponge, which we’d already been doing, but it just wasn’t working well enough. “What we need is some way to get water between the wall and the paper,” said I. Then I had one of those flashes of brilliance that convinced my wife that bearing my child was actually a good idea.

MrsB is a scientist, and scientists tend to accumulate somewhat unusual items around the house. We use giant pipettes to baste turkeys; we use latex gloves when people are dying their hair; we use syringes to refill the ink cartridges in our fountain pens.

So I grabbed a syringe, filled it with water, and told the wife to start shooting up. Jab the wallpaper, squeeze, wait for the chemical reaction to turn water into glue, and rub with sponge in case air bubbles remained. Worked like a fricking dream. :smiley:

::nods:: Very clever. :slight_smile:

I thought this was going to be about using a shotgun to install air conditioning. Neat trick!

Nice trick! I’ll have to remember that. I’ll probably skip the airr conditioning, though.

I learned years ago how to shoot up an orange. The woman who taught me said it’s the first lesson juvenile diabetics get. Happy faces on the oranges too!

The usefulness of 10CC syringes as domestic tools is vastly underrated. I have used them to:

-refill fountain pens & mix fountain pen ink in very precise proportions.
-clean & lubricate small intricate mechanisms
-give cough & cold meds (without the needle) to a sleepy baby/toddler at night

My mom was a nurse, and we always had bags with hundreds of various size syringes around the house when I was growing up. When I was a kid, I used to play with them in the tub all the time: they made a great “raygun” for GI-Joe, and when you plugged the needle with soap, a great spear gun for him too…

I also had great fun using them to squirt contents of various bottles from the parental liquor cabinet onto the wood fire in the fire place. Some of these fancy digestifs made pretty coloured flames! It speaks to how much of a square nerd I was as a kid that it was much more interesting watching various spirits burn than drinking them…