The love of God
And constant contradictions
With just a smile, wink or nod
What’s stranger, fact or fiction?
And never ceasing to amaze
On a regular basis
First hand into his pocket
Or first fist into the faces
The last hurrah?
Nah!
I’ll do it again
The Spackle King behind the bars
Or the one in front of them
(dah dah dah dah!)
(©1997 D. Barrett/J. Gittleman/Bosstones)
Sorry, I got a little ska in my eye. But I’m better now.
Next week the Little Woman is off work. (This relates to the Warning. But that comes later.) So she decided it’s time to paint about half the house. Which, when you think about it, is OK since it’s the half of the house I wanted to paint since we moved in. So from a certain point of view, I get my way here. Only I can’t get the colors I want. Something about resale values and “butt-ugly”. “Butt-ugly” came up when I picked the colors I wanted. So, of course, we’re going to use her colors. (I think one of them is “Toast” but I’m not sure.)
Before we can paint, though, we have to prep the walls. Mostly this is taking the pictures we have hung up down and filling in the nail holes and stuff. If it were just our nail holes, things would go a little more smoothly. But it’s not, so it isn’t. But that’s the way things go.
When we put up our pictures, first we decided where it would look best. Then we decided it would be better if we put things up strategically to cover as many of the slugs in the wall the last people left. So when we took down our pictures to get ready to paint, there they were. All the slugs we covered up when we moved in. Weird how they didn’t go away.
Our house is a couple of years old. And by “a couple”, I mean “about 55”. It was built right after The War and has these unbelievable plaster walls. They’re like concrete. Man, they are some hard walls. Which makes hanging pictures a little tricky. The people before us got around the trickiness of driving nails into concrete by auguring out a hole about the size of your thumb and filling it in with a plastic plug and putting the screw into that. They did this a lot. They had a bunch of stuff on the walls. And from the pattern of plugs left in the plaster, they moved their stuff around regularly. (I blame everything on the people right before us. It couldn’t have been anyone else, now could it?)
So yesterday, I fill in our discrete nail holes with spackle and get to filling their huge, gaping caverns in the plaster. If they pushed the plastic plug in so it was at least flush, if not sunk just a bit, it would have been easier. But nooooo… they had to leave a little plastic hickey sticking out of the wall. Bastards.
So I have to drill out some of the plastic, so I can spackle the wall smooth. Only this makes the whole plug disintegrate. So I wind up with a giant, gaping cavern to spackle. When you spackle a giant, gaping cavern, the spackle sort of sucks up into the hole as it dries. No big deal. I just have to go around and respackle all over the place.
This looks like a job for the Spackle King! Luckily I have a theme song.
Oh, and a stray cat decided it would be fun to harass my dogs yesterday afternoon.
She (and I’m fairly sure it was a she because she was calico, and for a boy cat to be calico, he would have to be XXY, and that’s pretty rare, so I’m going with percentages here) plopped herself down in the sun right beside the dog run and when the dogs went out to do what dogs do when they go out to the dog run, they saw her and barked and barked and barked like lunatics. Which is pretty much what dogs do, even if there’s no cat there. But since there was a cat, they barked even more. And since the cat knew the dogs couldn’t get at her, she played all aloof which made the dogs crazier.
Then after I collected the dogs and brought them in, the cat thought it would be cool to hang out on our porch. Right where the dogs could see them from inside. Stupid cat.
The Little Woman wouldn’t let me deal with the cat in a straightforward, decisive manner. She said it was “too cold to spray it with the garden hose”. And she wouldn’t let me use my squirt gun either. She wouldn’t even let me set up the Shop-Vac on the “blow” setting and convince the cat it would be better to hang out somewhere else. She thought it would be better to wait it out. Like you can wait out a cat. Sheesh.
Finally the Little Woman shooed it away with a broom.
I still think I should have used the Shop-Vac. If I did it right, I could have probably launched that sucker clean across the road.
Not that I’d actually do that. It would be mean.
-Rue
And here’s that warning I told you about:
Next week (as I mentioned above), the Little Woman is taking time off from work. So I don’t think I’ll be having a Monday Morning Post.
So here’s what you can do:
- Suffer.
B) Search out an old Post and make that do. (But this would stress the hamster, unless you did it in the middle of the night or something.)
or
III Make your own Post. Something is going to happen to you this week. Probably something good, I can just feel it. Save it back for Monday and start a thread. Call it “The Official Monday Morning Thread” or something, so everyone knows what it is, and put your story there. Whoever starts the thread first gets a prize. Maybe.
But it’s all up to you. Do what you want.
