September 15, 2003

• It was easy turning green.

  
  

  Doug suggested calling this blog, “It’s not easy being green.”  That’s a bit trite, and besides that, I didn’t find it at all difficult.

  
  

  We painted his room tonight.  By the time we got all the furniture out, the molding and trim removed, and the places we didn’t want green masked off, the sun was down.

  
  

  He had never painted with a roller.  I don’t think he believed me during the planning phase when I told him it was fun.  Early in the job tonight he admitted that it was fun.  That was shortly before he said we should have documented the job with before and after photos.  I had thought about that before I started, but then didn’t think of it again until he mentioned it.

  
  

  We do have one photo of how the room looked before, but Greyfox doesn’t want it published.  I shows him passed out drunk on his cot in front of the moldy exterior wall we covered with ivy-covered Con-Tact® wallcovering.  The picture clearly shows those vertical stripes that always reminded me of jailhouse bars, as well as Greyfox’s alcohol-flushed face and the dirty look on Muffin’s face. 

  
  

  Muffin is the cat who thinks that Greyfox is the most comfortable warm furniture around.  She misses him a lot since he’s been gone, and now she misses her old room, too.  She has been disoriented and disgruntled for several days as the preparations for the redecorating proceeded.  Now the door to her room is shut to keep the cat hair out of the wet paint, and she is asleep on the sofa where Doug is playing GTA Vice City. 

  
  

  When I let Koji off his tether for the night, the only place Muffin has to go, besides out the bathroom window into the great outdoors, is to her pillow which has been relocated to the hallway.  I put her “teddy bear” on it for her.  That’s not a stuffed animal, as you might guess from the quotes.  What it is, is a fake fur golf club cover with the number 5 on the top end.  She snuggles up to it.

  
  

  Anyhow, after I reminded Doug that we had a picture of the room “before”, he said we could caption the before-and-after shots, “We kicked out the Old Fart, sobered him up, and painted the room green.”  But when I called Greyfox tonight, he nixed that idea.  You’ll have to use your imagination.

  
  

  I guess the job was harder on Doug than it was on me.  I dunno… he had the roller for the entire first coat, and I was doing corners and edges and touch-up with a brush.  He could reach the top of the wall, but I had to move my kitchen stool around to get myself up to the ceiling.  I say he had it harder only because he was expressing more weariness and fatigue than I was feeling.  He was also expressing some crabby pessimistic skepticism between coats, over whether there was enough paint to do a second coat.

  
  

  I’m a lousy supervisor.  I got busy with my work and forgot to keep an eye on what Doug was doing, and the first coat went on a bit thick on one wall, before I caught on and advised him to spread it out more.  Actually, it really WAS a bit close.  One gallon of paint was supposed to cover about 20 square feet less than the area we had to cover, but I decided we’d make do with one gallon… and we did.

  
  

  A single coat was sufficient in some areas.  The only places that really needed a second coat were those where the old striped wallpaper was stuck down too firmly for us to peel it off.  Doug quit and sat down at the PlayStation after the first coat, and I applied more Con-Tact® around the closet, replaced the molding and trim (had to call for help from him a couple of times for that job), and by the time that was done the first coat was dry enough to take a second one.  To make sure the pint or so of paint we had left would cover the places that needed it most, I rolled on the second coat.

  
  

  I didn’t really turn green.  The paint is in streaks and splotches on my hands and arms.  We took some care choosing our clothing for the job, picked things already either holey or stained or both.  Oddly enough, I don’t think I got any paint on my clothes.  Doug rubbed up against the wall a few times and got light green paint on his ragged old red sweatshirt.  He seems to have made it through without getting any specks on his spectacles, but I had to clean one paint speck off each of my lenses.

  
  

  Tomorrow, I’ll take down the masking, and bundle it up with the plastic sheeting from the floor, before heading down the valley again.  If there is enough time (and energy), I’ll even move some of the furniture back in there.  I am tired but happy tonight, the paint is drying, and if Muffin can’t content herself with her pillow in the hallway, she’ll just have to find another place to sleep tonight.  If she wasn’t such a fraidy cat, she could snuggle up with Koji, Pidney and me, on our bed.

  
  

  

  • 3:45 am
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