scrapin' by
In order to save money, Dan and i have decided to paint our house ourselves this summer. Well, just one wall of the house actually, the wall on which the paint is peeling due to the handywork a rogue steam pipe. The rest of the house we are going to leave for a few years until we are a bit richer and can pay some other people to risk their lives hanging from ladders all over our property. People who don't speak too much english. You know, so the fear of them dying of a fall from great heights is not so strong.
Turns out scraping even one side of your house completely is not an easy task. After fifteen minutes the points on both our scrapers wore down, and by our demenor one could tell that both Dan and I blamed the other for this. Now Dan is off to Home Depot buying a heat gun and better scraping blades. Two days and $120 and counting. This is just like one of those home-improvement shows. Except without the montage. What i wouldn't give for a montage right about now.
quote of the evening thanks to the two neighborhood kids playing in our front yard
kid 1: You know when you see a planet in the sky that's gold? That's God.
kid 2: Yeah, I know.
box seats
I was working up here in the office, when gradually a tremendous din impressed itself upon my ears. What could it be?! Why, it was the kids out in the yard, mentioned by Leah in her last post. Only now it wasn't just two of them, it was more like thirty or forty... or at least eight. They were playing football. I didn't know that until I went to the window on the other side of the house and opened it to look out, at which point I also realized that just about all the windows and doors were shut and still the noise was strong enough to rouse me from my contemplation of InDesign. So I watched the game for a while, from the comfort of my bedroom.
As I observed I couldn't help but notice that, rather than following any of the traditional rules of football, the neighbor children and their friends and relatives were operating under the timeless kid rule that whoever is bigger, or alternatively whines louder, gets to make the rules. Also they were playing tackle so nearly every play resulted in a touchdown. Especially because they were allowing unlimited forward passes.
Sadly, too soon after I started watching the game was over, its end marked with angry tears: "Why do you guys always have to quit when we're playing?!" Oh the pathos.