Red Shoe Ramblings: A Little Slice of Hell

Oh, ok...A Little Slice of HECK! (It isn't really THAT bad.) If I've been a little scarce repaying blog visits the last couple of days (and might continue to be for a few more!), I hope you'll bear with me. I hope to catch up soon. I'm not spending much time on the 'puter right now because I'm trapped in Redecorating Hell. Or Heck. Whatever. J just had a couple of days home from work and we moved massive amounts of books and fabric and Stuff, and moved two of the biggest pieces of furniture away from what is destined to be The Green Wall in the Library/Sewing Room/Puter Room. Yesterday morning J went back to work and left me to paint. Before he left, we had a little discussion about the paint I bought. It went something like this: J (looking skeptically at the itty-bitty can of green paint): "Do you think that's enough?" D (laughing in a very "poo-poo you silly boy" sort of manner): "Of COURSE it's enough! I'm only painting one wall green!" J (continuing The Look): "But...." D (putting on the Domestic Goddess Knows Best face and holding up the gallon size can of brown paint while showing off her Mad Math Skillz [Hey! You in the back! Stop with the laughing! Sheesh]): "Jooooohnyyyy, this one says it'll cover enough square footage to do the whole room! If this is enough to do four walls and the little can is 1/4 the size of the big one, then it should be enough to do one wall, right?" J (with The Look): "OoooKaaay. Whatever you say." J puts down itty-bitty can of green paint and backs away slowly. D rolls her eyes and wanders off, confident in her Skillz. Flash forward to later that day. I've been to town. I've had a haircut. Oh! If I can digress a minute (and really, since it's my blog, who's going to stop me?), I have to tell you that I had some layers cut into my hair and I think it turned out really cute! I'll have to take a pic soon. And maybe I'll even smile for the camera and not look like I want to beat someone up. MAYBE. I didn't mean for yesterday's Blue Alien pic to be so scary, but dammit, those flowers were telling me some awful stuff about what people are doing to the planet and I was getting pissed! But ANYWAY, back to Heck. I got home, changed clothes and got ready to paint. I did the trimmy stuff around the edges. Smooooth. I poured the paint into this Handy-Dandy Battery-Powered Paint Roller Dealio. Hhhmmm....that sure doesn't look very full in there. Oh well, I KNOW it's enough to do one wall, so it'll be fine. Twenty minutes later I had 2/3 of one coat on that one wall and a HDBPPRD that was about to burn out if I didn't stop painting because it was running out of paint to suck up into the roller. Dammit!! That means J was right and I was oh so very, VERY wrong. I hate when that happens! Does anyone know a good recipe for crow? Soooo...I had to go back to town for more paint. And I decided I'd better get a gallon this time since that itty-bitty can didn't even finish ONE coat and I'm figuring I'll probably need to do three. And then I look at the can of brown paint, which I haven't started on yet, but which I was SOOOOO totally confident would cover the other three walls. Um, yeah, better buy some more brown too. I looked down at myself. I was dressed in rags. I'm not using a figure of speech here. I was wearing a pair of gym shorts and a big ol' t-shirt that I threw into the rag bag during last week's closet purge because I figured if I wouldn't wear them in public anymore, then they weren't good enough to give away. But then I remembered I would be painting and I went out to the garage and dug them out of the sack I'd stuffed them into because I didn't want to ruin any of the good clothes I kept and I am fundamentally incapable of painting anything at all - from a canvas, to fabric, to trim, to walls - without looking like I've been rolling in paint. So I was wearing clothes that were stretched, faded, pilled, paint-stained, and quite honestly probably hadn't been all that flattering when they were brand new. I also suspect they hadn't been improved by being stuffed into a garbage bag for several days. I knew I should probably change, but it was getting late and I was tired and hungry and cranky and pissed at being proven wrong, and dammit, I just wanted to be DONE. So yes, y'all, I went to town in rag bag clothes. I figured hardly anyone would see me because I'd do some hit-n-run shopping. I'd park by the garden center entrance and scoot in there and dash quickly over to the paint counter, buy what I needed and get out of there. In-out, easy-peasy. Or maybe nottie-wottie. First, no one was working at the paint counter. People kept wandering up and saying they didn't know how to mix paint but they'd page someone else for me. So they would, only no one would come except more people who said they couldn't help. Well, except to page someone else, of course. Eventually I told one little girl that I was thinking maybe I'd just go behind the counter and try to mix it myself. It didn't look THAT hard to do. She looked vaguely alarmed and scurried away and pretty soon someone showed up who could mix paint. Go figure! End of the problems? Oh, you sweet foolish dreamer, you! No, you see, I needed green paint AND brown paint. They both were formulated to be mixed into an accent base. Want to guess how many gallon-cans of flat latex accent base they had in the entire store? If you guessed ONE, you get a shiny gold star by your name. (If you guessed two or more, you haven't been paying attention to how my afternoon was going.) I thought in despair of my half-painted green wall and knew I'd have to go with the green and hope to get some more brown another day. But then, while the girl they'd found to mix the paint was doing her thing I had A Thought. "Hhhhmmm," said I, "You have one of those paint-matchy machines, right?" "Yeeeeah," she said cautiously. "Well," I said, "why couldn't we put the paint chip for the brown paint in the paint-matchy machine and let the Magic Matchy Fairy who lives inside tell us how to mix the color on a different base?" I was very proud of myself. I thought this was a brilliant plan. She, on the other hand, looked a little freaked. I'm not sure if it was the thought of doing something different than "normal" or the mention of the MMF that did it. But either way, I'll give her credit - she tried it and it worked! Yay! Or at least maybe it worked. It's not like I've tried painting with it yet or anything, but I compared it to the other gallon when I got it home and they LOOK the same - like big gallon cans full of melted chocolate ice cream! We'll see how it all goes when it comes time to paint the brown walls. Stay tuned... Speaking of green and brown (am I the Segue Queen or what!), I told Lynn a few days ago that I'd try to take some photos of the goats (some of whom are brown) at the goat farm (the grass of which is green) down the road. Never mind why. If you want to know why, go read Lynn's blog. (You should probably read Lynn's blog even if you don't want to know about the goats. She's a good writer.) First I got this shot, but it seemed a bit difficult to tell that these were actually goats:

Then I got this shot, but the goats didn't seem to want to show me their best side:

But then, finally, I got this shot:

It ain't art, but it's better than sucking rocks. And I thought the one on the left was kind of handsome, for a goat. In fact, I decided to make him the feature of today's Daily Art Thang.