Home Improvement?

2002-10-11 - 8:17 p.m.

I have a feild of chaos and entropy that surrounds me. Sure, that sounds a little melodramatic (at best) or schizophrenic (at worst), but it's true. Look:

-A glass breaks in my house at least once a month.

-My pants start to tear/wear through after only a month or two of wear.

-No matter how much I spend on them, my shoes have a usefuly life span of 8 months at the most.

-White socks, even if I wear them once, become dingy and grey/brown.

Those are just general examples. Last winter our landlady's furnace sprang a leak in its dehumidifying thingy. Since the furnace is right next to our bedroom, and since the wall seperating us from the furnace room is gyprock, the wall grew soggy and eventually, when I touched it, got a hole. One of our cupboards has a fist-sized hole from some drunken rampage (or something? I think Pookie was angry at those Christian "We Can Make You Straight" things). Our bathroom door has a -giant- knee-sized hole because I had a shower, dripped water all over the tiled floor, called something out to Pookie which he didn't hear, and when he came in, he slipped and "remodeled" it. Also in the bathroom, the light is flickering. For no reason. At all. It's like living in a horror film all the time.

Why do I tell you this?

Because tomorrow Pookie and I are going to paint our living room. I'm thrilled to be doing it, and excited anmd all that. Yay, colour! But I'm expecting paint spills on carpets, poorly-executed detail work, stroke-lines visible from Detroit. I'm seeing peeling paint two years down the road, a half-finished wall, rubble where the building once was.

I shouldn't be this paranoid: both Pookie and I have done stuff similar before. It'll be my first -painting- job since I was a kid, sure, but I'm no stranger to home improvement. I like assembling furniture, for example.

But Pookie and I together have a bad track record. About 8 months ago we took down a light fixture so that we could install a better light that wouldn't bang Pookie on his head whenever he's in the kitchen. He doesn't bang his head anymore, but that's because the new fixture hasn't been installed yet. Likewise, we started to peel spackle off of a part of the ceiling but after a month have yet to finish peeling off spackle. Our ceiling is now white-spackle and brown-gyprock paper in a fancy pattern that just -looks- random.

I'm almost just waiting for Pookie to finish his school so he can get a job, we can buy a house, and start all of this all over. In our new house there would be no job left unfinished. I'd be a puttering machine, doing plumbing, fixing furniture, painting bannisters, all with results that are both pleasing to the eye and resistant to wear.

Stay tuned for details on this...

Cheers,

The Magus

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