Yesterday, the project was refinishing the wooden front porch -- about a 12'x4' space. The project began with a belt sander, a frisky little device that bucked like a puppy on a leash, ready to take off if I didn't maintain a firm grip. Two days, seven sandpaper belts and one wide, red scrape down the inside of my left wrist later, I had a mostly sanded deck, with large areas of paint left around the edges.
Next, the Internet said to "strip" the deck, so I went out and got me some deck stripper, giggled some, wistfully fantasized about deck strippers, put on a baseball cap, latex gloves and safety goggles and went to work rolling the pungent liquid onto the deck. At some point, I decided switch from roller to stiff-bristled brush, so I lifted the safety goggles, unscrewed the roller from the pole and in doing so, spattered deck stripper on my face.
I felt what I imagine a vampire feels when splashed with holy water -- "It burns! It burns!" Thus the firing of the garden hose at my face.
Later, after a cleansing shower, I took inventory. There's the purple bruise on my toe and still-not-yet-healed scrape across my shin from dropping a large wood frame during the construction of the kids' bunk bed -- a project that involved much swearing and use of Resolve to dissolve the blood on the carpet. There are the host of little cuts on my hands and wrists, the most fresh from rolling two rocks from the woods to the garden -- the rocks must have weighed 200 pounds each.
Then there's the thin scar on my forehead, obtained 17 years ago, during a stop to see a friend in Cleveland on my way to Minnesota. My allergies were horrible that trip, the floor of my little maroon Ford Escort was covered in Kleenex, and my sneezing fits were increasingly violent. So I'm with my friend Naomi digging through the Escort for a package of Sudafed, when I feel another sneeze come on. So I stand up and sneeze hard, slamming my head into the corner of the open car door. It sounded like I'd been shot. Blood streaming through my fingers, I turn to Naomi and say, "Why did you hit me?"... Which strikes her as the funniest thing she's heard in the longest time and she laughs and laughs while I grab at wads of dried Kleenex to stop the bleeding. I saw her a couple years ago at the wedding of a mutual friend, and she still could hardly speak she was laughing so hard. Meanwhile, you can still see the scar, faintly, over my right eyebrow.
Okay, that had nothing to do with home improvement. Except to say that, in general, it's best for all concerned that I continue to hire experts for most projects and save my frequent flier miles for long summer trips.
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