In answer to your post, I've had the week off from work to prep our house to sell - in order to be ready to move into our new place (when it's built) later this year. It has been an unimaginable amount of packing, due to our overabundance of stuff. I honestly can't believe some of the things I actually brought with me from Nova Scotia when I moved to Southern Ontario in 1998, but I guess it was psychologically my way of saying "goodbye, I'm never coming back" to my home for almost 40 years, while also being an enormous pack rat. My wife would suggest it's more about me being a pack rat, but she has no room to talk on that subject. In defence of the culture of packrat-ism - which I believe was partly a reaction to the Great Depression, and then passed on to future generations - there were a number of times this week in which things which I had not used in months or years were used this week in aid of preparing the house for its sale, giving me a few opportunities to say, "See? This is why I kept that!"
...but mostly we packed boxes upon boxes of things we weren't going to need for at least a few months, maybe never again - but much less of that sort of stuff, because we purged a few truckloads of 'prized possessions' and turned them instantly into junk for the garbage heap or donated them to worthy charities. Still, we put a ridiculous amount of stuff into storage, and we easily could have purged a bit more - but we only had a week. All the while, The Tinks had to be attended to, as life went on as per usual, and the arthritis in my hips is the worst its ever been from humping boxes up and down two flights of stairs for a week. We saved the funnest (yes, it's a word. I said so.) stuff for last, though. Yesterday, after a day or two of going around the house looking for bumps and dents, and prepping said bumps and dents, I started painting. Now, one of the things I don't like about painting - and I like most things about it - is how many pieces of clothing you go through after getting little specks of paint on them that won't come out, because you never buy a set of painting overalls to paint in if you don't do it regularly enough to warrant them. Given my penchant for collecting stuff, I would have thought that painting overalls would be something that I would have had three or four pairs of before now. Not the case. Always for me, it's t-shirt and shorts, and you have to throw them away afterward because three days of painting in them has made it impossible to ever wear them anywhere else ever again. Nothing serious - just speckled - but muti-colour speckled is not a fashion trend I care to wade into.
One of the many things I love about my wife is how beautiful she looks when I make her laugh. Here, for example, at a sometime-around-Christmas meal, her little snowman earrings dangling as she cracks up:
So - note to self, 'always try to make Janne laugh'.
Bearing these two things in mind, and while getting all things necessary for the painting run at Home Depot (the mecca for all things men need), I decided to see if they sold painting overalls. The young clerk said they did, and took me right to them. Sarcastically, he then added, "As you can see, they come in an array of sizes. Large and Extra-large." I immediately liked this kid, and it turned out that he was the guy - out of the four possibilities of Home Depot Paint staff behind the counter - to help me get the colours I needed mixed. There was a LONG line of Saturday Home Depot Paint shoppers. My number was 9, and I was still being served when they were calling for number 19. I was getting a lot of little cans of different colours for touch-ups, and there was probably someone around number 12 who wanted to kill me. Kinda wished for a moment I was 20 years older, and then asked to pay in pennies in a really loud voice just to send Disgrunteld Impatient Customer Man over the edge.
Back to the point. The overalls look like they're made out of paper, and that they'll be horribly warm to wear in this Southern Ontario humidity, but they're cheap, and I see the possibility of using them to make my wife laugh, so I take home all my little cans of paint, and the suit. (Actually spent about two hundred bucks at Home Depot, which isn't hard to do if you're buying large ticket items, but I was just stacking little cans of paint, for the most part.)
When I arrived home, I didn't mention the overalls, of course - because that would just ruin the surprise!-first-gaze-laughter effect. Got all my paint organized, then threw the suit on as quickly as possible over my clothes, and jumped out to reveal:
...and then she said, "Stay there! I have to get the camera."
Desired effect achieved.
Then, her Mom, who's been over twice this week to help us with the babies (thank you so much, B) poked her head around the corner, and also had a good laugh.
It helped break up a bit of the tension we've been feeling from trying to get so much accomplished in one week without neglecting for a moment our little twins, so - even though the suit was uncomfortable, and almost useless - it was worth every penny I spent on it. I tried wearing the 'overalls' for a while while I painted the ceiling in my office by taking the hood off, pulling up the sleeves to the elbows, and the pant legs to the knees (while wearing them over my usual painting attire of t-shirt and shorts, of course), but it just got too warm and uncomfortable. This Sunday morning, I sit here at this plastic-tarp-covered computer in my usual painting attire: shorts - and a t-shirt covered in tiny paint speckles - ready for Day Two of painting.
"We will return to our regularly scheduled programming (i.e. Tinks pictures) soon."
On another subject -
Bob, I worked for CHUM for about 14 years, and I'm very angry about what happened last week - to you, to hundreds of other CHUM TV employees, and to the company itself. This would never happen if Alan were still alive, and that's what makes me the angriest. I'll probably post more on this later, but for now, good luck in finding a better gig for better bucks with a better company. You have a positive attitude, and you realize that it has nothing to do with your talent, but with a backroom deal made to get a big sale. Jimmy Waters gets 1.7 billion, you get the shaft. I got laid off by CHUM years ago under a somewhat more personal circumstance, and I didn't take it well. You, on the other hand, are a rock. Wish I'd known you back then to advise me. Don't lose the positive attitude if things aren't where you want them to be after six months. Remember this - I left Nova Scotia because of being laid off by CHUM, and I ended up here, where I met my beautiful wife, and now we have two gorgeous children, and this coming week I'm a guest on my favourite television funnyman's show, David Letterman!
...Okay, that was true right up to where it says, 'gorgeous children'. ;-)
