Everyday Stupidities

First, a few words on today's image. Paige and I went to see Dante do a stand-up set at the local bowling alley yesterday, and he was amazingly funny. He's also quite personable and friendly as all getout. He is however currently going out with his opening act, a physically attractive young lady whose wish upon a star is to be Sarah Silverman. However, the position of Sarah Silverman has already been filled by the real Sarah, so her act fell on its face. That detail didn't escape her. Anyhow, so after the show he was out in the lobby to sign autographs, pose for pictures, and sell his DVDs, and she was right with him. Paige and I came up to say hello, he offered an autographed headshot (yaaay!), and then he suggested a photo together. Dante tells his girlfriend to step aside so I can snuggle up with him. I handed my cell phone to Paige to take the picture, and shooting photos with a cell cam is a dicey enough proposition, which is why this is so blurry. She's standing in the middle of the lobby framing him and I up, when she jumps into the frame on my right shoulder -- which I was not aware of at the time because I'm wrapping myself around a famous comedian. Paige sees the intrusion, thinks she should ask her to get out of the picture but figures it would be rude to tell her to push off (but I would have done so had I noticed!), takes another step back to get the three of us in the frame, and shoots. We got home, I'm sorting through the pictures and find the two major faults with the photo, and unable to do anything about the sharpness of the image I improved the part I had power over by Photoshopping her out of it to restore what was supposed to be pictured.

So here's the status of the kitchen: The ceiling is done! What I wrote last week about the ceiling isn't how things played out. Yes, I think a very light green would have been great, but bright white is better. We decided that we wanted to apply a texture to the entire kitchen/diningroom ceiling to bring continuity -- what was up there was a fine orange peel on one side and an even finer orange peel on the other, with a diagonal division between the "rooms" which was probably created with masking tape in 1959. Paige had painted white up there, as I mentioned, but the texture paint ("if we use texture paint rather than a texture spray covered with paint, we can have it done in one try") proved to be dull white, closer to vaguely yellow, so we DID have to paint over it anyway with bright white. Rolling on the texture paint was somewhat of a challenge because the texture roller put on too much and the regular wooly rollers put on nothing at all, so I wound up using a 6" edge roller on the entire ceiling. And by the time I ran out of white paint, there was still a 30' section left to go. But I made sure to take care of the two fixture areas and the fissure between "rooms" so those two trouble areas would be painted in a consistant color. Okay, once those were dry around 11pm, I decided to put the kitchen lights up at long last... it's only been since October we haven't had overhead lights in the kitchen. (And found some screws in the shed that would work; I still have no idea where the baggie with the real screws went.) So now we have light in the kitchen! But it's very direct task-lighting; the places where we work are illuminated but the kitchen as a whole is dark. Ugh. Time to move along to the countertop, backsplash, three walls, and floors...

Anything else I was contemplating saying here is slipping my mind so more words can wait until next week, which isn't that far away. Will toss out here that for a department that's going to be going away soon, we're sure bringing in new people at a fast clip. FIVE this week! In the morning it seems evenly matched, longtime employees and newbies, but after 2pm the ratio slides amusingly. And it's likely one of those vacancies which we're filling was caused by the termination of the least competent member of the crew, who everyone jokes about. Unfortunately the person who has taken his place (there was a one day overlap) is someone I worked with at a previous job (and our supervisor of the time hated with the fury of a thousand suns), so I know he's a completely different breed of annoying. The old guy may have been stupid but he smelled good and didn't provide Too Much Information about personal subjects to strangers, two attributes the new guy did not exhibit two years ago and doesn't now. My friend who was giving him some training today told me at lunch that I was right, he does truly reek of fungus or something ass-like and tells you unprompted about his health problems, to the point that my friend here (and I quote) wanted to pull his own testicles out. Such is life. Cheers...