Death by impatience
Saturday afternoon and I’ve just finished cutting into the trim in the lower hallway and kitchen areas. We’ve done no painting for months, mainly because the mere thought of it was enough to induce spontaneous coma in the pair of us. I can just see us finishing the painting a week before we move on.
Cutting in turns me into a person who can spend however long it takes obsessively coaxing three bristles into a 1cm2 corner. I always have to be careful not to get an eyeball stuck to the brush or my tongue stuck to the wall.
There is a shelf that runs the entire length of the stairs hallway, with a 40cm section I can’t reach unless I balance by the toenails on the banister or dangle from a light fitting. Unfortunately, I’m not quite limber enough for either these days. When I asked Andrew to do it, he claimed he didn’t have the patience.
“To paint a 40cm strip?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“You realize I could fall off the banister and injure myself?”
“Well, I might DIE.”
I’m not sure from what exactly - acute impatience? Then again, this is a man who would spend his time exclusively soldering bits of metal to other bits of metal and soldering the result to more metal, except that he occasionally has to eat and sleep.
While I painted, Andrew spent the morning ripping out the interior of the MR2, including door handles and panels, the dashboard and centre console, the seats and floors. I think he’s fixing the car stereo. The reason I’m uncertain is that it always sounded fine to me. However, he flew into a rage yesterday afternoon, because - from what I could make out - the car is too small to fit a sub-woofer.
To inspire him while he tinkered, Andrew put on a CD of greatest rock hits ever. At the moment, Jimi Hendrix’ ‘All Along The Watchtower’ is vibrating the living room, while Andrew has sufficiently fixed his car stereo to blast Norah Jones at top volume.
Some things never change, but there’s something infinitely comforting about that
