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poisoned into a vague pink
Wednesday, October 30 2002
setting: rural Hurley, New York
A couple of guys spent the morning putting in new carpet in the basement to replace what had been ripped out yesterday. To tell you the truth, I never had much of a problem with the carpet that had been there to begin with, but Gretchen had been adamant that it be removed. I have to admit, however, that the new carpet is a definite improvement, particularly over the barren concrete slab bleakness the basement had been since last night. The guys who did the installation worked much faster than I expected, doing it all by mid-afternoon.
Meanwhile, I was doing a number of tasks. One of these was the installation of a pet door on the front door (the only suitable door for pet door installation). I didn't entirely think through what I was doing and ended up installing it too low and was forced to chisel out the bottom of the hole to make it so the plastic flap could swing the way it wanted to. The guys installing the carpet kept coming in through the door while I was working on it, and at one point one of them said, "You aren't done with that yet?" He said it in a jovial way, but I nonetheless construed it to be a sort of put down from a guy who knows his way around home repairs to me, a presumed tool-inept city slicker. It's hard enough getting my body and mind back in a mode to do endless handymanning even when I'm not perceiving such insults.
Later I found myself frantically trying to fix the paint job in the living room. All sorts of bad things were happening with the new paint: it somehow got poisoned into a vague pink by a trace of stray pigment in a not-perfectly-clean brush. Then I noticed that the paint was drying slightly darker than the old paint it was supposed to look exactly like. Evidently the formula had changed slightly since the last time Gretchen had bought a batch.
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