Getting painted

We have had an hour or so of pounding, pounding rain every day for the past couple weeks so today we start painting the house. Seriously.

George (our contractor & not to be confused with family-member-of-the-same-name) has been MIA for a while, but he called last night. His girlfriend got back from a visit home (Japan) late last week & then they got married so now he is ready to work. Actually, what he said on the phone last night was "now that I am whole again I can start getting things done".

Many moons ago, I started shopping for a contractor to finish the back room (now that light filled space at the back of the house, but in those days a rank, concrete hole that a previous homeowner had sort of just stuck on). I could not believe what came out of the yellow pages. I think my favorite was the guy who brought his mother; she took notes & drove him around because he had problems with his drivers license. Between them they had three teeth that I could see. There were several other candidates, all variations on this theme.

George was different. First of all, he had no trouble with the ocean of dog that surges around our house. & they had no trouble with him. This is a huge plus. There were also a thousand small things that I couldn't put my finger on, that I gradually came to understand. He was from Manchester, CT so he sounded like a normal person & not some DukesofHazzard wannabe. He measured things while he talked about completely different things (I took this to mean he had a brain that could multi-task, also my step-father does this so it was another reflection of home). & not once ever, did he bring up Terry Schiavo (remember poor Terry Schiavo? This all happened in those weeks, if you want you can look it up); this was a bigger relief than it should have been because we had just had some work done to fix our water pump & put in a new septic system & all the workmen that entails so I had really had enough of this particular topic. I had (have!) a strong & specific view on this issue & was sick to my eyeballs of hearing what their pastors had to say about activist judges.

Anyway, we found George & he has been our contractor ever since. He squeezes our small jobs in around his other work (other contractor jobs but also yoga classes-he's the instructor). & today, he will start replacing the bad boards outside the house & we will get painted!

What color are we painting, you ask? Why precisely the same color everything is right now. Well, not precisely. I think we managed to match the color the old paint has faded to.