Life and Splatter Patterns.

After two years of almost unremitting troubles, I had a surprise today. A pot of paint contrived to jump out of my hand as I was bending to put it down on the drip cloth. A pot of paint has never done such a thing to me before; I suppose this one didn’t want to be left out of the general trend.

It made a mess. As it hit the deck, some splashed up into my face and left eye, while another contingent leapt over the drip cloth and onto the carpet, there to deploy itself as several pools of white paint augmented by a pretty impressive splatter pattern. That’s the second time this week I’ve been confronted by an unwelcome splatter pattern. Fortunately it was undercoat, which is water-based, but it still made one unholy mess and still needed a lot of cleaning up.

I decided that my eye should be the recipient of priority attention, since it was stinging a bit and eyes aren’t designed to sit uncomplainingly in a pool of paint, undercoat or not. By a fortunate coincidence I’d bought a new eye bath only a couple of weeks ago, and I knew it was somewhere at the bottom of all the rubbish in my backpack. I rummaged with one eye open and the other shut and stinging. My fingers soon felt a familiar shape and the eye was open and functioning more or less normally again within minutes. Now for the carpet, all ten square feet of it.

How many buckets of hot, soapy water and cold rinsing water does it take to get rather a lot of paint off a carpet?

Scrub, rinse, scrub, rinse, change water…

Scrub, rinse, scrub, rinse, change water…

Scrub, rinse, scrub, rinse, change water…

It takes a lot, I can tell you. I think I was on the job for about an hour before I decided that I was as satisfied as I was ever likely to be. I took a break and treated myself to a check of my e-mails and a banana.

There was a very nice message waiting for me, and life put on her best smile again.