Klowns in my Koffee

The painting project is starting to feel like something that Dickens might have written with page after page of meticulous description and no forward motion in sight. Except of course that it is going forward, if only at a dismally slow pace.

I washed the garage door with an alkaline cleaning mixture and learned two things: 1) the door panels are made from layers of wood and these layers have separated on half the panels and 2) when the directions say to wear gloves and perhaps a mask, they didn't mean to use bare hands, an old dishpan, and a sponge. For the first issue, I have some 5 minute epoxy with which I'll glue the wood strata back together tomorrow. For the second issue, I have some really interesting welts. Shouldn't have scratched my chin.

When the experience of melting my skin off had resolved into just another sore spot, I climbed up the ladder to the top and evicted some birds who had been living inside my front wall for years. They'd made an impressively precise perfectly round hole in the siding about 16 feet in the air. After I pried up the siding, I found that the hole extended through the thick layer of wood beneath the siding. When I dug in there to clean it out, the contents poofed out over me in a cloud of the most ghastly stuff imaginable. It landed on the skin that have been burned by the cleaning mixture and started to sting and itch immediately. There's not a lot of room for expressive reaction at the top of an extension ladder.

I'll spare the details, but there is now a semi-clean wall cavity, an aluminum plate adhered between the wall boards and the siding, and a tennis ball-sized plug of water putty in the exterior hole. Somebody is going to fly back from migration and be cranky.

Our city held its annual open house this evening. We looked at fire trucks, ate hot dogs, and received bags of every conceivable giveaway item from community groups, utility companies, and governmental entities. The kids' favorite was the gas company's booth where they gave away hula hoops made from gas line material. Then, of course, we spent the rest of the evening carrying these hula hoops from activity to activity.

All of this was followed by a large fireworks display. I took some random shots using the night setting but without further adjusting the shutter or exposure time. This isn't a 'classic' fireworks picture but somehow it manages to capture the exuberance of fireworks in a rustic way.