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naked in a respirator
Sunday, October 21 2012
At the conclusion of yet another Sunday morning coffee (held, as it has been of late, in Ramona's corral), I went down to the greenhouse upstairs and continued a decluttering jihad I'd been ramping up for days. The idea was to empty it of everything but essentials so I could sand down the drywall and begin painting. Among the things removed today were all the power tools (drywall dust is bad for electromechanical devices), a couple firewood-long-length tree trunk segments (which had been used as jacking blocks during the raising of the roof and then as general-purpose sawing surfaces), and every random piece of wood (nearly all of which I put aside to be burned in the woodstove). With all that stuff out of the way, I could sweep up the enormous quantity of pulverized construction debris (mostly sawdust, pieces of styrofoam, and drywall dust). By this point the greenhouse upstairs was looking very tidy.
Before beginning the sanding of the drywall, I put on a respirator and shed all my clothes. Because I had no pocket to put the little FM radio I used to listen to podcasts, I had to hang that radio from one of the respirator's straps. It took me more than a half hour to sand all the drywall joints smooth.
I immediately took a shower and then used our older "fucked" vaccuum cleaner (you wouldn't want to use a Dyson) to suck up all the dust I'd just generated.
With the drywall all prepared, I couldn't resist the next task: painting the drywall with white primer. It was a sunny day and the greenhouse upstairs was very warm, so it didn't take long for the paint to dry.
This evening Gretchen and I drove with Eleanor down to Ray and Nancy's house for a pasta meal built around cauliflower and bucatini. (There was also a watercress salad, which for some reason Ray felt the need to contaminate with green apples.) Though Ray hasn't been drinking since his recent DUI charge, we brought a bottle of red wine. It was one of the best red wines I've ever had. Ray, being the master of slippery slopes, had a small sip and agreed that it was delicious. Too bad I can't remember what it was.
On the drive to Ray and Nancy's house, that Men at Work song "Down Under" had come on the radio and I'd turned to Gretchen and asked, "is this a song about oral sex?" And she'd replied by asking if the massive abscess in her armpit was a sexual turnoff. I admitted that it was.
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