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a use for dirty paint thinner
Monday, April 12 2021
I was a little worried about the polyurethane I'd applied to the floor in the upstairs bathroom at the Wall Street house, so after work today I borrowed the Prius (from Powerful, though it's technically not his car) and drove over there to apply a second coat, which is always a good idea when it comes to polyurethane. Soon after arriving, I needed something out of the glove compartment, and when I opened it, I was nearly overwhelmed by the smell of air "freshner." Powerful had put one of those little Christmas-tree-shaped jobbies in there. Not wanting it to further affect my life, I through it in the ditch. A cold April rain was falling at the time, and as it disintegrated, it likely was making an unpleasant day for wildlife in either the Rondout or Esopus watershed (the house is in a flatland near the divide between the two).
Fortunately, the earlier coat of polyurethane looked great in the bathroom. It was shiny and seemed dry (even though we were only a day into a two-week curing process). I quickly slapped down a second coat over most of the floor and barricaded the bathroom door with the bathroom's radiator cover and left a note telling the new tenant not to use the bathroom for the next two days. There was evidence that the new tenant was moving in, including a couch I hadn't seen before in the living room. It was a great place for the dogs as they waited for me to do this rather quick chore.
I don't have a lot of experience with oil-based surface treatments like polurethane. Generally in the past, it's been easier to just throw the damn brush away than to clean it. But I'd spent about $12 on this brush, so I took the time to swirl it twice in clean paint thinner, wash it with Murphy's oil soap, and then let it soak in water (in hopes that remaining oil-based material would rise to the top). As for the dirty paint thinner, I poured it into the ashes in the woodstove and burned it. The evening was cool enough that the heat produces was actually useful.
This evening I'm glad Gretchen convinced me to watch My Octopus Teacher, a nature documentary (I suppose) of one man's relationship with a single particular wild octopus. That octopus is never given a name, but the narrator/filmmaker spends so much time with her (he does provide a gender) that we see seemingly all the big events of the octopus' life, including being injured in a shark attack, recuperation from that, and the couch-potato romance that typically comes just before an octopus dies. The quality of the video is amazing, and that's what really propels the story, though of course it's also the incredible access provided by the octopus herself, who soon understands the narator to be a non-threatening part of her world (which is otherwise full of dangers). Then, of course, though we already know octopuses are equipped with minds as complex and flexible as their bodies, the details of this octopus' brilliance kept our mouths agape. I suppose it's possible the whole thing was one long clever edit involving multiple octopuses, but it's worth watching all the same.
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