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puddle of paint technique
Wednesday, April 21 2021
I have a nearly a gallon of semi-gloss white paint that I'd let sit so long that much of the pigment fell to the bottom and formed large clots that have proved resistant to dissolution whether shaken or stirred. This means that any paint applied from this can has less pigment than it should, and to produce opacity requires the application of many coats. It's frustrating to work with such paint, and I'm tempted to just throw it out. But there is utility in paint even when it is completely colorless. That's the idea behind polyurethane and transparent latex finish. On the laboratory floor, one of the roles the paint plays is to keep the chips of OSB from delaminating from the surface, where they can result in dangerous (or at least unpleasant) splinters. That function doesn't require pigment at all.
But there actually is enough pigment in this imperfect gallon if it is applied with sufficient thickness. With this in mind, last night I dumped a large blob of the paint directly from the bucket and then used a small brush to coax and prod it into a close approximation of the shape I was trying to repaint. By today, that thick puddle of paint had completely dried, forming a tough, completely white surface. Interestingly, it has mostly assumed the texture of the underlying OSB. (I've found that it takes many many layers of paint to obscure that texture.)
The part of the floor that I am now painting is beneath a wooden table near the middle of the east half of the library. This table used to be Ray and Nancy's dining room table in their Park Slope apartment, though it's been in the laboratory since before I started painting the floor in February of 2003. I hadn't reached parts of the floor down there when I'd last undertaken a large floor repainting project (in the spring of 2017), and some of the colors were the original paint colors (significantly more pastel versions of the mint green and yellow).
The cats have been pretty good about sticking to their usual routines while I've been painting, and they've mostly stayed off the wet paint. But I've also been able to shield swaths of wet paint using my larger paintings (which are of a handy size and can easily be propped up to avoid coming into contact with the paint). Under the table, though, it's been hard to get in there to do the painting, so I've tended to leave the paint unshielded while it dried. I'd had to pull a couple wheeled storage solutions out of that space to expose the floor. This opening up of space proved tempting even for Oscar, though he's not nearly as curious as Diane (whom I'd locked out of the laboratory completely). It wasn't just the lure of a newly-opened space available for exploration, I found significant fecal evidence of mice beneath one of the wheeled storage solutions. Before I could do anything, Oscar had gone back there and stepped in some fresh green paint. I quickly made sure the laboratory door was latched so he couldn't track that paint through the rest of the house, and then I grabbed the only part of Oscar I could reach: his tail. He yowled in either discomfort or fear as I wrestled him up from the floor. I immediately took him to the bathroom and washed his two contaminated feet (which were both on one side). I then went into the laboratory and cleaned up his tracks. There were just a few: on an old PS2 keyboard, on an old image scanner, and on some carpet fragments.
The puddle of paint technique had worked so well that I poured two more of them under the laboratory table, this time on yellow shapes, with the intention of painting them yellow.
In the remote workplace, Alex and I had our usual weekly meeting with the Ukranian outsourcing team. We've been telling them for weeks that our project was running out of money, but only to mean that we would have to cut back on their hours. I don't know what changed this week, but this morning Alex seemed sad and helpless as he told them that they would have to wrap up development by the fifth of May. They seemed a little blindsided, but then I felt a bit blindsided as well. I still have my job, and if anything this meant that I will have to work even harder, doing the work I'd rather be doing (instead of the management-style work I have been doing). For a week or so I've been trying to get up to speed on the frontend Angular code they'd written. But it's numbingly baroque, with long variable names that differ occasionally in small ways that are hard to see. And then there's the problem of trying to interact with such code. The --live-reload flag of ng serve is supposed to do an incremental compile and then reload the site. But even on a Core i5 with 22 gigabytes of RAM, such compilation is unreliable, forcing me to initiate clean recompilations, which can take five minutes. Computer programming requires the sort of obsessive focus that for many people can only come from adderall, and it's very nearly impossible to maintain that kind of focus through a five minute delay, particularly when there's a floor that needs repainting nearby.
Meanwhile, Powerful took the Subaru to Van Kleeck Tires today and had them install two new rear tires. He also had them do an inspection, which it miraculously passed. The Subaru needed new windshield wiper blades, something the Van Kleeck employee figured out. For situations like this, where someone else has completely control over an aspect of my life unless the proper paperwork is filled out, I like to have a few "gimmes" for them to find, such as bad windshield wipers. That way they might overlook something suspicious, such as a small exhaust leak in that has been present ever since I shoehorned an ill-fitting exhaust system onto its undercarriage about four years ago.
I often cook dinner on Wednesday evenings, and this evening was no exception. I made chili, which included onions, mushrooms, tempeh, green beans, and several varieties of friole-style beans.
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