Marriage

On the way home this evening, Erin informed me that she would like to paint our downstairs bathroom. Tonight.

The thought of taking up a sudden painting project is bad enough. But the reality of this particular project is that the task is to touch up some damage done to one of the walls in our bathroom. This particular wall now has three large locations that require some sort of picture to cover damage incurred while I previously tried to repair a smaller issue. As it turns out, I'm only slightly better with a putty knife and spackle than I am at performing open heart surgery. In other words, I might be able to mash some stuff in there and stop the bleeding, but in the end, the patient is in real trouble.

The latest injury to our drywall occurred when one of our children decided that to climb up on their step stool to use the sink, they should leverage the towel rack like it was a zip line. Since this occurred somewhere around three months ago, I guess Erin decided that tonight was the night to correct the situation.

What really had me in disbelief was the fact that that she knew that the paint for this project was stored in our minibarn. She informed me of her decision to work on the bathroom at around 6pm, by which point it was turning dark, was around 35 degrees, and there was a hard rain falling. Really? You want to go into the minibarn and look for paint, you say? That seems reasonable.

I also knew that the paint is at the back of the barn, behind all of the hose reels and lawn equipment, neatly stored for the winter. Of course, you can't tell that it's neatly stored because it now has all of the various boxes and tubs for our Christmas decorations strewn across the minibarn as though they were involved in some sort of armed assault. Apparently this task was undertaken in the cover of darkness as well, based on the current state of the minibarn.

As you can tell by my candor, this whole "discussion" (which ended with Grant questioning how he would ever learn to pee standing up without a father present) lasted for a good hour. By the end of the hour, I was soaking wet, angry, and fully aware of the fact that we had disposed of the paint for this particular bathroom. Which led to another marital gauntlet -- more picture hanging.

If you ever come to our house, please do not look at anything hanging on our walls. If there are two pictures side by side, one is most assuredly a quarter inch higher than the other. And if you dare lift the picture off the wall, you will surely see at least one other hole, often still featuring a nail and a little bit of my pride.

Of course, Erin claims that she's "over" the fact that I cannot hang a picture accurately. She has never looked me in the eye and told me this though, as she's always looking over my shoulder at whatever slightly cockeyed print is behind me. But I'm fine with it. It's a foolish woman who thinks that she's found the perfect man, and it's a foolish man who expects a woman to plan ahead enough to look through the minibarn for paint when it's at least 40 degrees, dry, and still light out. Neither of us can have everything.