Ouch!

Aches and pains this morning. All from the major re-decorating project in our dining room. Finger and wrist joints damaged long ago by a career in construction have a tendency to be quite painful after an almost full day of painting. A little ibuprofen and I’m good to go for another day; which will include more painting of course. Painting a dark color over light without using a dark tinted primer was a mistake and it looks like I will have to coat everything twice, at the minimum. But…it’s looking good!

It also looks like my projects are mounting up once again. I have far too many unfinished ones. And now I have added an old ½ wine barrel to the list. It’s sitting in the garage, filled with water to keep the staves tight until I can get around to cutting a scalloped edge around the top. Of course I had to add a drop or two of oil to the water to keep the mosquitoes out of it. We’ve been lucky so far and haven’t been bothered by a lot of mosquitoes…spiders and flies, yes…but no mosquitoes.

And speaking of mosquitoes; I bought a window fan for the guest bedroom and plugged it in yesterday morning. What I didn’t notice, in the dark, was the fact that I hadn’t replaced the screen in that opening. I had taken the screens down a few weeks ago to wash the windows. Of course the fan worked quite well, sucking in the cool morning air…along with every flying insect that happened to pass by the window.

At first I didn’t notice anything was wrong, except I did see a large gnat or mosquito fly close by my monitor, attracted by the light. I assumed it had come in when I had opened the garage door earlier. Then I heard the cats ‘meow’. It sounded really close? I got up and looked out the screened window in the study but couldn’t see her. Then I heard it again and realized that she was right behind me. What? How did she get in? Had we left her in the house all night? Slowly, a little light came on in my brain…a dim light. The window – the screen – the insects – the cat! Quick, turn off the fan and close the window! Too late of course and so we battled flying insects all day yesterday.