Ode to a Blue Ladder and other stories

My husband has been gone for 11 days and will not return for two more. When the cat is away this mouse plays...or something. Since I suspect the hubs is too busy to read my blog I'll tell this little story here today, because I'm tired and I still have work to do and by writing this I am procrastinating a little more. Plus, I think it is funny. Now. Not so much when it happened.

I said before that I am notorious for my messes and I am living up to my reputation. While my husband was gone it was my job to texture the bathroom ceiling and walls and then get them painted so that when he returned we could do the tile in the shower and on the floor. I've done that, but I decided that while I was at it (and he was gone, remember, mouse playing) I would give our bedroom a little re-do, just a face-lift. Well, true to my past history I made some big messes. I scraped the popcorn off the ceiling (a horrendous job that required wearing that bio-hazard respirator all day and having a bruised nose for several more). I re-textured the ceiling, that was the big glop of drywall mud on my glasses. Then I thought I had the right can of paint to do some touch ups so I slapped a patch on the wall, about eye-level and when it dried it was NOT the right paint, so I had to repaint the whole room to cover the swatch...silly me.

So, you're thinking why is this post titled "Ode to a Blue Ladder"?

All of these jobs have required that I spend an inordinate amount of time each day on the blue ladder. The blue ladder is fiberglass and light enough for me to move easily and it has been living in the wrecked bathroom for months....we've gotten to be good friends Mr. Blue Ladder and I, but I was getting pretty sick of climbing up and down and the more I mentally complained about it the more Mr. Blue Ladder started playing tricks on me.....like convincing me I was on the last rung when I was really on the second....that is a big step down to the floor from there and very jolting...he thought it was funny.

Yesterday, I was on that damn blue ladder again. I was tired and I was mentally grumbling about how tired I was, both physically and mentally of climbing that ladder. I had just filled my paint tray and was using two different brushes and two different rollers. All four items had been riding up and down the ladder in the tray all day. (Just for the record, I had visions of "something bad" happening, but didn't do anything about it). So, as I descended my ladder AGAIN, I balanced the tray like a waitress on my left hand, held on to the ladder with my right, and as my feet touched down the little roller started to teeter on the edge, slowly rocking back and forth and even though it was happening very slowly I was still holding on to the ladder and couldn't release my hand to catch the roller and down it went, end over end, sopping with paint, right onto the drop cloth. Sigh. of. Relief.

But the little roller leaving the tray had upset the balance of the whole thing and in a nano-second the tray flipped backward out of my hand (and this was not in slow motion) and SPLAT, a full tray of paint was upside down on my wood floor just a foot away from the drop cloth. YIKES. I stood there frozen....thinking what the hell do I do now, that is not going to be an easy clean up and Yes, you are right, I went for the camera first, knowing that this would be a good story to add to my long list of "I can make the biggest messes" story collection.

By the way, the clean up sucked, but you can't even tell that I dumped half a gallon of paint on the floor. And now that my story is told I have more work to do....