House Painter Holtie

It's my sister Merle's birthday tomorrow (May 24th) please pop in
and wish her a happy birthday, she is three years older than me
for a few days and you know how old folks feel about that sort of
thing. (well so I've heard.)

My wife, bless her, figured I shouldn't be climbing up ladders to change
light bulbs at my age, so I asked our next door neighbor for some help,
Do you blame me????

I have searched my memory for an instance when I could have
legitimately used this image in a story, all to no avail.

(But bugger it, I'm gonna use it anyway.)

Here I am for a change all caught up with my blogging on a cool day with rain on and off throughout the morning (I did say it was an unusual day… cool, rain, and caught up on blog.)

So for no particular reason I opened up “A five minute job, (refers to the taps)” which resides in “Classic Holtieshouse” on my sidebar,

There have not been a lot of memorable posts on this blog but a few that I have been reasonably happy with are available there if you feel like a walk down memory lane with me.

Back to the point of this post, the day spent as a plumber reminded me of other similar incidents in my life, for a pipe opener I will recall my experience as a house painter.

This was many years ago when Jacqui and I had only the first two of our four kids and were living in our first home, this was a timber house (called weatherboard for overseas readers) and I was painting the exterior.

I was on the last wall of this job and had set up a plank between two step ladders and another plank onto a 44 gallon oil drum so that I could paint each board from end to end without any breaks.

I hope you are following me here? so armed with my trusty brush and gallon can of paint I set to work, with a good old Australian “no worries” attitude, now because there was a sloping ramp up to the back door my drum was placed on the flat path leaving a bit of a stretch to get right up to the doorway.

I don’t quite know why I am bothering to write this down as you all know very well where it’s gonna finish ! oh alright… I painted two or three boards from the corner of the house and as far as my drum, now because I had to stretch a bit to reach into the doorway I put the can of paint onto the plank and ever so carefully stretched into the gap, I had overlapped the plank a bit and gently placed some of my weight onto the end of the plank… YEP, it catapulted the paint can into the air while I went sprawling into the gap below… YEP the bloody paint can emptied it’s contents over me with the precision that a bombardier would have been proud of.

Jacqui and I have discussed this incident since and she assures me that not only did the air turn blue but also I turned a very pretty shade of moonbeam yellow all in the space of a few seconds, to her credit, and no doubt a big part of the reason she is alive today, she managed to contain her laughter and help me clean up the mess.

Strangely painting for the day was finished!!!!!

Just add half a gallon of "Moonbeam Yellow" to this image and you
have a reasonable picture of the finish to my day.
By the way, the painting did get finished on the next weekend.

This somehow makes me feel
better about how the day
turned out.