Here's Ethel a week ago, after I posted about how she had left the painting project unfinished:


                  


I actually hadn't intended to "force" her to paint. In fact, I think that painting was the wrong thing to do, because there are about ten currently unfinished projects underway, and painting is the second-largest of those projects; thus, the other projects could be worked on instead of the paint, and thus reduce the number of projects in the pipeline with less effort. This is called "low-hanging fruit".

As it happens, we wound up with no net gain of unfinished projects, because Ethel took off in the middle of the week to buy a tall three-tiered Mexican fountain that we left in pieces in the side yard; it has to be cleaned, painted or stained, and reassembled with a new pump.

At any rate, this last weekend, Ethel decided that she was going to finish the current effort of painting - the kitchen/family room/hallways. This has involved four different colors and three different textures of paint, three different ladders, several different brushes and rollers and two different analgesics (Ibuprofen and Naproxen).

So, by the time I got home from my long run on Saturday morning, Ethel was already getting going with the painting. I didn't really have any choice - I had to help, of course.

Ethel said, "How sweet of you to help me paint!"

I said "Huh? What, exactly, am I supposed to be doing instead? If I sat in my chair, you'd be standing over me on a ladder, dripping paint on my head. You've managed to pile up all of the furniture in front of my large-screen TV, and we have to disconnect the DVD player so you can paint the inside of the shelving.

"...You've taped all of the cabinets shut, so I can't eat, and you've locked the dogs into the bedroom, so I can't take a nap. And you've spent all of our money on paint, so I can't go anywhere. So, again, WHAT ELSE CAN I DO BESIDES PAINT?"

And thus went the weekend - most of the time, I was taping off tile or ceiling or doors or windows or nooks and crannies or color boundaries, because Ethel didn't trust me to actually PAINT. She would let me "cut in", by which she meant "take a little bitty brush and paint little bitty areas that the roller won't reach", but she never actually let me hold the roller except to WASH it. She talked a lot about the areas that she was going to let me roll paint on, later, but by the time we got there I was removing tape that had already been painted around, or resetting switch plates or rewiring the home theater.

And a good thing, too, because Ethel did a real bang-up job. The family room is simply gorgeous; I would not have believed that it could look like that. I'd put up pictures of it, but she won't let me use the camera either.