Sunday, August 07, 2005

A New Kind of Naked

To round out the summer, I've been press-ganged into painting the house. After a few false starts, I got started in earnest yesterday, painting up under the eaves. The good news is I get to use all manner of bright yellow toys to do this. There's a pressure washer rated up to 2400(!) psi, with shiny warning stickers telling you it'll cut right to the bone given half a chance. I do that actual painting with a power sprayer whose shiny stickers tell you not only will it cut you deep, it'll inject the offending limb full of paint, posing A Serious Risk of Amputation. But these tools aren't just dangerous, and therefore cool, they make the job go a lot quicker. That Wagner sprayer is my new best friend.

The downside is that I'm working in a perpetual cloud of atomized white latex. I wear a hat pulled low to keep it out of my eyes, and this big industrial dust mask with screw-in air filter mounted on the sides. I look like the bastard offspring of Darth Vader and a chipmunk. And some parts of me are still exposed to the paint. Paint settled on my cheekbones where they weren't covered by the mask, leaving me with perfect white triangles under my eyes, like a mime. I acquired a faint halo in the back of my neck and across my shoulders. And of course it got all over my arms. By the end of the day, my forearms could have belonged to an especially skinny Yeti. They were covered in a thick mat of sticky gray fur, fur that covered ghostly gray skin beneath.

I couldn't wash this stuff out to save my life, and eventually had break out the electric clippers and shear off all the hair on my arms below the elbow. So now I'm prickly, and feel strangely exposed. I've never been so self-conscious about my ulnas in my life.

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