painting report

Well, we squandered a perfectly good weekend by painting the house, or at least the walls, not counting the top few inches below the trim (gotta use a brush for that) and the bottom few inches (gotta use a trowel and a brush to get down below ground level). Next after that: Paint the facia boards and soffits, grout some cracks in the stucco and paint that, and get rid of the "footprints" left by vines that grew up the walls leaving little tracks, and then paint that. Also, replace a rear door to the garage that was attacked by a gang of vicious ferns that grow around the edge of the pool deck, replace an outdoor light fixture, and replace torn screens around the pool deck. Ain't home ownership fun?

I would post a photo at this point but my first photos seem to have a slightly pinkish tone to them, as opposed to YELLOW.

The door and shutters are going to be purple - not like your typical grape but with a bit more blue. My wife, it seems, is trying to reproduce the University of Michigan colors as Versace would have done them.

peach to lemon

We are having perfect weather and I have Monday off, and I can't think of a better project than to paint our house.

Our house has been pink ("peach," she corrected) since the memory of man knoweth not to the contrary. (OK, maybe it's been 17 years, more or less, but you don't get to use that expression very often). One good thing about pink, er, peach, is that even when it's been faded by the Florida sun, it still looks pink . Here's a photo of the original color that's been hidden behind a shutter, and a sample of what the rest of the house looks like.

Today, the opening phase of the project was to rent a pressure cleaner and clean the walls, from the ground up. The "ground" phase involved a lot of flying mud and paint chips.

When we lived in Boca Raton, I cleaned and painted the entire house by myself one weekend. It was the weekend of the Liberty City riots down in Miami, if you want to look it up. My wife and kids were taking life easy over in Naples. I was pleased to finish that task before they came home, but my enthusiasm for house painting hasn't been quite the same since then. In fact, the peach paint was applied to our house by our church music director and his wife and kids, who sold their painting services at an auction that benefitted the church. They did such a fine job that I've not wanted to disturb it all these years. But, there's no getting around it, it's way past time to paint again.

The next color will be yellow ("lemon"). The door and shutters might be purple but that is a point of contention at the moment. Stay tuned.

watching the Olympics

I'm "into" the Winter Olympics.

My favorite event is the Alpine downhill, naturally. I have vivid memories of my limited time on the green and blue slopes of Buttermilk Mountain (a/k/a the "bunny slopes") but I can imagine what these skiers and seeing and thinking as they hurtle downhill. Good news: Bode Miller is no longer news. Couldn't the guy have at least pretended to have cared?

My second favorite event, believe it or not, is curling. I can't believe this game is an Olympic event. . .is badminton a Summer Olympics event? But after watching for a couple of nights (why does the network give curling prime time?), I am getting hooked. The players don't look like "jocks." They look like engineers, very serious engineers. The winners will take home Olympic medals of the same size and color as every other winner, without breaking a sweat. It looks like an event they must play at M.I.T. Sure enough, I see that M.I.T. has a curling club with its own web site. http://web.mit.edu/curling/www/ Tonight we saw women curling - no, not hairdressers, but women who look like engineers, only prettier, especially the Swedes. The NBC commentators are doing a lousy job of explaining what we are seeing, however. I have no idea how you score a point in curling.

My least favorite sport? Skating. I like the skaters but the commentators ruin it. The other night, the female member of the NBC commentating team actually said one of the skaters deserved to be choked for whatever the guy had done. Choked? I think NBC is choking in a sea of verbal air pollution. Shut up, please, and let us listen to the music.

Gotta go watch the snowboarders. . .these guys are certifiable lunatics but they put on a great show!

going, gone

My four regular readers know I've been complaining about the destruction of Calvary Baptist Church in downtown Clearwater, Florida, or what used to be "downtown." I've put off, until today, the pain of going by to see what the site looks like now that this historic and beautiful building is gone. It's ugly. Here's what it looked like before the wreckers arrived:

And here's what it looks like today:

what's fair is fair

This just in:

(CNN) -- An Iranian newspaper says it is going to hold a competition for cartoons on the Holocaust to test whether the West will apply the same principles of freedom of expression to the Nazi genocide against Jews as it did to the caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed, The Associated Press reports.

This will be a learning experience for those Muslims who have been so offended by cartoons depicting Mohammed. I predict that some Jews, and a few non-Jews who do not like to see history rewritten, will complain about the cartoons. I also predict there will be no riots, no burning of embassies, no cancellation of trade agreements, no demands that cartoonists be beheaded, and no other violent reactions.

The West is already accustomed to seeing Jesus and Moses being depicted by Rennaissance masters and by cartoonists with the mind-set of early teenagers. We have heard the "Holocaust never happened" nonsense. We have seen vile, anti-Semitic cartoons of Jews. We have accepted nasty cartoons about politicians as part of the price of being a politician. We in the West have learned to do something a huge number of Muslims have not yet learned to do, which is to shrug it all off as being essentially unimportant. Pictures of naked women bother some Westerners more than all of the foregoing, yet nobody has been beheaded thus far for publishing them (not counting Larry Flynt, who was shot because his magazine depicted interracial couples - the only victim of the First Amendment I can think of off-hand).

So, bring on those Holocaust cartoons. I'd like to see if Iranian cartoonists have a sense of humor. I predict they do not, but if they surprise me, I'll either chuckle or grimace and move on to something important.

in memory of Betty Friedan

Betty Friedan, who died today at the age of 85, was a leader in the women's rights movement. In 1975, she came to Tallahassee to campaign in favor of the Equal Rights Amendment. This photo of her was taken with my wife (the pregnant one to her right, or on the left as you look at the photo), parading towards the state capitol building.