One’s Self, Avoiding Pecans, and Painting Mishaps – Thoughts from March 27, 2025

March 27, 2025

Here we are again. I’m at the Honda dealer, waiting to get my car serviced. It sounds like I’m waiting for my car outside a brothel, but you need to get your mind out of the gutter. Why you, the future reader of these words, would plant that in my mind, I don’t know. One of us should be ashamed of one’s self. Since I said “one’s self” instead of themselves, his, or her, I’ll talk about that. I don’t understand why “one” was not even considered to replace he or she. “They” is a plural word that talks about more than one person. English already had a singular pronoun for this purpose. I understand these things happen independently of grammatical rules, but come on! My English Composition degree is holding its head in shame at the lack of consideration to singular and plural pronouns. It’s a confusing mess that we could have avoided. If ignorance is bliss, I’d rather be miserable.

I changed the snacks I eat at the end of working or on the way home. I was eating a nut mix I added raisins to, but then I found out I’m allergic to pecans. Before I started checking, I didn’t realize how hard it is to find a mixed but mix without pecans. Most mixed nuts come without peanuts. Pecans are not on most people’s allergy lists. I just looked it up and only 0.5 to 1 percent of people are allergic to pecans. As usual, I look normal, but I am anything but normal on the inside. I was removing the pecans from my mixed nuts when I was preparing them for the next day. This cut down on my reaction to the mix, but I still felt a soreness in my throat after I ate them. Ever since I started eating pecan free things, my throat has felt better.

Patti and I only have a few more places to paint on the house. We had a mishap with the painter’s tape for the trim that removed the paint when we pulled it up. I talked to someone at work about it and it was because we painted on top of an oil-based paint with modern non-oil-based paint. We needed to put a primer between the two paints. Patti pointed out that we used a paint that had primer in it, but that wasn’t enough to prevent the paint upheaval. In the end, we decided to paint over the sections that had been pulled up. What it really meant was I had to use my artist’s steady hand to touch up the areas that were messed up.

Rain interrupted several days of painting, but we continued painting when we could. I perfected my technique of painting with a file folder on the trim in a straight line to avoid painting over the main lighter color of the house. The key is not getting paint on the underside of the folder. If the darker trim paint got under the folder, you were doing more harm than good. People may have been doing this already, but I was merely solving a problem I saw. The best part of this technique was avoiding using tape on the trim. On a newer house, I’m sure it works quite well. For our older house, it created more headaches and wasted our time.

As we painted, I always knew the hardest part was yet to come. We had beams at the top of our carport that angled up to the center. The fundamental problem was that the center of the beams was about 14 feet high. To add to the complexity of the job, each angled board was about 10 feet long. I had a ladder that could reach that, but it had to lean on the house. The next highest ladder would only get me to the bottom of the board. I had to screw the boards with my arm above my head at an awkward angle. This was going to be a two-person job. Patti was the other person, and she is extremely uncomfortable on ladders. For now, it was a future problem for another day.