June 22, 2008

• Waiting for the Paint to Dry

  There’s a great deal of hurry up and wait in this remodeling business.  Hurry up and choose a color.  Hurry up and buy the paint.  Okay.  Let’s start.  But w—a—i—t!  First you have to move everything out of the way and that generally means deciding what stays and what goes.  W—a—i—t—i—n—g.  Then you have to find somewhere to put the stuff while you remodel whatever room you’re doing.  Swell – two rooms unfit for human habitation.  Then you have to patch all the holes in the walls.  The compound has to dry. W—a—i—t—i—n—g.  Eventually, you get to the painting.  Everything needs two coats.  Everything.  W—a—i—t between coats.  Really none of this waiting is a big deal except that whatever one planned to get done in a day invariably takes three because there is work and the occasional need for sleep, for heaven’s sake.  (I have discovered that painting when one is half exhausted is counterproductive.)  So that’s what I’m doing – waiting.  Sheesh!.

   

  Oh – a helpful hint.  The reason one should wear gloves when stripping furniture has nothing to do with the fact that the stain and paint get all over one’s hands and thus one looks like one bathed one’s hands in beet juice.  Nor is the reason for wearing gloves that the grit gets under one’s fingernails and even a wire brush and straight Clorox only serve to make it gray instead of black – a rather bizarre constrast to the beet juice fingers.  The REAL reason one should wear gloves when stripping a piece of furniture is that once the piece is done and lovely, the skin on one’s hands begins to strip off as well.  The plus side of this sloughing is that the stain and paint color are finally gone and the grime is gone from under the fingernails.  This is because at least twelve layers of skin are being sloughed.  The downside is that one’s hands look like one has been the victim of an exfoliation gone terribly wrong.  And sadly, the sloughing does not remove one’s fingerprints as one had hoped so the bank heist is definitely out.  Rats!

   

  Book Review

  Rachel Cohn isn’t afraid to tackle tough issues.  I love meeting her characters.  They are fresh, opinionated, arrogant, and vulnerable as only teenagers can be.  Cohn writes their lives honestly, and even though you may want to smack them between the eyes to get their attention, you also want to wrap them up in your lap and tell them the world won’t end today.  That’s an adult’s perspective, obviously, but the teens seem to love these characters as well.  I read Gingerbread out loud to an eighth grade class when it first came out and Cohn hasn’t written fast enough for that crowd since.  But always, it was her characters that drew me in.  In her latest novel, You Know Where to Find Me, something else entirely pulled me into the pages.  Certainly the characters are as rich as one would expect and the subject matter is as edgy as it can get – too many drugs and too much smoking in this one to even think about sex.  What pulled me in here was the sheer intensity of the writing and the experience.  I was in Miles’ head and it wasn’t happy place to be, but the healing – oh the healing.  I was there for that as well, and it was redemptive.  The imagery is stronger in this novel than in Cohn’s previous work.  It is as though she has pulled out the stops and let her words flow across the page.  Don’t be fooled – there are no easy answers here.  This is not a book for the immature or the faint of heart.  Bad things happen and poor choices are made.  But this is absolutely a journey worth taking. 

   

  Time for a second coat on the bookcase.

  And so it goes.

  • 12:53 pm
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