It's a great day

1/5/07 Friday
It’s a decent morning and will get up to around seventy degrees today. Tomorrow a cold front comes in so I want to get as much outside stuff done as I can. I pulled the metal cabinet that Cherie wants for her sewing into the garage to paint it. I decided to use the HVLP sprayer I had bought for painting the trailer on it so there will be no brush marks. After running over the cabinet with my sander to prepare it for painting I went and grabbed the gallon of white paint. You have to thin the paint pretty good for it to work with the sprayer so I got out the acetone that I had used with the Rustoleum paint before.

I got the paint carefully thinned to what I believed was the right consistency an put it in the sprayer. Going over to the cabinet I began spraying. “Gee, this isn’t coming out right” I said to myself as I watched clumps of paint spit out onto the cabinet. I checked the hose to see if there was a leak and then opened up the sprayer. The paint looked like curdled milk. Not good. I took the paint can and read the directions. It’s a water based paint!! How can that be?

Now I hurried to clean the sprayer. I got a brush out and spread what was left onto the side of the garage. It didn’t go on pretty but I’m not about to waste it. Don’t waste nothing around here if I can help it. Cherie came out and I told her of the problem. As I explained I noticed for the first time that the gallon can of paint did not say Rustoleum. No it said Latex Primer and looking up I saw the can of Rustoleum sitting across the garage on my cabinets. NUTS.







All said and done I got the right paint thinned to the right consistency and sprayed on Cherie’s cabinet. It looks great now. Used my saw jig to cut a bottom for the cabinet and that worked like a dream. It’s good to get something right.






I got the mess in the henhouse mostly out to where I think I’ve come to the original bottom. There are some 1957 license plates that Rudy had nailed up on the walls that are like new. That’s the year Cherie was born. I’ll pull them off and figure out something to do with them. Had to wash my hair after the henhouse. At least I was finally smart enough to wear a dust mask.






Cherie and I did our walk to the well and back. We both agree we need to do more often to get in shape and lose fat. I timed it and it only takes us eleven minutes each way. They just had some expert on the news this morning that said thirty minutes of walking a day was a good thing to do. As we walked we discussed where we could put things like the fish pond that would be used to raise Tilapia, other fish, and for aquaponics. That is a form of hydroponics that uses the water from the pond that is enriched by the fish wastes to nourish the plants which in turn clean the water as it returns to the pond. This greenhouse operation will provide year round crop production.

This has been another day without a slowdown. These things seem to run in cycles. I do have a headache that just came up (it’s 4:34) It’s not a migraine but not being nice either. Cherie and I were both tired so I laid down for about an hour. Almost went to sleep but forced myself to get up and moving again. She has been cleaning and is working on making tacos for dinner. One of the things she brought up earlier was that she needed to get on the ball about working around the house. “I used to work a full time job that was physical but now I’ve been relaxing” she said. I think it has just been hard for her to motivate with the stress and depression she’s been fighting. We are both getting renewed with this vision of what we can make out of this farm.