You know...

No soccer games this weekend. Which means that Miss Reba has been working overtime in order to devise manly, constructive activities to fill up the time in order to keep my mind away from thoughts of some quick rounds of playing tickle and slap with her. ::sigh::

First up?

Painting Oldest Girl's bedroom.

I dislike painting simply because of the mess--if I had some help to clean up, the actual act of rolling paint on the wall and carefully cutting in the doors and windows and stuff is actually sort of relaxing in that little-cheap-sand-and-rock-Zen-garden-you-got-as-a-gag-gift sort of way. Up, down, side, side--eeeee-ease around that.... ::mind starts to wander toward the carnal::

And the fumes are pretty trick, too.

But it's never that easy--gotta go to K-Mart for to get something out of their Screaming Domestic Insider-Trading Harpy Collection--I suggested K-Mart the other night ONLY because the store stays nearly deserted nowadays, and I was looking for a way to get in and out quickly.

Stupid, stupid Daddy.

Boy wants to look at extrasuperneatocool video games, Four Girls spend miles of time carefully choosing between imperceptibly different shades of off-white, Dad leans agains nasty paint mixing counter, looking at ceiling and slowly drifting off in a reverie involving a Lamborghini Muira and a young Sophia Loren in a peasant dress. Fortunately for all concerned, I was able to break free from my daydream by the sounds of a Tiny Girl screaming her head off because her older sister pulled the paint card out of her hand and put it back in the holder.

Wow.

She's louder than an F-4 on afterburner.

After choosing a stack of samples only slightly thicker than a phone book so that they may each be held up against various wall art hung in the room (in order to match the exact shade of light, grayey-lavenderish, pinkish rose beige in the corner of the third flower petal on the left behind the girl's hand in the picture), there is the final selection process, which boils down to two colors equally pleasing. "Well, let Dad pick which one he thinks is better." Thus guaranteeing that no matter what, the wrong color will be chosen, leading to Oldest's social ostracism and no small damage to her psyche, to be brought up on a psychiatrist's couch thirty years hence as the time Dad forced her to live in a room with black painted walls. Do I sound slightly less than enthusiastic? So sorry, but having been down these road before, I know just as surely as Kowalski that there's a bulldozer down at the end of it.

And the worst part of this analogy is that Barry Newman didn't have to move all the furniture to the middle of the room and take all the pictures down and spackle the holes in the wall and clean up the mess at the end of it.

So, on to manly activity two.

More plants.

As with painting, the prospect of digging a hole and dropping another living, breathing thing into it and covering it with dirt is not without its fun side, but somehow that gets lost in having to stand there with my Aerobic Post-Holeizers working on my pecs and lats. And then, you know what happens? That crap GROWS, meaning that there is a Manly Activity 2.1, Plant Trimming.

Everything is in overdrive with the rain and all, so it all must be punished with the string trimmer and edger and hedge shears and a variety of defoliants. Stupid plants can't take a hint, either--just keep coming back for more.

Exhausted thus by Manly Activities 1, 2 and 2 point one, I assume there will be Non-manly Activities in great abundance (cooking, cleaning, washing, doily-making) to insure, at least in Miss Reba's mind, that I am so thoroughly weakened that thoughts of a sneak attack upon her flanks will be cast far from my mind.

Well, let her think what she will.

Heh heh.

See you all Tuesday, and have a happy and safe Memorial Day.
posted by Terry at 3:39:00 PM