For Sunday, April 20, 2008 811 words



No rhyme or reason


This has been a bad week for me, full of fumbles, failures, and phlegm. I don’t even know where to begin. I guess I’ll start with my brand new blown-up $400 Toro lawnmower.

My wife and I drove to Sacramento to mow the lawn at our rental house. We need to hire a gardener now that I have installed a sprinkler system that makes the grass grow so I can cut it down. We haven’t seemed to yet find the time to scour Craig’s List and the Sac Bee for someone to trust with our gate keys. So, in the meantime, we do the mowing.

I was running the weed whacker while Sue was pushing the mower through the tall grass. Suddenly, the mower stopped. I checked the gas. It was full. I primed and pumped and pulled the rip chord again and again to no avail. Then I checked the oil dipstick, or should I say lack-of-oil dipstick. Or should I say I’m a dipstick. Doh!

We’d just performed a typical small-town American mistake. We didn’t check our fluid levels as instructed. Letting the mower cool, adding oil, nothing helped. I’m bitter. I’m going to go cling to my guns and my religion.

I contracted lung sludge from somewhere. I wrote last week about my trip to the doctor to check for strep. Good news – it’s not strep. It’s just 6 buckets of Crazy Glue clinging to the linings of my lungs, throat, and nostrils. It kept me home from work on Monday and has made every day since an endless snag in the space-time continuum, fraught with pounding head, nostril spigots, and useless coughing.

Worst of the worst: I accidentally painted my beautiful three-level redwood deck orange. Oh, it’s so ugly. I could hide pumpkins on it. Spilled apricots would look like burl. I can hardly stand to go into my backyard. And I worked so hard to make it beautiful for my upcoming annual Cinco de Mayo Hawaiian Backyard Luau.

I began the maintenance a week ago using a 1750 psi pressure washer. I scrubbed away the old stain down to the bare wood. Then I went shopping for new stain. My core mistake – I never buy the same stain twice.

I began this year with Behr semi-transparent California rustic for the railings. It looked good in the store, but applied it was a hard red and I didn’t like it. The natural wood grain got buried. However, I paid $40 to have two gallons blended and couldn’t return it, so I used it, swearing to use something else on the floor boards.

For the floor I first bought three gallons of Behr Natural Tone. It looked benign and was premixed and returnable. I sponged it onto one level. Yuk. It looked like nothing. It looked like the wood was wet. No luster. No enhanced grain. No glow at all. Too understated.

I returned it and spent a half-hour looking over the color samples. Behr Semi-Transparent Redwood looked less red that CA Rustic, and my deck is redwood after all, so ordered three gallons of no-return redwood deck stain for $65. Seems like a safe bet, right? I felt confident I’d love the look.

Oh, my stars and stripes. Oh, my guns and religion. The stuff is ORANGE! I kept sponging it on thinking, “What am I doing? This is terrible. I should stop! I should stop! But I paid for it. I can’t return it. I should stop. Maybe it just looks this way while it’s wet. Maybe it will tone down when it dries. Yeah. That’s it. It’s a temporary condition, like drinking too much carrot juice.” Wrong.
I have an orange deck, spanning three levels. It looks like a fake deck. Behr should have called the color California Poppy. It looks like a deck from a coloring book for color-blind children. It looks like candy corn. It looks like I found Nemo. It looks like a landing strip for monarch butterflies. It looks like I’m a Bengal’s fan. It looks like my 32 Irish Setters are shedding. It looks like I painted my deck with yams. It looks like OJ’s prison jumpsuit. It looks like a CalTrans Safety ad. It looks like Cheesy Poofs. It looks like cheddar. It looks like a Coppertone Tan. It looks like a loading dock for life jackets. It looks like three Reese Cup wrappers. It looks like I burgled the paint warehouse for the Golden Gate Bridge. It looks like a baboon’s behind.

My wife says, “I like it, honey. I think it looks fine.” Of course, in the back of her mind are my doctor’s recent words rattling about, warning me of my high blood pressure. If I kick now we’d go into foreclosure. And who in their right mind would buy a house with an orange deck?