If you asked me to name two things I hate doing and one thing that scares me I would answer: painting, housework, and heights.

This, of course, totally explains why I volunteered to paint the two storey, 150-year-old five bedroom farm house where my mom-in-law lives.

The house was last painted eight or nine years ago by the spousal unit who did the scraping and extremely high bits, and our daughter, who did all the rest to earn money for school. The daughter is a woman of many skills and has far more grit than her mother.

Alas, the daughter is now educated and gainfully employed. Alas, the spousal unit and I did not think to produce enough children to ensure continuous painting of the home farm by child peons.

Alas.

The house has needed painting for at least two years. This fact I have resolutely ignored in the hopes that a phalanx of paint fairies would swoop out of the sky and scrape off the flaking paint, wash the house down with tri-sodium phosphate to get rid of dirt and pollution so new paint would stick, paint bare wood patches with primer, and then apply said new paint.

Alas, nary a paint fairy in sight. Why is it that you cannot find a good paint fairy when you need one?

This year it became clear that the siding would be damaged if we put off the job any longer. This summer the spousal unit has been flat out between his carpentry jobs and working on our two porches.

The only way he could get to the paint job was to stop working on our porches, the porches I have waited for for 25 years. So this spring I said I would do everything but the highest peaks in the roofs of the home farm, which I would leave for him, so he could keep on with the porch project here.

We've been through an extremely hot and wet summer here, so I have had a buttload of perfectly valid excuses as to why I have not made much progress on the paint job. But the truth is that I have been procrastinating because deep, deep in my heart I cannot let this paint fairy notion go.

This weekend I looked at the calendar and realized I am fast running out of summer. I put my first serious time into the job. And how did that go?

Um, well, I am doing my best to look at this in a Little Miss Merry Sunshine way, to tell myself that every hour spent brings me an hour closer to completion.

I remind myself how much pleasure we'll get out of the porches when they're done and that what I'm doing now buys the spousal unit extra time to work on them.

I wish I could say that approach is working, but it is not. I am miserable, the special misery of someone doing two things she especially hates often while perched way up on a ladder with shaking knees.

Ignore me. I'm whining. In two weeks I will have the worst of this done and I know that. Occasionally, though, a woman has to throw a pity party and this would be mine.

Next summer will be the summer spent lolling on the shade on my brand spanking new screened in porches, taunting the mosquitoes and black flies on the other side which yearn to gnaw on my flesh, all the while sipping daiquiris bigger than my head.

I hope.

--Marn

Mileage on the Marnometer: 775.17 miles. Half way there. Oh, man, please let this be over