Now I understand what you tried to say to me

[austin_dern]

When we had the new roof put on, some damage was done to our paint job. In hindsight, we should've got the new roof first and then the painting done, but we can't change that now. After the roofers failed to ever find someone who'd do the paint touch-ups needed, bunny_hugger called someone she'd had do some work on the house long ago. She warned he was a character. She understated.

The guy just feels wonderful, that slightly exuberant sort of person that you kind of don't expect to see in the real world. He's Dutch, and has a pronounced accent, and that just adds to the marvel of it. Almost his first question about the paint job we'd got was why we hadn't called him to do it, and given the frustrating way the paint job finished up we probably should have.

He pointed out something that we had literally never seen before, and that nobody who'd seen our house had noticed either: the red paint on the second floor, the shakes, is really uneven. It looks like there's maybe one and a half layers of paint on, a fair red base and then many patches of a deeper red that aren't really uniform. Once we saw it, we saw how patchwork it was and that's just made us feel all the worse for how much we paid on the new paint job.

Joyfully, he doesn't want much to not just touch up the damaged areas but also repaint the front of the house (and a similarly patchy section on the back), and the only downside is that we're going to have to wait for a time in his schedule when he can do it. He said he's already booked through August, but ours is a small job, relatively, after all, and we might fit in the cracks.

Trivia: Administrators for Brigham Young's estate concluded that he earned about $88,000 from the two million railroad construction contract the Mormons signed with the Central Pacific. Source: Empire Express: Building the First Transcontinental Railroad, David Haward Bain.

Currently Reading: A History Of Money, E Victor Morgan.