pantoum's Diaryland Diary

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HERE BUTCHIE, BUTCHIE

(10:45 AM) I'm in a café picking up a decaf skinny latte (sigh) and this is a VERY brief entry while Slowgrrl makes it. (She and Fastgrrl appear to be maybe fourteen and fifteen and I believe they're the owner's daughters, but only one of them wants to be here).

I'm on my way to build stage sets—in a garage, so it's guaranteed to be hot as Hades. Almost packed my bathing suit so I can dive into the pool afterwards, but will probably be covered with sawdust and paint by the end of the day.

There's paint splattered all over them from when I stripped and painted a room in the Ginger's and my old 1910 stucco house. We discovered lead and and I proceeded to strip so many layers off the moulding that I discovered routered edges that I'd thought were flat—a good seven layers at least. And I did all that in a respirator. Not fun.

I built a double protective door to try to keep fumes and lead contained. (One of my many odd jobs was illustrating an EPA manual on removing asbestos from structures, so I built a two-room plastic tent just like the one I illustrated.)

Cosmos—my kitty that I miss so much—still got sick though and we wound up taking him to the vet emergency room on New Year's Eve. (Talk about expensive!)

I think a chip of paint must have fallen off my clothes and he ate it. Or something.

But I wander. We were talking about clothes, weren't we? Butch clothes.

I'm also wearing my well-used, lime-green Eno River T-shirt with a five-line, blue-tailed skink and many paint splatters on it. I packed paint-spattered shorts to change into too, since I'm sure it'll be hot in there. Got my big-ass hiking boots in tow too. And my big red tool box, a drill, an extension cord, my NaviGATOR electric saw, and a variety of paint brushes.

Almost wore my leather tool belt for fun and laughs too (well and because it's practical for framing flats).

Okay. Time to go get sawdust in my hair now. See ya.

It's really hard to stand close to an eight-by-eight-foot structure and draw a huge head. Was thinking about those huge long paintbrushes and pencils that Matisse used from his bed when he was ill and wishing I had one so that I could stand outside and draw from there.

Gotta figure out how to make a nice oval tomorrow. I can freehand it, but it'd look a lot better if I used a template of some sort. Ordinarily, I'd drop some string on there and trace it, but the prop is standing, so that won't work.

So my pal Coolio just called to say Musicgrrl is at the beach, and then she shoot her glass and said, "Hear that? It's a lovely sound. Uh huh. The sound of ice dropping into one of two bourbon glasses that I plan to take out to my deck on this lovely evening. Along with a pack of Dunhills. And I'm betting that both of them have your name on them."

10:46 a.m. - 2005-05-21

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