 Painting in general is not what we're best at, but both of us have a
creative streak that urges us to want to make our surroundings more
beautiful. Well, I want to make it more beautiful. My husband wants
to make it "not too girly." He thinks that if the decision was up to
me, I'd paint everything pink with a couple of unicorns sporting
sparkling horns and dancing on a huge rainbow... You have to admit,
though, that would be more beautiful.However, I've learned to
work with his less-than-stellar taste, so we tried to stick with
neutral colors that would match anything we put in the room. We
ended up with what was available on the discount shelf at our local
home improvement store. Many people might think that doing that is
going just a bit too cheap, but it saved us the trouble of trying to
agree on one of the bazillions of colors available. I had no idea
that there were so many shades of beige.
Plus, we can never come to an agreement on the type of paint we
should use: flat, eggshell, satin, semigloss, gloss, enamel, latex,
water-based or oil-based, or even what brand was the best one. For
us, it was much easier to let the discount shelf make our decisions
for us.
OK, you still don't think we should use discounted paint? Have
you ever seen a room painted by two angry people? Trust me, it's not
pretty.
After that major decision was made, things went pretty smoothly.
Looking back now, when the haze of paint fumes has lifted, I can see
that we got kind of punch-drunk. We didn't know it at the time,
though. It seemed perfectly reasonable to go into a giggling fit
when my husband asked if, while I was painting door trim, I had "got
the window one done too?"
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 I thought it was just hilarious because it sounded like a Native
American name -- Windowandantu. From that point on my name became
Windowandantu, which, I'm sure in some Native American language
means, "You missed a spot."
It wasn't long before we started trying to use our paint-addled
brains to come up with a name for my husband. At one point, I held a
long-handled roller while painting the top part of a wall. My
husband was sitting on the floor, directly under my roller, painting
the baseboard with his paint brush. There were several rooms to
paint; don't ask me why we chose to work in the same room on the
same piece of wall. I can only assume the answer had something to do
with paint fumes.
He happened to look up to say, "Windowandantu, you missed a
spot..." just as a huge glob of paint dropped from my roller and hit
him right between his mouth and his nose. The word "spot" came out
just before he said "Tooie!" to clear the paint from his opened
mouth, and then he added a sharp exhale from his nose to clear paint
from his nostrils. What I heard was, "Spottooie-mpph!"
We both erupted into full-blown, belly-rolling laughter because
not only did he look funny with a glob of paint for a mustache, but
we realized at the same time that this would be his new Native
American name: "Spottooie-mpph!" which probably means "one who
paints with forked tongue," or something like that. It was hilarious
to us, but now I realize you probably had to be sniffing paint fumes
to really "get" the joke.
It may have been only beige paint we were applying, but that day,
with a little help from fumigation therapy, we made our own rainbow.
[By LAURA SNYDER]
Laura Snyder is a nationally syndicated columnist,
author and speaker. You can reach her at
lsnyder@lauraonlife.com
or visit www.lauraonlife.com
for more info.
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