Mark and I spent Sunday sanding hardwood floors — as we inch ever closer to getting Mom’s new house ready for her to move in to. And I do mean inch. Why does everything take so much longer than we plan? I know to be conservative in my estimation, but good heavens, did it really have to take THIS long?

We rented a drum sander and an edger.  Mark had to use the edger to get the varnish off, but…that damn thing was a pain in the ass.  After the initial rough pass, it was up to me to continue to work on the edges with his orbital sander.  Which meant I was on hunched over on my hands/knees/sitting on my sorry butt for the better part of 30 hours on Sunday.

OK, maybe it was only 8 hours, but when you are hunched over on the floor sanding, it seems like an eternity. Especially when your taskmaster tells you that you have to do around the edges 3 times. And you are barely through with the first pass.  For the first 3 hours, I was alone with my thoughts (while you should worry about me being alone with my thoughts for 3 hours, you do NOT have to worry about my hearing: I was wearing ear protection, because dude, those sanders were really loud).  Oh, and we wore masks, too, and I made quite the picture, especially when I would take a break and pull the mask up on top of my head.  At one point, I grabbed a mask and started putting it on, and had to stop because I didn’t remember mine being so wet: I had accidentally grabbed Mark’s mask.  Mark sweats.  A lot.

In the afternoon, I wised up, and brought over my iPod and some earbuds, which went UNDER the earmuffs, and the cord went down the front of my shirt.  See, first you pull the mask over your head, and then you stick in the earbuds, and then you put the mask on, and then, finally, you put the earmuffs over the top of it. Of course, all of this goes over top of the layer of sweaty sawdust.

I set my iPod to shuffle my selection of songs from the first two seasons of Glee, and I’m not positive, but I don’t think I ever ran out of Glee music.  I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or not.

Over on Facebook, some commenters suggested that I was supposed to have convinced the boys to sand, by telling them how much fun they would have.  Unfortunately, they did read Tom Sawyer this past school year:  the whitewashing trick would not have worked on them.

There’s a point in here somewhere, and it may be the larger point of this blog over the years, i.e.: I’m a moron, and I’m here to report on the stupid things I do so that you don’t have to make the same mistakes.

Clearly, the moral here is that about 5 minutes after starting to sand, when I realized how much my neck/shoulders were going to end up hurting, I should have done something to mess up the job badly enough that I could quit:  breaking the sander, gouging the floor, finding a way to draw blood, but not hurt myself too badly.August

I’m a victim of my own competence.

Or something.