A Tearjerker

I have been painting for work these days - painting my dad's new office space so he can move his business into a place with pretty beige walls instead of bare sheetrock. It's no use denying that I sometimes get tired of painting. No, seriously, I will not deny it! I do! The constant up and down motion, the constant bending over to get more paint, and either the constant vigilance or the constant cleaning of spills and spots - it just isn't something I think I'll want to do in heaven. And when you have over a thousand square feet of wall space that is frequently interrupted by wooden trim boards that have to be painted with a brush, the job can be very tiresome indeed. There's nothing like a full week of repetitive work to make you appreciate the Sabbath.

Painting does have several notable advantages for me, though; it's not all a trial and a bore. For one thing, it's something I know I can do well. Sheetrocking, which I was doing last week, is not.

If I have any sheetrocking skills at all, they're pretty thickly buried under a couple strata of inexperience. I started last week with a couple pieces that had to be scribed to fit a rather irregular wall that included a ledge, a sill, an electrical track, and a beam. I measured wrong somehow and ended up with a nice one-inch gap between the board and the wall for about six inches at the top. The next piece I cut was almost just right, but was just big enough that I had to keep trimming down tiny slices off the end to make it fit. At least it was snug when I finally got it into place. By that time I was quite tired (just as, incidentally, I am now!), and I almost quit for the day. Not really feeling like I had accomplished much, however, I decided to try for one more board, this one a simpler specimen. All it called for was a simple rectangular window cutout. I measured once, measured again, and set to work cutting.

Suddenly, I stopped myself. I had just been about to cut on the wrong side of the board! I sighed with relief as I settled down to doing it right. The cuts were clean and beautiful, exactly following the lines I had carefully delineated with a pen and a square. I was sure that in a few minutes I would have earned my rest for the day. As I picked up my opus (it wasn't really magnum; just an opus), I was confronted with the awful truth: I had been right the first time.

There I stood, grasping the mirror image of the piece of sheetrock I wanted and having no way to rewind the time so I could cut it right. It fit perfectly into the space for it if I held it against the wall backward, but that wasn't much comfort. I just left it there and departed for a long weekend. When I got back on Tuesday, the sheetrocking was almost done, and boy was I glad! I've been painting ever since.