Monday, March 12, 2018

Samples

Inspirational song: It's Not Easy Being Green (Kermit the Frog)

Next door neighbor has progressed on his office reno. After panicking that he heard a noise that he thought was the ceiling fan support failing (it wasn't), he asked for assistance running a hard-wired ethernet cable. We have gigabit internet in this town (although we were one of the last neighborhoods to get the fiber optic cable connected), and it is truly amazing. But to get the real gigabit speeds, up and down, one needs a wired connection, not wi-fi. Neighbor was going to go down into his crawl space, while I stayed in the office, helping to run cable up through a hole in the wall. We never actually made it to that part. Mr S-P came over and gave a tutorial for how the process would work, and sent us to the hardware store for a longer spade bit to drill the hole from the underside, a drywall saw, and a different kind of gang box to put in the wall to hold the plug in place. Then the Mr skipped out and went to a meeting, while we went to Lowe's. We remembered the gang box, and the longer spade bit turned into an extender piece instead. He also picked up a bright neon green tape measure, that ought to be easy to read in the crawl space. We forgot the drywall saw until we were back in the car and starting to pull out of the parking lot. But I'm not surprised we forgot. We were distracted by paint.

He wants to make the walls dark green, and because green of any shade is such a difficult color to choose (I swear there are more greens in the color palette than any other possible color there is), I strongly recommended getting samples, and painting them on at least three walls, watching at two or three different times of day. He had chips taped up when I arrived, and his top three ranked. He picked his two favorites for samples. We waited more than ten minutes for someone to show up and help us at the paint counter, even though someone at customer service had paged for help halfway through our wait. The guy who did our order was not regularly behind the paint counter, so I wondered how well he was going to do. I kept that to myself until we were back at my neighbor's house. The first sample I opened was very poorly mixed. I needed to borrow a spoon and I scraped the blue and yellow pigment from the lid to stir it in. I made a huge mess of my fingers, but lucky for me, this afternoon I gave myself a dark green St Patrick's Day manicure. Nobody will notice if there's still wall paint there (not even I know). The two samples are up, and weren't dry before I gave up and went home. Neighbor is really happy with his decision to go with dark green. Me, I can't decide whether to push for a tinted primer or not. It is old school, but it feels like the right thing to do. The room used to be a little kid's room, and the walls show it. I feel like I would be remiss if I didn't give him the best advice I can.

I accomplished very little beyond the above and a few light chores today. I'm having more bad foot days than tolerable ones these days. Walking, standing, even sitting with my feet up is bad if I have any pressure at all on the left foot. I don't know what to do anymore. I can't even wear house slippers or have a blanket on top of it. Before anyone asks, yes, I have spoken to doctors about it. No one is taking it seriously. When I say my feet have hurt for twenty years non-stop, they totally blow off me saying "but this is different by an order of magnitude." My heel feels like I sliced the tendons on the bone spur when I was trying to massage the stiffness out of it seven or eight months ago by rolling a therapy ball on it too hard. The ball of my foot feels like I've been stepped on by a horse. The podiatrist ignored me when I told her about it less than 24 hours after the worst pain started. My primary care and rheumatologist have not prioritized it over everything else going on. I go back to the rheumatologist this week. I am going to have to nag. It is all I think about anymore. I can't focus on anything else. I'm just so afraid that they're going to insist I treat it like plantar fasciitis, which is the exact opposite of what I need. Trying to massage and stretch the fascia is what caused the damage in the first place. I feel like there are no easy answers.


No comments:

Post a Comment