I'll be out of town for a few days, traveling to the East Coast so that my wife (and I) can try and crash a reunion for a high school from which she did not graduate. Hopefully the prison will have wi-fi.

Ahhhhh!

I shaved the damn thing today. I feel human again. I let that beard fester on my face for 23 days. At the end of that time, it was still patchy in a couple of spots, and some parts of my face just completely rejected the concept of hair. The experiment was complete.

I shaved in the bathroom while Daisy was taking her bath. Much to her dismay though, I didn't capture the clippings as I went.

Daisy: PLEASE save the hairs for me! PLEEEEASE!
Me: No.
Daisy: Why not?
Me: Because it's gross. Just no.
Daisy: That's ok. I have a new idea! Want to hear it?
Me: You have terrible ideas.
Daisy: (laughing) I know! Want to hear it anyway?
Me: Oh, alright.
Daisy: Shave off all your hair! Go bald!!
Me: I knew this was going to be a terrible idea.
Daisy: Daddy! Do it!
Me: No way. At least with a beard, I knew I could remove it at any time. If I shave my head, I'm stuck with super short hair for a loooong time.
Daisy: Ok, grow your hair really long! Down to your butt!

I distracted her from this thought train by shaving off my beard in pieces, and documenting as I went. For your viewing pleasure, I present The Many Facial Hair Stylings of Mike aka How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love the Mutton Chop.



I cleaned up the sink after I was done, but a few hairs eluded me. I glanced at them, rolled my eyes, and said, "Daisy, there are a few hairs left in the sink. If you want them, they're yours."

She squealed like I had just told her we were flying to Disneyland on a plane made out of lollipops. She fetched a ziploc bag and now about half a dozen of my beard hairs live on her night table. Kids are weird.

I'm ready to shave this thing off. It's FUR on my FACE. It feels weird when I walk in the wind, it feels weird when I eat, and it feels weird when my face moves, like for example, when I breathe.

Furthermore, I keep getting glimpses of my moustache of out of the corner of my peripheral vision, which causes a constant "WHAT THE HELL IS ON MY LIP, OH IT'S MY MOUSTACHE" repetitive internal monologue. That's a lot of yelling going on my head.

However, although I normally do not like to brag about how I look, or about compliments that I get on my appearance, I'm going to make an exception just this once. Here are a set of completely unedited comments I have received on my beard the last few days:

Ella: What's with the beard? I mean... it's really... interesting!

Liz: Oh. That's just silly.

My mother: It's not that I don't like beards. I usually like them. Just not yours.

(Let the record show that my mother is probably one of the top 10 sweetest people in the United States. She is relentlessly supportive and my biggest fan. The above statement may be the first negative thing she has said to me since I took a rake to my sister's favorite dress when I was 3.)

So, uh, I think this baby is coming off.

My daughter, however, still pleads with me to keep it. We had this disturbing conversation:

Me: I cannot wait to shave this thing. I'm gonna do it on Wednesday.
Daisy: Nooooooooo! (making her market-tested sad face)
Me: Sorry. Three weeks is long enough.
Daisy: Okok, at least do this for me. When you shave it off, shave it into a cup, and then pour that cup into a bag for me, so that I can keep it.
Me: You... want... to.... keep.... my... beard... trimmings?
Daisy: Yes! (beaming)
Me: In a bag?
Daisy: Yes!
Me: You are a weird little child. Are you going to make a voodoo doll of me?
Daisy: What's a voodoo doll?
Me: Nevermind.

So, anyway, today and tomorrow I see some coworkers that I rarely see, so I'll let them enjoy my once-every-40-years-or-so beard, and then I'm shaving the bastard off, and not into a cup either. Creepy.

Hooooo-eeeee (sp?)! That was a good weekend.

No one extraordinary thing happened, but it was pretty solid all the way through. Let's do a quick highlight reel.

Friday Night: Daisy had a sleepover, so Hank and I got to have an "adult" night with Liz and Larry. It wasn't the drug and sex-fueled night it sounds like, but there's something undeniably relaxing and vacation-like about a night where you know that you can come home at any time, and sleep in until any time. Granted, my parenthood-stunted brain prevents me from actually sleeping a full eight hours, and I had to get up to meet my running club early on Saturday morning, but in theory I COULD have slept in. That rocks.

Saturday Morning: I met up with my running club and immediately noticed an athletic man striding towards us. Even though he was merely walking, he exuded speed and fitness. As it turned out, he's a world class runner, training to compete in the upcoming 100 Kilometer World Championships. I chatted him up during our pre-stretch warm-up run.

He was visiting San Francisco for a few days and hooked up with our club so that he could jog for 2 hours with our marathon trainers, and then he'd go and do his actual workout afterwards. I quizzed him about his race pace and it turns out that he can run 62 miles at a pace faster than I can run 1 mile. Bastard.

As we returned from our casual warm-up run, I sped up ever so slightly and nonchalantly tagged our table. Ta dah! And that's how I beat another world-class athlete.

Saturday Evening: We had a dinner and movie date with another couple. More about dinner another time, but we saw the Simpson's movie, which I can heartily recommend to anyone who enjoys the TV show. I stopped watching the TV show years ago because it seemed like the quality had fallen off, but the movie was entirely satisfying.

Sunday Evening: A friend from college contacted me recently because she discovered my blog (Thank you, Looksmart Google!). She came into town with her husband, who is a TV personality, and we had a lovely dinner. They told entertaining stories about the TV business, and I countered with hilarious anecdotes about software enterprise application integration. It was like we were all still in college.

Tomorrow I have to actually go into the actual office, which is a drag for obvious and actual reasons (pants).

Chloë Sevigny tagged me, because apparently she hates me. As it turns out, I am hated in many corners of the Internet, including New Jersey. Me thinks that she's just trying to avoid another Beard post.

The beard will not be denied. But, I am without a hilarious reason to avoid this tag, so I will accept. Below, please find several fascinating lists about me Me ME!!*

JOBS I'VE HELD

• Grill guy at Wendy's (If you received a burnt chicken sandwich during the summer of 1984, my bad)
• Photo processor at 1-hour photo shop (I've never been as good at any other job as I was at this one)
• Fluffer
• Office temp drone
• Software developer

MOVIES I CAN WATCH OVER & OVER AGAIN

• Office Space
• High School Musical
• Pulp Fiction
• Moulin Rouge

MY GUILTY PLEASURES

• Political blogs
• TV shows with scantily clad ladies
• Being injured and unable to run
• Pork that's just going to go to waste unless I eat it
• Survivor
  

PLACES I HAVE LIVED

• New Jersey
• Thailand
• New York
• Walnut Creek, California
• Berkeley, California
• Silicon Valley
• San Francisco, California

SHOWS I ENJOY

• The Office
• The Daily Show
• The Colbert Report
• Clean Sweep
• Battlestar Galactica
• South Park

FAVORITE VACATION SPOTS

• Oahu
• Kauai
• Maui
• Molokai
• Hawaii

FAVORITE FOODS

• Chocolate
• Dolsot bi bim bop
• Sweet and sour shrimp

WEBSITES I VISIT DAILY

• Looksmart.com
• Too many blogs
• CNN.com
• Slashdot.org
• ESPN.com

BODY PARTS I HAVE INJURED

• Collarbone
• Hip
• My brother-in-law's shoulder
• Penis

AWARDS I'VE WON

• Most School Spirit
• Best Beard
• Valedictorian

NICKNAMES I'VE BEEN CALLED

• Mikey
• Mickey
• Mikey Mike Mikerson
• Mmmmike
• Mr. Surly

* There's only one lie in each list.

My beard relentlessly marches on, consuming entire tiny patches of my face one scraggly hair at a time. It is a remorseless growing machine that will not stop until it has magically transformed me from Man Who Cannot Grow A Beard into Man Who Should Not Grow A Beard.

Opinions are split as to whether or not it makes me look better or worse.

When I ordered a drink at the Oakland airport on my way to Seattle, the bartender carded me. I'm nearly double the legal drinking age, so it's been a number of years since I've been carded. I was astonished and wondered whether my inability to grow a beard that actually covers the lower half of my face made me look less mature. Then again, the bartender was bearded, so perhaps he was just welcoming me into the club.

Days later, at a winery in San Juan, I used my credit card that says "See ID" on the back in place of my signature. The cashier complied and asked for my driver's license. She did a quick double-take upon viewing it.

"You look a lot younger in that picture," she announced.

"You obviously don't work for tips," I thought to myself.

Ok, the score was tied at 1 and 1.

Meanwhile, Hank grudgingly admitted that it looks kind of good. It FEELS scratchy, but doesn't look bad she said. 2 to 1, baby!

Today, however, I went into the office and a quiet coworker that I see about once every six months stared at me and said, "You're shaving that off."

2 to 2.

I haven't really investigated whether the ladies find it attractive, so when on my flight back from Seattle I found myself next to two young and attractive ladies, the opportunity seemed to present itself.

A college kid on the far side of me struck up a conversation with the ladies, and found out that they had been in town for an Ultimate Frisbee tournament. College Boy also sprouted some facial growth, but his looked like the "I'm having too much fun to bother shaving" beard as opposed to my "I'm proving a point here" beard.

I placed my eyebrows into their most debonair position and flashed my least (but still partially) creepy smile. I then leaned forward, interrupting the frisbee conversation between College Boy and the ladies.

"I just spent the weekend playing frisbee golf with a bunch of drunk old guys," I interjected suavely, "And I don't mean to brag, but I came in second to last, sooooo, if you need any tips or anything, I'm here in..."

I glanced up at the seat row number.

"23C"

I nodded sexily and leaned back in my seat.

One of the ladies thanked me with her best Grandpa Smells Funny smile while the other one took pity on me and agreed that frisbee golf really is best played drunk.

I'm thinking that the beard loses 2-3, but at least I cock blocked College Boy.

Getting to the house on the San Juan Islands was an epic journey. I walked down to the train with my duffel bag and a backpack filled with densest things I could find in our home. I don't know what they make ceramic poker chips out of, but I think it's black holes. It was literally comically heavy. Perhaps the biggest laughs I got all weekend were when I asked someone else to pick up my backpack for me. (We'll never know whether that speaks more to the weight of the backpack or my comedic delivery.)

Anyway, I then took a train, then a bus, then a plane, then a couple of car rides. Then we slept for a few hours in a cheap hotel, then another car ride, a ferry ride, and one more car ride. We finally got to my buddy's house a couple hours ahead of schedule. The nine of us dropped our bags (mine thudded) and looked at each other.

"Beers?" asked Guy B.

It was 11:00 am.

And so it began. We cracked open our beers, toasted our arrival, and one of the guys authoritatively proclaimed "What happens in San Juan STAYS IN SAN JUAN!"

So, it is with great bravery that I break the Guy Code and tell you what happened in San Juan.

• Death defying frisbee golf!
• MLB copyright busting Wii Home Run Derbies!
• EXTREME WINE TASTING!
• Marriage vow destroying Scrabble games!
• Homo-erotic kayaking!
• All out, balls to the wall, no holds barred napping!

And about 10 poker tournaments. I guess this is what happens when your group consists of computer programmers and project managers in their 40s (one outlier in his 30s and one in his 50s). No whoring. No drugs.

Really, the only unwholesome thing we did was methodically drink through the 100 beers and 15 bottles of wine that we brought. That and frequent Would You Do conversations.

For example, Angelina Jolie was right near the top of my To Do list, but astonishingly I couldn't get consensus on her. Angelina freakin' Jolie!

On the other hand, I appeared to be the lone dissenter against Jessica Alba. Yes, she's pretty, but she has that vacant expression that is a complete turnoff. It would be like having sex with a mannequin. Also, she looks about 13.

Thankfully, violence was averted when consensus was reached on Scarlett Johansson and Halle Berry. I'm sure they're honored.

It's been Smart Ass city here in the San Juan Islands with my old work buddies from HP, which is a little slice of heaven for me. Trash talking and hard-time-giving comprise 50% of the conversation. Nostalgic stories (which usually involve hard-time-giving) fill up another 45%, and the final 5% of conversation is standard "How's work?" stuff. That's a satisfying ratio for me.

Two examples before I go run off to harass someone

1) The boys were sitting around watching pre-season football, which is unwatchable even by my standards. I mentally compared it to baseball and casually asked how old the oldest football player was in the National Football League. One guy offered up the name of a kicker in his 40s, and another guy mentioned that Brett Favre is 38 years old.

Me: Late 30s for a quarterback? Huh, so I'm not too old to play in the NFL.
Guy 1: Too old? Nah, you're not too old. Too small? Too slow? Yes.
Guy 2: Too weak! Too clumsy!
Guy 3: And too Jewy.

That may have been my favorite bit of banter from the day.

2) I have been dubbed "Lucky Pierre" due to my willingness to sit in the middle of the backseat during occasional outings. I never had a nickname before.

These guys must really like me.

You ever get one of those hairs that dangles down into the corner of your peripheral vision? You clumsily fumble for it with one of your grubby mitts but you come up empty. Eventually you examine yourself in the mirror to figure out where the wayward hair lurks.

Or maybe you feel like you've got something on your arm or leg, like perhaps a spider (the jumping kind!). You shriek girlishly and slap at your limbs.

That's what having a beard is like. I'm constantly thinking "Gah! There's something on my face!" Turns out, it's my crappy ass beard. Every time. Plus, there are other new beardly issues. Last night, after having a tasty dinner consisting mostly of pot stickers, it was time for me to take Daisy to Tae Kwon Do. I stopped by the bathroom mirror on the way out the door to check my beard.

"Just making sure there's no food in my beard!" I called out to Hank.

"Ewwwww!" screeched Hank.

"It's ok!" I yelled reassuringly, "There was NO food in there."

"Just the idea of food in the beard is disgusting! I hadn't even thought about your beard getting food in it. That is nasty!" she shuddered.

"It's not nasty. It's funny. I'd love to find a pot sticker hanging off my face. That's funny."

Hank was not amused. Daisy busted up. She gets me.

Anyways, tomorrow I depart for the Great Pacific Northwest, for an epic male-bonding trip. I'm bringing flannel shirts, poker chips, and the finest facial fur I've ever grown. I'm also bringing my laptop for surreptitious blogging. I can type very quietly.

What did I do all weekend?

Was it that good or that boring? Sadly, it's been a long time since I had a weekend whose memories were blocked by substance abuse rather than my brain attempting to shield itself from death by boredom. Not that I miss puking, but part of me thinks that I should puke from alcohol (or something else) at least once a year to stave off a complete descent into the pits of responsible living.

Hank is flirting with those very pits. Last year she threw out her back pretty well and was mostly horizontal for the better part of a week. Her doctor prescribed hardcore anti-inflammatories, muscle relaxants, and a big honkin' bottle of vicodin.

Vicodin is a weird drug. It's supposed to be a pain killer, but it doesn't really kill pain. It just makes you not really give a crap. You lay there, all glowy, and think, "Hey, the pain is still there. Who cares! Hi, pain!" Then you contemplate crafting together a sock puppet opera with pain as a minor character, but you never get off your ass to actually compose the score. I thoroughly enjoyed my time on vicodin 10 years ago when I broke my collarbone, but it was The Evil Liz who mastered the art of vicodin by creating the Liz Cocktail, wisely adding the missing ingredient: booze.

(Recipe:

1 pill Vicodin
1 glass wine

Enjoy!)

Anyway, so Hank had the honkin' bottle of Vicodin AND NEVER TOOK A SINGLE PILL. It's like I married a monk, a sexy monk who makes a mean margarita, but a monk nevertheless. That bottle still sits somewhere in our house, a monument to a life poorly lived.

Daisy had her big chance to live it up earlier this month. Hank took her in for a dental appointment and the dentist had recommended that she get some sort of sealant on her teeth. However, the application of the sealant involved a piece of equipment which engaged Daisy's very sensitive gag reflex. After a few attempts, the dentist recommended that we try a little "happy gas" to lubricate the process.

So, they busted out the nitrous and let Daisy breathe it in. After a short period of time, Daisy began to cry, screaming "It feels weird and tingly!".

That ended that.

Happy gas made her cry. Freaky. I may demand a paternity test on that child*.


* Just kidding, Daisy! I love you! Don't read blogs!

"Daddy, you should grow a beard."

I stared at her. This was maybe her worst idea yet.

First of all, I'm incapable of growing a beard in a reasonable amount of time. Although my hair is full and lush on places like my ass (Ladies, call me!), it's kind of patchy on my face. Second, I've got a few gray hairs poking out into my beard, and nothing screams "OLD MAN!" like a graying beard. Third, I haven't purposely changed anything about my appearance or wardrobe since I was old enough to dress myself. I see no reason to start now.

Basically, it would take me months to grow a respectable beard. During the interim, I'd look like a prematurely graying pubescent with horrible fashion sense.

"Ok," I replied.

It's been that kind of week. My personal projects, like the baseball program, have been going poorly. My favorite coworker, Pablo, is leaving me. I might as well grow a freaking beard.

"Whoa whoa whoa!" cried Hank. "Don't I get a say in this?"

"You've gotten a say in this for the last twelve... however long I've known you. It's Daisy's turn."

So, after 5 or 6 days, I've got this:


I know. Pathetic. That's why I've been beardless for the last several decades. Still, I may keep it around for a bit longer. On Wednesday of next week I'm departing for a long weekend with "the boys". After sitting in my mother in law's house for over a week earlier this month, I said to myself, "Self, you need a real vacation. And a crappy ass beard." So, I accepted an invitation to hang out with 9 old coworkers from Hewlett Packard, where we'll do man/geek/geezer stuff like play drunk frisbee golf for 4 days.

If I show up with the world's worst beard, at least it'll give us something to discuss.

Final random notes on the Vermont "vacation":

1) One day we used a ferry to cross a narrow portion of Lake Champlain to get to New York. My mother-in-law noted that some people use the ferry as part of their regular commute. After waiting 15 minutes for the ferry to arrive, and then another 10 minutes to travel the 1/3 mile distance across the lake, I asked the logical question.

"Mother in law, why don't they build a bridge here?"

"There's a bridge 30 miles north of here."

"Yeah, but maybe a bridge every 30 miles is correct. It would save people from driving an hour, right?" I asked "Wouldn't that make more sense that a ferry that only runs during daylight and rare Vermont good weather?"

"We like the ferry."

I know that "Freedom and Unity" is supposed to be Vermont's motto, but perhaps a better one would be "Inefficiency and Lake Champlain Infatuation and Maple Syrup Addiction". I'll contact Bernie Sanders.

2) There was a scale in my mother in law's house. I don't stand on scales often because no news is good news. I don't want to hear that I weigh less (less muscley!) or more (fatter!), so what are the odds that I weigh the exact same thing? Slim.

But, I'm a gambling man (as shown by the abysmal performance of my baseball blog), so I stepped on that bad boy. The digital display "spun" for several seconds computing force vectors and whatnot. It soon reached its conclusion and displayed...

"ERR"

Err? What the hell was err? Was I too fat or too skinny for the scale? Apparently my mother in law had purchased some sort of Heisenberg Uncertainty Scale. The mere act of measuring my weight made it unknowable. Awesome.

3) We made a trip to Walmart to purchase a fishing rod for Daisy. It was my first trip to a hunting/fishing department of a store.

It was surreal in there. Entire aisles of hooks. Purchasable ammo. Camouflage for days. I can't recall when I've felt more out of place. Is this how people from Kentucky feel when they walk into an SF gay porn shop?

Yesterday we threw a belated eighth birthday party for Daisy. We held it at a local ceramics studio, so the kids did a couple of different activities, including making something out of clay, and then glazing a pre-made item. In general, the party probably resembled an art class at her school more than it resembled a typical kid birthday party, but it was what she wanted. Daisy digs structure.

A couple of the boy attendees required a bit of coaxing to get into the ceramic spirit. One boy in particular cracked me up. At one point Hank was talking about the kiln (the clay oven), explaining it it gets super hot, even hotter than a kitchen oven. The boy hollered out, "Hot enough to melt.... TITANIUM?"

I had been doing my best to stay away from all the children. I figure that large groups of kids are really only a few neuron misfires away from going completely Lord of the Flies. The titanium question clearly required my expertise however.

I whipped out my trusty Treo and googled up the melting point of titanium. Turns out, it's about 3000 degrees Farenheit. I approached the kid and informed him that the kiln would be unable to melt his theoretical titanium. He stared at me intently, much more engaged in our conversation than in the clay activity.

"What about hot lava? Could hot lava melt titanium?" he asked eagerly.

I retreated out of the room again and fired up the Treo once more. Within a minute, I had his answer.

"Sorry, kid. Titanium melts at around 3000 degrees and hot lava only really gets up to about 2000. So, no, not even hot lava will melt titanium."

"Whoa!" he exclaimed, his eyes getting big, "So.... that means that we could build a TITANIUM SUBMARINE and then sail it through a sea of hot lava!"

I blinked at the titanium-obsessed child.

"Well, I guess so. We'd cook ourselves while piloting the sub, but the submarine would survive just fine."

The boy pondered this development while I made a hasty exit from the room. He found me a little while later and asked, "What if we let a titanium robot drive the sub?"

I blinked at him some more. It's how I cope.

"Ok. I guess that would work. Yes, a titanium robot could drive a titanium submarine through hot lava."

"NO!" he squealed with delight, "Only the OUTSIDE of the robot is made of titanium. The inside and all the wires would melt!"

The child hopped excitedly on one foot, thrilled to have trapped me inside his wet paper bag of a logic trap.

"Go do your clay, kid."

Check and mate. Grownups win every argument.

Anyway, the party went pretty well. My job was mostly to run errands during the festivities, a task that I am well suited for. Errand running and googling are two of my bestest skills.

After the kids did their clay activities, we brought out the ice cream and toppings, and made ice cream sundaes for the kids. Unfortunately, we didn't time this perfectly, because after they ate their sundaes, they still had about 20 minutes to kill before their parents showed up. So, these 15 kids, hopped up on their extreme sugar highs, vibrated their way into the ceramic studio show room AND BEGAN HANDLING ALL THE FRAGILE CERAMICS FOR SALE.

I nervously darted between packs of kids, imploring them to JUST LOOK at the pretty ceramics, all the while contemplating how inadequate the bull-in-a-china-shop metaphor was in this case. How about 15 bulls amped up on sprinkles and chocolate sauce? Now, that's a party.

Stunningly, we reattached all the kids to their parents before any of them broke anything. Unbelievable.

And that was Daisy's party.

Unless you're rich, if you're buying a home in San Francisco, there's something wrong with it. Maybe it's too small, or next door to a crack house, or perhaps it has a giant pimple. The housing market in San Francisco is just too expensive to allow regular folks to buy unflawed homes. (Average home price in SF is currently over $800,000).

The flaw in our house was the front hallway. It was sloped and had giant cement support footers protruding into the walk space. The floor and the footers were tiled with a hideous pink tile with wide, dark gray grout. It made a terrible first impression. You'd enter the house, walk down that hallway and wonder whether it was leading you to a basement or the town garbage dump. Instead, you'd arrive at the kitchen.

So, before we moved in, about 9 years ago, we had it remodeled. We had the floor re-poured, and the support structures shaved down and disguised. Then it was time to pick paint colors, not just for the hallway, but for most of the rooms in our house.

Hank and I agonized over the choices. We muddled through the choices for the bedrooms, but the right colors for the hallway eluded us. We're both engineers, used to making choices based on data and algorithms, so the very notion of a completely aesthetic decision was contrary to our abilities and nature.

Day after day, we'd make trips to various paint stores, buying small cans of paint to see how they looked on the wall. On one such trip to a local hardware store, the store owner recognized that I'd been there before.

"Trying more paint colors, eh?" he asked, "That's quite a few so far. I've seen worse than you though. I had one guy come in here and go through TWENTY different colors! Can you believe it? TWENTY!" He punctuated the comment with a snort.

I stopped in my tracks and mentally counted the number of paint quarts we had bought. The previous batch brought us up to 23.

"Ha ha", I agreed, laughing nervously. "I think we might be getting near that number."

"Oh no! Good god. Let's fix this."

The guy then led me to the back of the store where they had a paint color computer. He asked me what we didn't like about the last few paint colors we had tried, asking if they were too blue, or red, or whatever. Then, based on my answers, he suggested new paint colors that addressed our concerns. It was a surprisingly algorithmic approach, and soothed the savage engineer beast within. Mmmmm, data, reassuring data.

Sadly, this approach didn't yield goodness either. After nearly 30 different attempts, we finally caved and went with white. We picked some vague off-white for the walls, and then diamond white for the molding and ceiling. The one white really made the other white pop. We added to the whiteness by installing a crapload of halogens, turning a journey down the hallway into a near ethereal experience.

Hank has hated that hallway ever since. Me? I liked to pretend that a trip down the hallway was like ascending to the heavens. I'm pretty sure that's the closest I'll ever get to Heaven too, but at least ending up in my kitchen is better than the fiery pits of Hell, so it all works out ok for me.

Anyway, since our house is currently being partly destroyed by contractors, we figured we'd get some rooms repainted while we were in Vermont last week. We had hired a painter to paint Daisy's room a few weeks ago and he did a nice job, so we asked him to paint our bedroom, our kitchen ceiling, and the dreaded hallway in our absence. We didn't want to paint the whole house. Some rooms were in good shape, and there was even one wall in the kitchen where we actually liked the color. However, for the to-be-painted walls, this meant choosing paint colors again.

Hank isn't one to make the same mistake twice, so this time she threw some money at the problem. The architect who designed our new room has a pretty good aesthetic sense, so we asked her to help pick some colors for us. She came over the night before we left for Vermont, and asked us questions like "What do you want your house to say about you?"

Hank puzzled over this question, so I interjected my answer.

"I want this house to make people think that I'm nicer than I am. It should fool people into thinking that I'm all friendly and crap."

"Oooh yeah," agreed Hank, "Smarter too."

Somehow this train of conversation ended up evolving into something productive and I lost interest. I heard words like "warm" and "inviting" and they all sounded fine. Whatever. Once we were past the smart-ass part of the discussion, I had no value to add. Hank and the architect perused the architect's big book of paint colors and eventually settled on a set of colors for the various areas that were to be painted.

I had previously walked the painter through the house, pointing out what we needed done, but Hank followed up with an email, listing the detailed instructions of which rooms and walls to paint. She taped this description near our front door. Then, she took post-it notes and affixed one to every single surface in the hallway and kitchen that needed painting, labeled with the appropriate color code. It was thorough, bordering on overkill.

Then, we departed for Vermont. The painter swooped in later that week and... Jesus, I'm not sure what happened. I think he had a brain seizure.

He called Hank midway through the week, with a question about which color to paint one of the kitchen walls.

"Kitchen wall?" asked Hank. "Don't paint ANY kitchen walls. Just the ceiling in the kitchen."

Well, ha ha ha, as it turns out, the painter had already either painted or primed all the walls in the kitchen, INCLUDING COVERING UP THE ONE WALL IN THE HOUSE THAT WE ACTUALLY LIKED. Then, instead of painting our bedroom, he painted our guest room. Ho ho ho, incompetence is hilarious.

We got home last weekend and surveyed the damage. He mis-painted almost everything we asked for. There was really only one area that he painted correctly, the infamous hallway. Hank and I stared at it. We hated the colors.

As it turns out, choosing walls color based on one-inch by one-inch squares in a book is a crappy way of doing it. It's like picking a car by just peering through the keyhole. "Hey, this one looks good! Cozy! Metally!"

So, things are in a bit of disarray around here. Meanwhile, the contractors finally cut a hole in our living room and built a staircase into our new room. We're finally able to go into the framed and unfinished room and look around. It looks... uh.... small. I want to go to the contractor and say, "Nice work, but can you embigger it a little? Around the edges?"

This is why I shouldn't have nice things.