Glue for brains

I got the bright idea Friday night that I might start a major remodeling project, since I was feeling rotten. I believe I wrote briefly about yanking out the metal trim in the bathroom. Well, I got carried away in there. Saturday I went to Lowes and bought wallpaper-removing crud, and came home and attempted to remove the wallpaper. What did I discover? The bathroom wasn't wallpapered. It was just rotten old nasty paint that peeled back in enough places to make it look like it was painted-over wallpaper. When did I discover this? After I used the wallpaper scoring tool and had put wallpaper removal gunk all over the walls, getting high from the fumes and giving myself a headache in the process.

In case I have not made it clear by now, I am a genius.

My bathroom is a fucking jizzaster. I mean it is really...it is really a mess. I am half-laughing as I write this because it is such a mess. It's like a gang of bipolar rats live in there.

I spent a lot of time yesterday peeling off nasty old paint. I've got this thing where, even if something is the wrong thing to do, once I get started on it I have a hard time stopping doing it. It might not be best to be peeling this paint back and exposing the wallboard, but it's all been scored with holes from the wallpaper scorer, so it's got to come off now. And so I obsessively pick and peel and chip at it. In some places, it comes off easily with maybe the first layer or two of cardboardy gunk that makes up the old wallboard, but in some places, apparently someone who owned this house before us had used some glue under the paint to put up some plastic paneling. (I have no idea how, or why, or the sequence of events that would cause there to be glue, then paint, but paneling...on top of the paint? Shit.) Needless to say, the old nasty paint doesn't want to come off the gluey parts.

This is coming out in a weird order. I have inhaled too much chemical and dust and crud in there this weekend. I'm coming to the conclusion that everyone who owned this house prior to us conspired against us to make our lives miserable.

Well, that might be a little dramatic and all, but still.

I don't know why I get myself into these things. I should have left well enough alone. But nooooo. I gotta go and be all -I'm miserable so I might as well rip out wallpaper- about it.

To make a long, boring story short, my brother has graciously assented to let us borrow his belt sander, and I'm going to attempt to fix the mess at some point this week. God. I'm just laughing when I think about it. What a mess. There are gooey bits of wet, peeled paint with wallboard stuck to it flaked all over the floor, plus all the fuzzies we've been sanding off the wall by hand where we've gotten large chunks of paint off. We have one and a half bathrooms, and of course this is the one with the shower in it, and the shower curtain is on the floor in the spare room at the mo, so when I got fed up with being funky this afternoon and took a desperation shower, it compounded the mess. The thing is, I am just not in the frame of mind to deal with this right now. I am a little off and have been for about three or four days. I need to get back on so I can deal with this.

I thought this morning when I got up that I'd go for a skate to clear my head. It rained some more yesterday and the air is cooler today, only in the mid-eighties, so I drove out to Miami Whitewater. When I got there I realized I'd forgotten to use the Advair this morning, probably because it wasn't in its usual place in the bathroom since the medicine cabinet is now leaning against the bed in the spare room. I had my Albuterol though so I figured I'd be fine, could just use that if I had an asthma attack. Of course I had an asthma attack about four miles in, and the Albuterol didn't really cut it. I didn't realize how much that Advair was helping until today, when I honestly thought I was going to pass out on the trail. It scared me; my knees were not under my control and I thought they were just gonna plop out. I had to lean over under a tree for a long time. Thought I was gonna puke too. That sucked. Also, I brought my camera out there with me thinking I'd take some pics since it's so beautiful out there but when I got out on the trail and turned the camera on it said "no memory card."

That's what my brain feels like. No memory card.