Message from outer space

You know in Sci fi movies where the character must don a spacesuit and take heavy equipment out into space to fix the outside of a space craft? They usually play some haunting piece of music interspersed with the sound of heavy breathing amidst overbearing silence. Want to recreate the scene? First take noise cancelling earplugs and attach to ears. Suddenly all you can hear is the sound of your breathing and the rustle of your clothes or skin against the plastic rod joining your ears. Now add a disposable dust mask. They are termed disposable because after doing nothing more effective than convincing you you can’t breathe, you tear them off (the staples always give way at this point anyway) and toss them away in disgust after finding your mouth and chin caked with plaster dust or sawdust.

So, today I visited outer space and sanded back all the plaster holes I filled yesterday. Just to keep it authentic every few minutes my faceplate would go blank so I couldn’t see any advancing danger (or the sander!). Why they haven’t invented safety goggles that don’t fog up when you wear them with a dust mask I don’t know?

Sanding done, I then broke out the roller and decoloured the ceilings of the new study, the hall and the bedroom. Strange how I didn’t notice until I started putting white on that they were all painted quarter mix of the colour of the walls. Suddenly the orangey pink of the bedroom and the yellow cream of the rest are much less 90’s. I also discovered that Teflon rollers are better than cheap ones and that I’m never ever going to paint the ceiling of more than one room per day! I had to pin the monitor to the ceiling to type this because I can’t move my neck any more 😉 Not to mention my arms feel like they have been torn out of my shoulders. I’m almost looking forward to pulling staples out of the floor tomorrow because it means I don’t have to look up!