Thanks to the budget cuts, I do not have a summer class. I have been using my time off to crank out books to sell on Amazon and to do a variety of DIY projects. Interestingly enough, I suspect that the value of the work I will do over the summer will exceed what I would have made while teaching.
Thanks to inhaling paint fumes for about two weeks, I am now prone to some writing rambles. I did, however, refresh my memory of painting and paints. I learned once again that paint adheres best to human skin. This has always surprised me a bit. After all, when you paint a surface, it is supposed to be dry, free of oils and so on. When I paint in Florida, my skin is far from dry and is rather oily. Yet, the damn latex paint just sticks and dries amazingly well on my skin. The very same paint that will peel up in the slightest moisture coming from wood will cling tenaciously to me over the course of a ten mile run in 90+ degree weather (I did this as a test). I am, of course, sweating like mad. After painting in a confined space, the fumes got me thinking that perhaps human skin should be vat grown and used as a wall covering. After I got some fresh air, I considered that maybe I should speak to a counselor about such ideas. Or a venture capitalist.
Speaking of bathrooms, I removed all the fixtures, towel racks and hooks when I painted. Some of these I replaced with new ones that came with handy paper templates. However, I had some hooks and other items that either did not come with templates or whose templates were long gone. Rather than marking my newly painted wall, I decided to make my own templates. While blank paper can be used for this, as a gaming nerd I realized that graph paper would be ideal for laying out a template. After all, it has a nice grid that makes it very easy to lay out where the holes should be drilled. So, I placed the hooks on the graph paper, lined them up, spaced them out, marked the holes and had a template. I used some painter’s tape to attach it to the wall, checked it with my level, drilled and installed. For those of you who are not math or gaming nerds, here is a pdf file of the graph paper I created using Freehand. Use it to create templates or dungeons.
