Technology, Innovation & Telecomm

Anyone who knows me will pretty much tell you that home-repair isn’t my strong suit. (take a look at “Defying the Laws of Physics” for some background.)

It isn’t so much that I can’t do it. Rather, it’s a matter of how long it takes me to get it done before it becomes more cost-effective to have someone else do the work…in something less than geological time scales.

So it came to pass that I was working on one of the closets in a bedroom of our house, repairing plaster. Our house is tiny…I mean it….tiny. Imagine then, what the size of a closet would be in a house so diminuitive and you get a decent mental picture of me working in it (a slight clue: I’m 6′.2″ and about 230 lbs.). Anyhow, I was using a spackling material to correct some minor chasms created by the gradual settling of that part of the structure over time. That stuff smells, let me tell you. In fact, I’m pretty sure it’s at least somewhat intoxicating. I know this because I found myself making the outlines of Mickey Mouse and other Disney characters in the stuff with my fingers and wondering just where my scraper was… The slight buzzing in my noggin’ should have been a clue, but I suppose that by the time the thought made its way forward in my consciousness, it was too late.

Eventually I did have enough sense to back out of the space and let my head clear. Coming back to it a day or so later, I was amused to find various cartoon characters’ images imprinted in the material that was supposed to have *fixed* the closet. I also noticed that I hadn’t even completely covered the spots that I meant to repair, meaning that the drywall mesh I was using was only partially covered in spackle, and there were some spots that weren’t even in need of repair with compound covering ‘em. Go figure.

Lesson learned: limit the time you spend with your head immersed in the vapors of a material that’s really intended to be used in spaces where air is actually flowing… I made my next passes at this in much shorter time periods and last I checked, the areas meant for repair were actually covered.

Now, if I could find that scraper…