After work today, I went to the paint shop in Chinatown to get some purple paint. But the shop was shut, so I went down to HarbourFront and bought a can of purple spray paint, a big plastic sheet and some sanding sponges.
Sanding sponges are a wonderful new invention I’d never encountered before. If you are going to paint a surface, you need to abrade it first to provide a good key for the paint to stick to. I used to have to either wrap a block of wood with sandpaper to make it easier to hold, or just rub at the surface holding the sandpaper barehanded.
I have a lack of blocks of wood conveniently lying around the flat, and just scraping something down with a bit of sandpaper in your fist leads to cramping, whereas 3M, bless their little Post-It note manufacturing Minnesotan geniuses, have found a way to make something the size and texture of a Brillo pad, in four different grades of abrasiveness.
So I sanded down the chair, then clipped the plastic sheet to the railings outside our front door, and sprayed La Serpiente’s chair as purple as I could.
Spray paint really stinks, and I was worried I’d inadvertently get high huffing purple fumes, but I coated most of the chair with paint, then retreated inside the flat to shelter from the stench. I still had picture hooks to stick to the walls, and the instructions for those stipulated cleaning the surface with rubbing alcohol first.
Now the inside of the flat stank of booze (I thought pure alcohol was meant to be odourless) and the outside of paint. Can’t go forward, can’t go backward.
After all this, the only thing left to do was to read some more of Narconomics, a fascinating read about the economics and working practices of drug cartels, and then watch an episode of Breaking Bad, where for the first time I realised that La Serpiente’s purple fixation is matched by that of Walter White’s sister-in-law. So, that’s one way for the future to work itself out.