Coasting in on fumes…

5 day recaps are a pain in the ass, just saying.

My mini-vaca started off with a bang July 4th with my timing the biggest 5K the running club puts on all year.  This race is always a huge pain in the ass for me because a large percentage of the runners sign up last minute on paper, I guess primarily because it is a holiday race that includes a lot of people from out of town.

Well we got HAMMERED with people walking up race morning to sign up.  It was madness.  I had a non-stop stream of applications getting piled on the table.  Thank goodness I had a guy helping me that is adept already at race environments.  In total we had almost 150 people walk up and register on the spot. It might have been the most walk ups I ever had to deal with.

Timing the race went relatively smoothly.  The worst part of it was when an 82 year old man collapsed from exhaustion about 10 yards from the finish line.  When he fell he ripped huge chunks of skin off his arm, it looked simply awful.  Paramedics came and cleaned him up.  I think he wound up just driving home.

After the race I went home and knocked out the post race stuff and then started working on some other things.  My hope as always was to get stuff chore shit cleared out to free up the rest of my time off.  In this case I wanted to allow myself time to do the bathroom painting project.

I decided against trying to see any live fireworks shows since I had the dogs still.  Quite often a lot of people that live around me will set off their own personal fireworks displays which scares the dogs.  I didn’t want to leave them home alone with nobody to come hide behind.  Ironically this year I didn’t really hear much commotion at all going on.

Wednesday night I finished up stripping all the stuff on the walls in the master bath to prep for it’s transformation.

Thursday I hit the project hard.  The first thing I had to do was fix the holes in the wall, especially the carnage left behind from pulling the shelves off the wall.  I first patched the holes with spackle and then hit the area with Kilz primer to cover up the glue stains that were left on the wall.  In retrospect I didn’t do a very good job at patching up the shelf area, luckily I later was able to somewhat conceal it with a picture.

Next up was the part of painting I really hate, masking. Unfortunately it is also the part of painting that makes the biggest difference in the final outcome.  Masking is tedious, detail work, something Ali is very good at, me, not so much.

I got busy, slowly plodding my way around the bathroom, masking off every edge there was. I probably spent over an hour laying blue tape. It sucked, plain and simple.

I had the bathroom window open because of the fumes from the Kilz. Without thinking, I taped the window area while it was still open, meaning it was staying open until I was done painting.  It also meant that a steady flow of warm, humid air was going to be making my work rather sweaty.

I started laying the paint down, first using the brush to do the corners and edges and then the roller to cover large amounts of wall real estate quickly.  I find painting with a roller to be relatively strenuous.  The textured surface and flat, shitty, original builders paint really required me to push the roller into the wall to get good coverage.  I worked myself into a decent sweat in a short period of time.

All in all I worked on the bathroom for probably 6 or 7 hours on Thursday.  By Thursday night I was yanking off the tape and starting to put stuff back together.

At first when I just had bare walls, but bare walls of a different color, I was a bit underwhelmed.  I thought the color looked good but I wasn’t real excited about it.

On Friday I came up with a few items that I thought might complement the bathroom.

The first stop was Bed, Bath & Beyond where I got new dark brown bath mats, a dark brown shower rod and a shower curtain that actually had the three main colors of the room in it, white, dark brown and the tan on the walls.  If you know me well, you know the fact that I actually picked out some complimentary accessories is a minor miracle.

The second stop was at Michaels, the craft place.  We have had an old print of Tiger Tail Beach in Marco Island for years, it has sat unused, propped against a wall in the hobby room.  I just happened to notice that the colors in the picture would actually complement the color on the walls.

This was a large poster style print print that had a large white border.  Well they did not have a frame with those dimensions but they did have a 12 x 36 frame that caught my eye.   I knew that was a little narrower than the image on the print but I estimated I could trim it to size and keep the core of the shot.

So when I got home I used the paper insert in the frame as a template and cut the guts out of my beach print.  It actually worked out perfectly.  I hung the picture on the wall where the old shitty looking shelves lived.  It looked quite nice hanging there and also served a dual functionality of covering up most of my less than stellar patch work.

Once I had everything back together and all the new stuff in place this is what I wound up with.  Now it looked like a transformed room.  Now I was pleased with the fruits of my labor.  Now I dreaded doing the entire thing over again in the master bedroom.

Here are all the pictures from the project.

On Saturday I got up and did a sweaty 7 miles.  I really ran it pretty hard.  If I didn’t slow down early on to talk to a few people for a few minutes I may have been able to cover the distance in less than an hour.

I also needed to clean, especially the freshly painted bathroom that had grime and grit in various spots.

The rest of the weekend was pretty laid back for me since the dreaded painting was done and the chores were handled.

I did have a bad Saturday night.  I woke up at 3:15am and absolutely had no shot of falling back asleep.  So instead I pop out of bed and do stuff.  I never paid my bills or washed the sheets before at 3:45 am so I guess I can check that off my bucket list.

On Sunday morning I met up with a running club buddy for a long bike ride (for me) of 25+ miles.

After that I ran a little less than 3 miles with him.  By the time we were done I was totally out of gas.  After running the day before and basically being up most of the night I felt horrible.  I slowly pedaled back to the water park where I had originally planned to get some laps in.  I unceremoniously said “Fck that”, and hopped in the truck to go home.  I almost felt like my blood sugar was dangerously low.

I got home and stuffed a ton of food in my mouth.  After that I laid down and thankfully got a couple hour nap in, boy did I need it.

Sunday night I decided to go see the new Spiderman and treat myself to a delicious and nutritious movie theater dinner of pizza, M&M’s and a Diet Coke.

I enjoyed the flick but it didn’t blow me away.  It was interesting how they changed certain aspects of the evolution of Spiderman.  If push comes to shove I would still take Toby’s version of the series.  I’d give this iteration a B+ which is kind of low on the super hero movie scale for me.