Well, I’ve had a couple requests for a story, so I decided to expound on an instance that I’ve already mentioned a few times… the doors.

Normally when you talk about doors, you’re talking about nice, flat, rectangular objects with a knob and a couple hinges that attach to the door frame. Well you haven’t met my doors. Maybe I should tell this from the beginning…

It was my first real workday at camp. We had two weeks until the first of seven weeks of camp was to begin. This was our time to do anything that needed to be done before campers and staff showed up. TJ and Rachel had just arrived, and we were all getting ready for a day of work. I wasn’t around when TJ and Rachel were assigned some jobs to do, but when I walked down to the barn, I noticed the pretty girl around camp (Rachel) was getting ready to (or receiving instruction on how to) spraypaint some doors.

This is about where you came in. See, these were not “Come and paint me, for I am willing” doors. These four doors were double-folding, fancily slotted “Point that spraypaint at me and I will eat your children” doors. Now, we won’t go into why I decided to help Rachel… suffice it to say that I had no children for the doors to eat, and really wasn’t too afraid of any long-term effects they may have on me.

Normally one does not think of sore wrists, tired arms, and horrible-looking blotchy paint jobs when you think of spraypaint. Most people think of it as a simple and effective method of changing the color of an object. They’re wrong. We went through 8 cans of primer and 8 cans of white paint before we had two of these freakishly over-elaborate doors painted… and I use the word “painted” loosely. And our wrists were aching, and our arms were throbbing. But we were both feeling pretty good, seeing as how we were floating on a hazy cloud of spraypaint inhalation… “Higher than a kite” to borrow the colloquialism.

I distictly remember, shortly after can number 8 of primer, getting on the radio to ask Lori how important primer was, since we had just run out. She basically told me it would be fine if I went extra thick with the paint. What’s the worst that could happen, it couldn’t look any worse than the rest of our stupid paint job. And it didn’t. All in all, if you’re standing far enough away, in poor light, the doors look pretty good. But beyond that is pushing it.

So, what was the point of painting these doors this week? Well, we needed them for the hotel rooms they had remodeled before we got there. So, after the disaster that was our painting, the doors just kinda sat there, and on the Saturday between weeks 4 and 5 (more than halfway through the summer of camp), Rachel and I laughed at the fact that all four doors were still sitting in the barn, two poorly painted, two unpainted, waiting for someone who perhaps knows a little more about painting. No doubt the two doors whos color we did “artistically alter” will be repainted when the other two get done, leaving our hours of laughing crying and painting virtually in vain.

On the flip-side, however, this was the first time Rachel and I really spent any time together. So I suppose there was a purpose in all of this after all. 🙂

Well… Hasta Lasagna.

This entry was posted on Friday, August 26th, 2005 at 4:57 pm and is filed under Babblings, Rachel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.