First of all, Mark, dearest husband and focus of all my affections 
on this, Valentine’s Day, if you read this before seeing me in person, please sit down and try not to hyperventilate.
Massive storms are slamming the East Coast, as you know if you have watched the weather channel recently. I believe we had a debilitating 4 inches or so of snow.
It did not shock me, then, that Montgomery County Schools closed.
Again.
With church programming cancelled today (and some actually pretty slick roadways), I thought it might be a perfect day to take care of some of those around-the-house jobs I’ve been putting off for four years.
One of the jobs on my list is repainting the front of the steps.
See, the fronts of the steps on the inside stairs going up to the second level of the house are painted a very dark gray/blue. 
Over the years we have nicked the paint with our shoes going up and down and it has always bothered me.
How fortuitous, then, that when I happened to be in the basement this morning and found an entire gallon of oil-based porch paint in the exact color of the front of the steps. Touching up the paint . . . FINALLY . . . would be one task I accomplish today, I told myself.
And I did.
Boy, did I.
Wisely determining that the job was a small one and I could save on clean up if I just brought the whole gallon of paint up the stairs (oil-based paint, you know . . . yuck), I took a small brush, dipped it into the paint I had previously stirred and touched up the nicks.
It looked great, but I thought one more little touch up would finish it off, so I decided to let the paint dry a few minutes then come back and touch up again.
I had a few minutes, then, to get another long-overdue task accomplished and I knew just the one: the portable baby crib in our attic had to go. Really. There are no more babies here and will not ever be again, amen. Since Sam is now 8, our regular use of the portable baby crib has significantly declined. Time for it to GO!
And as I got busy clearing out the crib, that’s when it happened.
You know how people always talk about watching horrible events happen in slow motion? I never knew quite what they meant until now. It seemed like just a few seconds stretched into hours as I felt the crib slip, crash down the stairs and hit the open gallon of paint sitting on the top step.
You can probably imagine the scene that followed, and your imagination may be aided by further explanation that the stairs themselves are finished wood on the top of each step and the walls on the stairway . . . well, a light yellow.
It was a surreal Jackson Pollock/Freddy Krueger sort of experience, I have to say, and the following hour and a half in this house was, well, rather stressful.
(Let’s just say we are now a little short on bath towels.)
I think we got most of it cleaned up, though that light yellow, while not quite green, will certainly need repainting. The fronts of the steps are now, not just touched up, but completely “repainted”—no more nicks! And the wood grain . . . well, I would say it has a little more depth to it.
And, if blood was blue, you might think I had committed a heinous murder and failed in my attempts to wash both of my arms up to the elbows.
Oil-based paint, you know.
