"Now the Sheriff is dead, the mayor is running a brothel and the minister is a drunk. My kind of town!" Big Smith, The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr

Proof that watching paint dry is still more exciting than watching the NBA.

During the summer, I attempted to convey the furious urgency of our work to prepare for winter. If it was outside the house and wasn’t done, it was going to be very difficult to do when it started to get chilly out. That’s because:

Frozen paint doesn’t dry very well.
It’s hard to pour asphalt at -20F.
My beer forms beer slush when it’s too cold out.

Those things make it just intolerable to work outside.

I got most of the things that I had planned on doing done. That was a good feeling. July was the turning point – the point where we felt we were getting ahead of the game. Now, as the temperatures first fall farther than the approval rating of a President named ‘Bush’ after an invasion of Iraq, I’m basking in a month or so of relaxation. I’m not pushing it.

Soon, though, we’ll embark on an entirely new batch of projects around the house, but those will be inside projects, interior renovation.

I started on those last winter, and finished most of the ones that I’d planned. These projects are nice, since they give you goals and things to do as the days grow ever shorter, other than go mad in a fit of drunken cabin fever and begin carving pictures of former Attorney General Janet Reno eating coffee cake on your body to relieve the boredom with a machete from Raiders of the Lost Ark that you got on E-Bay. I don’t want to do that (I’m out of room after carving that likeness of Strom Thurmond riding a Harley on my thigh), so we have projects.

Not that this place doesn’t need them anyway.

Now, when I’m talking projects, I’m talking ones that will make our house nicer. My buddy Oz talks about a house near where I grew up where the owner, confined to a series of very long and exceptionally cold winters, undertook interior building projects every winter. The result was a chain of rooms, each one more filled with beer cans and more inexpertly and strangely finished than the last (like evolution in reverse), linked in odd ways (going through the closet of one room to get into the next room) so that you had to walk through multiple bedrooms to get to a garage. This may not be exactly correct, Oz, but I’m attempting to give the sense of drunken winter carpentry gone wild over the course of years.

Fortunately, The Mrs. and I work well together on projects. She’s quite handy, and we actually enjoy each other’s company and rarely get into Three Stooges-type comic mayhem where The Mrs. ends up eating pancakes that I inadvertently made of drywall mud and retaliating by hitting me in the forehead with a hammer with the satisfying moderately high-pitched “bonk” sound.

But, all of that is in the future. Today I’m having a bit of coffee before we head out to an adventure of some sort, since the weather is more than warm enough (10F!) for playing outside.

What magical adventure will we embark on in the frozen north? Will we ski? Will we ride a snow machine into the wilderness? Will we mush a dog team through the frozen tundra? Will we go drill in ANWR just for the heck of it?

No, none of those things. We have a baby.

We have to go to the store, to buy formula and diapers. And beer. I’m getting ready to start working on the basement . . . and I don’t want the walls to be too straight.