Mud Fence Creations | Conni Delinger
I am a recent transplant to Stanton, and I have been invited to share my humor column with our readers. I will be writing approximately once a month, and I look forward to your feedback. If you enjoy it, please tell the publisher; if you do not enjoy it, please tell me!
I am a very independent woman, capable of doing just about anything to which I set my mind, including home maintenance. I have a huge detached garage at my California home. The original garage was converted to a living room before I bought the house, and the previous owners built RV parking in the back, as well as a huge garage, with workbenches all around.
That was one of the most treasured features when I bought my home. Since my cars seldom see the inside of a garage, I refer to this behemoth as my “barn.”
One hot summer day a couple years ago, I decided to paint the barn. My house is bright yellow, so I painted the barn, and the metal shed, to match. I forget all the other dramas that occurred that hot summer day, but I was about to finish for the day, so I was holding the 5-gallon bucket of bright yellow paint, still about 1/3-full, in one hand as I descended the ladder.
I missed that step by a country mile, lost my balance, and dropped the bucket of paint from a couple rungs up. It dropped straight down, which shot the paint straight up - right into my hair, dripping down my shoulders, all the way to my legs - gave new meaning to ‘bottle blond’. As the paint came up, I came down, stepping firmly into - yep - the bucket of paint, up to my ankle. Now I was dripping from both ends! I got sort of washed off with a hose, and headed to the house to shower.
As I was shampooing my hair, repeatedly, I slipped in the tub, grabbing everything I could reach to stay upright. The shower rod came down, with the curtain, entangling me in lots of cold, wet fabric, and smearing more paint.
I now had shampoo in my eyes and, as I slipped, I slammed my foot into the end of the tub, jamming several toes to a lovely shade of black. In addition, I dropped the razor off the shower shelf and - hold on - stepped on the razor with my non-jammed foot, slicing my little toe. However, because of the shampoo streaming in my eyes, mixing with the tears, and my inability to balance due to the jammed toes, I could not find the darned razor to pick it up, so I stepped on it a second time - with the jammed toes!
By this time, I was beyond redemption, and I ended up falling all the way down into the tub, thus busting my backside AND my pride the rest of the way! The tub was very new, and very slippery, and I fell three times in the first few months I lived here. I now use a full-length rubber mat, I have a screwed-in curtain rod, rather than the tension rod kind, and I take the phone into the bathroom for the 911 calls!
Eventually, I had to return to the outdoor disaster scene, where I found many yellow flagstones beyond hope of cleaning, as well as lots of doggie footprints - also yellow. Fortunately, these did not extend into the house and the aggregate floors (I saved that party for the burgundy living room paint job a year later!).
Yep, just another day in paradise…
Conni Delinger lives in Stanton. A business woman, she also is a freelance writer. Her column will appear monthly in The Express. You can reach her at mudfencecreations@yahoo.com.