I possibly incurred the wrath of my new HOA; I painted my fence today. It was on “the list” that I started writing down over the last few days of exploring the house. After a home inspector noted my fence in Mesa was hanging together by some old dead tree fiber and paint boogers, and it had been about 8 years since i weatherproofed it, I couldn’t not notice that about 2/3ds of the fences in the neighborhood were painted, and i couldn’t not notice none of them in the new neighborhood were, and mine was looking like about a 10 year old fence instead of a 3 year old one already.

I spent a mere 1.5 hrs at work today and had to get home to ignore the kids and blow off work and obsess over the chaos surrounding me. After 10 nonstop hours patching and painting the Mesa house yesterday, much of it locked in the white master closet painting it white and inhaling paint fumes, avoiding some of the mistakes in that house was on my mind. So i sorted through all the leftover cans and tried to match them to swatches, which led to me replacing the water filter on the fridge, which led to me disassembling and servicing the splash pad, which led to a dog door, which led to insulation for the garage, which led to painting the fence. There is a line through all this, a ginormous 4 lane highway like the Loop 101, but I’m too tired to follow it. The last few days of non-stop tasks and time-sensitive milestones have left me numb. And I have lost all faith in the orderly conduct of packing and unpacking when i can’t find my cell phone charger or a pair of clean socks. Beckie is obsessed with unpacking, fortunately. Such endeavors are too vague and subjective for me, I need minor victories for motivation.

Amazingly, I lost not one of 30 bolts or 30 nuts used to hold the slats in place, even with Genevieve and Alana helping me. G’s help goes like this: ask if she can help, get dressed in the old t-shirt i had moment before been wearing, wield a brush dripping paint like grease from bacon, amazingly take and follow instructions, paint almost 1 side of 1 coat of 3 out of 10 slats, declare she wants to return to her movie, run through the house a Bark Mulch 8374M-colored sprite. Alana’s help goes like this: take every single shiny piece out of my ratchet set, especially the small ones. I was a little worried, but there’s nothing smaller than 4mm so i was pretty confident i could pull it out of her throat as needed. She faced much greater risk earlier trying to crawl through all the chemicals and cleansers under the sink.