Sunday, June 15, 2008

Tickled pink about blue

As is the custom around our house, when the sun shines, as yesterday and today, the little chores which owning a house entails are addressed (one at a time, of course). One of the repetitive chores is repainting those areas in which the last paint job has deteriorated. Accordingly, on the instructions of the boss, the last couple of nice weekends have been dedicated to power wash the back yard (mostly concrete slabs) and to power wash and thereby strip the old flaking paint off the front stairs.


I did a bit of that "stair stripping" yesterday - in preparation for painting today. Our daughter-in-law (who really likes the colour blue and who painted the stairs three or four years ago in that colour) and our son, who live in the other half of the duplex, volunteered to do the painting again. After painting our stairs, our daughter-in-law used our power washer to basically eradicate whatever paint remained on the stairs on their side. She finished our side today - I consider that a wonderful fathers' day present. I also had a very nice card from our granddaughters - what a beautiful feeling to have a loving family. Thank you, Aidrie, Derek, Marina, and Lauren.
An update: Derek, Airdrie, Marina and Lauren took both my wife and me out for Fathers' Day dinner at the local Keg Restaurant. We all had a wonderful dinner. Thank you again.
Here's what our stairs look like, newly painted:









(photo by Derek)

The paint stripping is the time-consuming part of this effort. Here's how that looked:















(photo by Derek)



Just as an aside, looking at the stripped paint more closely, I'm reminded of the images which one can create to illustrate the underlying effects of chaos theory:
The flaked paint on the stairs.








(photo by Derek)




A closeup.


















Chaos-theory computer-generated image.
(from "Chaos" making a new science - James Gleick, Penguin Books, 1987)


This makes me think that deterioration is a chaotic process.

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