Thursday, January 20, 2011

Blood on My Hands

The leaky roof is plugged.  I think.  I cleaned the surface until I got tired, cranky and bloody, then slapped on a coat of exterior primer paint.  "Dries in an hour."  Fat chance.

But that's over.  I peeled and stuck the Peel & Seal, but in much smaller pieces than I had planned.  That's because a nice flat sheet of very sticky roofing stuff does not fit very well into the joint where the roof goes ^ and the side of  the house goes |. Kind of like trying to wallpaper the inside of a basketball.  So I chopped the stuff into wedges and jammed them into the parts that go < and > and ~.

 Then, taking my cue from good ol' Uncle Bud, I squirted bathtub caulk all over the whole mess and went inside for a beer.

A couple of years ago I was shopping in some auto parts mega-store, and they were practically giving away hand cleaner.  (Stay with me; I'll link this up in a minute.)  So I bought a couple of buckets of GoJo Cherry goop with Pumice.  I knew that someday I would need to get a whole lot of bathtub caulk off my hands.  (See how neatly that links up?)   I want to focus on the word "Cherry."  The stuff is red - blood red - and smells like King Kong poop after a three-day cherry binge.  I rubbed it on my caulky hands anyway.

GoJo Cherry doesn't actually remove bathtub caulk from anything.  It just moves it around into a thin film of poopy goop - waterproof poopy goop that lasts forever.  Plus, my hands were now covered in pseudo-blood.  Very convincing pseudo-blood.  No matter how much you rinse, some goop and some pseudo-blood always remain.  Think Lady Macbeth.

None of this was much of a problem until I wiped my hands on one of my wife's clean towels.

Newt

2 comments: