rex l. camino vs. the dreaded manuel labor

I have spent the past couple weekends helping my brother in law paint the inside of his newly constructed house. It wouldn’t be so bad except for the ceilings. I’d rather paint four walls than a ceiling any day. It kills your arm and back, and the natural tendency is to get right underneath the roller, as it is the closest one can get to a gravitational advantage. The problem with this is that the paint will drip and cover more of the painter than the ceiling. Then you sometimes ingest the stuff, getting a pit of the latex primer to coat the insides and render one a bit loopy for the next few hours. In the midst of this I paused and took this shot, thinking it artistic at the time.

Indeed, it was a bad trip. For the next few hours I was mellow and fine, but later found myself getting up at intervals in the night—creeping slowly to my closet each time in the hopes of busting in to find little people in the act of cobbling my shoes.

It is a nice house though. What you’re seeing is the view from the back. It is set in the middle of former pastureland with plenty of pastureland left all around them. Right now it is sort of a stark landscape but certainly more aesthetic than any number of cookie cutter neighborhoods. Houses in this context always remind me of Rock Hudson and Liz Taylor’s Place in “Giant”.

Maybe not. But there is something creepy about having all the cows around. Across the street and just behind them is nothing but fenced in hills and herds milling about. There is a fenced in strip of land running just beside the house so the cattle can mill about along the roadside for some reason. It should be a strange moment the first time he cooks some steaks on the back deck.