A Christmas Miracle?

At 5:15 pm last Friday, my son got a call from his retail employer that we missed. By the time I saw that his workplace had called it was a good hour later. Now had I taken the call, I probably would have awakened him. But since no message was left, and since he was asleep and I thought he probably needed to sleep before his shift that night, and the general consensus was that we should just let him sleep, we did not wake him up to call into work and see the reason for their earlier call.

When my son got to work last Friday night, he was informed that he was fired. He had the option of working his shift if he wanted, or he could go home immediately, but his 90-day temporary position, and that of others as well, was being cut - effective immediately, only about 60 days into the 90-day period everyone had expected. Aside from the fact that it was a surprise, in general, we were really shocked that people who worked the night shift would be called, when most were likely sleeping, and informed that they were to be cut loose, effective immediately, over the phone. That would be like a person working the day shift who normally gets up for work between 6 & 7 a.m. getting a call at 2 or 3 o'clock in the morning and being told they were fired - a bit shocking really.

Now I understand about the business end of the situation, but I'm not going to get into it here. That's not the focus of this post. No, the focus of this post is on the human aspect of this situation. We were really surprised our son was let go. Almost every morning upon his return home from work, he would inform us of something one of his managers had said to compliment him on his work. That Saturday morning when he returned with the news of his firing, he said that the managers were upset and that one had offered to write him letters of recommendation to the management at some of the other stores in the area. I truly believed that if they were as complimentary of him as he said they were and were that eager to write letters of recommendation, that they wouldn't want to let my son go. I wouldn't have been surprised if they had asked him to come back to work for them. I just didn't expect it to happen so soon!!!

This afternoon, he got a call from the retailer's HR department at the store he had been working at up until last Saturday morning. They have asked him to come back to work as a permanent part-time employee. This is not where he envisioned himself working after completing college, but it beats being unemployed, and it's nice to know you are wanted and appreciated. Hard work pays off. He starts again tomorrow night. I hope some of the other temporary employees were hired back too.

I'm feeling a little crabby at the moment, and what do I do? BLOG! Of course! I've been spending the last few days trying to finish the painting job in the dining room that I hired a painter to take over for me when I couldn't get it done after I'd gotten the room all taped off before my surgery. I have been frustrated by the seam created by the vertical line of separation that we had to create on the wall where the dining room meets the adjoining hallway. Unfortunately, when I took off the tape (at the appointed time) that was used to separate the two spaces, it also began to peel the paint off the wall near the point where the wall meets an arch. It pulled in another spot too, but I was able to salvage that. The part at the wall pulled and tore. After the fact, I was able to determine that it was because the painter used only the regular wall primer I had purchased as a base over the joint compound he had put on the wall to correct some imperfections that a painter hired by the builder had previously left behind.... *frustrated sigh* A primer designed to adhere to any surface (like Zinsser's) would have been the better option for the base coat over the joint compound, and I even had some available that could have been used.

I'm kind of irritated about the whole thing now. I know the guy had a lot of personal issues to deal with last week, and I am grateful that he was able to paint for me. Overall, he did a decent job. But the parts he didn't do decently are really nagging at me. I ended up patching and resanding the wall, and it didn't look great despite my time and effort. I like perfection; I can't seem to get it. When I took the tape down that I had put up to facilitate the repainting, it pulled the paint from the arch. Apparently, the joint compound extended further than I knew. I had to use a utility knife to cut the tape in an effort to minimize the damage, but it didn't help much. The paint on the arch peeled away & bubbled. I couldn't get it to lay back down, and I didn't want to have to sand the whole thing and start from scratch either. I did the only sensible thing I could think of the try to get the semi-wet paint to adhere to the wall: I got a glue stick and glued it down.

I was hoping the glue would be tacky enough to cover the joint compound and hold the loose paint edges that had peeled up against the wall's surface. It appeared to work. I went over it with a paint brush hoping that would provide further sealing coverage on the edges. At the moment it is drying, and I am "cooling off" as I write. I'm still pretty irritable. My thoughts range from thinking I should have just painted the whole hallway the eggplant color from the start, and considering that as a future option, to thinking about hiring someone to just come in and redo the whole arch for me, and maybe open up the doorway & remake it so that it has a defined boundary wall rather than the common wall now shared with the hallway. That would have been the SMART thing to do, but I didn't have a smart builder to begin with, so that is expecting too much and entering the realm of fantasy. If I just painted the whole hallway the eggplant color, I think putting a huge mirror on the wall in the hall to reflect additional light would be a good solution. I can see it in my mind. It almost works. It is an idea I would have to sell to the hubster though.

I have this nagging thought that I'm going to end up redoing that whole arch and section of wall from one end of the hall to the other end in the dining room. I just think that the places where the plain wall primer and paint met the joint compound aren't really going to work, and I am going to end up doing a major overhaul involving much sanding, and then repainting the whole thing because the paint I have left isn't going to be enough and won't match up exactly with the dye lot of the original batch of paint that went on the walls. This is not quite the way I envisioned the end of this project....it's sort of like the "Groundhog Day" (think of the movie) of painting. BOO - HISS!

The Rain Cometh...

Just checked the radar, and a ring of rain is shown as approaching. It looks something like "the blob," gradually approaching and overtaking white space on the map as it moves ever closer.

We didn't have the chicken stew and biscuits I'd planned to make last night. We went to "Plan B." I'm kind of glad. I think the chicken stew & buttermilk biscuits will somehow taste better on a cool stormy night.

Today I want to put the paint on the wall over the primer I put on it, yesterday, so I can get my dining room in order - finally! It's been a long time coming. The challenge is getting the line straight on the wall as I have an odd long wall that connects the dining room with a hallway to the kitchen, and I opted not to carry the dining room paint color all the way across the long wall because it is such a deep dark color [Eddie Bauer's Tannin (buy it at Lowes), but we call it "Eggplant" because it has a purplish hue, and after all, I don't like the color purple, so it's "Eggplant." Humor me.]. If it had been solely up to me, I probably would have done it, but the hubster thought it would be too dark for the hallway part of the wall. I am a little disappointed that the wall isn't as "clean" as I'd like it. Between the builder's lack of expertise and the painter's corrections and lapse in not putting the plain, sticks to everything, primer on the joint compound he put on the wall to make the corrections before he primed and painted the wall, the wall doesn't have as smooth a finish as I'd like. I did what I could to clean it up though. It'll do for now, but it'll look a LOT better when I get the paint on over the primer.