Dogs!!!!

I love dogs, really I do. This morning dogs have been an annoyance though, not necessarily through any fault of their own; they are just being dogs. My first encounter with an annoying dog, being itself, was finding the neighbor from up the street's dachshund rooting through my other neighbor's recyclables. I yelled at the dog once but it ignored me. I did find it amusing that it appeared at one point as if the dog was putting a cup it had been chewing on back in the recycling bin. Overall, seeing the dog rooting through trash and chewing on wadded up aluminum foil was too much though. I not only had visions of all of the trash ending up blown into my yard, but I had concerns about the dog getting a bowel obstruction, internal bleeding, or some other malady in addition to concerns that it could get run over by the trash truck, or someone in a hurry to get to work.

I thought about taking the dog home to its owners, but I suspected that they probably weren't dressed, and that was why their dog was running loose, and I don't get the impression that we are on the best of terms with them anyway (I'm not entirely sure why, but I have an idea...most likely just differences and probably misunderstandings; more on their part than ours, I suspect.). I deferred taking the dog home to the owners because I didn't feel like initiating more conflict and getting in their face first thing on a Monday morning. I did chase the dog away from the trash it was exploring, however, and then started walking/herding it toward home. When it looked like it might try to take a meandering path and go somewhere else, I picked the dog up and carried to almost to its front door. I have no idea if the owners will know I did that, and I really don't care.

I'm debating whether or not to mention the issue of loose and unsupervised dogs to the HOA, without mentioning any names. People know who they are... Seriously, if you can afford to drive a late model Mercedes, can you not at least afford to put in an invisible fence if not a regular one? It's not fair to the dog or the rest of your neighbors when you let your animal roam loose. Depending on the time of day, your pet runs the risk of being run over or becoming food for coyotes. Letting your dog roam about unsupervised just is not a loving or responsible thing to do.

My other dog annoyance this morning came from one of my own dogs. Again, she was just doing what dogs do. She is a herding dog, and she may have been trying to herd me. I just didn't know she was there, and when she cut me off, I crashed right into her nearly knocking her over because I was moving quickly and not anticipating impediments to my movement, or obstacles. All is forgiven though, because I love dogs, really, I do.

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!