Dementia. Okay. Whatever.

As some of you may know, my family has added an addition onto our house.
Since it branched off of the kitchen area, we decided to enlarge the kitchen
and redecorate it while we were at it. I say “we,” but I have very little to
do with the actual decision making process. I just live here. And I didn’t
really do any real work involved in the remodeling. I just suffered its
effects.

In any case, my dad decided to paint the kitchen cabinets white. Since they
were dark wood colored to begin with, this required a good bit of white paint
in several coats. He evidently spray painted them first, then went on to
use the conventional brush and roller. That’s all fine and good, except that
he left the door to the living room open. Thus the white paint from the
sprayer misted into the adjoining room, coating everything in it with a fine
layer of white paint. It wasn’t very noticeable. It just looked like things
were a little dusty and felt gritty to the touch. Unfortunately, our black,
grand piano was one of the affected items. The good news is that a
particular brand of solvent has been found to remove the paint without the
finish. Incidently, this is the same solvent that allowed my hair to become
ungunked after a brief period of punkhood. But that is another story.

The biggest problem presented by this state of events, however, was that
everything from the kitchen cabinets had been relocated to the living room
while the shelves were being painted. This meant that all the bowls, plates,
pots, pans, measuring elements, and essentially all instruments of cooking
and eating were covered in a misting of paint. This perhaps wouldn’t have
posed a very large threat… except that the paint was lead based.

And so our living room is still covered in items from the kitchen which we
haven’t returned because each thing has to be scrubbed thoroughly to remove
all paint before being allowed out of quarantine and back to its rightful
shelf.

In the meantime, we’re most assuredly suffering from lead poisoning.

Sucking on paint chips,

Jonah