9/18/08

Ok, sorry about not sending the rant yesterday. It was about a million o’clock when I got home and just didn’t feel like firing up the laptop to send it off to Spiderman. Ok, it was only a thousand o’clock when I got home but I stayed up and watched Mythbusters until a million o’clock. Either way, I just plain didn’t feel like sending the rant last night. So there. Ok, I just went back and re-read it and y'all really aren’t missing all that much. So, last night we went to the shop and painted the fiberglass bits on Shi-Chi. I swung by and picked John up at his house at around 1700 h and we rolled to Lowe’s. There, we bought ten cans of flat black spray paint, a roll of masking paper, and a roll of painter's tape. At the shop, John rolled Shi-Chi out while I did something in the other room. I think I was looking for something he had requested but I don’t remember. Anyhoo, when I got back to the “paint booth,” which is the room at the shop where Shi-Chi lives, I asked him how it rolled. He reported that it rolled out with no sign of resistance. If you haven’t read yesterday’s rant yet, I was worried that the bearings were tightening up. I guess I'll stop worrying about that until whatever caused the car to not roll the other day goes 100% terminal. It can only kill me once. Ok, so the car is now outside, well, in the narrative, not in actuality… let me start that sentence over. So John has the car outside and starts “washing” the front fenders. He wet-sands them then masks off the wheels, suspension, and car. He paints one front fender. It looks good. He paints the other front fender. It looks good too. As the sun is setting he enlists my help to mask off the rear fenders. I make a couple cutouts to mask off the body and he tapes them in place. He uses the centers of the cutouts to mask the wheels. He wet-sands the rear fenders and starts painting them. Since it is beginning to get pretty dark, and I suspect he’s losing some interest in the project, or perhaps just getting tired of it, or just plain tired, I notice that the paint is going down just a bit more “tiger striped” than the fronts. I tell him, “You do understand that any ‘ball busting’ I do in the blog over the ‘tiger stripes’ will purely be tongue in cheek, right?” He replies that hopefully it will settle out as it dries and we won’t see any. I'm sure it will. Besides, even if it doesn’t, it will annoy him almost infinitely more than it will annoy me. Of course I want it to look good or I would have hosed the thing down with paint myself and not gotten him involved, so there are limits to my “I don’t care what it looks like, as long as it looks good” attitude. I just figured out a way to ‘splain that a little better, I hope. With me, macro-æsthetics are more important than micro-æsthetics. As long as the car has a good looking basic shape or form or silhouette, I don’t care that much about the details like paint condition, dings, chips, scratches, and minor body work flaws. In other words, I don’t mind if good looking cars have a “patina” on them. For example, I'd pay money for a rusty old beater Datsun 1200 (obviously), but you couldn’t give me a Volkswagen New Beetle. I hope that clears up my point of view. Well, one of the side effects of staying up until a million o’clock is now I'm so very sleepy here at work. I think I'm going to shut my eyes for a bit. Ah, much better. I wasn’t out long, but I was out cold! Of course now I don’t have anything to say. I guess since it is almost lunchtime I'll call this a rant and go eat. Y'all have a day.