[m i a o w] the cat

I can carbon-date myself by paint colour. My days lately have unfolded thusly:

- Waken to savage reality via rooster.
- Spend several minutes devising ultimate torturous demise for above mentioned ornithological abberration.
- Prise oneself out of bed and dream of the sound of a hot shower
- Modify the dream to that of an actual bathroom
- Dress in three million year old paint encrusted things that began their lives as my favourite cords, and a flannel shirt courtesy of Pialba Op-Shop
- Get handed tea by diplomatic M
- Perform morning ritual of surveying all we command (i.e the 1.25 acres)
- Say hello to cats in their cat-home, drown in guilt for approx. 12 minutes
- Forget to wash mug and leave it in the place I’m least likely to find it in two hours time
- Attempt to begin painting for the day
- Immediately discover several places I haven’t sanded well enough
- Swear. Sand them. Brush dust away. Vacuumn dust away. Blow dust away
- Dust in eye. Ow.
- Finally apply paint to wall
- Colour is WRONG. Is it me? Is it the wall? Stare at wall from several different angles for far longer than necessary
- Compare paint colour with paint sample pot. Wildly different.
- Get in van for the millionth time, drive to paint shop
- Get new improved paint
- Drive home
- Repeat the five prior dot points at least five times over the next six days
- Endeavour to go hard and do night painting. Thousands of tiny black flying bugs come to cheer me on. I stop.
- Make more tea.

Battle of the Yellows
The many yellows...all of these were supposed to be the same colour as the sample pot. Needless to say, none of them were.

The marvel and multi-faceted wonder of the colour YELLOW. Not too yellow. Not pale pallid yellow. Not pastel yellow. Not babysick mustard yellow. Not egg-yolk yellow, and not the kind of yellow that prompts your mother to say; “That was the yellow we had in our kitchen when we were first married…” but a glowing, golden, warmish yellow that doesn’t hurt your eyes in the morning. The maestro at the paint shop interpreted all of the above with a delighful amount of feigned understanding and then went and located the exact shade. Too weird. He then made up for his uncanny achievement by mixing said shade into a sample pot with twice the amount of required tint leading to days spent in fury and frustration, as no one can understand why a huge tub of the stuff cannot be mixed to match it. Grrr.

To take my mind off the angst, but not, of course, off paint, I have decided that I would make a good Paint Namer. I would have a range called Shades of Reality (I do also have to mention here that I was horrified to discover the dreadful continued existence of Mission Brown. In the year of 2003, how can this be? Who is using it? And more to the point, what are they using it for?) OK, anyway;
Shades of Reality
Poo brown
Calamine pink
Gravel grey
PMT Persimmon
Kick-the-cat Khaki
Eyebag Purple