But Soft...

I don’t know where you live, but it has been unseasonably cold around here lately – I bet it was only like 45 degrees last night! Or more like 55. Or maybe 60?

I don’t know what the heck degrees it was, but I know that as soon as I got out of bed this morning I had to run around closing all the windows. Which would have been a smart thing to do before I got into bed last night, so I wouldn’t have wound up suffocating myself with my pillows over my head to keep warm (because that’s so much easier than getting up for another blanket), and I wouldn’t have slept through the alarm clock (because two big downy pillows over your head do tend to muffle noise), so I wouldn’t have lost an hour this morning, which wouldn’t have funked up my whole routine, so I would have been out of the shower long before just this very second (okay, ten minutes; I’m not still wet or anything), and I wouldn’t have had to skip my watermelon-and-“Big Love” Tuesday lunchbreak.

If only there were some modern-type device to tell a gal ahead of time what the weather’s going to be, so she could plan ahead and shut her windows…

But hey, at least it’s not like there’s any heat that’s going to go kicking itself on and warming up the entire eastern seaboard!

Anyway, I shut all the windows and I got my coffee and I sat down at my desk and I thought “Now why's it still so cold in here? And why does it still sound like there’s a window open somewhere?”

Ummmm, could it be this giant gaping hole where your front door’s supposed to be?

Oh! Goody! Crap! You scared me! I thought you had gone back to England, or taken the vow, or died or something. Balls. I mean, nice to see you, how've you been...?

Turns out there is a magical modern device that predicts weather, and it seems to think it might get warm again someday, but in the meantime autumn approacheth, and it mightn’t be a bad idea to have a front door to greet it at when it arrives.

If I hung the blasted thing back up unfinished, Johnny would kill me. (Actually, no he wouldn't. I’d fight him off with photos of the bathroom he’s left half-done for going on a year now. He would be powerless against me…) But Goody would kill me for sure. And, if I were any kind of prudent girl, I'd kill myself.

So I did it. Okay? Are you happy? I finished stripping the g-d door.

Sort of.

I got all the paint off the flat parts, but I’d been admonished – under penalty of death – to get the heat gun nowhere near the panes of glass. Because this is what happens when you get heat guns too near glass:

(Which is also why you never bother to finish stripping that particular piece of window hardware, which you had to leave in place because it wouldn’t come off no matter which screwdriver you used – and, now that you think of it, maybe you broke that glass when you tried to use the power drill attachment and it slipped, and you only told Johnny that you broke it with the heat gun, but, at any rate -- what was my point?)

Oh, yeah: replacing glass in this door is much more complicated than replacing it in a window (which, as you can see, we’re right on top of), so don’t Fugger it up.

So I had to leave the near-the-glass bits the way I found them.

If it’s up to me, I don’t care if they just get sanded and painted over, but I’m sure Johnny will have some big complicated process for doing it “the right way.” Which is the other reason I quit when I did. Because, believe it or not (and you know me, so form your own opinions), I was actually planning on sanding down the door after stripping it this afternoon (or, actually, I was planning on doing it this morning, but old marshmallow-head changed the plans on that one).

But the more I thought about it, I wasn’t sure that was the right next step. And I hate sanding more than anything. And if I sanded it down today, only to have Johnny tell me I had to do something else to it and then sand it down again, I might’ve taken this thing to them both:

And so help me, Goody, if you say one word about the "g-d door" comment I made up there, I'm coming for you next...