Painting

The nursery that the boys attend is a parents' co-op. Partly this means it's a bit radical and lefty and possibly unAmerican, which appeals. But mostly it means it's slightly cheaper ('cos parents need to work there) and it means that parents (i.e. us) have to work there. In addition, when stuff needs doing, it needs doing by the parents.

It was decreed, by whoever it is that decrees such things, that the main classroom needed painting. The email said that it would take from 1pm to 5:30 on Sunday. So we duly turned up only slightly later than 1pm to do whatever we were told.

There were about 10 people to start off with - a couple were assigned to making sure the children who were outside frolicking, didn't injure each other. Or get hold of some paint and paint the climbing frame. (Actually, they failed on the second one, but it wasn't our children.) We duly sanded and masked and washed and were told that our sanding wasn't good enough so we had to do it again (well, that was just me).

An awful lot of jobs seemed to be needed to be done by someone 'tall', and I was the only person who satisfied the description, so I did a lot of standing on things to reach the ceiling - eventually someone went home and fetched a stepladder.

Anyway, we primed and painted and painted again, and it all went on for a lot longer than the promised 4.5 hours. We finished painting at 9:30, and it took almost another hour to put the room back together, and remember where all the noticeboards went on the walls. Someone had diligently polyfilla-ed all of the holes, including the screw holes for the things that were on the walls. They did such a good job that we couldn't find the old holes and had to make new ones. (Although we had an electric screwdriver, so I just screwed into the plaster).

One reason it was interesting was the chance to chat to some of the other parents. As they say where I come from"There's nowt as queer as folk", but I'm still surprised by people's queerness. One (white) woman was an actor (I looked her up on IMDB - there was nothing I'd heard of, and not a great deal I hadn't heard of either). She had adopted a boy, who was now about 4, and seemed to be (to put it mildly) quite a handful. She asked if I knew any 45-55 year old divorcees. They had to be active, she said. And spiritual. Definitely spiritual. I didn't really know what that meant, but she told us about the church she went to, which didn't really believe in the bible. (I wondered what it did believe in.)

Another woman was part of a gay couple, who had had one baby each (spaced a year apart). The second one required IVF, the first didn't. (I wondered how the, ermmm, seed, was introduced, but I didn't ask). They both worked as sound engineers - one of them had recently stopped being freelance, and started working for Fox, doing the sound on the trailers between programmes. The other mostly worked on TV and radio ads. (I wondered what they thought about working for Fox, which is owned by Rupert Murdoch, who isn't really known for his tolerance of what we might call 'alternative' lifestyles. )

They both worked in Santa Monica - a lot of 'the industry' has moved out of Hollywood, and into Santa Monica. (Hollywood is too "eeekkk", nowadays, it seems. I didn't know what that meant.

Note for anyone hanging around with showbusiness types. It's not called showbusiness - it's called 'the industry'. Santa Monica is an 'industry town'.

One thing I learned is that lots of words involved in DIY are different - it was often hard to know what people were talking about. Lots of things that are referred to by their trade name (like Polyfilla) had a different name. There was a lot of talk of something called TSP, which seemed to be a cleaning product, and Goo-B-Gone, which was for getting rubbery goo off things. Skirting boards had a different name too (trim boards? I forget).