I take back what I said...

I said that painting a house couldn't be too hard. Famous last words. I don't think I had any idea what I was getting myself into. We started painting the porch yesterday, and I thought we could finish the whole thing before the end of the day, well, we got close but not finished. And that was only one porch. There are three. Our neighbor's son is going to paint the very high part of the eaves for me, and I didn't argue with them because, while I'm not afraid of heights, being sixteen feet up on a ladder isn't my idea of fun. Anyway, I think they offered to do that because we spent a week caulking everything really well, and so what they're paying us didn't consider all the caulking that needed to be done. At any rate, I'm about whooped after yesterday, I went to bed at 9pm and slept until 8am. On the bright side, I'd rather paint a house than work for a certain big-box-retailer-that-will-not-be-named. I'm not really sure that painting pays all that much better when you consider the hours put in, but I get to be outside.

Mamas, don't let your children grow up to be artists. Or at least not artists with massive amounts of student loans. It's not a good idea. It's easy to be an artist when you don't have Sallie Mae sleeping in your guest bedroom. We're working on kicking her out of our lives, it's just taking so long.

A flashback...
"This night will pass just like all the others." That's what I used to tell myself when I worked at a grocery store in high school. I really needed to grow a backbone then, and ought to have told those jerk faces to go to hell. They paid me minimum wage for two years, and I'm not entirely sure why I put up with them. The first two days on the job should have been a huge red flag. My drawer was short those first two days, and so I told my mother about it, wondering what I had done wrong with counting change. She asked me if I'd counted my drawer beforehand, and I'd said no. She said, 'you should always count your drawer before you start your shift.' The third day I demanded that it be counted before starting. It came up short by a lot.

Also, it's not like I liked working for them. I could have gotten a different job somewhere else that probably paid more, but I didn't. And looking back, I have no idea why. All that time wasted with assholes. The moral of this story? If you're not happy with things, then change them. Life is too short to be unhappy.