Dude, please -- just paint!

I apologize for being negative, and I truly don’t want to be unkind. But I have the World’s Most Annoying House Painter.

Fortunately he has no reason to suspect that I blog, so he won’t be seeing this. I would never intentionally hurt his feelings. But, just between you and me – this guy is driving me nuts.

He’s a talker. He’s REALLY a talker. Now, I am all for having friendly, collegial business relationships. But this guy is constantly flapping his jaws about anything and everything. We’ll be headed out the door to go somewhere and he decides he needs to hop down off his ladder and talk to us for 20 minutes about some situation with our eaves he’s discovered. Apparently he’s that he’s decided we have some sort of Dreaded Eaves Syndrome that will cause our entire house to self-destruct years from now. But hey, he’s got a cousin that could fix it right away and boy, would we be glad to have THAT little disaster nipped in the bud…

At first we didn’t mind him pointing out this and that, because he is, presumably, someone who knows his way around a two-story domicile and could have some valued professional input on its construction. So we’d listen with a mild amount of interest and assure him we’d look into it at some point. But once he’s got you in a conversation, this guy goes on forever and he always has an angle. He feels our gutters and downspouts are horribly inadequate. His brother-in-law can help out with that. He proclaimed our roof a mess. Surely it will cave in on us one night, but his wife’s nephew could save us from certain doom if only we would call him. You get the picture.

We had an exhaustive inspection when we bought the house two years ago, and while there is always ongoing maintenance to be done -- like, um, painting -- there just is nothing that dire about the condition of our house. But instead of just painting like we're paying him to do, this dude is on a one-man mission to secure employment for his entire family by fixing our home's fabricated ills.

To make matters worse, he’s painting only on weekends so the job is taking forever. Dan generally works Saturdays so that’s when I find myself flying solo in my quest to avoid the World’s Most Annoying House Painter. He’s working on the front of the house? I’ll bolt out the back! He’s run to the store for more paint? Quick, make a break for it!

But when I’m working in the garden, as I was almost all of last weekend, I can’t avoid him. More yappity-yapping. More endless observations of trees that need trimming, and how I'd better get my deck sealed or the earth is just going to open up and swallow my ramshackle hovel.

So you wanna guess my favorite gardening implement of all? Yep, you're right.

Blasting a little Van Morrison into my ears brings me right back to center and keeps the World's Most Annoying House Painter at bay for as long my iPod can hold a charge.