The Painters Are Here!

The painters are here!  I decided to paint the outside of the house, but we decided to have professional painters do the interior painting.  Because there was a lot of raw wood trim in the new room, and new wood needs three coats of paint, I decided that it would take me forever to do the room.  Three painters and their boss showed up and did the entire room in two and one-half days!  And they did an absolutely beautiful job!  I couldn't believe the care they took.  And it really is a relief to have it all done!  Oh, I suppose you want to see how the finished room looks?  Stay tuned.

Liar Liar Pants On Fire!

Remember when I said I was done showing you any more white paint?  I lied.  I mean, not intentionally, but still...   I was up on the ladder, finishing up the second coat of paint on the outside of the new room.  I went to dip my brush into the paint can and couldn't believe my eyes - there was a single yellow leaf floating on the top of the wet paint!  It was so amazing to see, but additionally, there is something kind of cosmic about this - the contrast between the natural and the man made.  I had been seeing leaves fall from the trees all the time I was painting, but what is the chance one leaf would fall right into the can!

The End of Painting

This is the Hickory tree in our front yard.  It is green all year long, and then late in the Fall season it suddenly turns bright, brilliant yellow.  And I have learned over all the years I have painted the house, once the Hickory turns yellow, the temperatures will never get higher than fifty degrees, which means that I can no longer paint.  Fortunately, I just finished painting the new addition yesterday, and I am done!  Just as the tree tells me I am done.  What a joy it is to see this brilliant tree against a clear blue sky!

The Real Jim

I am still in a state of disbelief that Jim is gone.  I mean, it is not as if he was not at risk of dying at an early age!  Jim did love risk.  I only listed about half of his professions yesterday.  Back in 2009 Jim was the building engineer for a 22 story luxury condo building in Koreatown in Los Angeles.  I went to visit him and he proudly showed me all the things that he was in charge of, including fire systems,  alarm systems and emergency diesel generators for electricity, and security systems.  And then he said: "You have to see the helipad on the roof!"  So up we went to the roof, and we then climbed 30 feet more to the mesh landing pad which is used for emergency fire rescue.  So we are standing there in the center of the helipad, and Jim says: "Let's have a contest to see who can walk backwards and get closest to the edge of the helipad."  So since I am always so easily influenced by Jim's great ideas, I took him up on the challenge.  Here is the photo I took of him at the edge.  Keep in mind, that if we fell off, we would only fall 30 feet to the roof, not 22 stories to the street.  So then it was my turn.  I will let you readers judge who got the closest to the edge!  Man, WHAT was I thinking!

Jim Wildey 1943 - 2015

I am sitting here in shock and disbelief.  I received a call this afternoon from Jim's wife Barb, and she said that last night Jim died of cardiac arrest.  They have just returned from a three month tour around the United States, in their RV, stopping to visit friends in a number of states, including New York and Pennsylvania and Florida.  In a number of places that they stopped Jim helped people with projects because that's the kind of guy that he was.  By the time they returned home, he was not feeling well.  I don't know any more details but I am in shock because Jim has always been in excellent physical condition.  I loved it when we got together and he reminded me he could crush me with his thumb!  He always loved projects involving dragging concrete blocks around, or in our case, ripping out all the lath and plaster in our bathroom years ago, when he and Barb came for a weekend visit.  I first met Jim when we roomed together one summer after I had graduated from RIT.  He was a business major, and we and our families have been dear friends ever since.  You could not find a more generous guy anywhere. This photograph is from around 1970 when I was doing a cross country flight for my private pilot's license, and landed at a small airport in Binghamton.  Jim, who worked for IBM at the time, came out to meet me at the airport, all suited up.  But do not be misled - he soon left IBM to become a dairy farmer, and then after a number of years, began buying and refurbing homes and selling them, before becoming a building inspector in Fresno, California.  And that's only the half of it.  This all seems so unbelievable, that it has not sunk in yet.

Evidence

I know, I know, if you see one more photograph with white paint, you are going to quit coming back to the blog.  I have titled this post "evidence" because you can see the evidence of all my hard work, painting the building.  I love how the addition looks along with the house, now that it is almost completely painted, where white goes into white.  I am still painting the back, but it looks like I will get it done before winter sets in.

Fall Color

We really haven't seen much Fall color around here so far.  But driving by this pond in Old Westbury on the way to church today, I saw these trees with good color.  Well, good color for Long Island, maybe, but not good color for Vermont!  The trees do look a bit motheaten, but I will accept anything with this much color.