Simple Things

I was painting today and was trying to figure out why I was in such a good mood. Now I’m not saying that I’m crabby all the time, but everything today just seemed to line up in the world. So I was thinking what made today different and I came up with 3 things.
THE FIRST THING:
The first thing, and how it started out my day, was that I was going to use the brand new paint stirrer that I bought the from the farm store. Now if you are thinking that this isn’t a big deal – you are sooooo wrong! The last one that I was using (and have been since I started) had the part that goes into the drill stripped out and was so heavy with paint gunked on it that when you tried to stir the paint buckets it always came out of the drill and fell into the pail. Then you had to scoop it out, clean it off, and then start again. Way not cool. So today I took the new one and put it on the drill and turned it on. It purred like a kitten and I had the paint stirred in no time.
THE SECOND THING:
Now the second thing that happened today dealt with itch weed (or nettles). If you don’t know what this is, let me try to explain it to you. When this plant touches you, it starts to immediately itch and burn. You really want to scratch it and when you do it itches and burns worse. It is terrible to be around and today I stepped in a bunch of it. I was painting the north side of the machine shed and before Daryl mowed it, this itch weed was all over. But since he mowed, it started to grow back and is really small. So when I was walking through there with my flip flops on, I got into some of it on my feet and I thought I was going to DIE! There was a bunch of mud beside the building and I thought that it couldn’t hurt – so I pasted mud all over my feet to stop the itch. Guess what? It worked! Now there are some of you out there that make fun of my feet on any given day (You know who you are!) But today you could have made fun of them because they were looking pretty bad, but feeling pretty good. So my second ‘good thing’ today is mud.
THE THIRD THING:
The third thing that I was grateful for was that I was able to get back at the sweat bees that have taken over the world lately. When I paint, they just swarm all over and I was getting pretty sick and tired of them. Even after I spray myself with bug spray they still buzz around me and land on me. So today what I found out is that if you watch them close you can put your paint brush right up to them and make them stick on it. Then I painted the shed with them still stuck on my brush. It gave me a whole lot of pleasure (maybe too much?) and after awhile I didn’t have too many around me. Maybe the word got out or something?      * side note: this method does not work with wasps.

My new paint stirrer