The mess that ate my living room

The mess started somewhere between the cookies and the paint. Isn't that always how it is? Besides all the activities I blogged about below that filled my weekend, I thought I could squeeze just a little more time out of Sunday night. Nevermind that I have to leave early Monday for an overnight for work. Nevermind that it's going to be 90 degrees, and I have no idea what kind of bathing suit could pass for a business suit on such a muggy day. Nevermind that I'm tired and just want to get to my reading pile shown above and my sketch book (I guess I'd better pack them all, along with my laptop to do three months' worth of work reports tomorrow night).

So I thought I'd make the fam some cookies before I leave. I start making chocolate chip cookies- milk chocolate chips and pecans. Oops, out of stick margarine. Improvise. Get cookies to oven. Am on phone with hotel reservations, on hold, on hold, oh, there goes the oven timer. Seems the 25-foot kitchen phone cord (who uses a landline anymore anyway?) will just not quite reach. Squawking oven and unhelpful phone person.

Cookies cooling. Decide to mix up some acrylic paint, Pearl Ex pigment and gesso to paint the 17 individual 4" squares of watercolor paper I have now cut for my Marie Antoinette book pages. Decide half blue and half green. Find a drop cloth. Mix up way too much paint. Decide to apply bits of sheet music and French text first. Use glue stick. Paint pages. Let one side dry. Run upstairs and put cookies in jar. Clean up kitchen, load dishwasher. Also do multiple loads of laundry to find decent clothes to pack.

Take an hour to do company expense report, chasing down receipts from car and brief case and computer.

Change paint color, flip pages over, paint other sides, let dry. Attempt to pack or do something useful. Clean up paints, water, brushes. Cleans up nicely with pink brush soap.

Decide pages look blah. Grab piece of punchinella (sequin base after sequins are punched out). Run back upstairs for packing tape. Run downstairs to tape punchinella to drop cloth. Slide pages under open holes and use gold spray paint. Looking pretty cool.

It is about now that I realize that gold spray paint does not clean up nearly as well as acrylic paint and gesso. And between the glue on my pages, some leftover wet blue-green paint into which I have accidentally placed my forearm, and gold paint all over my fingers and my newly-manicured red nails, I decide to clean up in the little sink in my art studio. The water appears to 'set' the paint on my skin, and the glue and paint combine to make a sticky mess, which when I grab some turpentine-based brush cleaner, becomes all the more sticky, kind of like tree sap. It is now blackish-brown tree sap on my fingers instead of gold paint. It is midnight, and it does not want to come off. I do not like to go to work presentations with paint on my hands. Hmmm. Why didn't I just go to bed a couple of hours before this?