Broad Strokes

I'm painting, I'm painting again.
I'm painting, I'm painting again.
I'm cleaning, I'm cleaning again.
I'm cleaning, I'm cleaning my brain. - "Artists Only" by Talking Heads
Painting is a job that I don't mind doing. I confess that the anticipation of such a task always makes me cringe. The hours of discussion that can be had about a finite series of paint chips can be mind-numbing, but once I'm actually up on the ladder, brush in hand, I feel a whole lot better. Why? Probably because I can see immediate results. This morning, our bedroom was dingy white. Now it's a happy new shade of blue.
When I was a renter, I never had the satisfaction of altering my surroundings. Unless I moved out, or the owners of the building decided to put in new carpeting, what I saw was what I got (and vice versa). To crawl down the evolutionary scale another notch or two, I tried living in furnished apartments. The idea now seems completely foreign to me. I remember one landlord who seemed more than a little put off by the idea of me bringing my own bed into his building. The single that was shoved into one corner of the bedroom just gave me too much of a "dorm" vibe. As fate would have it, this became my friend's crash pad when he slowly began moving in with me. Two guys in a one bedroom apartment - a one bedroom cinder block bunker decorated exclusively in colors not found in nature.
That was a long time ago. I have enough stuff that I need a garage and a basement to store it all. Well, my family does, anyway. And every so often, we get this wild hair to change the color of our surroundings. We can do that. It's our house.