The last time I wrote I was preparing myself for dancing in front of over a hundred people at my jiu jitsu style’s national ball.  It went quite well, and there is video which I plan to post on YouTube so all you Skirt!istas can see, but I haven’t gotten around to it yet.  I’ve been quite busy.  Mainly trying to finish my PhD (I printed a copy of everything I’ve written so far yesterday and…man, did a lot of trees die.  Somewhere a forest is weeping quietly to itself.  And yet, I know for a fact that my word count is a leetle bit under par.  I really hope they don’t notice.)  But that’s not all I’ve been up to–today, for instance, I found myself clinging humorously to some scaffolding while trying to paint steel rafters.  

Everyone else is fine with the scaffolding.  The fact that at any moment they might tip over the side and land, not so humorously, on the recently-poured concrete floor, doesn’t seem to bother any of my compatriot volunteers in the dojo-building corps.  I, on the other hand, HATE the scaffolding.  I feel that I am high enough off the ground already, thanks very much, and I really have no desire to visit any ceilings in the near future.  Or ever again, in fact.  However, the need arose, and I decided to face my fears and get up on the scary, scary scaffolding.  

Obviously I didn’t die, and I even finished painting everything that I was supposed to paint.  (I also botched up cutting the insulation, but nobody’s going to look up there anyway.)  Want to know what else I did today?  I moved a door.  That may not sound that exciting, but this door had three (THREE!) panes of double-glazing in it, that had been PAINTED OVER WITH BLACK.  I cannot think of a single circumstance, aside from wanting an obscenely heavy door, that would cause a person (even if they are a glazier, which is who occupied our building before it was the dojo that it is slowly becoming) to want to build such a thing.  Before we could get rid of the door (but not before we dragged it out to the truck and dropped part of it on my foot) we had to get all the glass out, in the process of which one of the panes broke (naturally).  While I shovelled up the bits I decided that from now on I’m going to call that guy The Mad Glazier of Exeter.  Probably just in my head, because most people aren’t going to care.  But they would if they’d had to shovel up that much broken glass.  Broken glass that was PAINTED BLACK.  I mean, really.