Como a Orina Lejos una Mañana (y cascarrabias sobre ello)*

Having agreed to cover the wings of an Ercoupe for a friend who runs the Marion airport, I began running down some of the supplies that I would need. This morning’s shopping list included a couple of high quality, pure bristle paintbrushes, a quantity of “throw away,” one-inch bristle brushes and a gallon of MEK.

I usually shop in Carbondale, but as I was to drop the stuff off at the airport, I went to Marion’s Home Depot. My first set back was finding pure bristle brushes. Seems all the stuff comes from Mexico now, and as part of what seems to be the goal of discontinuing English as our national language, all the labels are printed in Spanish. I ran into this problem last summer while remodeling the upstairs bath. I needed to add a light switch on a finished wall and was searching for an electrical box made for this installation. All of the wall boxes were packaged in cardboard with Spanish labels and, with Spanish not being my second (or first) language, I ended up having to open some twenty boxes to find the right one.

Here we go again with the paintbrushes. The higher quality ones are all packaged in cardboard where you can’t see the bristles to tell if they are pure bristle, nylon, polyester, or some combination of the three, and the labels are (once again) written in Spanish. Finally finding a brand that were of pure bristle, there were only 2″ wide ones (which I needed) but no 3″ (also needed.) They did have a quantity of the cheap 1″ ones, but no MEK.

Being hard headed, I refuse to buy two or three items from someplace that should carry all of this. So . . .

South Side Lumber in Herrin, who don’t have MEK or cheap 1″ brushes and have a poor selection of quality brushes - but again all Spanish labeled.

Next stop - Ace Hardware, where I find the most expensive MEK that I have ever seen, and all of their brushes were plastic handled - which melts in aircraft dope. Also, their cheap 1″ brushes were $1.69 - the same ones I usually buy for 35 cents.

I gave up and came home where I am studying my Spanish dictionary in preparation for this afternoon’s trip to Lowe’s in Carbondale.

* How To Piss Away a Morning (and grouch about it)

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