4/21 Okay, painting a staircase is a multi-week project, and it won’t always be multi-week projects that the house demands from me. It is still remarkable how in the countryside life oscillates between your house and the home improvement store.

While we’re at it, remembering the journeyman carpenter who was my room mate thirty years ago, and who said: the way somebody eats, is how he works. You can’t generalize that, he added quickly and politely, because I didn’t do particularly well on that scale.

I do almost everything the way Claude explained it in long paragraphs culminating in catchy phrases such as: “skip this step and nothing else matters”. What I refuse to do: paint the stairs in an odd/even schema, two days for each coat of paint. If I paint the stairs in the morning, we’ll be able to walk on them in socks by the evening, even if Claude finds that too short.