So the slappers decided to play praise music and have a loud sing-along party in their backyard one weekday evening. yeah, super great. praise music, my favorite, even better sung by child abusers. sometimes i want to believe that i am unfairly exaggerating what awful people get invested in Christianity. surely i am minimizing the percentage of real christians who understand their religion and do good everyday as jesus laid down. surely it's more like 60/40 baddies:goodies and i am being dramatic thinking it is 99/1? but lately ... the more someone puts their Christianity on display, the more convinced i am they are a selfish abusive jackass in sheep's clothing, just waiting to reveal their true nature. i see someone with a cross necklace or a jesus shirt or a bible verse bumper sticker and i just assume they beat their kids or have a chosen minority they want eradicated or approve of slavery (for women, poor people, etc - i mean if god liked them they wouldn't be female or poor, amirite?) or want to make it illegal to not be Christian (which ultimately i think is their goal). oh i see, that person is signalling that they are terrible and i should have nothing to do with them. as the far side cartoon said, "how nature says 'do not touch'".

am i being unfair? and then the slappers are out there blasting their praise music for the neighborhood to enjoy. nope. christians are jerks.

mostly i have just been silently seething, very unhealthy. they have almost completely ignored me and i have returned the favor. i brought the trash bin into the backyard for easier access on memorial day (the second time they had the inflatable party) and exchanged a couple words with the slapper patriarch as he was starting the bbq at 10am and filling the area of our respective driveways with smoke. he extended a halfhearted invitation to get food and i told him i appreciated the offer and that is the sum total of our interactions. he did later make sure his visitor didn't park right in front of my driveway (seriously who parks blocking a driveway!? the butt end of my car is RIGHT THERE) but that may be because i deliberately went into the front yard and was briskly rolling up the hose that brenda loaned me and giving the truck "you have to be shitting me" looks. like, you have until i finish rolling this hose and then i'm being a bitch and shooing you off. but the patriarch called out and asked the guy to move first. i'll also give him a point because i haven't heard him yell at the kids. it's the matriarch and the grandpa (her dad, surprise) that are the absolute worst.

i strongly considered blasting my own music to drown out the praise music, but i am so adverse to forcing noise on other bystanders that i ultimately just jammed on my headphones. but i'm getting really fucking sick of being trampled on here. who the fuck thinks it's awesome to have a religious sing along in their backyard? why not meet at your church or do it in a big park? why should i have to put on headphones whenever this family starts caterwauling?

anyway, i'm going to paint a satanic/occult mural on the shed. knowing loud 'n proud christians, it won't take much more than some scary astrology symbols and some nipples to put them in a complete tizzy. their home is a split level and our shed is in the back corner, in full view of their upper windows, as good as a billboard. nobody else has much of a view of it except the slappers. secret garden house can maybe see it at a certain low point of the vines growing over the fence and that's it. it's not visible at all from the street. yeah you can have your all day inflatable parties because there's no hoa, but it also means i can paint my shed however i please and there's nobody to stop me. and if they deface it i'll just paint something more offensive on top - so many options! wanna stare at nude gay demons out your window all day? i can arrange that. oh gosh, sucks to have something you don't like assaulting your senses and ruining the outdoors for you.

this makes me feel better about their noise pollution even though a shed mural is low on the priority list at the moment. i'd like to have the mural done for the house warming party but so far my projects are going super slow, womp womp. i've done big chalk paintings so i know the mechanics of transfering small scale to large scale. it's getting appropriate materials and the painting execution that will be a challenge. but i did the ceiling mural with cheap craft paint so that gives me some confidence. and i didn't need nearly as much paint as i thought.

i got this wood stain by behr that is supposed to be stain + finish and it's terrible. i deeply regret purchasing it. "how bad can it be?" i thought, and i should know by now that is a big red flag. it's patchy and shitty, like thin bad brown paint. i had to strip and sand the mop handles for the curtain rods and i picked this stuff up because i thought it would be time efficient. no, it's shit. i am consoling myself with the fact that nobody really looks at curtain rods, but i don't think that makes it better considering all this work i have put into things i now don't want people to look at too closely. oh well. i probably haven't saved any money on these fucking curtain rods despite making them out of mop handles and children's blocks. dammit! well, at least they aren't mass manufactured plastic, i guess. you can tell by the fucking STREAKS! arrgghh.

the guy i've commissioned to make a mantlepiece is finished and i am going to pick it up tues. i bet it's going to be gorgeous. i cannot remember the name of the wood except it's a medium brown, comes from mexico, starts with a P and smells spicy. parota, i think? a 3” thick slab of parota with a midnight blue resin filler on a starburst crack, handmade, for $350? that's a good deal and i don't see how it can't turn out amazing. i got all the wood tiles i am going to use to cover the legs of the fireplace insert. i had to fight with amazon to get them all (sure amazon, force me to order 4 times with ups shipping to alaska because of "quantity limits" - way to be efficient you idiots), but at last i have them. so the tiles have a chevron pattern with pieces in a mix of wood types. i think it will pull together the various mismatched woods and it has a geometric feel. it's the best option i could find anyway. the tiles are expensive but i am betting they will be worth it when finished.

i'm noodling around with various wood finishes to figure out how to approach the more visible wood additions to the house like shelving and accent walls. obvs the behr stain is garbage. i'm trying tung oil (so far not as darkening as i hoped, more yellowing than anything, tsk!) and i have some generals dye stain and some powdered dye. experimenting sucks up time.

i watched the january 6 committee thing and it reminded me of what that day felt like, knowing something bad was likely, knowing spouse was working just down the street and potentially in harm's way. sending him texts about what i was seeing on the livestreams. i'm so mad about the whole thing, especially when laid out so clearly. there are not enough bad words for that fucking selfish monster and what he has enabled. if i had it my way i'd drop him on a desert island with a crate of nutrient paste and let him figure out how to die. we should be dreadfully ashamed and horrified, right now, but i suspect the nation as a whole will not absorb the full meaning and shame of that day for some years. decades, if we are unfortunate. i don't think we've hit rock bottom yet. sadly.

spouse is currently in dc which makes it weirder and still personal.

the thing about a fall from grace is it does allow a chance for redemption (like every star wars fallen jedi arc ever). we can be as brave and wise as we are selfish and cruel. we can choose to be better in spite of that corrupted element, because suddenly we see the sharp contrast between the ideal and the fallen. will we stand up in defense of what we've lost? will we right ourselves? like how the wildfire that burns through the stagnant forest enriches what is left behind. we have become too dependent on our authority figures taking proper actions for us, allowing us to feel blameless and point fingers. it is time to be present and responsible on the small scale.