Paint the Town!

Today Sue and I went to represent CiN Weekly at Paint the Town. I took tons of pictures so you can feel like you were there, even though you decided to sleep in instead of waking up at 6:30 a.m. and painting a house in the hot sun. Whatever, lazybones.



A "before" picture. You can see our fearless leader, Stepfanie, in the yellow shirt, giving us a pep talk about how we'll be starting with the porch so we don't have to get on any tall extension ladders ...




Like this girl did. You know, you can't really see how far up she is here. Let's pull back juuuuust a bit:




That's four stories, for those of you keeping count. See the red ladder in the middle - the 12-footer that's way, way shorter than the yellow ones towering just over it? I climbed that ladder and started feeling kind of queasy. (It seemed a LOT taller in person.)




Midmorning, and we're doing great! You can see the homeowner on the ladder on the porch roof. He and his wife were super-nice - they bought us fruit to snack on. And every time he went to climb the ladder to the porch roof, he sang, "Up on the roo-oof ..."




More people on ladders I was uncomfortable climbing. Luckily, Give Back Cincinnati allowed you to specify your ladder preference at registration. (P.S. The guy on the ladder on the right - the one working on the window trim - was a machine. I think he said he actually does construction or rehab work for a living.)




Aww yeah - lunchtime!




Sue and Stepfanie chow down.



Back to work! My friend Jeff was there too - that's him on the porch roof, helping out with the trim.




The strangest part of the day for me came when a few of us walked over to the church next door to use the bathroom. (We had a Porta-Potty, but we figured running water was worth walking a few hundred feet for.) As we approached the church, a man in a car stopped to give us gift certificates to his online store. Then, Charlie Winburn and Sam Malone walked out of the church, shook our hands, and asked us where we lived and what church we went to. I think they were rehearsing for the next day, because Winburn was apparently going to be speaking at the church.

When I said I sometimes go to Bellarmine, Malone was all, are you XU? (He actually said the letters X, U, which I didn't think was a thing.) And I was like, um, no, sorry, Ohio State. And Malone was like, that's cool, I'm gonna hug you now. And I was like, I'm covered in paint, and you're wearing a suit. And then Sam Malone hugged me, and then we went into the church and interrupted what looked like a stepping rehearsal so we could use the bathroom, and when we came back out Winburn was all, "Here, have some Diet Coke. And come back tomorrow for the service."




Hey, that's me! "Up on the roo-oof ..." I touched up the trim on the edge of the porch roof - following the directions given to me by people on the ground. "OK, a little to the right ... now down a bit ..." I would have just laid down on the roof and peered over, but by that point, those shingles were butt-burnin' hot! I could barely handle sitting on the blazing things, let alone allowing my bare skin to touch them.




Whew! Almost done. There's a little patch of unfinished business in the back, but it's all being taken care of by a few brave people on extension ladders. The rest of us don't have much to do, so we go ahead and ...




... get on the bus.




Poor Jeff - he's dwarfed by me.




Time for the after-party. Free hot dogs - woo-hoo!




I managed to keep my Paint the Town shirt relatively paint-free - but that didn't stop a big gray glob from lodging in my hair. That was super-fun to brush out. (Side note: is my hair really that red, or is it just the light?)