There's Always Been Blood and Sweat. Why No Tears?

Well, the tears came with this incident.

I'm in my 13th month of remodeling. I have survived 3 robberies (two were successful), 1 sprained ankle, 3 electric shocks. None of it freaked me out. I have been working 50 hours a week for a long time. I have made some big mistakes that cost me weeks at a time, only to discover that, "Hey, they make a tool for this!" It didn't get to me.

But this did: Graffitti. And lazy neighbors who won't paint over it. They just left it, week after week. The neighbors said about the taggers, "They just come back." Competing taggers crossed out rival graffitti and wrote in their own beside it. The neighbors didn't even call the city. It was looking like gangland in New York. I guess the little punks have more tenacity and resources than home-owning, hard-working adults. How will I recover the money I invested when I have such a neighborhood?

So I went a bought special paint and covered it up. The whole alley. Took like 2 hours in the first pretty day of spring. I increased the value of every home on that block by a hundreds of dollars each. I hated every minute of it. I knew that Jeremy would criticize me. A neighbor came out and gave me 5 bucks. :)

I was wrong about Jeremy. It wasn't just him criticizing me, EVERYONE criticized me. I did more on that day for the good of mankind than I have done in months. Yet I was critcized. "Leave it until just before you sell." But I know it will take several rounds of new graffitti before the taggers give up. I was right. I drove by on Saturday night, and there was a fresh display of graffitti on 3 garages.

The next morning, I went to church and the music was too loud. I sat for a few moments -with my critics- and decided that I couldn't stand the racket. No big deal. I have done that a half dozen times in my old church. But THIS time, I went out and started crying because of the noise. It wasn't really the noise, it was just a tiny annoyance added to my already broken heart. I couldn't stop. Jeremy went out with me and we sat on a bench outdoors. I just couldn't stop. I'll bet it's been 6 months since I shed a tear. He kept his arm around me. I felt less silly.

PLOT TWIST
Then we went back into the building. The music was still playing, so we were waiting it out in the foyer. There was a lady in the foyer with 2 children who were adopted from an orphanage in Russia! She was drumming up volunteers to fill boxes with gifts for orphans in the former Soviet Union. Our friends Pavel and Tatyana were the contacts on the other side there in Moldova, to insure that the gifts actually made it to the children.

I guess this whole fiasco was to get Jeremy to talk to this lady. He got 10 boxes, 10 boxes, and filled them with candy, toys and personal grooming products. I helped pick out the goodies and pack them. He had been saving up 10% of our income for months, and this wiped out about half of it.

I still haven't covered up the graffitti. I think it's good to avoid making a game out it by covering it too fast. It's not increasing and the rivals are ignoring it. I'll cover it eventually or maybe leave a flyer on the front doors of the owner's houses encouraging them to cover it. I recommend Home Depot's shellac based paint (the fine print says "alcohol-based"), formulated for graffitti. It covers in just one coat, and it's thin so it goes a long ways.

I drove by another alley just a block away. It's so ugly, the taggers don't want their names there. Strangely, that made me feel better. After all, these are just alleys.