I’ve spent the better part of the last three evenings painting our mantel white, to match the trim and, more importantly, not to clash with our furniture.

I enjoyed myself so much that I’m thinking about repainting the entire kitchen/living room and hallway, just for kicks. And I really feel like I can do a better job than the painters did. (Seriously, there’s globs of green paint all over the white trim. That’s just laziness.)

The only thing that might ruin such a paint job, though, is the thing that ruins most everything in this house: Molly.

Today, I was in the office doing work for the job that actually pays me, after having spent the afternoon putting a final and probably unnecessary coat on the mantel, when something made me get up and go into the kitchen. I’d like to say it was intuition, but, let’s be honest, it was to get a snack.

And there is Molly, under the kitchen barstool, chowing down on a wet paintbrush.

So I start my typical yelling and taking it away from her, and she does her typical running away and then staring at me blankly, like I’m the crazy one and she has done absolutely nothing wrong. And as I am standing up, I smack my head so hard on the counter overhang that, even as I am doing it, I am thinking to myself that I should probably call my neighbor because, when I finish standing up and the blood drains from my head, I’m going to pass out and end up laying unconscious on the floor until Rob finally comes home from work at like ten o’clock.

The good news is that I didn’t pass out, or throw up. The bad news is that I looked up to see (five or six swimming versions of) this image:

That would be an entire can of paint. Oh, and its hard to tell from the picture, but it did seep under the carpet. And it was pretty dry already, too.

I didn’t lose it until, in the process of cleaning up, I got a spot of paint on my brand new, absurdly expensive jeans. Rob has been wanting to refinish the floors, and I didn’t love that rug anyway, but seriously? Good jeans are hard to come by.

Molly is lucky she’s so cute.

PS: Rob, don’t freak out, I managed to get it all up. And out of the carpet. Fantastik is, well, fantastic.