Tung Oil and TEA Party...

Two separate subjects connected only by my brain. The first refers to a wood finish, the second to a bit of political protest.

As many of you know, the floor of our house is natural wood. The original owner finished it with tung oil. For the longest time the only reference I ever heard to tung oil was in the movie Beetle Juice. One of the main characters went out to get some tung oil and died in a car wreck on the way home... you can bet your rubber gloves and steel wool I drove really carefully on the way home, completely avoiding covered bridges and small white dogs.

Tung oil comes into play because I need to refinish part of our floor. The wood stove used to sit in a corner but we removed a wall and rebuilt the hearth pad the stove sits on. Now the pad covers less area and the wall is missing so there are parts of the floor that don't have any finish. We kind of need to refinish the whole floor because it looks old and semi-abused...but I kind of like the look, probably because I look old and semi-abused. I'm thinking I can incorporate this into my home defense plan...sort of a camouflage thing. Someone breaks in, I lie down on the floor, fade into just one big expanse of old and semi-abused..leap up as the dipstick walks past and Ginsu him with my utility knife.

But I do need to refinish those newly exposed parts of the floor. I doubt if I'll be able to make the parts match completely, it's difficult to match wood that's been walked on for 10 years with wood that has not... but I can make it a bit less noticeable.

I'm not actually at the tung oil part of the project. I'm at the creating massive amounts of dust during the mind and finger numbing task of sanding. I spent the entire day sitting on the floor sanding, and sanding, and sanding, and sanding. I discovered this old and semi-abused body doesn't react well to sitting on the floor all day. This has created a small choice type difficulty for me.. Aleve or Guinness? I'm thinking Guinness for supper...Aleve for bedtime.

I don't know if you've ever spent the day sanding, and sanding, and sanding, and sanding, but it's not a very mentally challenging thing to do... there's only so much to think about so your brain has to think other thinks. Mine turned to the TEA Party I attended yesterday evening.

In case you've been living in a rock (because I'm thinking even the things under the rock had heard about Taxed Enough Already parties in 800 or so cities) or are Barry O, the TEA Party was a gathering of citizens in various cities to protest the outrageous tax bill headed our way as soon as our current administration realizes they've won the election, don't have to be campaigning at the moment, and decide to start telling the truth about how much all these spending, bailout, and stimulus bills will actually cost.

So a few weeks ago I started reading things about the TEA Party, looked around a bit and discovered one was taking place near the square in Fayetteville. I kept reading words like, protest, revolution, and right wing. I started thinking...this thing could be a bit of fun. Revolution and right wing in the same paragraph...the right wing has all the guns, right. Could get interesting. Maybe an unruly mob, fanged police dogs and Bull Connor wannabes, tear gas and fire hoses.

So I made plans to go and was a bit disappointed when I got there... I've been waiting 31 years to participate in a protest. Having lived outside the U.S. for a goodly part of that 31 years, I tended to avoid any protests occurring in the foreign countries we were living in because no matter what the subject of the protest...someone in the crowd was bound to decide the U.S. was totally at fault. Being completely unable to hide my "American"-ness, especially if I said anything, I was always concerned about becoming some big, hairy pinata. The rest of the time we lived in Hawaii...and what in the world is there to protest there?

So here we are...lining up for my first protest. Revolution and gun-nuts. So I prepared to go downtown. Charged up the camera battery (I'm thinking Pulitzer prize time here), looked up 3 bail bond companies and wrote their numbers in the waistband of my underwear (figuring when the cops started arresting people I might not be able to get out of the way), and stuck $100 in my left sock in case I needed to bribe a taxi driver.

Watching the news before heading down town I got even more excited about the possibilities for mayhem and chaos. This was mostly due to the mainstream news heads claiming the TEA Party attendees were a bunch of stooges of the vast right wing extremist conspiracy...

Imagine my disappointment when I showed up and found... a bunch of ordinary, work everyday, pay the mortgage citizens simply concerned that their duly elected representatives no longer represented them and were wanting to work within the system to elect folks that wouldn't so cavalierly place an untenable tax burden on the next generation.

No raving mob, no fire hoses, fanged attack dogs, or tear gas. If the crowd had been any more genteel it would have been mistaken for a Miss Manners school of etiquette mixer. Regular folks actually expecting their elected representatives to listen to their needs... maybe it was a pretty grand protest to be involved in after all.

..take care.. t