Yellow Jackets

Up early, though the museum is closed D and I need to get started taking the Impressionism Show down, the wrapping so problematic we don't have a feel for how long it will take. Early enough that I've got a few minutes to sling-blade some brush before leaving the house. Nice way to start the day and I'm enjoying the relative coolth, then stumble over a hole and yellow jackets come roiling out. Stung six times around the head and neck, one just below my left eye. Come in and make very strong coffee, a substitute for meds I don't have, and it works, a little woozy then jangled by too much coffee too quickly. Not going to work is not an option, buck it up, dab on some ointment, head to town. Saturday we had dug out all the packing materials and sorted most of it, actually threw most of it away, as everything had been done wrong, doubly wrong, maybe triply. We couldn't wrap paintings that badly if we tried. We establish our system. D prepares the nest, cardboard on the bottom, bubble wrap next, then glassine on top (to protect the painted surface, the assholes at South Bend had actually wrapped them in plastic sheeting and are lucky they didn't grow mold on 3.3 million dollars worth of paintings), we use blue painter's tape with a folded edge (for easy removal) on the glassine, then clear packing tape, folded edge, for the bubble-wrap, same for the cardboard-to-wrapped-painting joint. We quickly get very good at this. I don the white gloves, get the paintings off the wall, shed the gloves, then our four hands fairly fly through the folding and taping. We impress ourselves. Our goal is 21 of the 63 paintings. As we clear a bay, we stop, remove the hanging hardware, and patch, we leave the vault open, upstairs, and when we finish wrapping a painting I put it in the elevator, which, as the museum is not open, we can leave locked open, when the elevator is full we offload it upstairs. We talk about Rumi and how he can't hold a candle to Basho. We talk John Boats. We talk about the Wrack Show. We see the increasingly pregnant Zoe at lunch, she bumper-cars us with the twins. The staff at the pub are (is) surprised to see us for lunch on a Monday, it was like a scene from a movie, where, in a slightly sarcastic manner, the staff over-accommodates the patrons, pretty funny, really, and then Jim went to the cellar/storage and when he came up he plopped a five-gallon pickle tub on the seat next to D, D hadn't asked for a pickle tub but would take it anyway, and there was something about Jim's grin. The bucket is heavier than it should be and rattles, 14 bottles of beer on the wall, 14 bottles of beer. Jim always gives us the odd beers that don't sell, and some of them are awful, but some are interesting and they're free. The swelling has gone down, I can no longer see the flesh beneath my left eye, what is that called, vertical seeing. I'm sure there's a name for it, it escapes me just now, whatever I meant to say.