We seem to have inadvertently established a pattern, this past week.

The pattern goes something like this: Penny comes home from daycare with Matt. She is whiney and grouchy and generally ill-behaved, until she finally crosses the line and goads us into giving her a time-out - usually about halfway into Sesame Street (which we tape for her, as it's on during an impossible time of the day for us).

During the time-out (which is anywhere from 2 to 5 minutes isolated in her crib) she cries a little bit, but not terribly. After Matt gets her out, she clings to him woefully and sits on his lap for the remainder of Sesame Street. And then she's well-behaved and generally fairly cheerful for the rest of the evening.

"I'm going to start just giving her a time-out as soon as we get home," Matt said. I think he was only half-joking.

As Penny was happily upending her pegboard last night, I said to Matt, "So, what do you want to do after she goes to bed? I've got this Buffy disc..."

Matt said, "I thought you were going to paint the porch?"

"... Oh. Right."

"You don't have to!" he said hurriedly. "I just thought..."

"No, no, it needs to be done." Especially since we sanded most of the paint off the railing back at the beginning of July, and the house is beginning to take on a sort of redneck/white trash character. And especially since my mother-in-law is coming to visit in a week.

But outdoor painting needs at least 3 dry days in a row - you don't want it raining either before or after the painting for at least 24 hours - and the only days in the last two months that it hasn't at least threatened rain was that week stretch where we were having a heat index of nearly 120, and I simply was not going to get out there and paint in that.

And according to the forecast, it's not supposed to rain today or Friday, and it is going to threaten rain starting Friday night and running all the way through to the 13th, which is when we're having Penny's birthday party. Making last night pretty much the only good time to do some painting.

So after Penny went to bed, I changed into some scummy clothes and went to work. Naturally, since Penny goes to bed at 8, I didn't get to finish - I worked until 9, and the last half hour of it, I was working by the light filtering out of the living room window.

But I got the trim around the garage door, and the posts and rail by the porch steps, and the top-rail all the way around the porch. I had to stop because I was literally painting by feel, but it didn't look too bad this morning. There's a couple of spots that could use a little touching up, but not nearly as many as I'd expected.

What's left are the posts (for which I'll need a stepstool) and the latticework (for which I'll need a lot more than an hour). Also, I need to figure out how to get the house numbers off the one post without damaging them, or else I need to go buy new house numbers to put up when I'm done, because it would take me far too long to try to paint around them.

And sometime after last night's painting dries, and before I do the latticework, I want to get the pressure-nozzle on the hose and see if I can clean some of the gunk off the latticework and the porch overhang.

So, that was my evening. How was yours?

--Liz