When the Rain Comes

On Wednesday I was talking to a coworker about some logistics for the LEAP sandcastle classic (my firm does this every year to help fund arts education for Bay Area kids), and she mentioned that rain was in the forecast, so we needed a tent to keep our supplies dry.

Rain? So soon? Isn't it still August? So it turns out that it's, like, October or something, and the rainy season is upon us.

Of course, as soon as the reality of rain became clear, my first thought was not of several small children getting soaked and catching their death of cold, but instead that we had our front stairs stripped of paint, and we'd been planning to paint them on Saturday. The rain was projected to start Friday. You really can't paint wet wood, so we somehow had to get the stairs painted, but also we had no obvious daylight hours in which to paint them (another symptom of October).

So we hurried home after work Thursday and Noel sanded the stairs, then I put down a first layer of paint (thinned with water, which actually worked quite well). It needed six hours before it was ready for a second coat, and by the time we finished I was working with a pair of worklights, and the soonest the next coat could go on would be 1am. I get up before 6am, so that was definitely not going to happen.

So Friday morning we got up at the crack of dawn and started painting as soon as it was light enough outside. The second coat went on much faster, so I wasn't even too late for work.

Painting the stairs

With the stairs themselves all nice and bright, the porch looked kind of dingy, so we gave it a quick coat of paint, as well. (We intend to strip and re-paint the porch at some point very soon, so concern about adhesion is pretty much irrelevant.)

Just in time, too, because by the time I got home Friday evening it was sprinkling, and soon there was a real rain coming down. Happy autumn! Happy rains!

This being Alameda rather than San Francisco, the clouds didn't stick around long. This was the view this morning:

Not cloudy for long