Sanding off the Veneer

If you've been following the blog, you know we're in the middle of a lot of projects around the homestead right now.  The Mr took the banister off of the wall because it needed to be painted.  We set it out in the garage and I got to sanding.  I welcomed the break from all of the paint fumes to go into sucking in fine polyurethane particles.

I don't know the the whole vibration of the sander or the alone time with the white noise of it got me all zen or what but I actually got a little sad.  This is our first house.  You know, the place we were going to stay for 5 years and then move on?  Well, it's been almost 16 years and living beneath our means has allowed us to live a good life especially since its just the two of us.  I thought of all that banister had seen.  I thought of the 21 and 23 year old us doing their final walk through and grabbing the newly painted banister as we headed upstairs to inspect the rest of the house; excited that it would be done 2 weeks prior to our wedding.  I thought of holding onto it my first night in our new home in exhaustion from a wonderful wedding day after having eaten groom's cake and counting our money until 2am when we had a flight to catch to Hawaii in 6 hours.  I thought of the people it had hosted from friends to family both here and gone to repairmen to a little black and white short-haired pooch that was the light of our lives who might've walked under it quite a bit as she'd peer through the open back stairs but was never tall enough to reach it.  I thought of what a bitch it was the paint behind when we were too stupid to remove it the last time we painted.  I thought of all of these things as I tearfully sanded away the times that were now etched into this piece of wood...times that were now in a pile of dust on my garage floor.  I kind of felt like I should save the dust to hold on to those things.  But I was proud of what was revealed.  A beautiful, fresh piece of wood.

As I began sanding off the veneer of the banister that had seen it's better days, I also couldn't help but think of how it related to this whole weight loss thing.  You have this strong, sturdy foundation that gets taken for granted and one day you look at it a go "hmm, that's seen its better days."  You either choose to let it get worse and degrade, get a whole new body and throw away the old one by whatever means necessary or you do what you should've done all along...sand away the veneer to reveal the beautiful clean slate waiting for all of us.

I think I just threw up in my mouth a little.  I guess a 5 pound loss will do that to a person.

I hope you're all ready to do a little "sanding"...what's your plan to kick things into gear this week?

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