ladder-owners.

I'm a tall girl, and I'm not used to being limited by height. Little old ladies in stores ask me to get things off the top shelf for them. But I'm afraid that even Richard Kiel would not be able to paint my living room, which is too bad, because it would be pretty neat to say that Richard Kiel painted my living room.

It's not that I haven't tried. I recruited my tallest piece of furniture to paint the master bedroom. I also recruited a box of books once I realized that my tallest piece of furniture still wasn't quite tall enough. I set up a slightly shorter piece of furniture and a kitchen chair to make set of steps up to the tallest piece of furniture. While on top of this arrangement, I thought about my nephew, who is reckless and fearless and just generally nine years old. He probably thinks that adults never do dangerous things. Well, I was sure showing him. I didn't much like it, but I did it long enough to paint the top of the walls. But there is also a very tall loft area up there. And while the dresser/box allows me to reach the walls with a paintbrush, it does not allow me to climb up on the loft. Or maybe it's my lack of upper arm strength that doesn't allow that. In any case, I'm not even sure if the loft will support my weight.

For most of the house, a kitchen chair has been sufficient. These chairs, they've seen a lot of paint. I stood on them when I painted my old apartment, and you can still see the different colors splashed across the seats and dripping down the backs. Now, I've splashed a whole new set of colors on the chairs. I suppose I could wipe them off, but they're charming in an unintentional documentary sort of way.

One of those chairs fell down the stairs. I did not fall with it, and I probably owe God a favor for that one. I would have been crumpled at the bottom of the stairs, dragging myself seal-style to the cell phone, thinking about that old woman in the commercial who had fallen and couldn't get up. Instead I was standing at the top of the stairs, contemplating whether the chair's tumble had scratched any of the freshly-applied paint in the stairwell. It is luck that allows us to ever think about such trivial matters.

I told Josh about the chair's noisy fall. When he calls, he tells me about the bar in Arizona he played at that had a full-size Easter Island statue, and I tell him about what I painted that day. After such a near-death experience, it was nice to have something interesting to say. He said that I should not do any more painting, that I should wait for him to get back and he would do it all. What a terribly silly thing to say. If I can paint and I have the time to do it, why shouldn't I? My ex-boyfriend complained that I was too independent once. I don't even know what that means.

The living room walls will have to wait for him, though. There's no way I can reach them without piling strong furniture upon strong furniture and then climbing on it. My nephew might think that was a great idea. Me, I've already had broken bones before and decided it wasn't that cool. But then there is the half-finished hallway, where a lovely shade of red extends about ten feet up the wall before meeting beige in a jagged edge shaped by a paint roller. It mocks me. While I knew from the beginning that I couldn't do the living room, this wall still seems finishable. I just need a bigger box of books.

When I'm not thinking about bigger boxes of books, I think about ladders. I don't have one. Clearly, I need one for this specific job. But it might also be nice to have one around for when I want to change the lightbulb in the living room or clean the gutters. Those are things that homeowners do, right? Homeowners are also frequently ladder-owners. Hmm. I never thought of myself as a person who might one day own a ladder. Buying a home brings out all these things you never knew about yourself. Sandra: Ladder-Owner.

I could borrow one. I don't really have a way to transport one, though, so it would need to be from someone very close to me. I only know one of my neighbors, and I wouldn't feel comfortable knocking on her door and asking to borrow something. One day, I drove by another neighbor and saw her on the roof, a big extension ladder leaning against the house. I began formulating plans to befriend this woman and wondered whether a batch of homemade cookies might soften her feelings toward a near-stranger asking to borrow large home improvement accessories.

I started looking online. I discovered that if you do enough online searches for a word, you start to think too hard about the term itself. Ladder. Lad-der. LADDER. And that's how you end up doing wikipedia searches for common household items. Sandra: One Who Looks Up "Ladder" on Wikipedia.

I was surprised to see the many advances in ladder technology. Eventually, I would like one of the fancy multi-use ladders. You can extend them or step on them or make scaffolds out of them. Ladders have followed the action figure model in that you can pose them in all sorts of positions. Cosmic scaffold, activate! Action figure ladders are pretty expensive, but it seems like a good value if I only ever have to buy one to cover all my self-elevating needs. If I can make sound effects whenever I change the pose, that's just a bonus.

For now, I'll probably continue spying on the neighbors and working on my cookie recipes. Sandra: One Who Bribes with Cookies.