A Proper Knees Up

Today I did two things I haven't done in years.

The first was that I knelt down. The second was that I stood up after kneeling down.

I cannot remember the last time my knees let me do a proper kneel-down, but today I decided to chance it in pursuit of getting our house sold. On Saturday I had painted over some chips and scratches on the yellow columns at the front of the house. The assumption being that people react quickly to how a house looks when they first approach it, and it seemed important not to let them see that we hadn't bothered with the dings and nicks since we moved in.

Anyhow, the paint job on the columns seemed effective enough without going to the trouble of repainting the whole thing. But all the yellow paint I had spilled on the marble pavers of the porch needed a scrubbing this morning.

I also wanted to paint the step at the front door. For some reason the previous owners had painted it bright red, which I have always thought was an odd choice for a yellow house with aqua trim. But in the 9 years we have lived here much of the red paint had worn away to the point where you didn't know if it was a red step with lots of wear or a wooden step that had been bleeding.

Anyhow, it was time to kneel down. Nothing ripped, tore or even hurt much. I was thinking this wasn't going to be as bad as I had worried. Then I realized I still had to get my other knee down.

Once both knees were down, I started scrubbing like a scullery maid - if you can imagine a bald, fat scullery maid with a moustache. The yellow paint came up pretty easily, and all that remained was to get the paint and do the front step.

Which is when I learned that kneeling down - as challenging as it may seem - is much easier than standing up.

Much.

More or less stuck on all fours on the front porch with little idea how to get out of that position, I ran through my yoga positions in my mind. Perhaps one would show me the way to get upright again.

The Downward-facing Dog is supposed to start from a kneeling position, but I've always cheated and skipped the kneeling part, so that was no help. The Sun Salutation had taught me how to do a sort of squat that uses my knees to stand up from a bent-over position. Unfortunately, I can now tell you that you cannot squat when you are sitting on your feet, and really it was getting those feet out in front of me that was the real challenge. So that was little help.

I finally figured out that the porch railing could also function as a pull-up bar from the position I was in. Grabbing it, I was able to swing one foot and then the next in front of my body. And from there I did a modified Sun Salutation and pushed my way through to the upright position. My Wii guy probably would have told me I need to work on my balance, but it did not matter.

And yes, the whole process had to be repeated in order to paint the step. So you could say that I have now done this kneel-down-and-get-back-up thing twice. But when I was done, I was relieved that twice would be quite enough for the foreseeable future.

That was until a few moments later. I forgot to shut the front door afterwards and Streak walked through, leaving paw marks on the newly painted step and paint marks on the porch pavers. LK volunteered to clean up the paint the cat had tracked, and I did a quick fix on the step, but it will need another coat. I guess I will be back painting the step one last time tomorrow.

Assuming my knees are still working when I try to get out of bed.