It’s official: I’m a regular at Canadian Tire. I guess this is because I no longer have instant access to tools, 99% of which belonged to Yann. I’m surrounded by tools every day at work, so on my days off, my hands start shaking from withdrawal. I am slowly building my tool collection: pink, 75% smaller, and 200% more expensive, of course. Stainless steel and black rubber are so unladylike, ew.
My latest trip to obtain made-in-Asia goods from Canadian Tire was for L-brackets and screws to reinforce my fancy bedside table:

It’s a workaround for Ikea’s MALM bed frame, which has poorly thought-out full-length drawers on the sides. If I were to use a regular four-legged bedside table, I wouldn’t have access to my pants unless I move the table! And I can’t be Porky Pigging it. I also need a table to support my nightly hydration operation.
When I moved into my current place, this table had to be cut shorter because it blocked the bedroom door from swinging open. I can’t access the drawers on the other side of the bed either as that side is against the wall, which gives you an idea of how dinky my place is.
Now that I’d made this table functional and sturdy with the addition of L-brackets, I could concern myself with its presentation.
While I have a tool deficiency, I have a sizable collection of art supplies, including a bottle of pouring medium that I’d bought years ago for one project. If you know what you’re doing, the result can be something like this:

I’d painted the wood black. My next plan was to turn the top into a psychedelic pool of colours!
Instead, I turned it into a puddle of despair. I’d tilted and rotated the surface to get even coverage. When this wasn’t happening, I poured more paint into the gaps. It got progressively uglier as I attempted to correct the mistakes.


I HATE IT.
Now my bedside table looks like the kind of garbage one would find on the curb in my old neighborhood of James Bay, a graveyard for failed art experiments. It is so aggressively ugly, and I’d wasted a bottle of titanium white on this atrocity. I don’t want to put my glass of water on this thing. I WANT TO PUT MY FOOT THROUGH IT.
I want to learn karate so that I CAN CHOP IT IN HALF. THEN CHOP THOSE HALVES INTO HALVES.
In actuality, the next step would be to scrape the dried paint off with a snap-blade, repaint it black, and leave it like that. Surely I can stand to keep something simple and tasteful for once?
Yes, I can be a sensible lady!

Either I got my world-record-length tongue re-pierced and developed thrush, or I successfully made a realistic-looking tongue out of Model Magic® and acrylic paint.
So, this week I was successful in creating good and bad ugly art.
I used to go to Crappy Tire to buy tools on sale that I didn’t need. Over the years I’ve used them maybe once and told myself they were worth the money. I hate Crappy Tire because I used to work there but I’m always there.
The table is not ugly; it’s groovy. Your tongue is something else; I don’t have a word for it.
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