Ouch! Shopping is deadly.

I went to pick up the groceries yesterday. They had been ordered online and all I had to do was to drive to Walmart to pick them up or rather supervise the minimum wage meth-heads that Walmart employs to carry stuff from the store to the car. With the amount of stuff that goes missing from the orders, minimum wage is way too high for those people! Yesterday was a bit of a surprise - only the bread was missing from the order. Interestingly the meth-heads weren't as slow as last month when I waited 90 minutes.

So, having got the groceries loaded, I headed home. I was fortunate in not seeing the meth-heads smile with their wonderful demonstration of meth-mouth. I'm sure a no-questions, low-fee denture clinic will be Walmart's next offering. In fact the local joke is about Walmart opening a dental clinic with a speedy checkout for those with 12 teeth or less.

At home is where disaster struck. It wasn't so much that I dropped anything. I'd carried all the heavy stuff into the house and was bringing in a lighter weight bag. I bent to put it on the floor and felt something above my left hip go rigid then felt a searing pain. I didn't realise that I could curse in 15 different languages before then! So, the frozen and chilled stuff being already put away, the rest stayed where it was.

Fast forward to today. Most of the pain has gone though putting shoes on etc was somewhat of a painful challenge as was getting out of bed to pee in the night. Thus since I'm still in recovery mode although the weather is gorgeous with a blue sky, I could not continue with the welding. Instead I picked up the mail and found the battery holder I'd ordered for use with my 12v screen had arrived. Then I did get to the bus to do stuff.

Before I got hurt I'd seen some grey paint that was peeling up. I pulled on it and great big sheets of Rustoleum flaked off. 

That's ridiculous but was helpful today when I wanted to remove the house number I'd stuck onto the back of the bus. I've decided to go simpler and have the house number printed on paper and left inside the windshield. None of the delivery people could see the back number and were blind to the number I had stuck to the front bumper that I had tried to remove the other day but had ended up painting over. If they're not going to see it, what's the point?

The other day I'd painted one of the rub rails black. I like the new look so I decided to paint all the rub rails black again. This entailed going up and down the bus with my battery drill and a paint-removing bristle brush. That worked really well on the loose flakes of the paint on the rub rails. I also went over the areas where the grey had flaked off revealing yellow.

From yesterday it seemed easier to spray black then touch up the grey which is what I had a go at today. I had one super-sized spray can of black paint and rapidly used it up. It did two rub rails only. With that in mind I'll probably get a pot of paint to do the rest as that works out way cheaper than spray and will also mean I won't have the overspray and touchup I do with spray paint.

For fun I sprayed the steel panel I'm welding in, grey like the bus. It looks really good. I'll have to finish the welding, of course. With luck my back might let me grab the air tank and the welder tomorrow since tomorrow is forecast to be good weather. Indeed, if I can get the outside welding done then I should be able to zip around the inside of the panel with very few welding rods, securing the panel fully. Then I can grind the outside welds to turn them from blobby Farmer Joe to professional welder style welds. As a friend once said - "The difference between an amateur welder and a professional welder is an angle grinder".

Once the panel is completely welded, I will probably after sand-blasting the inside faces of the welds and spraying them with rust-killing paint, fill in all around with Bondo then rivet the original security panel back inside the door. I can't imagine too many people wanting to climb up to the back windows to try to get in. Having said that, the three remaining back windows are destined for replacement. I won't be welding flush though unless I can find an easier way of doing it!