Graffiti on our Lockers

I've had these old lockers from the IU Wrestling Team's locker room for a LONG time, and that whole time they've always been the same chipped black and red paint with IU Wrestling stickers on, because they were so freakin' heavy that there was just absolutely no way that I was going to be able to move them across the house, down the stairs, into the yard, and back again.

Our new house, however, has a wheelchair ramp! Matt is god-like in his strength, and the man can move anything if he's got a ramp. He moved those lockers out of our old house (and I don't know how the hell he managed that, but he did), onto a trailer borrowed from a friend, off that trailer at our new house, and set them in the driveway for me, with the agreement that he'd move them inside and put them where I wanted them whenever I wanted him to.

Because I'm a pretty tacky person at heart, I didn't want to refinish the lockers to look cute or anything like that, mind you. Instead, I wanted to camp them up with graffiti!

I primed only the front of the lockers, because priming them was an insanely, stupidly difficult job (that steel mesh made brush-on primer a Sisyphean ordeal of constantly mopping up drips, and it also absolutely soaked up spray-on primer to very little effect, since 98% of it simply went through the mesh):

No matter where we live, you'll always be able to tell which driveway is ours!

On Independence Day, after the parade and the park, we went to the hardware store and bought spray paint in every rainbow color, plus black. I couldn't find a silver that I liked, and we already had gold at home, because Syd had wanted to make a PVC pipe "light saber" for a friend's birthday the previous week.

Off and on for the rest of the long weekend, whenever the kids had a mind to, they took spray paint to lockers, and oh, my goodness, they had a fabulous time with it:

I really just needed them to get down a random base layer that looked like decades of old graffiti that had been painted over tons of times, and they did a masterful job.

We also spent a lot of time talking about graffiti as an art form, which explains Will's little lecture on graffiti art in this video:

That kid is going to be a superb politician/professor one day: she can parrot back parts of her reading or one of my lectures or something heard on NPR, mix in stuff she knows on her own, and add in whatever VERY firm stance that she has immediately taken on the issue, presented as fact, and will defend unto death. Currently, you should hear her talk about the drug industry--a Michael Jackson song came on the radio yesterday, which got us talking about him, which got us talking about drug overdoses, which got us talking about drug abuse, which got us talking about pain management, which got Will ranting about how someone needs to finally map the human brain, dang it, so that people can alter their brains to do what they want without drugs (I don't know how that became the takeaway, but there you go--add mad scientist to her future career possibilities).

When the kids had happily covered every square inch of the lockers with color, I added some text. I had wanted Matt to do something really stylized, but he was spending the day at our old house and I was impatient, so I just did it myself with my junior high bubble letters:

It's part of Matt's last name, plus if you're going to do graffiti you have to have a Doctor Who reference, plus the year that we moved into our new house. 

With all of these house projects that must be done before we can stop living in chaos, preparations for our impending road trip have taken a serious hit. If you know me, you will be shocked to hear that the children and I have not intensively studied for this trip yet! We plan to listen to the Little House books during our trip, not before, and the entire Little House and paleontology unit studies are now going to have to be completed AFTER our trip, not before as they clearly should be. 

I must take deep, calming breaths as I think of that, and remind myself that a vacation can still be fun even if you haven't spent two months studying for it...