A Tale of Two Paints

I went to Home Depot this morning to get a can of grey spray paint. Home Depot doesn't have a particularly good selection of grey spray paint, as it turns out, but as I was rummaging through what selection they did have, I amused myself by constrasting the difference between buying spray paint at home centers and hobby shops.

At home centers, you go through the shelves looking for, say, grey. You find such things as lavender, taupe, tangerine, pumpkin, marigold, eccrue, putty, and bone. Is it a paint rack or a fruit stand?? There are 20 distinct cans of paint that are all roughly the same color as "Almond", and 15 that are roughly the same color as "Rose". But no grey, unless you want sandable primer, which I didn't want. (If you must know, I was looking for light grey that I could spray on an SA-2 surface-to-air missile, the kind of apparatus that looks a bit foolish painted "Lemon".)

If you go to a hobby shop, virtually all colors of paint are grey, sand, or green. But mostly they're all grey. Ocean grey, medium grey, neutral grey, gull grey, dark gull grey, aggressor grey, dark sea grey, extra-dark sea grey (logically enough, I suppose), field grey, haze grey, light grey, camoflauge grey, Euro I grey, dark grey, barley grey, deck grey, Japanese Army grey, Japanese Navy grey (why not?)... (There are almost as many greens, and they're even harder to tell apart, but since they unnerve me, I don't want to spend any time talking about them.)

I guess the bottom line is that I didn't get any light grey spray paint at Home Depot. So I looked at my collection of spray paint out in the garage and asked myself "What's wrong with spraying an SA-2 missile Burgundy? I mean, who's going to care? And maybe it'll be an improvement."

I'm going to cut this short because I sense that I am in imminent danger of freezing to death. Making a pot of iced tea on a cold, windy day like today may not have been the best idea I've ever had.