If somebody came by your house, stuck their head in your front door and told ya an outrageous lie every day, ya probably wouldn’t want that fella to come around your house too much.
But for some reason, every day around suppertime Minnie turns on the TV and lets 
the weatherman fill our heads with lies.
Supposed to be sunny this weekend, we’ll say to each other, noddin’ along with the TV, and then she’ll come up with somethin’ for me to do that ya need good weather for.
Last time this happened, Minnie was after me to paint the baby barn. So when I seen the weather was supposed to be good, I said there ya go then, I’ll do it Saturday.
Normally, I’d do anything to get out of doin’ something like that – paintin’ a baby barn and workin’ around the house and that – but the way Minnie got me was, she said I wasn’t allowed to get any more beer for myself until the baby barn was painted.
The thing is, I was still kind of in the doghouse from the hockey playoffs when me and Cyril and Timmy and Tommy and Murph were gettin’ together pretty much every night and drinkin’ our faces off, watchin’ the hockey games.
So fine, I says. The thing is, especially with Minnie, you gotta know when it’s OK to push your luck, and I had a feelin’ I pushed mine just enough. So I said all right then, I’ll get up Saturday mornin’ and get ‘er done.
So Saturday comes and I get up and go over to Cyril’s place so I can pick up a half a can of paint I knew he had over there, and then I came back home and mixed it with the half a can of paint I knew I had out in the barn. They were two different colours, but I broke a branch off the tree in the back yard and mixed them up pretty good so it was sort of like a muddy beigey grey type colour. I knew it wouldn’t quite be enough paint to do the whole barn, so what I did was, I got one of them big white plastic buckets (I think it’s belonged to pork riblets or somethin’) and I poured the mixed paint in there, and then I did this little trick I seen in a movie once.
I knew I had to make the paint stretch so I could do the whole barn with it, so I ran in the house and snuck out a bottle of vegetable oil from the kitchen when Minnie wasn’t lookin’. I poured the whole thing right into the paint bucket and started mixin’ ‘er up again.
I got an old crusty brush from the barn and started washin’ it out under the hose.
Holy frig, it was a nice day. The sun was shinin’ so bright you could feel the sunburn settin’ in on the back of your neck if you stood still for five seconds. Just one of them crystal clear beautiful days that you dream about in the middle of January when you’re up to your eyeballs in snow and you can’t feel your feet when you’re shovelin’ the driveway.
Anyways, I said to hell with it and took my shirt off. Minnie says I could be charged for indecency with the body on me. But I took it off and flipped my cap on backwards and I started workin’ away on the back of the barn. I figured if I frigged it up too much, nobody’d see on the back. But you know somethin’? It actually went on pretty good.
I got around the side of the barn and Minnie was hangin’ out a full load of wash on the line.
Now, I don’t know how you explain this one, but as I’m just about finished paintin’ the side of the barn, and just as Minnie’s finished puttin’ the last two things on the line, a rain drop falls out of the clear blue sky and hits me right between the eyes.
What in the hell is this? I says to myself, but before I can even get the question out, another drop hits my hat, and another one hits my shoulder, and before you know it, it’s absolutely friggin’ spillin’ on us.
Minnie starts scramblin’ to get the clothes back in off the line but quits after a few things because they’re already soaked. I fire my brush on the grass and run in the house and the two of us stand there in the back door, watchin’ my homemade gettin’ rinsed off side of the barn and Minnie says – It wasn’t supposed to rain today, was it?
John McNeil 