I could’ve sworn this cooler was blue yesterday, I thought to myself.

Standing in our kitchen, I was looking at the small cooler we often use to haul gatorade, ice, and cooling towels for our son’s baseball. My eyebrow was gently cock-eyed as my mind tried to decipher what exactly I was looking at here. 

The cooler was looking like a reverse Dalmatian. It had obvious white spots on what had previously been a pristine royal blue exterior.

I knelt and picked it up for closer inspection. 

Of course the white spots were white paint. Why wouldn’t they be? I am married to an artist, after all. 

I should have shook my head, walked away, and left it at that. Should have. Didn’t.

I should have shook my head, walked away, and left it at that. Should have. Didn’t. 

Instead, I sought out my artist wife. I found her in her basement art studio. [link] She was crouching down and fiddling with a painting when I knocked and walked in.  

“Hey, what happened to our cooler?” I asked. 

She stopped fiddling and looked up at me with a sheepish, sly smile. The type of smile that says, “You already know what happened.”

Indeed, I had a good idea. But I still wanted to find out how it happened. 

My artist wife recently painted a temporary mural for a business in Edmonton, AB. 

Not only did my artist wife spend a whole day painting this, she completely covered our blue cooler in white spots. And the beautiful mural is now for sale. You can also have the cooler for an additional price.

It was a full-day, outdoor job in a blistering summer heat wave. She had brought refreshments with her in the cooler.

As she told me how our cooler had turned into a Dalmatian she began to get more excited. Unreasonably excited, I thought. 

I guess she had a little fun with the mural. Basically, she explained she had rigged up a paint “explosion” to cover the painting with white paint. 

The unintended consequence, of course, was making everything else in the vicinity a casualty of the paint explosion, including our cooler.

“Oh, and I have a video of it, too,” she said with excitement.  Immediately, she whipped out her phone to show me. 

As she was excitedly showing me how she covered so many of our possessions in paint, I couldn’t help but notice that her phone was spotless. 

The very phone she had used to film the paint-splosion. The very phone that had been sitting in the immediate blast area. Miraculously, it survived.

But that’s life married to an artist. If you have any possessions not covered in paint, just wait. They soon will be.