Today was a tough day. I went out to the show to touch up some outlining that had to wait till the two parts came together and found that the paint on the bottom edge of the marquee was peeling. You can see from the picture how the marquee has a strip of aluminum all around the edge framing it. I just painted directly on it. The enamel paint should have no problem bonding to it. I painted it 2 weeks ago! So I get there and the paint just on the bottom of the marquee all along that strip of aluminum was peeling. There was actually moisture under the paint…which of course caused it to peel. I don’t really understand how the moisture got there. Last night was the first night it was exposed to the elements…and it had to be from the dew I guess. The only thing I can think of is where the edge of the aluminum strip and the panel come together there may have been spots that didn’t get filled in with the paint allowing a spot for the moisture to collect and seep in under the paint. I am not really all that smart about how paint works but that can be the only way I see that this could have happened. I was really frustrated because we have a bit of a time crunch now…and I have to clear coat it tomorrow. I am praying that it will be fine and I won’t have another situation like that to deal with tomorrow. So what did I do about it…well, I decided to scrape the entire strip (about 1 inch) and then paint kilz primer on it. I wasn’t really sure that it would fix it for good…but that’s what I did. Then I painted over it and fixed up all the touch ups and now it’s done. It looks pretty good. I was pretty happy about how it came together. I had to paint the two pieces separately and so I used a tape measure to measure the points when one part of the ship or tree would end on the trailer so I would know where it would be on the marquee, but then I had to measure 15 inches in, because as you can see the marquee is shorter than the trailer. It will be fine, because we are going to mount some jolly roger flags on either side of the marquee and then all along the top as well. I think it will look pretty cool. The thing that made today frustrating was that I had taken the kids with me. I didn’t really think this would be a problem because it should have only taken me about 20 minutes to touch it up. But it turned into more like 2 hours. I hadn’t brought any snacks and the boys were fighting (irritating each other) which they rarely do. Jasmin was actually less maintenance than those two. And I don’t know what was wrong with Karson today, but it was bad. He whined and screamed and complained SO much today. I had had it by this evening and after dinner put all the kids right to bed. They were all asleep by 8:30. I think he was mostly just really tired, but there wasn’t an opportunity for a nap today. Tonight Sam left to go be with his mom and sisters. His mom is not doing any better. It’s hard. I was sad that he had to go tonight.