Fatherly advice. (Warning: involves highly disrespectful discussion of a major religious figure.)→[More:]

While I'm here in Calgary, I'm house-and-cat-sitting for my stepmother and will be painting the stairwell and adjoining hallways. I'd planned on doing prep all day today, but now it's the first day I've had to myself since I left B'ham, I haven't stopped moving in two weeks, and I've had it. So Dad calls, and I ask if he thinks it would be okay if I took it easy on the work front today.

"You know what? There's nobody there. If you want to take it easy and someone's telling you you can't, it's a ghost. Besides, it's Sunday."
"True, and working on Sunday makes the Baby Jesus cry."
"Oh, the Baby Jesus won't just cry, he'll send you all to hell."
So then we got into a discussion about how cranky the Baby Jesus gets and what he would do to me if I worked today, at the end of which Dad sighed and said, "Yep. Don't fuck with the Baby Jesus."

And suddenly it's so clear why I turned out the way I did.