Hmm. I bid on to have these tiles made for me by Chicago artist Jason Messinger at a fundraiser in January 2004. (That would, in fact, be the fundraiser where I received the Michael Jackson Service Award. For some reason, perhaps having to do with Michael Jackson's indictment for murder one, they seem to have now retired the award). The tiles were finished in, oh, May, or so. When Bill was holding one of them up by the wall in, oh, September or so, it fell and broke. The replacement was ready in October. We hung most of them up on nails in November. But we couldn't get one of them up and then another one fell (but didn't break, thank goodness). Sometime, February? March? we decided to put them up permanently. In April Bill bought mastic and got them on the wall. Then I bought the wrong grout. Then we bought the right grout. Then on May 30th--that would be 2005--we spent maybe 45 mintutes mixing grout and putting it on. Then we spent 4 hours, wearing out four toothbrushes in the process, trying, with substantially less than 100% success, to get the grout out of all the little designs on the tile. Lesson for the day: Don't do your first grout job on tiles that have 400 little indentations per tile, all of which will have to be cleaned out.
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