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walk of life
Thursday, August 18 2005
This morning I installed two by fours to brace the right angles between the vertical posts and the cross member on the south assembly of my solar deck. This assembly is what must eventually be walked out and positioned atop the roof, and I want to minimize my variables by not having to wonder, for example, whether or not the angle between its posts and its cross member is in fact a right angle.
The next step was to arrange for some sort of support for the south assembly once I got it into position, assuming that was even possible. I decided to position a single floor joist running from the north assembly near (and parallel to) the roof ridge. Eventually six such joists will connect the north and south assemblies, but in such work the first is always the most difficult.
To keep this single floor joist in position, I made a little structure out of wood and put it as far out on the roof ridge as possible and then balanced the single floor joist atop it. This attempt actually failed; I hadn't secured it to the north assembly and when I started drilling it vibrated loosed and went sliding off the roof with great fanfare. Objects as heavy as a 103 inch two by six develop considerable momentum sliding off a roof pitched at 45 degrees and I'm lucky nothing (such as my truck, still serving as a ladder platform) was damaged or destroyed.
On my second attempt I sure to secure the floor joist at the north end. Then, as a lark, I tried to see if I could get to the roof ridge using the 30 foot ladder I had rising from my truck bed. I climbed to its top and then gave a sort of running leap toward the ridge, which I was able to catch and hold with my hands. Once I'd pulled myself to where I was straddling the ridge it wasn't too scary, even though I had to keep my knees uncomfortably bent so my feet would rest on the opposite 45 degree surfaces. Knowing I could do this, I went down to the ground, up to the laboratory deck, and climbed the stepladder to the place where I'd been constructing the assemblies. There I took the radical action of unclamping the south one from the north one, leaving it balanced precariously and held upright by a single piece of rope. I repeated the sketchy procedure to get atop the laboratory roof ridge and then walked that south assembly out across the roof. It weighed about eighty pounds and lifting it over the fragile assembly holding that lone floor joist was a harrowing procedure, made somewhat more difficult by the various tools I'd prepositioned on the temporary joist-holding structure. As I carried that assembly, I had that goofy Mark Knopfler song in my head, "Walk of Life," complete with its bouncy guitar line and everything.
But then I dropped the joist into its joist holder and I ratcheted home a big lag bolt into it. Lag bolts have a simple message for the things they penetrate: you're not going anywhere.
After that the installation of the other floor joists went quickly. I used lag bolts on all of them to draw them tight against the north and south cross member. By early evening the framed deck was solid enough to survive powerful winds, though none came. Here's a photo I took today with labels demonstrating the parts I've been writing about:
Lulu isn't scared of heights; she has no trouble falling asleep on the ridge cap.
This evening Gretchen and I went to see March of the Penguins at the Rosendale Theatre. It's the first G-rated film I've ever seen with an explicit sex scene in it. You can laugh, but it used to be that animal sex was never shown on, say, American television. Remember the way they used to discretely cut away in Wild Kingdom? (It bears mentioning that the Brits collectively failed their children by never developing this taboo.)
I'd half-expected the penguins to be digitally altered so they could be given dialogue, but no, it wasn't that kind of movie. Instead it was a gorgeous portrayal of the nutty, complicated scheme Emperor Penguins have developed to raise their young. This scheme is full of interlocking relationships, shared burdens, and precise series of steps that, if not properly executed, result in the waste of the preceding months or boredom, misery, rituals, and work. The Emperor Penguins are up against basic thermodynamic laws in an unforgiving land. Their solution to these challenges is to raise their children far away from both food and (most) predators. But because their ultimate goal is to create more biomass in a place (the nesting area) where biomass must be burned but cannot be obtained, they're forced to make long journeys back and forth on foot. Over the æons they've developed a finely-tuned system where the amount of travel has been minimized, happening only every several months. But this means they experience huge fluctuations in body mass as they deplete their stores: first for the females laying the eggs, then for the males incubating the eggs, then for the females feeding the young, and so on. Keep in mind, for some reason all of this happens during the Antarctic winter.
As gorgeous and moving as it was, March of the Penguins definitely lacked narrative depth. The movie provided little in the way of scientific background so, in order to better appreciate the penguins' ordeal and the reasons it may have developed, it was essential that I brought my own. In some cases the narration veered into the unnecessarily vague and even needlessly misleading. I suppose an old penguin falling asleep and "disappearing" could be considered magical realism, but for the many kiddies in the hizouse (and a couple of them wouldn't stop talking), it amounted to the insertion of a falsehood into the web of factual relationships in their growing minds. Who knows what sorts of cognitive dissonances are possible when you try to erect a college education on a shoddy foundation like that?
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