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birdhouse CD rack Saturday, August 12 2006
Lamont's margin over Lieberman's in the 2006 Connecticut Democratic primary for US Senator was four percent and was widely described in the media as "narrow." Bush's victory over Kerry, at least as measured by the official poll results, was 3% and was widely described as a solid victory in those dark days of November, 2004. Perhaps the descriptions of the margins had something to do with how they varied from expectations. Lamont had a double-digit percentage lead in the polls several days before the election and it had narrowed considerably by the time the official vote came in. Bush, on the other hand, was widely expected to lose re-election by people paying attention to exit polling data on election day in 2004.
The other day Gretchen and I bought a huge communal Purple Martin house from a craftsman's barn at a farm on Hurley Mountain Road. It's a cyllndrical structure made of five detachable levels, each an intricate arrangement of bent plywood and thin partitions. On its top goes a detachable roof sheethed with copper. The guy who sold it to us is actually the son of the guy who'd made it; all he'd done was attach the copper roof and apply some coats of paint. The birdhouse was originally built back in the 60s and had once included a complex of internal pullies allowing it to be disassembled from someone operating cords at the bottom of a central support pole. Our goal is to somehow get the damn thing up onto the roof of our house, where it will serve as a cupola. But if it is to remain a birdhouse it will have to be maintained, and getting up onto our roof to maintain things isn't easy or safe.
(Just getting the birdhouse home had been a challenge, though somehow I'd been able to pack the whole thing into the back area of the Honda hatchback. That had left no backseat at all and Gretchen and I had each had dogs in our laps in the front seat. It's possible to drive with a 40 pound dog in your lap, though I wouldn't recommend it for long trips.)
In the meantime, the birdhouse is too tall by at least a level, so Gretchen removed one, figuring I could make it into a chandelier or something. I had a better idea: a CD rack. Today I installed it above the stereo in the living room and Gretchen immediately stocked it with a subset of her CD collection. (I never play CDs except in my car.)
I had to pick up some last-minute supplies in town to get the drains hooked up to my new shop sinks. For some reason one can't just buy a 1.25 to 1.5 inch PVC adapter, you have to buy a complex of threaded fittings that then mate with the kind you can glue together, all of this so I could adapt the 1.5 inch sink hardware to the 1.25 inch PVC pipe penetrating the slab and foundation wall (there was no way I could have drilled a hole for anything larger without renting a jackhammer).
Susan is still staying at our house, still working on a translation. This evening Gretchen was out somewhere and Susan was hungry, so she ordered something for pickup from the Reservoir Inn. She asked if I wanted anything so I suggested a medium cheese and mushroom pizza. Susan is not a vegetarian and is allergic to dairy, so she tends to eat large chunks of meat when she's hungry. Tonight we dined together and as I ate my pizza she devoured an enormous pork chop, using plastic knives and disposable dinnerware to avoid loosing meat cooties in our kitchen. Evidently Susan doesn't pay much attention to Jewish dietary laws.
Before I went to bed I undertook a massive shifting of lumber scraps off the northmost wall of the shop area, the only large expanse of wall left to clad in drywall. A shipment of 18 more pieces will be arriving tomorrow.
The new Purple Martin house, minus one of its levels.
One of the levels as a CD rack.
The new working drains beneath the sinks in the shop area.
My new shop workbench, already cluttered. Note the vintage automatic hacksaw, which Gretchen bought me at a sale in the Adirondacks.
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