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every drywallable surface
Sunday, August 20 2006
Three and a half years ago, a massive drywalling undertaking (orchestrated by Gretchen and temporarily paid for with credit card debt) produced a habitable laboratory, teevee room, and master bedroom in what had been an massive unfinished attic in our house. Since all of that new space had cathedral ceilings extending to a one-dimensional ridgeline, plenty of triangular drywall scraps resulted. I managed to finally use one of those scraps yesterday when I completed the sloping ceiling over the east end of the shop. But, due to the handedness of the scrap I was using, I'd had to install it inside-out. I don't know if you're supposed to do that under any circumstances. Today I installed an identical-though-opposite-handed scrap over the west end of the shop, and this time the inside side could remain inside. With that, finally, I'd completed covered every drywallable surface in the garage. I'd installed and taped over 1500 square feet of drywall.
This evening, a group of friends, mostly of the non-vegan, non-Buddhist variety, came over and watched a DVD of a movie called By Invitation Only, brought by one of the attendees, a documentary filmmaker based in Woodstock (he'd gotten the copy directly from its director/first-person-narrator). It's a one hour PBS-format film about the debutante scene in New Orleans and how it relates to the good ole boy system of white Mardi Gras crews. Rebecca Snedeker, our narrator, comes from a well-placed New Orleans family and was able to film in places and situations where cameras are normally forbidden. She grants us access to the crazy world created in New Orleans by wealthy whites responding to the freedom of their slaves. In this world, participants actually don the costumes of European royalty (or rather, what an eight year old imagines European royalty looking like) and blowing vast sums on tacky parties and contrived pageantry that has been handed down for generations. Our German-to-English translator friend Susan grew up in New Orleans and actually knows Rebecca Snedeker; she was here tonight for the viewing and according to her, all the wealthy in New Orleans survived Hurricane Katrina because their neighborhoods are all on high ground.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?060820 feedback
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