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mildly translucent gutters
Monday, July 7 2008
This morning I installed a forty foot run of gutter along the entire west drip edge of the garage and shop. The gutter dropped an inch over this distance from south to north, dumping its water at the north end of the house where it can easily wash away. This gutter will intercept all the water that used to splash on the ground in front of the two garage doors. This splashing water has caused trouble over the years, tending to moisten things well inside the garage and facilitating rot at the bottom of the garage doors and at the bottom of the door jambs on either side. (For the past couple weeks I've been gradually cutting out the rot in the jambs and replacing it with treated wood and epoxy.). The gutters, by the way, were vinyl, my first installation of gutters in this material. Vinyl is tough and resists dents, but it's also mildly translucent, which makes the gutters look cheap when the sun is in certain parts of its daily trajectory.
That sun was a hot bitch today, and eventually Gretchen and I went to the Secret Spot on the Esopus. (It's not so secret: 41.882247N, 74.146171W.) Eventually we were joined by our friend Tara and one of Tara's older lady friends. This friend hadn't brought a bathing suit, so Tara convinced me and this other guy who was there to go downriver a ways so the older friend could swim in her saggy old birthday suit.
So I started building a dam, and eventually that guy pitched in to help. He obviously didn't have much experience with dam building; he was chucking small stones downriver from the large rocks defining the location of the dam. (Even beavers know that new material should always be added upstream from a dam, where water pressure will tend to force it into leaks.) Later I learned that this gentleman had just gotten out of prison, a place where dams are usually made from plastic and erected inside toilets. By the time I stopped my work on the dam, it had raised the level of the river upstream about an inch.
Meanwhile Sally had excavated an impressive (though fruitless) rodent mine in the second story of a enormous exposed root ball beneath a massive tree on the cliff above the Esopus.
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