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plywood hauling with a four door
Monday, July 21 2008
For my garage door restoration project, today I picked up a sheet of four ply 3/8 inch oak plywood from the Home Depot, the only local retailer of plywood with those characteristics of thinness and strength. With it, I bought four two by fours for which I have no immediate need just because I needed support for the floppy plywood when I tied it to the roof of the car. In the past I've brought home 48 by 96 inch sheets of plywood and particleboard using a Honda Civic hatchback, but today I was using a four door. It turns out that it's a little easier to tie something to the roof of a four door because of the additional intra-door posts, which serve as excellently-positioned places to lash ropes.
Now that I have acceptable (if not enviable) welding skills, I'm tempted to weld some hooks to the underside of the soon-to-be-street-legal hatchback to help with my cargo needs. As gasoline becomes more and more expensive, I expect to see more and more Americans using their small cars the way Africans use theirs, and I want to be on the cutting edge of this new trend.
While I was in the Home Depot, I noticed that the cheaper measuring blades all came with metric and English units, whereas the expensive blades (which can be as long as forty feet and cost as much as $30) only had English units. This led me to wonder if perhaps recent Hispanic immigrants, a demographic that now dominates American construction, do much of their measuring and calculations using the metric units of their homelands.
On the way home, I stopped at the bottom of Dug Hill Road and went with the dogs and my metal detector to the ruins of an old stone house's foundation (41.9238N, 74.0945W) to look for metal relics, but the mosquitos conspired to cut my search short. I found a few little rusted bits of iron and nothing more. On the way back, the dogs ran across the road and forced me to socialize with the friendly folks who live with a huge pile of firewood in an improvised ranch-style house that appears to sit atop a pile of gravel. It was evening and they were drinking Busch beer. Our conversation was mostly about the dogs: how old they were, what they liked to do, and that sort of thing. Seeing my metal detector, one of the guys asked if I'd found anything.
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