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windows from Shandaken
Tuesday, May 29 2012
The day was hot and humid like early August, though there was enough residual coolness in the house for it never to get all that bad there. As I had the day before, I continued with my Game of Thrones marathon, only being interrupted twice. The first interruption came this afternoon when I loaded up the dogs in the Subaru and drove out to Shandaken to pick up a "bay window unit" I'd claimed via Freecycle. I'd been told that I'd need two people and a pickup truck to get the thing, but I was confident I could get it up on the roof rack by myself.
As it was, the set of bay windows was big and unwieldy, forming a trapezoidal box measuring 60 by 41 by 16 inches. It had lain on the ground beneath a tarp for a long time, was full of spiders and some of the plywood had begun to rot. The place I was picking it up from was a seedy roadside motel and originally the window unit had been intended to be incorporated in one of the units, but the man who co-ran it with his wife had died. Shandaken is a godforsaken place in a dreary part of the Catskills, and it's places like this motel that make it that way. The paint is pealing, clapboards have fallen off, and the one customer who came out to give me the puzzled once-over proceeded to hack up a lung beside his dented red American-made car. Meanwhile I was under time pressure; a huge thunderstorm was coming in from the west and rain had begun to fall. I managed to get the bay unit on the roof and tied down securely before the rain began in earnest (and no, though the unit looked like a large penthouse on the car's roof, I didn't feel compelled to make one of the dogs ride inside it).
I more or less outran the storm as I headed back east down Route 28 to Hurley. But after I was safely home it eventually arrived, complete with fierce winds and a number of pea-sized hailstones (though not enough to damage the garden or fuck up my new window unit, which remained tied to the Subaru's roof). At some point while I was watching the first episode of the second season of Game of Thrones, the power went out and stayed out for the rest of the night. (That was the second and final interruption of my Game of Thrones marathon today.)
With nothing but an evening of 19th Century diversions ahead of me, I cleaned out a gutter near the southwest corner of the house and then unloaded the bay window unit from Subaru. Though the framework of the bay unit was a piece of shit, the three individual windows were all in good shape. They were double-glazed and each
measured about 41 by 20 inches. Two of them could be opened and one had even come with a screen. Of course they were also filthy, covered with schmutz and broken glass from some other window unit that hadn't even been worth putting on freecycle. These three windows represent about a quarter of the glass I will need to fill the south-facing wall of the new greenhouse upstairs. I'm new to Freecycle and figure that if things keep going the way they have been, it won't take long to get the other glass I need.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?120529 feedback
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