|
|
less paunchy Monday, October 6 2014
In the mid-afternoon I drove over to the house on Wall Street. Like magic, the garbage collection service had picked up all the trash from the nasty (and torn) plastic bags I'd piled up in front. There was all kinds of disgusting stuff in there from the previous owner, including a seemingly-unused flat pack of uncooked chicken wings that a raccoon had torn partially open and that had been drawing flies (and Eleanor the Dog). More surprisingly was the fact that someone had then brought the one can in from the street and miraculously a huge blue recycling can had appeared. (I suspect this was done by our immediate neighbor, a late-middle-aged woman who lives alone with her striped cat Felix.) As I went around doing some initial chores (including spritzing the portland cement around the dryer vent with yet more water), the doctor with the office next door struck up a conversation with me. He's the one who had an overly-nosy conversation with Gretchen the other day. I continued the story she'd begun then about how we'd bought the house so we could move my aging mother into it. That's about the gentlest way possible to introduce the idea that we've only bought the house as an investment, although any renter we would choose for it would probably be acceptable to our nosy neighbor as well.
After that, I unloaded all the six sheets of OSB into the garage and then, because I'm a conscientious neighbor, I shut the garage doors behind me before making the ruckus of sawing them all in half lengthwise. The hard part was carrying them all up to the attic while minimizing scuffing against the walls and splinters in my hands. It was a cool day, but the work was hard enough for me to feel comfortable doing it shirtless. Between the greenhouse excavation and the physical ordeal of working on the house, my body is looking fairly good these days. I'm less paunchy than I was back in the spring (indeed, I have a bit of a nascent six pack developing) and I'm down to my preferred weight of 170 pounds.
On the way home, I stopped at Home Depot and bought a pull-down attic access ladder for small openings. The hope is to provide potential renters with a lot of accessible attic storage space. I'm thinking that the more shit they stack up in the house, the longer they are going to want to stay.
This evening, Gretchen was down in Lake Katrine attending a debate between our tea bagger congressman Chris Gibson and his youthful upstart (and openly gay) challenger, Sean Eldridge. One of the topics was environmental protection, so I'm curious what Gibson's views are on global warming ("just a theory"?) and fracking ("it creates jobs!"?).
For linking purposes this article's URL is: http://asecular.com/blog.php?141006 feedback previous | next |