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stud wall for beer
Wednesday, November 18 2015
Q, Gretchen's co-worker over at the bookstore in Woodstock, came over late this morning with his new wife N and their even newer puppy "Coach." (Coach is a shortened form of Coach Eric Taylor, a character in Friday Night Lights.) Q & N only recently bought a car; they live within walking distance of most of the places they need to go in Woodstock, and so a car hadn't been necessary except to facilitate social visits. Coach is a lively rubbery black Lab mix rescued from somewhere in the south that northerners like to get their dogs from (assuming, perhaps, that stray dogs in the north have it easy by comparison). He seems as well-behaved as a dog that age can be, and though N kept worrying about him running away, he generally stayed close when we walked a loop through the forest. Then, while Coach and Ramona chewed bones, us humans had coffee. Celeste the cat was so freaked out by having seen Coach that, after he left, she undertook her first venture into the house with great trepidation.
This afternoon, I gave Gretchen some alone time by going over to Susan & David's place to help David with the concrete-block building that he is turning into a work studio. Against my advice, David has chosen to wall off all the concrete from the inside using wood framing and insulation, thereby separating the interior space from a substantial thermal mass. Today's job was mostly to frame out the the new interior wall along the north wall. Unfortunately, I was using a defective level to get the new studs plumb, with result being that sometimes they would be out of place by as much as 3/4 of an inch. David wanted the studs to avoid a series of vents along the bottom of the wall, and this forced their location to change phase every now and then along the wall. I could see this being very frustrating in the future when trying to attach stuff to the wall, so I suggested David mark on the floor the location of the studs.
At some point, we took a break for lunch; Susan had made a delicious chili containing squash (in addition to many other things). Meanwhile, the house was crawling with contractors, most of whom where mudding up the dry wall down in the basement. There was also a big tattooed dude who was there performing odd jobs like dealing with a vintage cast iron sink and fixing the fence so Olive the Dog will no longer escape. Susan and David said they hired him to do all the things that David has had trouble getting around to doing. The rate at which money is being consumed there appears ferocious, but on the bright side, jobs have been created. As for me, I'd volunteered to do anything David needed doing, though he insists on getting me a gift card to Beer World. We also drank a couple of beers today, once during lunch and after we finished up around 6:00pm.
We drank those with Susan in the cluttered dining room (everything had to get moved out of the living room while a wall adjacent to the stairs is being rebuilt), occasionally joking about things such as short buses so short that they resemble a slice of bread or psychotarded clips from the Tim and Eric Awesome Show (which Susan and David only just learned about via Gretchen).
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