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not failing at life
Saturday, May 26 2018
I woke up a little after 6:00am with the feeling that I was going to have trouble falling back to sleep. So I took a normal dose of ambien (whatever that is, I forget) and stayed up as it kicked in, hoping to write a little code designed to parse parameter names out of a SQL expression. But the precision of my thoughts soon faded below a threshold needed to much progress on that. Meanwhile, the cats were all queuing up to climb into my lap or, short of that, they'd just sit there and stare at me. That makes me uncomfortable even when I'm not on ambien, but in this situation they felt more like peers. This makes sense; I've written in the past about how ambien makes the world seem to come alive with animist spirits. It stands to reason that truly alive things like cats would come to seem more human.
This morning I tinkered further with the screened-in porch, installing the southmost and northmost collar ties and temporarily attaching two of the collar ties that I will eventually remove to the eastern girder. I'd spaced the collar ties every two feet, which is more collar ties than this structure needs. But I need to temporarily use the collar ties as a scaffolding support while I installed the rafter attachment plate to the wall of the house, and I need all of the collar ties for that. Eventually I will be removing two of them from the places where they interfere with the placement of rafters (which will be installed every 16 inches).
After taking multiple measurements, I finally got around to cutting away the clapboards where that rafter attachment plate will go. In the past I might've tried to use the oscillating tool for this cut, but for the recent clapboard cuts I've just been using a 120v-powered handheld circle saw with the depth set to about the thickness of a clapboard and with the teeth guard held out of the way with a length of twisted wire. It makes quick work of the job, though I still have to finish the ends of the cuts with the oscillating tool.
Meanwhile Gretchen had gone into town to get Neville's arm bandage re-dressed. She also picked up a bunch of garden seedlings from Herzog's and a place called Buzzanco's north of Route 209 off Sawkill (it's a little place Gretchen just learned about today). I took a break from my gardening to plant everything Gretchen had bought. It was a late start for our garden, but at least we managed to get it in the ground before Memorial Day. As I put it to Gretchen, "If we didn't have a garden, I'd feel like we were failing at life."
I'd suggested maybe we'd have to order roofing from a special roofing supplier to have stuff good enough for her to want to look at every time we feed the cats (since the new porch roof will be just outside the cat feeding windows), but Gretchen thought the stuff she'd seen on the Home Depot website might be good enough. So this afternoon, we went to Home Depot together to see what they had in stock. (I also needed some things — particularly brown caulk and aluminum flashing.) All they seemed to have were two-foot-wide corrugated panels (which I'd used on the brownhouse) and those three-foot-wide panels I've never used (partly since they don't correspond to any known rafter spacing paradigm). Gretchen seems to like the three-foot-wide panels, but only if they can be had in grey (though grey wasn't in stock). While at the Home Depot, Gretchen also checked out kitchen cabinet options. She's incubating a plan to replace our kountry-krafty 90s-era kitchen cabinets with something that looks a bit less like a setting for Intervention. The woman working in the kitchen cabinet department clearly hadn't been hired for her looks, but she definitely knew a lot about cabinetry.
Next door at ShopRite, Gretchen and I tried to get our bearings on the new store arrangement. "It's a bit fancy for the clientele," I declared, motioning towards the shoppers. "It's aspirational," Gretchen agreed, adding, "It's like it's trying to be a Whole Foods!" After touring the whole perimeter of the store (where all the refrigerated foods were kept) we finally had to ask about where the tempeh and such were. Gretchen knew enough not to ask about tempeh, so she asked about "Tofurkey" instead. It was in a small refrigerated section near the produce, similar to how the Ghettoford does it.
Gretchen was so pleased with all the work I'd done today that she decided to cook me a special dinner of anything I wanted. So I just made a humble request for spaghetti in a chunky red sauce. She ended up making spaghetti with vegan meat balls comprised mostly of deep-fried balls of sticky rice. We ate it all out on the east deck while drinking Tecate with slices of lime. In this weather, one wants a cheap macrobrew, and Tecate is about as good as that sort of beer gets.
In preparation for installing the aluminum flashing that will cover the intersection between the wall and the new roof, I removed the outside trim from the bottom of the window in which the cats are fed. I then pulled nearly all of the nails from the bottom of the plastic flange attaching that window to the rough framing. I wanted the flashing to go up under this flange to carry away any water drawn into the house by running along the outside of the window.
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