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a hand holding a phone in the flip-phone era
Sunday, July 8 2018
Today while Gretchen was off Neville-less at the bookstore, I installed the last bits of carpentry needed before painting/staining. These included the little pieces to form the shortest sides of the long triangles under either end of the sloped roof. I also blasted spray foam into some cracks to make them mosquito-tight and then added some more structural metal: more hurricane ties on the bottom-ends of the rafters and intra-rafter metal struts to better support the thin plywood decking. All that stuff would be painted, so it was important to get it in before that began.
The original plan for this evening was to go over to Susan and David's place for some grilled veggie burgers, but there ended up being some sort of provisioning problem, so the plan changed to one of going out for a restaurant meal. I'd just been to the Garden, so I lobbied, ultimately successfully, for the meal to be at Catskill Mountain Pizza.
At some point before I left, there was an altercation out on Dug Hill Road. I heard Ramona's aggressive bark and ran out to see what the problem was. There at the entrance to the Farm Road, a couple of cyclists were standing there gabbing away, being an attractive nuisance, and of course the dogs had run out to see what was up. One of the cyclists must've acted aggressively, accounting for Ramona's "I don't give a fuck" bark. By the time I got there, Neville was standing there in the middle of the road, not letting cars pass. I had to practically drag him home. They would not've been this way had they been treated nicely.
I couldn't just leave the dogs back at the house with a couple of dumbass cyclists still in the neighborhood, so I brought them along on my drive out to Catskill Mountain Pizza. I arrived there a whole ten minutes early and sat under an umbrella out front, where the weather conditions seemed suitable for the eating of pizza. There was a live band playing outdoors directly across the street from the pizza place. They had the roots-rock groove of the Grateful Dead, though the singer was a woman. It wasn't quite my thing, but it wasn't terrible.
The first of my party to sit down with me was Susan. She was concerned about all the dust from the 212, whose asphalt surface had all been recently ripped away as part of some sort of resurfacing project. But the fact is that it wasn't particularly dusty; someone had been spraying down the roadway. It was little louder than usual, what with the crunching gravel and lady-fronted roots-rock psychedelic band. And so it was decided we could eat there outdoors. We ordered two large pizzas: one with olives and spelt crust, and the other with mushrooms and banana peppers and regular crust (regular crust pizzas are always bigger for some reason). We also got an order of fries, and I got myself a DIPA from the bar. David regaled us with tales of the storyboarding life, which included a very lucrative series of gigs for Sprint advertising campaigns. In one grueling 18 hour period, David said, he earned more than $40,000. Some of that work involved copying and pasting the same image of a hand holding a phone (from the flip-phone era) over and over again into different frames.
As for the pizza, Catskill Mountain Pizza's quality is decidedly uneven, but today we hit them on a good day and the pizza was actually amazing.
Later we all convoyed back to Susan and David's house (and my exhaust pipe came loose along the way, dragging on the road and spraying sparks everywhere). We sat out on their screened-in porch with their dogs (I left ours in the Subaru) and chatted about this and that. But my mind is so in screened-in-porch-building mode that all I could do was look at how their porch had been made. It was a much lighter design than mine, with four by four rafters on two-foot centers, four-by-four verticals on four-foot centers supporting four-by-fours holding up the rafters. The roof is shallow and maybe 12 feet wide, so I thought those rafters might not be up to the task of supporting a heavy snow load. David said that indeed the roof does sag after a big snowstorm.
For the drive home, I'd tied up the exhaust pipe so it wouldn't drag on the ground. I'd used a piece of hemp rope, since that seemed less likely to melt at exhaust pipe temperatures (though there was, of course, a danger it might catch on fire).
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