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form-follows-function structure overhead
Tuesday, July 24 2018
Fairly early in the day, I installed the last of the screen on the screened-in porch. This included two large four-by-eight foot screens on the south end and a small rectangle to screen-in the transom over the screen door (also on the south end). Then I stuffed some foam pipe-cozies (the kind used to insulate plumbing) into the narrow gaps between the house and the frame of the porch. Since I needed to insulate against a clapboarded surface that gradually became narrower with altitude (because the house's wall is out of plumb), this seemed like the easiest and neatest way to fill in those gaps, though I still consider it a temporary solution. When I was finished, the only avenues remaining for insects to get into the porch was through the gaps in the plank flooring or around the still-warped screen door. (Though I'd been able to slightly unwarp that, diminishing the available gap around it.) At some point I lay down on that floor and relaxed, staring up and marveling at all the sage-green form-follows-function structure overhead. I wouldn't've been able to do that yesterday due to the occasional annoying mosquito, but the screen seemed to be keeping them out.
Late I turned my attention to the Subaru, whose intermediate pipe and muffler sections of its exhaust system had become so rotten that they required replacement. It's always a pain working with old corroded exhaust systems, but this time I hoped things would, for once, be easy. I got the car up on plastic ramps so that it leaned sharply sideways and then climbed under the car with metric wrenches in hopes of backing off some screws. What a joke! The nuts were corroded down to little nubs and it was soon clear I would have to cut the bolts off. My next hope was that the bolts would then fall out, but no. They were secured on one end by threaded nuts evidently welded onto the upstream pipe. In the absence of any protruding bolt, I was going to have to drill them out. That was a miserable job, and left a chunk of welded-on nut even after I'd drilled all the way through. I needed to remove that or I'd never be able to get a bolt through that hole. Somehow I'd lost my angle grinder, but fortunately I had little diamond wheel for my Dremel, and that took that chunk off without too much work. I then tried to use the diamond wheel to grind off the nut on the other side, but geometry was such that I couldn't reach all the parts I needed to. By then it was getting dark and I was tired of the filth of working beneath the car on the damp ground.
Meanwhile Gretchen had gone to Woodstock to attend a reading by Joyce Carol Oates, which had precipitated lame Hall and Oates jokes all day. She later watched the new film Leave No Trace. When Gretchen came home she reported on how unfaithful the film had been to the book upon which it had been based, My Abandonment, one of the few contemporary novels I've actually read.
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