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materials needlessly destroyed
Tuesday, November 30 2021
I was the only human in the downstairs office in Red Hook today. It's nice to have the whole place to myself. I can snoop around, talk to myself, and fart with abandon. In the past I've even been known to piss in a container so as to avoid having to go the bathroom, but not today.
I went into the Red Hook branch of our credit union with checks adding up to $60,050. Normally I wear a gaitor over my face for covid reasons, but it looks a little too much like something a bank robber would wear (and I'd accidentally left it at home anyway) so instead I wore an N95 mask. Bank tellers don't make much money, so I wonder what they think when a scruffy guy like me walks in and, instead of robbing the place, makes a deposit that is closer to six figures than it is to four.
After work, I drove down to Williams Lumber to return the black iron pipes that were the wrong length. While there, I got some basic tools specifically to be kept at the cabin (instead of me borrowing from the various car tool kits). I also got a number of storage solutions featuring lots of small transparent drawers so I can finally impose some order on the developing chaos in the cabin basement. I also bought a large snow shovel with a folding handle to keep in the Bolt for the next time we find ourselves unable to climb a snowy hill.
When I got home, the house was full of wood smoke because Gretchen had left a piece of wood on the hot part of the woodstove even as the stove became hot enough to set that wood on fire. She and Powerful were watching a movie in the living room in front of the woodstove like it was no big deal, but I would find myself coughing like a covid patient for the rest of the night.
I immediately went down to Powerful's room in the basement and cleaned up the spray-foam mess I'd made yesterday. I then began to install the "planks" of vinyl flooring, starting from the east wall. Gretchen had wrestled the boxes of flooring in from her car and had, in the process, managed to let one of those boxes slide down the stairs and crash into the basement floor. Since vinyl flooring is surprisingly brittle, this had damaged nearly every plank in that box. They were so damaged that I had to earmark them for the few places in the room (its entranceway and closet) where a single plank was longer than the space needing flooring. But then I discovered a fair number of pieces in the other boxes that were broken at their ends, indicating Gretchen had just let the boxes drop to the floor after carrying them in. That's one thing about Gretchen: she has little innate understanding of material sciences, and it hadn't occurred to her to be careful with a box of vinyl planks. If I'd been carrying them in, on the other hand, I would've made no assumptions about their fragility and would've handled them carefully. But no, Gretchen had been the one to bring them in, and she'd been working with firm ideas about their fragility that she didn't bother to interrogate. As I gradually discovered that somewhere between a third and a half of the planks were damaged, I was thrown into despair. It's deeply depressing to install materials that are visibly damaged, and (unlike the advice Gretchen then tried to console me with) there would be few opportunities to conceal the damage. The thing about interlocking flooring tiles is that the locking edges are the thing you tend to have out in the room, interlocking with other pieces. It's the cut ends that tend to go under the moulding. So it wouldn't be possible to simply "hide" the damaged ends. I complained about this multiple times, and initially Gretchen felt bad and apologetic, but at some point she decided I was being an asshole, which was true. But it was deeply aggravating to have to work with materials needlessly destroyed by someone who was cheerfully going through life making inaccurate assumptions about how the world is put together, often arguing with me that her asumptions are valid.
Still, I worked for a time installing floor while listening (on my headphones) to the interrogation of Shawn Grate, a drifter who was both a serial killer and a rapist operating in northern Ohio, not far from where I used to ride my bicycles when I would ride home from college. At some point, though, I was so frustrated and angry about the fucked-up materials (and the abrasion wounds I was developing on my right knuckles) that I quit for the night. I took a xanax to help me get to sleep.
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