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unwarping the homemade solar panel
Sunday, October 27 2024
During the night, Gretchen woke up because she couldn't sleep. I happened to be awake at the time, so we talked about the thing she'd been thinking about that was making it difficult for her to fall back to sleep: the money owed to her (or, technically, us) by the men she'd loaned it to. There's Powerful, the guy who got out of prison and moved in with us for a couple years starting in the heart of the Covid pandemic. At the end there, he requested a $6000 loan as he headed off to Albany, and I wisely suggested that the "loan" be $3000 instead. He's never paid us back any of it, which really doesn't surprise me. But then there's also Light, the guy who was deported to the Caribbean the moment he was released from prison. I think he managed to convince Gretchen to loan him $4000, and of course he hasn't paid us back anything either. I'd known what we were getting into with Powerful, but with Light, I could only work from a superficial impression. He didn't "read" to me as someone who would ever pay us back, but Gretchen assured me that there was no doubt that he would. Now, years later, she's realizing he's never going to pay us back. This became clear when he stopped responding to her messages on the subject. Gretchen asked me how it could be that these guys weren't repaying the money they owed us, and I replied that it's actually quite unusual for people to repay such loans. It's easier in situation like this, particularly when the relationship is long-distance, to let the friendship come to an end. Friendships end all the time even between people who don't owe each other money, and the situations that led to these friendships, the ones that had resulted in loans, have long since faded away. Gretchen has always had her own view about what a friendship should be, and often her friends don't put in the effort she feels friendships with her require. I explained that what she was seeing with these loans was just more of that. Gretchen asked if I'd ever loaned anyone any money, and I couldn't think of a single time when I had, at least not in the scale of thousands of dollars. "They destroy friendships," I mused. Gretchen then reflected on all the times she'd loaned people money, which had only been three times. The time I didn't know about had happened back when Gretchen was working at some sort of nature camp near San Jose, California back in the early 1990s. A colleague there managed to get her to loan him $180 (which was a lot for her at the time), and then went off his separate way, never repaying her. She contacted him and asked why he hadn't, and he insisted that he had mailed her a check, but the address he'd sent it to must've been wrong. So she gave him the correct address, but of course he never sent the money. All these men were Black men, and perhaps she'd felt some duty as a privileged non-minority to help them out. And they'd all probably rationalized not repaying her with the thought that she's "a rich white lady" (which is true). "I guess it's reparations," Gretchen sighed. I agreed that that was the best way to look at it.
This morning I was happy to procrastinate away a large part of the daylight drinking coffee and noodling around on a Chromebook in the living room. It was Sunday, so I'd made coffee and a fire in the woodstove, and we were all snuggling very cozily beneath a very soft sage-green blanket on the couch. At around noon, though, I finally forced myself to do something non-procrastinatory. I needed spray foam, carriage bolts, and other hardware, so I drove off to Home Depot. I invited the dogs to come, but at the time they were in the yard being mesmerized by a very nice cow bone they'd found in the forest, one that had belonged to Crazy Dave's dogs. Charlotte was the one who initially had it, and Neville was nearby wishing it was his. When I called the dogs to have them join me, Neville acted like he wanted to come, and that made Charlotte drop the bone and come too. But when that happened, Neville grabbed the bone, lay down in the yard, and began to chew. It was then Charlotte's turn to watch. Suffice it to say, the dogs didn't come.
Once I had my hardware, I returned
to the solar deck to continue work on the solar panel refurbishment project. The goal today was to install a 12 foot long treated two by four at the top back of the panel near the top plank that has twisted and started to disintegrate. The plan was to have the 3.5 inch side of the new two by four to be parallel with the bottom of the back of the panel, with lag bolts at either end attaching it to the two side planks of the panel. But I soon found a problem; back when I'd built this shallow box, I'd secured the corners with metal structural connectors secured with screws, and not only did they not want to come out, but there was styrofoam in my way. I only needed to remove parts of these connectors to make space for the new two-by-four, so I got electricity working on the solar deck for the first time in years and took my angle grinder up there. The resulting shower of sparks soon set fire to the styrofoam on the solar panel's top west corner, which I was fortunately able to blow out before it got out of control. I managed to dig that one out completely, though for the one on the top east corner, I opted to leave some of it in place and just use metal fatigue to break away pieces that were in my way. After that, getting the new two-by-four in place was a real struggle, as the panel was badly warped and it didn't want to bend that much. But, little by little, I managed to use shorter two by fours as props to force it into place and to straighten out the panel as well. By the time darkness arrived, the panel was nicely stabilized.
By this point I was feeling irritated and cranky from all the spray foam on my hands and not having eaten anything in hours. But Gretchen put us together a nice meal of junk food from the freezer. It included buffalo "wings," ravioli, and a fairly good salad. We watched Jeopardy! and then an episode of English Teacher, a densely-funny comic series we'd recently gotten into. At some point Diane the Cat jumped up on the couch near Neville, and he snapped at her in that way he used to do (but stopped doing for a few years after accidentally biting me in the arm). It's the sort of behavior we tolerate when he does it to Oscar, just because he's so annoying. But no, he can't be doing that to Diane. So I smacked him, mostly as a reflex, and it seemed to put Neville in a contrite mood for the rest of the evening (though Gretchen says we're not supposed to hit our dogs when they misbehave; she prefers a technique called "redirection").
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