Checking In

Sorry for so few posts, recently. All the things we've been doing (sniffling with colds; catching up on end-of-year finance statements in readiness for taxes; swamping out the basement; knitting and felting slippers; cooking; etc.) haven't seemed worthy of photographs. (In the case of the slippers, because they are cute I will eventually blog about them, but want to have a finished product first.) And without photographs, what is there to say?

We are over our colds, now, however, and getting pressure from household to produce results. So soon...soon...

Digging down

The intensity of the interview yesterday has led to a day of pungent self-doubt. I swing from moments of acute nostalgia for the loss of the sparkly, creative woman I remember being at Infocom, to finding myself unable to love the memory of that same self-absorbed and cock-sure girl. What banalities about the others and mortifications about myself have I now preserved in digital video? How could I have forgotten my place so much as to think, for a few hours, that I was as relevant as Steve Meretzky, or Brian Moriarty, or Dave Lebling, or Stu Galley? And how did my neck get so goose-skinned, like those too-thin older movie stars?

I did work on the pathway, for a little while. The ground under the sod is dense clay tangled with the warp and weft of decades of unaerated grass roots. Two days ago, I set the sprinkler on until the area was a grassy marsh, but the water appears to have slid off ineffectively rather than sinking in and softening the dirt. I did uncover a little "cliff" between the hard clay and a small patch where we dug up concrete months ago, where the ground is wonderfully light and aerated. Using that as a starting point, I was able to carve progressive inch-wide shovelfuls off the cliff, plowing up the packed earth for several feet.

But shoveling, or cutting the ground with a shovel, gets old fast. So I turned to removing the mortar from the bricks, which you do by scraping bricks against each other, mortared side to mortared side. The clumpy gray mortar crumbles off fairly easily, leaving smooth red brick underneath. Then you turn both bricks to a different mortared side and scour them together, repeatedly, over all six faces of the brick. It doesn't show in the photo -- the nearest line of bricks are cleaned and smooth, and will look red after a good rainstorm; by comparison, the ones behind are still gray and lumpy. But all that bending and balancing and rubbing bricks together is really hard on one's back.

A rational person would expect, as I adopted the stances associated with poor Chinese farm workers, spine aching and hamstrings taut enough to pop, that I would gain a little perspective. I'm building a brick walkway around the spacious house in which I live. I'm working on it a couple of hours every day. I'm not starving, standing half-naked in a rice pond for months on end.

But a rational person would be wrong -- perspective remains beyond my grasp. Hard labor and physical pain, however, do push to the back of one's mind the immediacy of self-pity, so in the end the same goal was reached -- I stopped dwelling.

So, after gouging out some dirt, and scouring off a few bricks, I shoved a hypothetical ramrod up my spine, and Andrew and I went to Ikea (for the third time in a week) and then to Home Depot, and then out for gelato and coffee. Sometimes you just have to enjoy where you are, and vigilantly not-think about where you were, or where you woulda-, shoulda-, could have been, had things been different.

Vacation Adventures 4: Mom's Garage

One last thing we did in Minnesota, before coming home to Oregon: Andrew cleaned Mom's garage, with help from David, Robert, Sarah, Mom, and me. Sarah and Mom helped hugely by taking the children swimming at the splendid Shoreview Community Pool and exhausting them with pleasure.

Actually, it was pretty easy. The garage was mostly full of trash that just hasn't been taken that final step (a high step) -- To the Dump. Or, in the case of some items, to GoodWill or recycling bins.

So it was simply a matter of breaking down boxes and tying them up to go to the Cardboard Recycler; pulling out still-usable stuff for GoodWill; separating the hazardous waste into a pile for special dumping (e.g., paint, oil, pesticides, fluorescent lightbulbs); and finally, stuffing everything else into garbage bags for easier carrying ability. I vacuumed 10 years of blown leaves, dust, dryer lint, and spiderwebs -- the only time in my life I've enjoyed vacuuming. It was very satisfying.

We also organized the space. All the treasures, including the things we thought would be precious to any of us regardless of whether they are actually of any value (e.g., the candle sconce Dad made in woodshop in high school) are in the shelves behind the boat (and in the army trunks). Dad's tools -- what's left of them after being sorted through by Rob and Andrew in previous years, and David for those that are still in use -- are in the shelving unit on the other side of the garage. Some tools that were Grandpa's (both grandpas) are over there, too. The cleanup left a shelving unit open, now reserved for David's use.

Easy it was; it did take all day, however. In the end we were stuck with everything all bagged up, but nowhere to go. You can't (legally) dump trash at the landfill after dark on Saturday night, and the Cardboard Recycling bin at the library was full. In order to save Mom and David from becoming the Clampetts of the street, we had to put everything back into the garage at the end of the day, which was disheartening. Existentially, Andrew and I felt we left the garage in the same state we found it -- the stuff remained one step (one steep step) from where it is supposed to be: Not There.

(In the photos, you can see some of the 30 or so trash bags stacked at the back of the boat. There also is a pile of extra gutters and long gardening stakes under the boat.)

Since we left, Mom and David have dropped off the charity items, and rid themselves of the cardboard. The trash is a different issue: waste containers (aka. dumpsters, which are conveniently dropped off empty and picked up full) are a lot more expensive in Shoreview than in Portland (about $178 compared to our $85). One slow but cheap option is to put a bag in the regular waste pickup every week, where they have room anyway. This isn't trash that rots, so that should work fine, but for us in distant Oregon, it remains an unfinished task.

Note: Mom says that Paul next door has his dryer vent hooked somehow into a bucket of water. It doesn't blow the lint into the garage, rather bubbles it into the water pail (which must need to be dumped and refilled regularly). We couldn't figure out how to set that up -- maybe someone in Minnesota could look into that. It'll save on vacuuming when next we clean out the garage, 10 years or so from now.

Slow progress

If you're keeping track, of the items to finish before we leave for Minnesota:

#1: Plant the wisteria. Done.

#2: Finish the railing for the stairs. Half-done, but we need more wood, and a trip to Home Depot will take 2 hours from other projects, not to mention suck the last remaining spark from our souls.

#3: Secure the bike cellar. Three-quarters-done (The door is complete, although painting will wait until September. The space is almost electrified -- meaning, it has lights inside and a motion detector and light outside, but the wiring isn't complete. This item will probably be completed tomorrow.)

#4: Cover the hole in the roof. Not started. It won't take long to do, just the chutzpah to climb on the roof again, without a safety rope -- or rather, with a safety rope, but it is no longer tied, as it used to be, around the chimney as an anchor.

#5: Yard Clean-up. Half-done. Getting the wisteria planted was a big push forward, but we still have to get all the wood scraps put away. We made inroads on this today, but there is a lot of wood -- this shows about 1/3 of it. We have finished the storage area for wood in the crawl space next to the bike cellar -- laid a tarp and set in hooks for the wood to rest upon -- but have only just started stowing it.

The green stuff is the old tongue-and-groove porch planks, most of which are rotted on one end for about 10-15 inches, but otherwise fine wood. My job today was to cut off the rotten bits and remove the rusty nails -- I got through less than half this pile, taking 3-4 nails from every board. Both Andrew and I have plans for this scrap wood -- he wants to build a sort of table for tools in the cellar, I want to build the "cat structure" that Molly has been designing for months (essentially boxes on a pole, lined with carpeting). We have so many cats living in the yard now that I'd like to provide a cat-house (like a bird-house) for winter.

By the way, you can also see in this photo the edge of the brick walkway I am creating, using the bricks from the chimney (or rather, the ones remaining after paving the patio in back, and the floor of the bike cellar). It's very rough right now -- the mortar (which is like heavily caked sand) is still on these, and I've just set them into place over the grass, which I'm trying to kill. One of my first projects after we get back in September will be to cut out the lawn underneath, clean off the bricks and lay them properly. I suppose I'll talk about why what and how when that project is properly in progress.