Tuesday, November 06, 2007

The Weekend Three-Banger

Hey y'alls, what's up? Or, in the words painted in blaze orange on one of the boulders up in The Boulders "Whast (sic) tha (sic) word". Yes, that's correct. Two misspelled words in a three-word sentence, painted on a boulder for all to see. Dumb bastards.

FYI, The Boulders is 634 acre piece of land owned by Crane & Co. (they make the paper on which our money is printed) and protected by the MA Department of Fish and Game. At the top is, you guessed it, a bunch of boulders. It's a popular destination for hikers, bikers, runners and unfortunately, punk-ass high school kids.


Friday, Perfect for Spring Cleaning

This past Friday we had the day "off" as the 10th day in our 9/80 schedule. The company counts this as a vacation day, and likes to tout it as a real bonus. In reality it's just a day filled with all of the chores that you couldn't do for the last two weeks because everything was closed by the time you got out of work. Anyway, I put it to good use this week.

My plan was to clean out the garage (or put the shit back in the basement where it belongs), take the 5 bags of lawn detritus (needles, etc) to the transfer station, "winterize" my kayak (put a tarp over it), get new panes of glass for my last remaining storm window, take the four bags of clothes to one of those clothes bins (like Goodwill, only convenient), mow the lawn and have a fire.

Well, I did manage to pick up the glass (damn, $18 a pane for a window I barely need), drop off the sacks o' pine needles and clothes, mow the lawn, run the gas out of the lawn mower (for winter) and do a bunch of laundry. I didn't get to the garage or the kayak, but I had my reasons.

Back Story: I have two storm windows with two panes of glass in each. A few years back one pane in each window was broken in a wind storm. Conclusion: two windows with one good pane and one broken pane in each.

After picking up the 2 panes of glass for my storm windows, I felt inspired to start working on them. I scraped the paint, got the old glaze out of the track, removed the little glazing points (the little metal things that actually hold the glass in place) and was ready to install the glass. That's when I thought to myself, "Well, I really should re-do the glaze on the old glass too. Why half-ass it?"

So I set to work removing the glaze and glazing points from the good pane. I cleaned it up real purdy-like and just when I almost had the glass out, CHINK, the damn thing broke. Now I have three panes to replace. My next step was to steal the glass out of an old window I don't need, cut it down to size and replace both panes.

With handsaw in hand, I cut the old window frame to pieces, gently removed the glass, set it aside, and quit for the day. That was enough suffering for one day. I didn't want to risk breaking another piece of glass.

I think tonight I'm going to reassemble the first storm window and get started on the next. Hmm, maybe I'll clear out the garage so I can work in there.


I Know There's a Reason...

This weekend I decided to rearrange my bedroom. It's always a refreshing task that seems to give you the feeling of having a whole new bedroom. As with any task, it also introduces a few more tasks that, if tackled, improve your quality of life. This one was no different.

For a while now I've been trying to figure out a new configuration for my bedroom furniture. Every time I think I have a plan, there's some reason why that plan won't work: the bed would be right in front of the door, bad Chi, outlets in the wrong places, etc. This time, I threw caution to the wind and basically just mirrored the old setup, switching the bed with the rest of the stuff.

My bedroom is not quite a square. It has a little cove-like area where my bed used to be. This made sense because it kept me from losing floor space, and it gave me that cozy cave-like feeling that hermits like me enjoy. Needing a change, I decided I could live without that and I moved everything around.

Besides a new arrangement, there's the added benefit of a clean room. Anyone who's ever moved furniture knows that you better have a HazMat team on call to deal with the shit behind/beneath that furniture once it's moved. Rearrange everything and you're really asking for it. I had more dust, cat fur, spiders and cobwebs than I could imagine in an otherwise clean room and thanks to my decision to rearrange everything it's now all clean.

The other benefit is that my bed (and a pound of cat fur/dust/spider carcasses) used to cover the return vent for the heat. This of course resulted in no (or at least very little) heat in the bedroom. In a house where the warmest room is 58 degrees at night, an unheated (or scarcely heated) room gets mighty cold. We'll see how that works out.

As I rested my head on the pillow Saturday night (the first night in the "new" room) I was prepared for a good night's sleep. It was early and I had a sense of satisfaction that can only come from checking myriad things off a to-do list. I double-checked the alarm to make sure it was off then rolled over to drift off to sleep. BAM! A street light was shining right in the freaking window, right in my freaking eye! Maybe that was the reason I never moved the furniture around.


Alright, I've been working on this for days. If I don't just cut it loose now it'll never get posted.


Over and Out,
Old Coot

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"Something inside of me just said 'Hey, wait a minute, I want to beat him.' and I just took off." -Pre