Later today, that is. Yesterday construction work paused again. Not due to oncoming trains at the end of the tunnel this time. Merely because The Wandering Monk had other commitments. Though unhappy to lose momentum, I found it glorious to bask in the sun of one of our rare, nearly perfect spring days. The Monk returns today, with minion, and the first order of business is taking a saw to the back end of what was once meant to be the bedroom. The minion he’s bringing is not the neighbor he felt so sorry for. Said desperate neighbor declined to…
Month: May 2017
Bob Owens of BearingArms.com is dead. Apparently by suicide at age 46. No doubt the antis will gleeful make hay out of his death by gunshot. Owens wasn’t a favorite of us gun-rights purists. He was notorious for a particular “blame the gun” editorial in the L.A. Times that could have been written by a hardcore Bloombergian. Or a Quisling. I suppose now it would be an ungracious, arrogant understatement to assume the guy had issues. Good guy? Bad buy? Good guy, but? I don’t know. Still. Crappy fate. He had young family, too. More from his co-editor.
Um … that was a rhetorical question. I don’t think I am, but your opinion may vary. I was just reminded in the last few days why people often view us INTJ/freedomista/rational/free-market types as having icy souls. —– The Wandering Monk likes to see himself as a person who helps people. And he genuinely does much good. He goes out of his way for people all the time. He specializes in clients who don’t have a lot of money and he charges accordingly. He often spends late nights counseling troubled acquaintances. He does little things for clients that are above…
Last week’s foundation work turned largely into discussions about how to proceed (after discovering that the light at the end of the construction tunnel was an onrushing train). Today the Wandering Monk arrived bright and early to get down to real, physical work again. That is, he arrived 20 minutes past our agreed-upon bright-and-early start time, desperately clutching a cup of coffee. But we (mostly he) got right down to it and so far, so good. The NW corner of the house is now supported by nothing. Or rather, the nothing that was previously supporting it has been removed, waterlogged…
I was wasting time doing some really important searching on Amazon the other day, when I discovered that they have a button dedicated solely to “interesting finds.” Click on the icon, and heaven knows where you’ll end up.
The Wandering Monk and I haven’t accomplished much on the physical part of the newly re-christened Great Foundation and Screen Porch Project this week. Some teardown; the back end of the bedroom has no floor and we’ve uncovered enough crumbling, cracked, rotted, bug-eaten, twisted, misplaced, poorly thought-out beams, joists, and posts to know we had to rethink the project. And thinking is what we’ve done. Tuesday after realizing how screwed the foundation was we must have spent nearly three hours talking about how to cope. I know we both worried about it overnight. On Wednesday we talked a couple of…
“Dark night of the soul” is too serious a term for this week’s mini-crisis. That’s an expression to reserve for the big bad moments (or years) in life. But this week fell at least into a momentary twilight of the creative soul. Then … light! —– Tuesday the Wandering Monk and I found all that awfulness as we began the Great House Foundation Project. Not unexpected. Dismal nevertheless. The Monk immediately began kludging together a plan for jacking up the house even with very little of the house left to jack. His plan was creative. And intelligent. And it removed…
The brain isn’t working today. I blame the house foundation. The Monk, however, has his system figured out, with only mild consultation from me (which mostly involved me asking, “Why aren’t you doing XYZ?” and him explaining quite logically why something that made perfect sense in my mind actually wouldn’t work as well as what he’d already figured out). At least I was able to come up with the average psf weight of a house for leveraging purposes. My major contribution for the day. Once the lumberyard delivers beam-and-joist materials this afternoon, my major contribution will be banging nails and/or…