back (and forth?)
Nov. 25th, 2007 08:23 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dchenesI'm back, and Lily is still speaking to me, to the point of not letting me out of her sight if she can avoid it. At the moment she's lying on the floor five feet away, half upside down and half sideways, and purring like a fiend.
The weekend was very nice. It involved, among other things: four pies, a discussion about when exactly mayonnaise was invented, the discovery that one of our guests also has a cat named Lily, a couple of pretty decent puns, gin and tonic, bourbon and Coke (bleah), two nights of extremely strange dreams on my part, the Latin name for the common grackle (Quiscalus quiscula), crepes with about six kinds of fruit to put in them, and a project.
This time the project was replacing a section of the loft in the shop, which had been taken out when Dad was putting the boat in there. Since he's retiring as of Friday, he wanted to put the loft back together so as to have more space in the shop to store lumber. The short version of what ensued is "high and wobbly fooling around". I resigned from nailing in the joists, because I was always at the wrong angle, and I bent a couple of nails on the X and Y axes at the same time and couldn't straighten them again. I also couldn't get enough leverage to pull out the nails with a pry bar, since I was at the top of a questionably steady ten-foot stepladder. (And the existing loft has been there for about 25 years, and if you leave fir 2x8s in a dry environment for 25 years, they dry out and harden quite some.) Having resigned from nailing in the joists, I got to play with a framing square so as to mark where the bracing should go, and then hand up the braces. Following which, there was Fun With Underlayment (getting it off the truck and flipped upright on a bench so it was reachable from the loft), and then we all declared that was enough of that. Especially since all the lumber was soaking wet, and therefore the last sheet of underlayment wouldn't fit where Dad wanted it.
From now on I should probably just bring a set of work clothes every time I go to Noank.
Today I should clean things and do laundry, and maybe go get some more cat food and such. Hooray?
The weekend was very nice. It involved, among other things: four pies, a discussion about when exactly mayonnaise was invented, the discovery that one of our guests also has a cat named Lily, a couple of pretty decent puns, gin and tonic, bourbon and Coke (bleah), two nights of extremely strange dreams on my part, the Latin name for the common grackle (Quiscalus quiscula), crepes with about six kinds of fruit to put in them, and a project.
This time the project was replacing a section of the loft in the shop, which had been taken out when Dad was putting the boat in there. Since he's retiring as of Friday, he wanted to put the loft back together so as to have more space in the shop to store lumber. The short version of what ensued is "high and wobbly fooling around". I resigned from nailing in the joists, because I was always at the wrong angle, and I bent a couple of nails on the X and Y axes at the same time and couldn't straighten them again. I also couldn't get enough leverage to pull out the nails with a pry bar, since I was at the top of a questionably steady ten-foot stepladder. (And the existing loft has been there for about 25 years, and if you leave fir 2x8s in a dry environment for 25 years, they dry out and harden quite some.) Having resigned from nailing in the joists, I got to play with a framing square so as to mark where the bracing should go, and then hand up the braces. Following which, there was Fun With Underlayment (getting it off the truck and flipped upright on a bench so it was reachable from the loft), and then we all declared that was enough of that. Especially since all the lumber was soaking wet, and therefore the last sheet of underlayment wouldn't fit where Dad wanted it.
From now on I should probably just bring a set of work clothes every time I go to Noank.
Today I should clean things and do laundry, and maybe go get some more cat food and such. Hooray?
