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September 23, 2006
Friday, September 1
We are shamefully behind in documenting our storming of the barn. Much has transpired. There is much to share. And yet we have been keeping the progress to ourselves. Why have we suddenly grown so greedy? Perhaps because, now that we have landed, we are less motivated to spend our time blogging as a means of dreaming of arrival. This complex theory was advanced by our friend Christian who was in total barnstorming withdrawal after we had failed to post in nearly three weeks. He is a clever guy, and so I am compelled to think him right.
Knowing now that our recent blogging indifference is born of self-satisfaction, I must firmly discipline myself to complete the story for the sake of our abandoned readers. Please forgive us this thoughtless breach of protocol.
Without further ado, let me take you back a bit. About three weeks back.
At 5:36pm on Thursday, August 31, 2006 I officially retired from my account manager position at NCSDO. I got in my car, drove across the bridge, and enjoyed a delicious celebratory meal prepared by Seiko. I went to bed with visions of my new life: long stretches of uninterrupted time for contemplation of life's great mysteries, restful sleep uninterrupted by thoughts of contracts and deadlines, hours in bed each morning for musing over the great literature of our time. I dreamed of rest, peace, tranquility of mind and spirit.
At 7:00 my bliss was shattered by Robbi's unkind voice.
"Hey Bozo! Wake up. It's time to work on the barn."
And so I returned to reality, to my perch in the rafters.
Now that the doors and windows were hung and framed, the time had come to tackle the unpleasant challenge of thoughfully filling the hole in the wall.
Harassed and fatigued from six months of construction (and desperately ready to begin my retirement, remember), I came up with the brilliant idea that we merely nail boards over said hole, saving ourselves the headache and trouble of having to engage in complex feats of construction surely far beyond our powers to summon.
Yet Robbi would have nothing to do with this scheme. "We're building a bookcase," she reminded me. "If you're not going to help, then I'm going to do it myself." She might have said "dammit" for emphasis, but she didn't, being a generally couth young woman.
She took out her tape measure and got serious. I fell humbly into line.
After meticulous measurement, Robbi created the following sketch. Take a close look and you will see the dizzying complexity of this project. The notches represent spaces that must be left for vertical boards around which this board, the bookshelf base, must be carefully fit. You will instantly identify with my preference for simplicity. You will suddenly agree that it is I who might rightfully have said "dammit."
Once the measurements were taken, Robbi, undaunted, proceded to cut the board that would be the base and bottom shelf.
Bob and I were up to something while Robbi worked. I can't now remember what it was (I'm fighting against three weeks of haze now, remember). Perhaps I was framing out the bedroom side of the cat door. Perhaps I was counter-sinking nail heads and spackling over them. Perhaps I was painting trim, moving paint cans, standing in mute wonder as my wife completed feats of construction prowess far beyond my power to imagine.
It took some doing and more than a few trips back to the chop saw for refinements, but "dammit" if Robbi didn't succeed in getting that board to fit.
Once the board was in, we took a photo revealing such heights of self-satisfaciton on the part of Ms. Robbi that I cannot bear to show it here. It would set your screens afire. It would blind you like the stuff that melted the faces of the bad guys at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark.
One-by-one, we added the boards that would form the back of the bookshelf, thus sealing off the warehouse from our living space.
(This part is really exciting, so I'll include every photo we took. If you look at them really quickly, it's sort of like watching a movie, a really exciting one.)
First board
Second
Third
Fourth
Fifth
Sixth
Seventh!
Scrolling through our progress right now, you might get the sense that it only took us a few minutes to nail up these boards. You would be mistaken. Horribly so. The boards, which just happen to match the rest of the wall into which we were building the bookshelf, had to be carefully measured, cut, and placed. With finesse, care, and even aplomb.
Maybe not aplomb, perhaps, but definitelly finesse and care.
And if you know me well, or even a little, you will know that as much as I care, I lack finesse. And so, in the course of hoisting myself into the rafters, I rammed the top of my head with the force of a well-swung hammer into a thick, unyielding beam that did not yield. I saw the light of eternity, nearly fell down the ladder, and made some horrible sounds that caused no end of alarm on Robbi's part. The resulting headache was profound, the resulting hole in my head not insignificant, and the pain in my neck long-lasting (to this day, to tell the truth, though it has gotten better in the last few days).
See below said hole.
The incident brought an end to Friday, September 1, 2006.
Posted by bogenamp at September 23, 2006 10:48 AM