A couple of milestones were reached today. Snow flurries filled the air for much of the day, eventually turning to straight rain by late afternoon.
It was also the first day this season that I wore a long underwear top underneath my sweatshirt.
Damn.
It would seem that S.O.B. Jack Frost is burning the bridge to summer.
After an excruciating day of replacing “el baño del diablo”. I stopped by the post office to find 2 small packages and three additional package slips in my post office box. Upon turning in the yellow, pick-up slips, the clerk looked at me with suspicion. Ever since I received a cylinder head in the mail, the postal clerks seem to approach me with doubt mixed with a healthy dose of concern. Of course, it is possible that it was the complete exhaust system that ruined my reputation with USPS. At any rate, I did confirm to the clerk, “Yes, I believe it’s Rover parts”. She promptly grabbed a cart and ventured into the back.
Three boxes full of brand new Land Rover parts. The efficiency of Rover’s North amazes me sometimes.
There is a habitual planner out there lurking in the corn, who will be thrilled to know that I now have plans for the weekend.
My rain gauge had .83″ of water in it this morning when I emptied it, and it had at least half as much in it when I returned home this evening. It is still raining, which puts a damper on the job of putting new shingles on a roof.
Luckily, I did get the lid done on the house, and all I have left is to tackle the roof on the garage.
On a sidenote: The front porch had sagged so much in the center, that the rain water spilled over the gutter right there in the middle where the steps are. After removing 20 deck planks, I found that the two 8×8″ porch pillars have nothing but air underneath them. They are both just hanging there in mid air like rough-cut stalactites waiting for the day when they will touch Earth. In fact, other than a couple of oddly placed, and now rotting, railroad ties, there seems to be very little supporting the porch and its very heavy roof at all.
Since I found the waterfall over the steps to be a tad annoying, I jacked up the deck in the center with my Hi-Lift, and like magic, the water now flows through the gutter and… overflows the gutter downstream because the downspout is completely clogged.
Cleaning gutters was not part of the original bid.
“I got to keep movin’, I’ve got to keep movin’, blues fallin’ down like hail, blues fallin’ down like hail
Umm-mm-mm-mm, blues fallin’ down like hail, blues fallin’ down like hail
And the day keeps on worrin’ me, there’s a hellhound on my trail, hellhound on my trail, hellhound on my trail.”
—Robert Johnson
In what is shaping up to be my busiest summer on record, all I can do is keep moving. I’ve never seen a season shape up like this one, and the calls keep coming in.
I’ve been plumbing for the past two days, which usually puts me in a foul mood. It doesn’t help that plumbers are all sadists, and I’ve come into a situation 40 years after the original install, with the Ghost Plumber chuckling at me from the attic. I replaced a shower valve that was installed through a stud, and I swear that the stud grew around the valve like an oak tree grows around barbed wire.
I’ll be installing tile the next 2-3 days, which may be good for the soul, if a tad hard on the knees. On the plus side, everything has been torn out, so I’m starting from scratch.
I could not find the artist’s name who created the Hound of the Baskervilles above, but kudos to whoever they are.
I received two messages today suggesting that the Circle to Circle cover page has become a bit stale. I realize I’ve neglected the site this month. Work has been relatively slow since Thanksgiving, so in January, I accepted an invite to sub myself out to another company for a few months. I believe they call this “Whoring Oneself Out” in the trades.
It’s been a frustrating situation on some levels. Mainly, they are insanely unorganized, and that fact has been driving me nuts. My crew is already well ahead of schedule, and nobody seems to know what to do with us now that we’ve gotten this far. We’ve been getting “busy work” the past two days, which I have little patience for. I do know that they want me to join the company full time, and I’m starting to get trained into areas of the company that I’d rather not get involved with at all. I keep reminding them that I am a free agent, and in March I plan on testing the market. They keep pretending not to hear me.
So far, the new J.O.B. has offered little to write about on here, and it has left me mentally frustrated, so that I have had little interest in any attempt at online creativity. With that said, I will try not to go totally silent between now and the Frozen Four in early April.
In other news: It was 30 degs above zero at my place this morning at 6am. That is beyond unusual. When I arrived home tonight, the cabin was a sweaty 80 degs due to the excess heat of the woodstove, and I had to quickly change into shorts and a t-shirt just to be comfortable as I opened a cold beer.
Not that I’m complaining, mind you, but I can’t quite get my mind wrapped around the idea of such a mild winter. I think it’s a great idea for the Polar Vortex to visit other parts of the country from time to time. Let us share the wealth.
I ran out of thinset at about 4:15 yesterday afternoon while laying floor tile. The customer had left me a tub, but it was dried out. I debated on running to Depot to pick up another tub since I only had about 10 square feet left. I decided against it because I had a lot of diagnal cuts to make, so I decided to go in and finish it this morning.
I sent the customer a text about another facet of the job for Monday when I was at Depot. He called back and asked how the rest was going.
Client: “Did you tile under the cabinets?”
Me: “No. There isn’t enough tile for that. There is just enough to do the kitchen running up to the cabinets.”
Client: “Did you tile up to the door?”
Me: “The entry door? No. You asked me to tile the kitchen.”
Client: “I was hoping you’d do it like apartment #5.”
Me: “I’ve never been in apartment #5.”
Client: “You haven’t? What were you in?”
Me: “Apartment 1.”
Client: “Apartment 1 isn’t like that at all.”
Me: “No kidding. We don’t have enough tile to do to the door. Where did you buy this stuff?”
Client: “Wow. Let’s see. I think it was on clearance at Lowes for 99 cents a tile.”
Me: “Frack me.”
As it turns out, I got lucky running out of the thinset. I would have finished off the kitchen and been done with it. With the little hallway and entryway getting tile, the diagnal cuts are now unnecessary. Not that it matters, Lowes no longer has the tile.
They call it clearance for a reason.
I was back out on the river recently to finally install a deck rail on a deck I built last year. We were going to install cable rail, but I’m not an overly big fan of the stuff. For what you get, the price is absurd. In the end, I think the client agreed, once she recovered from hearing the bid. We went with conduit instead, and I really like the look.
I’m glad I subscribe to the theory that planning too far out is simply a waste of time. Embrace that loosey-goosey lifestyle!
I was supposed to install a chimney & woodstove this week for a client. The night before I was to start the job, the customer informed me that she was no longer interested in a woodstove. It seems a mutual acquaintance, another contractor in fact, told her she didn’t want to deal with firewood. The damn busy-body! The cost of heating oil isn’t dropping anytime soon, hot shot.
Ahem…
What really annoys me is that she’s going to change her mind back and want the stove installed in October, when we have a nice layer of snow up on the roof. Why do it now when we don’t have a cloud in the sky?
On the plus side, she has about ten cords of downed birch & spruce stacked near the cabin. “If you need firewood, take what you need,” she says to me.
So I’ve been hauling, cutting, splitting and stacking firewood this week. It was 85 degs here today, which is not ideal wood cutting weather. I realize that I won’t be getting any sympathy from South Texas, but 85 is still hot to those of us within a short drive of the Arctic Circle, and I’ve been sweating up a storm this week.
Normally, we’d be seeing rain and weather twenty degrees cooler about now, but there is still no rain in the forecast. Not that I’m complaining about that, since I’m trying to get a nice roof job yet this month.
With the excessively dry weather, the Borough and State have banned woodcutting in the public areas dedicated to that. With the high heating oil prices, the price of firewood is bound to climb as well. So free firewood is just as good as getting paid to install a chimney.
…When you are really better off not going home during lunch.
That’s all I have for today.
