When the day begins at 81 degrees, you know you're in for it.

Squeeky and the kids ran off shortly after dawn to partake of a library carnival. There's a oxymoron, eh? We had libraries in college that functioned as bedrooms for some (during finals, some of the students would wash up in the lavatories before heading off to class, having spent the night staring at the insides of books), but never a carnival.

After the festivities, they'd be off to a friend's farm to confuse the goats and chickens, leaving me with a good seven hours' work time around the house.

I am amazed, every time, how fast that goes by.

The first order was to finish the big windows. No, I still have not completed that job, if you count trimming and painting as "finished." Weather kept me away for weeks, as the prospect of slogging around in mud outside the house deterred me. Then there was the internment of Dad's ashes, plus a gazillion more pressing matters, and before I knew it two months had slipped by.

So today I dragged out the 1" trim, saw, glue, ladder, scraper, nails, hammer, measuring tape, staple gun, and a little spike thing for driving finish nails, and you can see right there how half an hour evaporated just collecting and dragging stuff out to the workplace. Thing about trim is, it's only when you get down to the fine details of sticking it into place that you find little imperfections that you can't let be. E.g., some of the three layers of paint and caulk slapped up there since 1956 were caked in such a way as to prevent my laying the trim down flat. So a trip back to the garage for scraping tools was in order, plus the time it took to hone everything to a smooth surface. Thank God the glue remaining in the caulking gun from last time hadn't set. I had to cut the trim, spread glue on the back, tack it into place with finish nails, then cross my fingers that the nails held in the mortar between the bricks long enough for the polyurethane stickum to set. As long as a piece didn't plop off onto my hair, I'd be happy.

And it didn't. Wolf Dog kept watch on me through the windows as I worked. Once the corners were all finished out, I painted them with primer and took a break while it dried. Lo and behold, I discovered in the garage a half-dozen eaves vents I had bought but never installed. Screws, too. Well, no excuses: I'd have to use the primer dry-time to finally put these things in.

something happened nine years before i was born, when the builder of this house elected not to ventilate the attic nor install gutters. Perhaps he knew I would have some strange need to perform these tasks. Or, it being a boom time in Dallas, and just cut little corners like this and shaved a few dollars from construction costs. Whatever it was, I hope he's roasting in hell for it, because although I like doing crafty things, there is no fun in buzzing through old plywood over your head with a sabre saw, knowing when the rectangle is finished it's going to shower you with smelly insulation and sawdust. I'd hold an umbrella if I had a third hand. The job cannot be done from above, owing to the low hips on this house, and I was blessed not to have hit a single stud in the process of drilling and sawing. What I didn't do properly was the math.

Attic vents are supposed to go up every eight feet. Somehow I wound up measuring five feet between them. So I ran out of vents after finishing one side of the house. That meant an hour-eating trip to Big Box Home Improvement. As I've noted, it always takes an hour.

I got back in time to finish just as the family rolled in. That meant I would not get to paint over my primer, with the fumes and the sticky and the messy and the Little Roo going straight for the wet stuff, ugh, ugh, ugh.

I called it a workday and packed up my tools. The windows could wait. Heat stroke would not, and my T-shirt had been completely drenched since noon.

squinx is looking forward to the circus tomorrow. I am, too, except for the $15 parking fee. I wonder what that space would cost on a per-square-foot basis, per year, if $15 only covers it for a few hours. I thought I'd paid for the whole new hockey rink/basketball stadium/monster-truck boutique with some taxes I voted against back in 1999. Must be built on rising real estate.

I'll still drop them all off and park the car myself. We're taking a neighbor girl and Little Roo, and in the heat there's no sense baking all of us.

What Squinx seems just as excited about, though, is the Perseid meteor shower tomorrow night. We're granting a special dispensation on bedtime so we can camp out front 'til midnight, or however long we last. We'll see how long a five-year-old can stare at the same patch of sky without nodding off. If only I could train Wolf Dog to bark just as each meteor appears.

saturday night, time to check pbs to see which aging rock group has come back from the dead. Sometimes I leave the sound off to see if I can guess just by looks. It isn't easy. Most are in their '50s or greater, and those have all been highway miles. Tonight, I can't figure out who it is; the hair transplants don't help.

As Kenny Loggins once said, there's no retirement plan for musicians, and they have no other marketable skills. So they keep going, long as they're able, and as long as anyone will listen, or longer. I suppose the same fate awaits all writers. See you Sunday.

Posted by: Michael Rittenhouse at 08:26 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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