Dimensional

Someone needs to tell Market Basket that hash browns are supposed to be shredded potatoes, not julienned. These suckers are practically shoestring fries.

Yes, I'm up very late and had breakfast for dinner. It was delicious, despite the potatoes being the size of kindling.

Hooked

After a year of dragging my feet, I'm finally starting to go through my moth-infested craft room and pitch the things that are beyond saving. I can only do it a little bit at a time, because it's depressing to see that much work and material ruined, but occasionally I run across something I'd completely forgotten about and don't have to chuck in the bin.

For example, last night, in amongst the laceweight cotton-linen recycled yarn that the moths apparently found delicious, I spotted a dark blue, naugahyde, zippered case. Inside was the pride of my crochet hook collection, misplaced years ago, that included both my ivory hook (brought back from Africa by my great aunt Stella in the '60s along with a zebra-skin handbag) and my lignum hook. The lignum (Lignum vitae, a wood of extraordinary density and strength) hook was a gift from the woodturner I worked for five or six years ago, and I'd been idly wondering where it was.

Now, what to crochet with it?

Bonus

The log cabin job that we finished around New Year's was for a lovely couple who enjoyed being involved in the deconstruction process and feeling like part of the crew. They provided us with space heaters and a little break room setup (microwave, mugs, packets of cocoa) on site, they made us cookies and chili, and were just as pleasant as could be. When we finished up, on time and on budget, they decided to give us a little bonus -- every crewmember who worked on that site got a gift card for the local outdoor/work gear store.

I was hoping for proper snowboots, but they were out of the budget, so I came home with some long-sleeved thermal shirts that will fit nicely into my winter-into-spring wardrobe. It's nice to feel appreciated, especially in this line of work, where we can't go back to a site and point at what we did, because if we've done our jobs right, there's nothing left. My new shirts are something of a monument to that job, and I like them all the more for it.

Silver Linings

As hard a decision as it has been to leave window restoration (because self-employment isn't something I can handle, and there's nobody nearby in this field who I could work for), it does have some silver linings. One is that, once I'm working for someone else full-time again, I won't have the constant feeling of guilt over not spending more time working -- when I clock out, I'm done. Another is that I'll have resources available if I screw something up. Being the boss has meant that I have no backup, no help if something goes sideways, and it only adds to my stress. The silver lining I've been thinking about most, though, isn't big in the scheme of things, and it's pretty specific, but it's such a huge relief to me that I've been dwelling on it.

Back in September I went to a conference for people in the preservation trades. Because the fee to attend was out of my budget, I volunteered to teach a workshop on glazing windows, which got me in for free. I love demonstrating my various skills, and I wanted to network with other preservationists, so it seemed like a good fit.

It was the biggest shitshow I've ever had the displeasure of attending.

The professional organization that runs the event has been doing it for 20 years, so you'd think they'd have at least the basics covered, but that wasn't the case. Simple things like a street address for the venue, whether meals would be provided, and the schedule of events, were incomplete, incorrect, or not published at all. One of the other demonstrators had to stand at the gate handing out photocopies of her workshop description because the workshop coordinator had forgotten to put it in the official info packet. Of the first dozen people to sign in on the first day, half of them didn't get nametags because they either hadn't been printed or hadn't made it to the check-in table. I missed the first part of a workshop because the location had changed without notice. I ended up cleaning up the food tent in the mornings because nobody had stayed behind the night before to pick up trash or make sure things weren't left on tables.

A little perspective: between 4-H, historical reenactment, sheep and wool festivals, and renfaires, I've participated in a LOT of volunteer-run events. I've helped out with everything from bake sales run by third-graders to multi-weekend fairs that see ten thousand paying patrons through the gates. This conference was, by far, the most disorganized, confusing, poorly-run event of them all.

The worst part was the attitude of the people running it. Any time I suggested an improvement or asked why something wasn't done, I was met with, "well, it's your first time at this conference, so you don't know how it works," and/or, "join a committee if you want to make it better." So... you belittle me, invalidate my experience, and then expect me to bust my ass to make up for your incompetence? Not a chance.

For a group of so-called professionals, their conference was the most unprofessional event I've ever attended. I am so very thankful that I don't have to go to another one.

Plastered

My black workboots are white with plaster dust and my body is screaming in pain after two days of pulling plaster off lath at work. Despite the pain, there were good things about today's labors.

Pretty lath is a good thing. This is accordion lath, made from wide, thin boards that are then partially split and stretched to create gaps for the plaster to squish through to hold it on the wall (keys). The architect in charge of the renovation was so excited by this discovery that he's making the lath a design element in the new master bedroom.

Finding old wallpaper is a good thing, too. This was the third layer on the plaster (first and second I only found tiny remnants of in a few places, and their designs were so subtle as to be lost to my phone's camera), and it was only once I took off the crown moulding that I found it -- they'd cut it at the edge of the moulding and taken it off the walls before adding more recent wallpaper, so it only exists in this strip around the top of the room, and now, not even that.

Things that make me giggle are also good. This is short for "demolish," not for "demo-licious," as my work-addled brain would have me believe.

It's finally time to rest, without worrying about the alarm going off at 5am. Thank gods.

My Father's Daughter

Despite the turmoil in my head and running on maybe three hours' sleep, I had a remarkably good time at work today. We're on a new (to me, the rest of the crew started a week ago) job site down in Massachusetts, and it's not a complete tear-down the way most of our deconstruction jobs are. This one is what we call a soft strip, where the client is going to be remodeling and wants parts of the old structure removed, but the exterior frame and a lot of the interior walls stay put. The original house was built in the 1820s (sayeth the homeowner), but it's gone through some drastic changes since then, so there aren't many original details remaining.

My job today was to strip plaster off the walls in one of the bedrooms. We'll strip the lath once we get our mega-vacuum on site, because nobody wants to expose the blown fiberglass insulation until the vac is set up to contain it.

 

Spending six hours playing with plaster gave my brain plenty of time to engage in one of my father's favorite pastimes: writing silly songs and parodies. I spent almost half the day trying to come up with lyrics for what is, unfortunately, a pretty narrow subject, and finally defaulted to a parody of Little Boxes (note: "brown coat" is sort of a setup layer in plastering, and horsehair or some other binder is mixed in to give it some "tooth"):

Little horsehairs in the brown coat,

little horsehairs in the plastering,

and they all came from a chestnut,

and they all look just the same,

there's a red one, and a red one,

and a red one, and a red one,

little horsehairs in the brown coat,

and they all look just the same.

With that in my head on repeat for hours and hours, the comfortable monotony was only occasionally broken by something weird or interesting. There wasn't much to interest my inner window geek (all of the windows were replaced sometime in the mid 20th century, have godawful spiral balances, are poorly-proportioned, and have flat glass and failing glazing), but my inner entomologist (another link to Dad) was amused to find that, as I was pulling plaster off lath, a few beetles poked their heads out of the wall cavity, too. 

Apologies for the awful stupidphone picture. This here's Harmonia axyridis, the Asian Ladybeetle imported by the US Department of Agriculture to help with an aphid problem a while back. While H. axyridis eats aphids happily enough, it also eats Coccinella septempunctata, our native ladybugs, which the DoA folks didn't bother to check beforehand. These little varmints will winter anywhere it's cozy, including in the little gaps where the plaster didn't get keyed (squished through the gap in the lath).

I also found, under the wallpaper, this little note:

Why they wrote it, and marked a spot not quite where the plug ended up going, is beyond me, but it made me chuckle anyway.

This, on the other hand, confused me. Before we started our work on this site, a crew came through and covered all the floors that were going to be kept (including two sets of stairs) with thin plywood, and while they used standard duct tape on most of the seams, on the stairs they used Zip tape, which is designed to be used with Zip System wall panels. It's not cheap (roughly 25¢ per foot, retail), and it doesn't release well at all. But I suppose that's the GC's problem.

Near the end of the day, I got a bit of a treat. The homeowner came by to do some snow clearing, and he brought his two dogs, an older Golden Retriever and a very young Pitt Bull cross. They're extremely friendly dogs, but not well-mannered -- they love to jump on people and chew on hands to show excitement. Still, it was lovely to get to play with them for a minute, and their visit made my day.

Now that I've washed the plaster dust off my face (even with a dust mask, I came off the job site looking like a cocaine addict), it's time to put on a movie and let my sore muscles relax so I can go back and do more of the same tomorrow.

An Object In Motion

As long as I keep moving and keep my mind running after solutions to unrelated problems, I can almost hold it together. The moment I have nothing else demanding my attention, though, I fall to pieces. Bedtime is the worst. The gap between turning off the computer and picking up the book on the nightstand, that time filled with the mindless transition from activity to rest, is fraught with pain. Another day has passed, the wound is still open, and there's less hope of resolution than there was the day before. Let sleep come quickly, to outrun the headache that follows so much crying.