Stomp
I lay in the bed in the dark room, eyes closed. With one hand, I absently stroked Tom Cullen, who sprawled beside me with his belly exposed and one paw thrown up in the air as if he were filled with the Spirit in an evangelical church. Beyond him, little Miss Stinkerbelle sat grooming herself, purring like a motorboat.
It was maybe 4:30 this morning. I’d awakened some fifteen minutes earlier, peed, and gotten back into bed to lay there for another hour or so to shower and get ready for work. As was the case more and more these days, I just felt too tired — or lazy, disguised as tired — to get up and work out.
I’ve fallen into a routine of only working out Tuesday through Friday. My reasoning is that since I work outside pretty much nonstop all day Saturday and Sunday, I don’t need to work out those days. By Monday morning I’m pretty tired — yesterday, for example, I spent all afternoon wrestling 4×8 sheets of heavy subflooring around for my shed — and I take that day as my “official” no-workout day.
Despite the fact that I’ll go home and heft wood around for the shed for 2-3 hours this afternoon.
On days that I’m not working out, I still wake up at the same time, so often I’ll leave my bedroom door open after I pee, so the cats can come in for some bonding time. Most of the time, all the cats except Spot (and maybe Miz Poo) will make their way through.
As I lay there petting Tom I became aware of a faint sound. I turned my head so I could hear the noise better. Distant and tinkly, it sounded like one of those old radios people had on the mantel back in the 30’s. I thought I could even hear the tinny voice of someone singing, the voice all thin and sounding like it was coming out of a can.
My heart thrilled.
Maybe this is our haunting, I thought, rather excitedly. We’ll hear snatches of music from the ghostly radio that plays hits from the era when the house was built.
I lifted my head and strained hard to see if I could hear any more, to maybe even recognize the phantom tune.
That’s when Robyn flushed the toilet, and I realized what I’d been listening to.
I spent most of the weekend working on my shed, which is starting to look kind of like a building now. I finished hanging girts on Saturday, and got most of the flooring down yesterday. I’m mighty proud of it when I stand inside and look around. At roughly 23×12, it’s almost big enough to be a small guest house. At the rate I’m going, I should be finished by the time I’m 45 or so.
Seriously. I’m amazed and how long it takes me to build things. When you’re working alone it takes you about five times as long as it would with a partner to help. For example, to hang a girt (this is a girt), I have to first measure the span, which is a lot easier with someone to hold one end of the tape. Then, I have to mark each post at the right height so the girt will be level. Measure and cut the girt, which is a 2×8, and carry back to the shed. Because I can’t hold a girt up and screw it to the post at the same time, I have to screw small pieces of 2×6 to the posts first, so I can rest the girt on them. Once the girt is in place, I put 8-12 3-inch screws through it at each post. Finally, I remove the supports and the girt is hung.
That’s one girt, at the bottom level. It gets much harder and more time-consuming when you’re working on a ladder several feet off the ground, trying to do all those steps.
But, like I said, I finished the girts on Saturday. I wanted to go ahead and put the support beams in for the roof ridge, but after doing just one on Saturday and finding out what it was like trying to move the ladder around amongst all the joists, I decided to put the floor down first. That way, I’m not as far off the ground (the floor is about 10 inches above the ground) and I’d have a nice level surface to move the ladder around on.
Way back when I started the shed, I first tried to build it to rest on skids, but lacked the skills to get the damn thing level. That’s why it’s a pole building now. During that first attempt, I attached one 4×8 piece of flooring, and when I took the first attempt apart I laid that piece of flooring on the ground underneath one of our pecan trees.
When I lifted that piece of OSB (oriented strand board) yesterday, I found about five hundred crickets and one evil bitch.
To get those pictures, I called Robyn to bring the camera out. Once they were taken, Robyn dispatched the little lady to a better place (well, better for me, anyway) and went back inside.
Not five minutes later, when I picked up a piece of treated wood to use as a weight while cutting the original piece of flooring, I found:
This does not give me a warm fuzzy feeling about getting wood out of the woodshed this winter.
I stomped the second one into jelly, and felt good about it.
Every time I look at that second-from-last picture above, I love our new camera just a little bit more. I absolutely love how the picture is so detailed you can see the reflection of the trees on the widow’s body.
Surely those pictures demonstrate how the black widow looks like pure evil, right?
This video has it all: ABBA, and hunky men in drag. What more could you need?
You may never look at Agent Smith the same way again.
