vituperation

“Goddamnit,” I said, when the nut let go and my finger sliced across some unseen piece of metal underneath the riding mower. The socket wrench slipped from my grasp and clanged to the ground. I pulled my hand out from around the rear wheel, my awkward access into the belly of the beast, and examined it. I was bleeding from a sixth cut now. Great.

I was officially having A DAY.

I woke yesterday morning in a good mood. It was only the second day of a four-day weekend and I had grand plans: put pieces of 2×8 up between the rafters in the shed to keep the wasps out (I’d been procrastinating this since before I finished the shed); finish up my latest project in the workshop; run the riding mower over the yard to chop up the twelve tons of leaves that fell during Wednesday’s storms.

In retrospect, I should have known the day was going to be bad when I started it by going to Lowe’s. On Black Friday. At opening time. I needed silicone, you see, to use around the upstairs dormer that apparently leaks in a gullywasher. Silicone can stop the leak, thus allowing me to procrastinate getting a metal roof installed.

I also needed silicone for the workshop. Long-time readers will remember that the workshop used to flood when we got any rain. After pulling up an old fence, using the tractor to reshape the landscape, and installing a threshold for the door, I’ve got the flooding stopped. However, I haven’t stopped all the water. When we get a really hard rain, like we did Wednesday night, a little water still gets in under the siding. Silicone should stop that, too.

Silicone is the shit. You can make boobs out of it, use it as an adhesive, and it’ll stop water in its tracks. Best of all, it lasts forever.

In addition to silicone, I needed a couple of things for the aforementioned project in the workshop. I didn’t want to be out on Black Friday, but didn’t really have a choice. If I wanted to move forward, I needed things.

At six a.m. yesterday, Lowe’s was busier than I’ve ever seen it. Slack-jawed zombies wheeled their carts around, loading up with fake Christmas trees, two for the price of one poinsettias, and other shiny baubles. A few raced from place to place to pile as many sale items in their carts as possible, but most shuffled aimlessly, human cattle grazing in a pasture of American excess.

It felt like forever, but I finally got my things paid for (the cashier noticed I didn’t buy any of the specials, and said she felt for me) and out to the car. Whereupon I realized I hadn’t bought everything I needed, and had to wade back in.

The second cashier also noticed I didn’t buy any of the Black Friday specials.

Back home, I worked in the workshop for a while on my new project, then went out to the shed to measure for the 2×8s. I cut about ten pieces, pulled them out to the shed on the wagon, and discovered quickly that only three of them actually fit. Some rafters weren’t perfectly straight and some I measured wrong because of the rounded corners (measure twice, cut once is a mantra I could stand to learn), and it didn’t take me long to get frustrated, standing on the ladder and trying to pound the pieces into place with a hammer.

Worse, the ones that DID fit looked funny. I knocked them all out, and tried hanging a 16-foot 2×8 on the ends of the rafters to see how that looked. To my credit, I managed to pull that off without a hitch (no small feat when you’re working alone). I mostly liked the look, but thought the thick wood looked odd, so I put everything away and called the building supply company for 1×8s and some plywood to use as soffit.

After another brief stint in the workshop to work on the new project a little more, I decided to get the mower out and chop up some leaves. I’d been doing that for all of ten minutes when the accelerator just stopped working. One minute I was going, the next I was not. Looking underneath, I could see that one of the belts seemed awfully slack, and I figured it had come loose.

I got the mower up on jack stands, and very soon discovered that there’s no good way to get your hands up inside. Everything’s too tight, and you can’t see shit because if you’re underneath, grass keeps falling in your face. From the side, I could see several pulleys in there, and the loose belt. One of the pulley looked like it might be the logical one for the belt to go around, and that’s the pulley I was trying to remove.

Getting to it required a contortion act with one hand around the rear tire and the other through the back of the mower. To loosen the pulley, I had to put a screwdriver through it to hold it in place with one hand, while I used the socket wrench with the other. Add to this the inherent discomfort of being on your knees on concrete and the fact that my right hand was already slick with blood from all the cuts, and you can understand why I was in a crappy mood.

The sound of a vehicle turning into the driveway drew my attention from the mower. It was a white truck, driven by a spry older man with an infectious grin and very white teeth.

“How do?” he asked when he was out of the truck. “I stopped by here last week and talked to your wife. I was looking for the first name of Mr. Bank? Larry? Your wife told me and I looked all through the River City phone book and couldn’t find them anywhere. I was kindly hoping you had their number. I wanted to call him to find out who did that skirt around the house next door, because I want it done to my house.”

“I don’t have the Banks’ number, but I have an email address,” I said. “If you want to leave your name and number, I can email them and give it to them.”

He fished a stack of worn and dirty business cards out of his jacket pocket. As he thumbed through them, I could see most had numbers written on the back.

“I actually stopped and talked to the people when they were working on that house. I know they’re from Cullman, and I wrote their number down on a card, but I musta lost it.”

He found a card and wrote his name and number in big blocky letters. We talked a little more about the construction of the faux bricks on the house next door, and about local history. The man grew up in Smallville, just a few blocks from us, and knew all sorts of interesting things about the area. Turns out old man Nelson, who built our house, ran a blacksmith shop just down the road.

Conversation wound down after a few minutes, and before he left, I decided to try my luck.

“Do you by chance know anyone local who does lawnmower repair work?” I asked.

His blue eyes twinkled, and he grinned at me.

“Would you believe I do? I have a mower in the back of the truck I’m on my way to drop off right now. What problem you having?”

We walked over to the mower as I explained the problem with the accelerator pedal.

“And it doesn’t have any forward motion a-tall?”

“No, sir. I think there’s a belt off, but I’m having a heck of a time getting to it.”

“If you flip the seat forward and take the battery out, there’s a hole in the body where you can see all the pulleys.”

I did that, and sure enough, you could see everything from up top. He plunged his hands down into the machine and started explaining how everything worked, and showed me which belt was causing the problems. He was ready to start taking things apart and repairing the mower for me when I stopped him.

“I’d be more than happy to pay you to repair it for me. I don’t want to take up your time,” I said. He told me it wasn’t a problem, but I pushed. I just wouldn’t feel right having someone stop to ask a question and end up fixing my lawn mower.

He told me that he was supposed to drop the other mower off by 3:30, and that he would go by his house and get his trailer. He did that, and together we got the mower loaded. As he was tying it down — twice — he told me a funny story about losing a mower off the back end once and saw it in the rearview mirror, doing pirouettes in the middle of the highway.

“I told the good Lord if He would keep it from flipping over, I’d tie ‘em twice from now on,” he said. “Would you believe it didn’t flip over?”

When he finished tying the mower down he asked me my name, and wondered if I was related to some people over in Peeper’s Corner.

I wasn’t sure, and told him I originally came from River City. We made a little more small talk.

“Alright then,” he said. “It’ll probably be Monday when I’m finished with this.”

“That’s fine. I should be home by 3:30 or so.”

He grinned his infectious grin again. “If there ain’t nobody here I’ll just drop it off. We can settle up whenever.”

We shook hands and he left, leaving me with a sense of wonder at life in the country and the feeling that maybe the day hadn’t turned out so bad after all.

Last weekend, I started getting my workshop organized. Robyn wanted me to build something when I finished the shed, and I knew it would be hell with the shape the workshop was in. So, I bought some organizational things at Lowe’s, and spent most of last Sunday whipping the workshop into a workshop. It’s not finished yet, but it looks a whole lot better.

Behold “Man Central”:

You can almost smell the testosterone.

Our cat Spot is pushing fifteen now, and he’s not as spry as he once was. One of his favorite things to do is lay in the sunlight by a window, but it’s getting harder and harder for him to get up on the back of the wingback chair. So, a couple of weeks ago, Robyn told me she had a project for me: build something so Spot can lay in the sunshine. The rules were simple: It needed to be easy for Spot to get up on (handi-cat accessible, you might say), come to the bottom of the window, and have a lip around it to hold a cat bed in place.

My original plan was to make it out of pine and paint it, but when I got to Lowe’s earlier this week and started looking, I thought what the hell? and bought stain-grade wood. I started work on Wednesday and I should finish it today or tomorrow.

It’s poplar, except for the treads and platform. I think those are red oak, but I
can’t remember for sure.

I’m happy with the look so far.

The treads are banded, and I hope the lighter and darker woods contrast nicely when stained. I’m planning to put the top band on today, and then it’s time to start staining. I chose a color called “Olde Maple” and took the lazy man’s way out by getting the stain-and-polyurethane mix.

The old bastard better like it.

And now, perhaps the best song of 1992, if not all of the 90’s.