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leg breath
Sunday, December 8 2002
Darren's helper homeslice today seemed to be even more of a drywall samurai than Darren himself. I have never seen such perfectly-measured cuts in my life. This guy could measure and cut all the holes for all the boxes in a three-outlet-box piece (as he did on the far wall of my studio), and they'd all fit nearly snug. After seeing his work, I found myself wishing he'd been around from the start. With him as the sole exception, my cuts have been visibly more accurate than those of any of our hired contractors. Darren, though, is so skilled with tape and spackle that he can fix even the widest of butt joints, which is good because some of his are awfully wide.
Later tonight as he cut odd-looking quadrilaterals to fit into the complex geometry of a peaked roof over a slanting floor formed by another peaked roof intersecting at 90 degrees, he sighed, "Remember when they used to make houses square?" Then he added, "If I'd known how tricky some of this stuff was, I would have taken geometry back in high school." But it's amazing how little geometry one needs to know in order to be an effective carpenter (or, for that matter, computer programmer). Though in this project I've cut many materials at angles of 45 degrees, the only time I've needed to resort to the Pythagoras Theorem was when I was making the frame for the triangular window between the master bedroom and its bathroom. And the only time I've resorted to trigonometry was when I was calculating angles related to the basement stairway, which, according to an arctangent calculation, appears to have a steepness of 41 degrees.
Louis came today, delivering the bathtub for the new bedroom. It's a 41 by 72 inch monstrosity and weights about 200 pounds. As usual, Darren helped us carry it up the stairs. Louis then proceeded to cut a hole big enough for the tub into a deck he'd built earlier.
Meanwhile Sally the dog was outside gnawing on a disembodied deer leg she'd found discarded in the woods. Gretchen and I jokingly referred to her as "leg breath" after that. Something about all that leg meat didn't agree with Sally, and she ended up puking multiple times throughout the house.
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