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wheelchair rock hauling
Friday, October 15 2004
I was listening to a Guided by Voices tune in WinAmp, which was running in that mode where it displays information about the artist in a special window, along with rotating band-related news items. One of these was entitled "Lenny Kravitz is Guided by Voices." You can imagine my horror, since if Guided by Voices is my favorite band, Lenny Kravitz is high on my list of least favorite. Evidently, though, the placement of this news item in the GBV headline list was something of an algorithmic glitch. The news story did have that title, but it was meant to be taken literally. Lenny Kravitz, we are to presume, is led by disembodied people speaking within his head. Lenny Kravitz is not, however, congruent to a band led by rock and roll visionary Robert Pollard.
For part of the spring and all of the summer, Gretchen has been on me to resurface the basement guestroom slab with natural stone, something I have done to all the other outdoor concrete surfaces. This slab, which lies outside a pair of sliding doors and is home for two plastic Adirondack chairs, is 160 square feet in size. That's more resurfacing than all the other resurfacing I've done put together, so I've been putting it off for months. But in the mean time I've been gathering as many flat stones as I can and stacking them up in piles. The coming cold weather and the end of the basement drainage project is pushing the resurfacing project to the front of my to-do list. For the past couple of days I've been gathering flat rocks at an accelerated rate, occasionally using an unusual transportation to device to help me with the really big pieces. I've found I can haul much heavier rocks out of the woods if I put them in the seat of a wheelchair than if I load them into the shitty light-duty wheelbarrow I made the mistake of buying last year. I use the foot supports of the wheelchair as wheelbarrow handles and push the wheelchair backwards, resting the entire weight of the load on the two big wheels. Mind you, the wheelchair doesn't really seem to enjoy this work, rattling noisily down the uneven trail and continually threatening to fall apart.
In other news, I finally got around to adding a downspout to the gutter system draining the northwest sector of the house. There are now three different gutter systems on the house, though this is the only one with a downspout. It dumps its water directly onto the asphalt driveway.
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