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unbalanced groupings of planks
Sunday, May 20 2007
I'd arranged with Penny to help her build a ramp to for her basement storage using the various power tools at my house, but first I needed to duck into town to get supplies for my nifty new urinal system. I somehow lost track of time and passed Penny on Dug Hill Road after she'd given up on me ever arriving at the appointed time. I'd assumed she'd be hanging out with Gretchen on the chance I was running late, but at the last minute Gretch had to table for Catskill Animal Sanctuary at the Hurley Vet, which was having an open house to showcase, among other things, all their fancy new granite countertops. To Gretchen's horror, hot dogs had been a food option at the open house.
Eventually Penny and I got together and built that ramp, 32 inches wide and 66 inches long. Though I did most of the work, it went much more quickly having an assistant to feed me lumber at the saw or just generally keep me from dawdling or spending to much effort on taking and retaking measurements. Penny is a graphic designer, so the main thing that bothered her was unbalanced groupings of planks having similar grain patterns or lengths.
The completed ramp didn't have much room to spare when it came time to fit it in Penny's car, a Toyota Matrix hatchback. As part of the post-construction cleanup, we swept up all the yellow treated wood sawdust and put it in a bag for special disposal (the landfill, as opposed to being soaked in urine and eventually spread on the garden). I'm much better now than I used to be about keeping the sawdust from treated wood out of our local environment, although burying it in a landfill also seems less than ideal.
This evening Penny returned with David and we all enjoyed another of Gretchen's fabulous vegan meals, this one a bean bake with polenta. Later we sat talking around the woodstove while I burned an accumulation of paper trash. In so doing, I learned that a phone book burns as well as a similarly-shaped piece of firewood. Evenings and mornings have been cool lately, the kind of cool that necessitates closed doors and windows, though there hasn't been a real need for a fire in over a month.
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