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potential of awfulness/anachronistic horribleness
Friday, April 24 2009
I continued my ditch digging in the new trench along the south wall of the greenhouse today, eventually digging as deep as I felt I needed to. On the west (uphill) end it was two feet deep, but even on the east (downhill) end it was over a foot deep. Given that the ditch was about fifteen feet long and two feet wide, that reflects a good rate of excavation given that I'd started only yesterday. As always with excavations in this landscape, I separated out the larger rocks into their own pile. The soil at this depth was all part of the fill for the septic system's drainage field and consisted of reddish earth mixed with many round river rocks ranging from pea-sized to larger than my head.
After I had the ditch dug to an acceptable depth and flattened out to an appropriate away-from-the-greenhouse slope, I laid in sheets of two inch blue extruded styrofoam.
As I worked, I was deviled somewhat by the irritating flies that come out with the first buds of late early spring. These flies usually just buzz in clouds several-dozen strong in front of my face and only land occasionally, but when they do they eventually bite and that's never to be desired. Temperatures were in the 60s, which might have been just cool enough to keep the flies from reaching their full potential of awfulness.
These evening Gretchen and I watched a movie called The Rocker starring Rainn Wilson (the Office's Dwight) as a rock drummer named "Fish" from the age of big hair, cowbell drumming, and air-humping guitar players. Early in the movie, Fish is kicked out of his band, though he doesn't leave without a fight, and the scene of him chasing down the van full of his bandmates is like something out of the Terminator franchise. Twenty years later, Fish is still a bitter and finds himself moving in with his long-suffering sister. His nephew is in a band, the band suddenly needs a drummer, so Fish takes his drumsticks out of mothballs and hilarity ensues. The nephew's band is a thoroughly modern pop band with a slightly post-punk flavor, but somehow they find themselves opening for Fish's old band (now megastars, despite retaining their late-80s sound in all its anachronistic horribleness). When Fish meets his old bandmates again, he finds they all now have British accents. And that isn't the only think a little fake about them, as we see in the final inevitable uplifting good-versus-evil smackdown. Gretchen and I had low expectations for the movie but ended up liking it. Gretchen was particularly impressed by absence of heavy-handedness in the depictions of the various romances that cropped up along the way (and there were at least three).
The ditch along the greenhouse's south wall.
The ditch with a view into the greenhouse. Click this and it will enlarge.
The east wall of the greenhouse from inside
The ceiling, which is what I'd mostly been working on for the past weeks.
The ditch later today, with styrofoam and a first covering of flat rock (shale mostly).
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