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before bumblebee season
Sunday, April 29 2012
This afternoon Gretchen took Deborah, Nancy, Sarah the vegan, and various dogs on a walk back to that artificial pond we'd found the day before yesterday. Again they found it devoid of people, and they ended up hanging out there for over an hour.
Meanwhile I'd begun the process of readying the greenhouse attic for a subfloor. I climbed up into the attic (which barely has enough space for moving around) and added blocking between the floor joists at their south ends, where they butted against a much deeper girder joist spanning the greenhouse from north to south. Part of the reason for the urgency I suddenly have for this project comes from my experience that exposed insulation is an ideal habitat not only for wannabe-feral housecats, but also for bumblebees. If I wait too long into the warm weather, there will be multiple nests of those fuckers to contend with. Already there's a queen bumblebee buzzing around, and it's only a matter of time before her first crop of workers are mature enough to make working in that attic impossibly dangerous.
When the ladies got back from their walk, they all went into the kitchen to eat muffins and make sandwiches. Nancy asked about my Makerbot, so I ran off and got it as well as some of the things I'd made. It took some explaining to get across the idea of 3D printing. "Wait," asked Deborah, "why do they call it 'printing' then?" So then I'd explain that it was really fabrication. But then I had to explain that the fabrication happened additively, not subtractively. "It hurts my head to think about it," Nancy sighed at one point.
This evening Gretchen and I went down to Ray and Nancy's house in Old Hurley to have another one of Ray's usually-delicious meals. Dinner mainly consisted of fried polenta strips and vegan meat balls. The former had been fried in deep pools of olive oil and in latter Ray had used vegan sour cream as a binder. Part of the secret to Ray's success in the kitchen is his liberal use of oil.
Toward the end of our visit, Gretchen waged something of a nail clipping jihad, starting with Wilma (who used to be our cat but now belongs to Sarah and the two have been staying at Ray and Nancy's place since Sarah's winter dogsitting gig came to an end). Next Gretchen clipped Suzy's nails and finished up with Sally's. After nicking a quick on one of Sally's rear nails, we spent the next five minutes containing and mopping up the blood.
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