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without a protractor
Sunday, August 28 2016
All Gretchen wanted me to focus on today was the solar deck. We'd finally managed to get a structural engineer to come out, look at it, and make some recommendations. If I carried out his instructions, the building inspector would close out a nearly-eleven-year-old permitting ticket, and we could finally get a mortgage on our main house, thereby allowing us to pay off a bridge loan we'd gotten from Gretchen's parents so we could buy the brick mansion. But I wasn't getting to it quickly enough for Gretchen, who seemed upset to find me reading an article (a fascinating one about Donald Trump voters in blue collar Louisiana) when she got back from walking the dogs. The dogs themselves didn't come back immediately, which was a problem because it was important that Neville go with Gretchen for her shift at the Golden Notebook in Woodstock. Today there would be a book signing by someone who had written about rescue dogs, and Neville is about as good of an ambassador for dog rescue as there is. Gretchen was so adamant that I work on the deck project that she actually called up Eva to arrange for her to drive Neville to the bookstore whenever he the dogs finally returned from their adventure.
I soon drove off to Home Depot to get the supplies I would need: 16 eight-foot pressure-treated two by fours, and numerous 3/8 inch galvanized lag bolts, carriage bolts, washers, and nuts. It all added up, and the total at the cash register was well over $200. I was attended by the bitchiest employee at Home Depot, a plump web-necked woman who never expresses any warmth that isn't part of some script. I used to think her problem was that she was hard of hearing, but the proctologically-suspicious way she went through my bags of bolts and her attempt to charge me separately for a washer that had obviously slipped out of a cardboard box of them indicated a real malice of heart.
I was still staging my worksite when Eva and Sandor came to pick up Neville. He was happy to jump in their CRV, and poor Ramona had to stay with me (she's too poorly-behaved to work as a bookstore mascot).
I carried all the lumber up to the laboratory deck. I arranged it as a pile diagonally on the northeast corner of the railing to serve as a workbench for my chop saw, which I lugged up from the garage. Any job involving 16 two by fours is a big one, especially when they all have to be chopped at specially-mitered angles and then installed mostly from the surface of a steep (that is, 45 degree) roof. The structural engineer had called for me to add eight diagonal braces from as low as practical on the corner pillars up to the center of the span above. He'd called for them each to be made of paired two-by-fours. I installed the easiest ones first, the two beneath the north end of the deck, where I could do all the work from the laboratory deck below (that is, not out on the roof).
I found that the braces weren't very low on the pillars unless they angled up more steeply than 45 degrees, though that complicated the cuts and measurements. I went to find a protractor, but it turned out that there was none anywhere in the house. When I was a kid, a protractor was a prized possession (even if I rarely had use for it), yet somehow I'd come into middle age without one. Several months ago I'd been inspired somehow to buy a speed square, and that turned out to work well enough for the work I was doing today, though I would've preferred a simple transparent plastic protractor.
The brace installation got a lot harder once I started installing one out on the roof (beneath the solar deck's southeast corner). The lowness of the attachment meant that the roof was in the way when I tried to bolt it onto the pillar way I'd done the northmost braces. Soon it was getting dark and a few mosquitoes were managing to fly up in the evening still to get me, so I called it quits for the day, having only installed three of the required eight braces.
Before I went to bed tonight, I set up two Zodaic-brand flea foggers in the laboratory to hopefully kill off the many fleas remaining.
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http://asecular.com/blog.php?160828 feedback
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