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big door delivery
Saturday, January 28 2017
Our Saturday-morning coffee ritual was in front of an occasionally-raging fire kindled from all the Ikea cardboard we've been generating. After reading about various vintage computer hardware (a nice non-Trumpian subject in these dark days), I went down to the basement library and began assembling another bookshelf. I don't know if it was the caffeine or the experience of having already assembled a bookshelf, but the job went quickly, and I was just finishing up by the time Gretchen arrived. I suggested we assemble the last two in tandem, and so we did. That's definitely the way to do it if you have several to do. Unfortunately, though, I swapped the position of two of the crossmembers, exposing the ugly Ikea fasteners on the front. Fortunately, it didn't take too much effort to free them and put them in their rightful places. There should be a name for the kind of reversals that have to be done after an Ikea product is assembled; in many cases the instructions alone aren't enough to keep such transpositions from happening.
Next, I removed the kayak rack attachments from the Subaru's roof rack and tied down some two by fours and a two by six to make platform. The plan was to drive out to the Door Jam on Route 28 to pick up a set of french doors Gretchen had ordered for her office. The doors will be replacing a window and will eventually open out onto a deck. The doors had been hung as a unit in a 62 inch wide door jam, and Gretchen wondered if that would be too big for the rack. I didn't think it would be a problem. And so off we went.
The guys at the Door Jam are super nice, and Gretchen seems to have the kind of charisma that makes them even nicer. After first buying a 32 inch door to replace the craptastic folding unit that is the library's secondary door, we went to settle up and realized we hadn't brought our checkbook. The Door Jam does not take credit cards. This was when Gretchen's charm seemed to work its magic, and they agreed to her mailing a check. But then when we saw the door unit, it seemed bigger than I'd pictured it. That seemed like a wide 62 inches. Another problem was that it weighed about 200 pounds and didn't seem sufficiently stiff. The guy there didn't think I should put it on my roof, and I quickly agreed that he was right. When he offered to deliver it for $30 bucks, a price he soon spontaneously lowered to $20, that seemed like a very good idea. This would also allow us to give them a check for the purchase today. So there we were, driving back from the Door Jam with a couple guys tailing us in a huge pickup truck. Those guys were able to unload the massive unwieldy door assembly and carry it across patches of treacherous ice into the house. Gretchen then asked if they could get it down the stairs into her library "for an extra $10." Clearly one of the guys spoke only English and the other spoke only Spanish, meaning had to communicate with gestures, though their hands were often occupied by their 200 pound burden. I helped them get it down the stairs, a tricky task given how little headroom we had to work with. But eventually it got delivered to the basement, with only a few gouges in the drywall and torn-loose carpet fibres along the way. Gretchen gave the guys $40.
[REDACTED] I drove with the dogs out to the Home Depot on 9W. I'd wanted to get some cash along the way, but, alas, I'd taken my debit card out of my wallet, errantly thinking it expired. In addition to the bits of plumbing and three gallons of antifreeze, I bought some winter gardening supplies. It's that time of year.
Meanwhile, out in the wider world that Donald Trump now owns, chaos was reigning at the JFK airport. It seems that, with a stroke of a Chinese pen, Donald Trump had decreed that nobody from a list of Muslim nations could travel to the United States. The Department of Homeland Security was interpreting this to mean that even holders of green cards (somebody such as our friend Ray, who owns a house in the United States) were to be barred. But the urban left had had it with Trump, and it's easy to organize and deploy in a city, so hundreds of them had show up at JFK to protest on the behalf of those being denied entry. On Facebook (via Moveon.org) I saw live video of the JFK protest, and they were chanting some great chants. My favorite was "What's with all the riot gear/I don't see no riot here!" I posted a link to it in Slack, and that got Da and I chatitng about the craziness of our times. He said he'd be going tomorrow to the protest at the Atlanta airport.
[REDACTED]
My late-night Youtubing had me watching several performances by The Who. I hadn't realized how very R&B they (particularly Roger Daltry) are until seeing them live (which, for some reason, I never had; Youtube makes all sorts of things possible). Also, Pete Townsend is a fundamentally homely fellow.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?170128 feedback
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