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tiling teamwork
Saturday, October 30 2021
location: rural Hurley Township, Ulster County, NY
On Tuesday when I'd driven the Subaru to work and bought two by sixes at Home Depot on the way back home, I noticed the car was kind of falling apart on the drive home from Downs Street. The power steering gradually stopped working, forcing me to use considerable arm strength to turn the car, particularly at low speeds. I've driven cars without power steering before, but they were designed to be driven that way and had steering wheels geared down to turn the wheels left and right without the need for too much force. (This had to have been the case with my father's old 1969 Chevrolet pickup truck, though the Volkswagen Beetles I have driven might've just been lightweight.) Another problem was that the exhaust system was back to being loud again, meaning my pipe-clamp-based fix had failed after several weeks of success. Yesterday I'd used some steel wire to better support the muffler and then I re-seated the pipe clamp. I'd also added some power steering fluid to the place where that is added (which, annoyingly, is under an air scoop, forcing me to use a piece of paper as a makeshift gutter-funnel).
This morning when Gretchen and I started our long drive to the cabin in the Subaru, the power steering initially seemed to be working once more. But then it gradually went bad again. It did so sporadically over a few miles, with right turns being power-assisted and left turns not. But then after I topped off the air in the tires at the Stewart's, the steering was pretty much unpowered after that. The exhaust system, though, was much quieter, particularly at cruising speed on the Thruway.
Our first stop was at the Tile Shop, a huge tile store in Colonie. It's the kind of place with lots of bathrooms that have no toilets or running water, all designed to showcase ugly designs for rich people redoing their houses. The designs might've been ugly, but there was a great diversity of tile, some of which was beautiful. Gretchen had bought two different kinds of six inch by six inch sage-green tile, one covered with little sunbursts and the other plain, with the idea that we would be tiling around our cabin's downstairs bathtub in a checkerboard pattern using both kinds. Somehow we spent a very long time at that tile place, mostly because Gretchen also wanted to get a product to recolor the grout lines of the floor tile I'd laid in that bathroom. I'd made the mistake of buying a grout without getting a signoff from her first, so of course I'd gotten the wrong color (it had been too light, and thus too close to the color of the tile itself).
We also stopped at Bed, Bath & Beyond, mostly to get a magnetic knife holder. But the only one they had was big and expensive (and something of a finger-crusher when two of them fell within the tractor beams of each other), so we ended up getting cheap things like a curtain for the front closet, oven mits, and a wine bottle opener instead.
We hungry as we headed west on I-90 near Schenectady, so did some research to see what the options were for vegan food in Amsterdam. She found Moe's Southwest Grill (which I knew to be a kind of ghetto Chipotle), and that seemed acceptable. So that was where we went. We weren't there very long before a very competent African American employee assembled a bean salad for Gretchen and a bean burrito for me. We would've had the tofu "protein" had it been an option, but apparently so few people order it at the Amsterdam store that they hadn't bothered preparing any. Then, after our food had been prepared, they fell into the jurisdiction of another employee, a white guy who appeared to have paralysis around the muscles of his left eye. And that wasn't the only indication that he was a man with mental challenges. As he flailed about, getting distracted by the normal things that happen in a restaurant, our food languished in a line of other foods, all of it waiting to be rung up. Gretchen turned to me at one point and said that this looked to be a case of service deterioriation resulting from the ongoing covid-related worker shortage. Neither of us thought the droopy-eyed cashier would be able to get a job in more normal times. Then, when a door-dash guy came to pick up an order of food that hadn't even been prepared yet, Gretchen had had enough and said, "Hey, our food has been made and all we need to do is pay for it." That was all it took for the droopy-eyed guy to drop what he was doing and ring us up.
On the drive to our cabin on Woodworth Lake Road, we saw yet another parcel had begun clearing a road into the woods about a quarter mile from our cabin. Much more alarming, though, we saw that Shane, the owner of the only other parcel on our driveway, had apparently started clearing his building envelope too. That's within sight of our front windows, if only just. He'd cleared about a quarter acre, leaving an ugly jumble of fallen tree trunks and mud surrounding a big yellow excavator. We'd been holding out the hope that Shane might run out of money before being able to clear his land and start building. It was looking like we'd be getting our one neighbor a little sooner than expected.
It was 48 degrees Fahrenheit inside our cabin as we sat down to eat our Moe's Southwest Grill. The food wasn't great, but it was food. Eating it was a little less pleasant than I'd hoped even knowing what I know about Moe's, having just seen the devastation at Shane's lot nearby.
When I went out to start the generator, I found its 12 volt car battery too exhausted to crank the starter, something I'd been warned could happen. I decided to deliver the two-by-sixes to Woodworth Lake's common dock before worrying about jumping the generator. I took the dogs with me when I did that, but none of us had any fun, as a cold rain was falling at the time.
I had to take an extra panel off the generator in order to jump-start it. But then I couldn't find the jumper cables in the Subaru (though they actually were in there). Fortunately, I'd brought an extra pair of car batteries for use in experiments running the cellular hot spot, so I could use one of those to start the generator. This worked great, but then when I hooked up the generator's dead car battery to its terminals, the whole system stopped again. I had to slowly trickle-charge that car battery before the generator would happily operate with it attached.
At some point Joel, the neighbor from across the lake, showed up on his ATV with a parcel FedEx had stupidly left at the front gate. It was soggy from having been out in the rain, though that was just the outer box; the inner box was somehow still dry. Joel didn't stay long and said he had muddy shoes and shouldn't come inside, which was just as well, though I did show him the generator.
The soggy parcel contained a small hardwood workbench Gretchen had bought for me. She was little embarrassed by how small it was, though I thought it would be perfect for lots of projects. As I began to assemble it, though, I found that a flat piece designed to fit into slots in the horizontal beams between the legs had been damaged in transit and would need some glue. It the damage had also caused the layers to delaminate and thicken, meaning the slot was now too narrow. Eventually, though, I managed to slide the flat piece into the slot to make it work. But I would do that much later this evening, after the glue dried.
Before all that, I procrastinated until after dark, getting everything just so in preparation for an epic tile-laying jihad. One of the things I did was prepare a place to operate the wet saw down in the basement so I wouldn't have to go cut tile in the cold rain outside. To keep the wet saw from spraying water all over everything, I put up pieces of styrofoam and hung sheets of plastic.
Once I mixed up the thinset, there would be no going back, and I began to put up tile. At first I tiled in silence as Gretchen read. But then I put on some music: WFNY, Glove City Radio. That's the station with the eclectic mix of songs reaching from the 1950s well into the 1980s.
Even better than the music on WFNY is the advertising. One almost never hears the same song twice, but there are only six or seven advertisements on a tight rotation. They're all for local businesses (as opposed to national chains) and they go out of their way to make the businesses sound down-home and human (which I have no doubt they are). This part of New York has relatively deep history, having been here consistently since the Industrial Revolution without too much of it having been erased by modernity. This means there are a fair number of businesses able to say (in advertisements) that they have existed for more than 100 years.
The best advertisement of all is for Rossbach Shoes. It features two voice actors talking about possibly going for a walk but there's a problem: one of their feet is experiencing pain. Not only do they sound like they are reading from a script; they sound like they'd never before seen the script and also like they might've dropped out of school in the fourth grade. It's delightfully awful, and every time it began, I shouted with joy. It must've played four or five times tonight alone.
Gretchen can't really read when there's music playing, so she decided to help me. At first she spent her time cleaning plastic spacers off the tile. Then she started bringing the tile into the bathroom for me. As the tiles reached up toward the ceiling, she stood there and handed them to me. At first I was a little annoyed by her help, since I felt put on the spot, like I could no longer work at my own pace. But then it became clear she was making it possible for me to work much faster than I otherwise would've even though she brought no tiling skills of her own. She was also genuinely interested in process of tile laying, following my example to lay a few tile herself while I mixed thinset and then following me down to the basement to watch me cut tile with the tile saw. At some point Gretchen figured out that my math had been bad and we didn't have enough tile to finish the job, so we only tiled two of the three walls above the tub, leaving the wall with the knobs and spigots (and tricky tile cuts those require) for another day. (I'd had to make relatively few cuts today, and was even able to cut tiles in half and use both halves.)
It was after 11:00pm when we finally quit tiling, and I could finally crack open a Guinness Stout, the only alcoholic beverage I would drink today.
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http://asecular.com/blog.php?211030 feedback
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