When I was a child I liked doing puzzles, mazes, and solving riddles such as the one about the farmer on his way home from market with a chicken, some grain, and a fox. He comes to a river and his boat will only hold himself and one other item. If left alone the fox will eat the chicken or the chicken will eat the grain. How does he do it?
A child has lots of free time and I found that with perseverance I could eventually find the answer. But then I got busy and gave up puzzles. Besides, why would a farmer buy a fox at the market? There's the real riddle. My various jobs always came with puzzles that needed to be solved which kept my mind active. But when I retired I could feel my brain going slack. It was nice in a way, but I knew it would not do.
I am no longer able to watch television on my own. I have not taken the trouble to figure out the new remote. If I ever do want to watch something, I have to ask Teresa for help. I have a smartphone and a GPS. I figured out how to use the features I needed. The more I used these devices, the more features I stumbled upon, most of them mere bells and whistles.
In my last post about the rehabilitation of our two sheds, I promised to spare the reader the boring details of construction. Some of those details are to be found in this post. A good portion of a carpenter's day is spent setting up the worksite in the morning and putting stuff away and cleaning up in the evening. Good carpenters keep their tools in one place and remember where they set them down. Real carpenters move about the worksite expeditiously.
When I started working on the chicken coop it took over an hour to get set up. What tools I had were scattered in several places about the estate. Carpenters justify their expensive tools as making them more efficient. A real carpenter though would have been several times faster than me even using my basic tools.
Things got better when I started getting on the job earlier than 11:00 a.m. and working later than 3:00 p.m. I gave up my traditional nap and shortened my lunch hour. We were planning to leave on a three week trip in late August. There's nothing like a deadline to put zip in my step. I needed to button up the coop before we left.
When we were out in Massachusetts we told our son Matt about our project. I was planning to leave the second more complicated shed project, the potting shed, for the spring. But then Matt and Heather announced that they were coming to Wannaska to spend two days working on the future potting shed. When they arrived on Sunday afternoon, Matt immediately set up the rafters for the lean-to. I had one idea how to do it, but Matt's more complicated method would give us a lot more headroom under the lean-to.
The next day the new roof for the potting shed and lean-to went on, including skylights in the potting shed part. My job was to cut the recycled corrugated steel panels to fit the roof. On day two, Matt finished the roof and started on the cedar shingles on the wall where the two sheds meet. This is a critical job to prevent leakage. Matt gave it his best effort, but after an eleven hour day, and with darkness descending, he quit for the day.
The next day, Matt and Heather left. I am now puzzling how to get the shingles to come together neatly at the top of the gable. There's lots of angles involved. I've always had trouble translating the angle on my measuring tool onto the piece of wood. After turning several singles into kindling and paint stir sticks, I came upon the solution: 'You be the angle.'
When I'm done, the gable will look fine from a distance. The carpenters who replace my shingles fifty years from now will have a good chuckle, but by then I'll be across the river with the fox, the chicken and the grain.
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| Matt left an example of how it's done. |
Carpentry is like writing - at first it's all about the tools, the pieces of wood, the fasteners, the process. I recently read about how John Ashbery's prams were all about process and procedure. In a Norton Lecture on Raymond Roussel's pram, Nouvelles Impressions d’Afrique, Ashbery mused:
ReplyDeleteThe poem was in seemingly regular alexandrines, but constantly interrupted by parentheses, which were in turn interrupted by double, triple, quadruple, and even quintuple parentheses. In fact, each canto consisted of a single fairly short sentence expanded to epic length by the accordion-like system of parentheses. There were footnotes as well, also in rhyming alexandrines and with their own sets of parentheses.
Years later, he thought otherwise:
Although Roussel had always been fascinated by stories within stories, what the French call a novel with drawers, here the situation is reduced to many sentences interlocking within a single sentence. By flattening the thing out, so to speak, that is by unraveling the parenthetical thoughts and arranging them in proper sequence, it is possible to read the poem and make perfect sense of it…. It is the construction, not the content, of the poem that is mysterious, and content is definitely upstaged by construction.
The Two-Sheds Unification Project is the epitome of art-as-collage.
You could always google it, but that would remove the delight of solving the puzzle. I like your method, Chairman.
ReplyDeleteMaybe you could watch a tv show about it. Oh yeah...
ReplyDeleteI put off my comment in order to have it to look forward to. Ha! Who am I kidding? Certainly not you; however, I do doubt that anyone was holding their breath waiting for what I had to say which so far is nothing.
ReplyDeletePlease don't stop your 1-2-3 shed narrative.............................................. so there you have my comment - late, sincere, but full of nothing. I'll do better next week.