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Tuesday, July 20, 2010

All Summer in Two Days

With just a few weeks remaining in the summer, I'm doubling-down on as much freelance work as I can, before school starts in the fall.  Consequently, I haven't really been able to do much of anything 'summery,' which is a drag, but as far as drags go, having too much work as opposed to not enough is the preferable drag by far.

Over the weekend, however, I was able to squeeze in a lot of summer activity into a very short time - as houseguest/day laborer, over the course of about 30 hours, I removed all the wiring from a 60-year-old garage, along with a partial plywood ceiling (storage area above the main floor), then put in a new ceiling frame, then went biking and swimming and collecting donations for a local arts group outdoor performance of As You Like It.*  And it's a testament to how tight my life is that spending eight hours sweating in a garage with a nailgun actually felt like a vacation.

The best part of the weekend was discovering that the mystery wire that came in through the concrete floor coupled with the feedline actually went down to a forgotten fallout shelter below the garage.  The shelter itself (accessed through a very small wooden hatch behind the garage) was a pretty sketchy place; a 5' diameter piece of corrugated piping, completely in darkness, with about 6" of ground water in the bottom.  The mystery wire was there as suspected as suspected, coming into the shelter over in the corner, coiled slackly around a metal rod, with some kind of nut locking off the end, waiting to be hooked into whatever sad little light was brought down there right after the apocalypse.

Bear in mind that the space (and the wire) had been unused and untouched for almost 60 years, and that the wire was live the entire time, until I finally cut it off at the source.

Yesenia missed all this fun, opting to stay at home with bronchitis.  She's crazy.

D.

*Longtime passengers of the Rambler may recall an earlier vacation with the same play in similar circumstances.  Something about my summer vacations always seem to end up with outdoor performances of As You Like It.  Is there something about this play in particular that lends itself to lawns at sunset?

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