Is Plaster Faster?

I should be working on my movie treatment (sounds like a joke doesn't it??) but instead I feel like writing about today....a day in our simple retired life. We're in Metaline Falls. The morning was mostly clean up. A normal retired thing to do. Then, we picked up color boards from the plaster guy***. We met him half way, an hour drive and close by western standards as they say. Gary, the closest (only) plaster guy we could find, showed up with his little dog wearing a football jersey that said QUARTER BARK (the dog, not Gary) with a #! between the QUARTER and the BARK. We could tell that Max was jealous of Quarter Bark #1 because he could be carried around. We treated Max to a walk on the way home at some waterfall...he wasn't impressed...in-fact he vomited.

Back home, 31 degrees and feeling like it was about time for something semi-epic, we convinced ourselves there was enough daylight to ride up Hall Mountain (elev. 6400') We rode to the trailhead and hiked to the treeless peak through meadows with clumps of softwoods and rock outcroppings to a 360 degree view of Washington, Canada and Idaho. The late afternoon angle of the sun tinted everything a rich gold. So far so good albeit a little colder on the way down than the way up. Normally I would have looked forward to the all downhill bike ride but as I suspected my summer weight Yoko gloves weren't even close to warm enough. (UNDERSTATEMENT!) Four hours and a movie later, I can type and feed myself again but that's about as interesting as I can make frozen fingers.

Metaline Falls.
Movie. "Nine". It was neither about an aging Bo Derek nor a musical with Penelope Cruz (not sure where I got that idea) but it was animated...and pretty good. I'm glad we went because then there were six of us in the theater.

House. The tent came down and we moved into a corner of the master bedroom this weekend. The photos make us look cold and uncomfortable but our word for cold and uncomfortable is 'cozy'. Will waking up with a coating of sheet-rock dust in my mouth cause any long term damage?

Back to the movie treatment. I've been struggling with ways to decrease my school work-load and finally got up the nerve to request an audit for Film Studies. I picked up the hot pink 'switch to audit' form at the office one day when there was actually someone in there and filled it out. I started to hand the hot pink sheet to Ian, the professor. "Did you enjoy the assignment?" he asked, all excited. I ended up using the back of the audit form for notes on Nanook of the North.

***plaster.
Plaster is good.
1. We don't have to paint because the plaster is tinted with our colors
2. We don't have to tile because the shower will be waterproof plaster
3. We don't have to trim the windows because our window perimeters will be plaster

Plaster is bad.
1. We have to pick the colors we'll have FOREVER, NOW. Would that make you nervous? It makes me nervous.

time-FRAME-ing

Lucky you. : ) Our little house was framed so quickly that it left me at a loss for words.

By August 9, after a day and a half of hammers, saws, bad words, sun and a pesky hawk, our perfect frame rested happily under a roof of an exactly blue sky and the occasional vaporous wisp*.

We continued to work long days as though it were possible to move in by the first day of school, September 8, as planned. Who were we kidding?

Even so, we felt lucky. A sympathetic sun kept rain and cold weather haunting New England and our laundry drying in 15 minutes. The cleanest air ever, if you stay away from the American Legion on Friday nights, made every breath a celebration. A 5-star restaurant could never compete with our nightly cooked-under-the-stars-with-a-Coleman-stove organic rice and beans. With a salvaged 50 gallon drum table holding candle stubs and a re-purposed peanut butter jar of roadside sweet peas and daisies each meal punctuated the end of a chapter....that I'll never get around to writing because I'm messing with that damn Coleman stove.

*we have great clouds here

WILD KINGDOM LUCK

Snapped from sleep by one sharp percussive, I'm-watching-you bark, Max's attempt to scare a couple of smirking elk twenty feet outside our tent failed but left my heart beating like a hummingbird's. Once I figured out where I was, I decided to do my being in-the-moment exercises by savoring the dully-lit, playfulness of dawn.

Moments:

I realized that all those barking dogs were actually honking geese.

I followed the sound of a truck crossing the bridge into town and coming to a stop. Did he stop for breakfast at Cathy's Cafe? I've noticed (and re-noticed to make sure I'd read it correctly) on the door it says she opens at 5:30 and I've wondered if anyone actually eats there that early.

I watched frustrated mosquitos outside the tent screen that haven't figured out they could just come up through the deck floor boards if they wanted to get in.

MomentMomentMoment. The screeching whistle of that eagle I've never quite managed to see sounds closer than usual. I'm not sure if I heard or felt the easy evenly spaced wing beats that followed him? to that doug fir with the cushy exploded top. Seconds later it was joined by a husband or mother? Sister? maybe friend....not sure of how eagles pair up... Anyway, relaxing in their living treetop mattress, they let me take a picture. They even gave me time to change my lens. It's hardly a work of art, and I don't want you thinking that I think it is, but at least you know I didn't make the whole thing up

This hectic morning show leaves me feeling a bit less skeptical of the whole Noah's Ark story (but 2 of everything???) and that I should pick a different time of day to sleep.

Oh, before I forget...we've had an Immediate overwhelming response to filling the hummingbird feeder with sweet red liquid, as opposed to having it filled with just air, although there was one gullible hummingbird that seemed to think it was sustaining itself with the feeder's red plastic flowers and our red canvas camp chairs.

p.s Did I ever show you our riverfront?

p.p.s. we have rafters...stay tuned.

1239.50 and We'll Be In By September

Tuesday before last, we traded a doodle-ridden, coffee-stained, meticulously completed checklist atop a set of engineer-stamped building plans and check for $1239.50 for our building permit.

$1239.50. Does that seem like a lot for a building permit to you?

Once I regained consciousness, the cowboy shirted gal at the front desk assured us that everyone paid that amount. We didn't believe her but in lieu of pissing off anyone at the county building department, handed her a check.


PICKING UP OUR BUILDING PERMIT.

Sounds easy and it may have been if the checklist wouldn't have had things like:

1. Proof of site's potable water source.

In our case that meant
a. find and hire a well driller for our Washington project while we were living in Vermont
b. have the well guy drill the well in Washington while we were living in Vermont wondering "Couldn't well people just dig as far as they wanted and no one would know?"
c. have the well guy tell Vince were at 440 feet and still hadn't hit water while we were living in Vermont. I was walking Max down the road and heard Vince tell them they had to hit water (Vince was in the house) and 40 feet later the hit 100 gallons a minute.
d. get water sample out of the well to send a water sample tester
e. figure out to whom the water test results were sent by mistake

here's another one:

2. Approved septic system design.

In our case that meant
a. find someone to dig the holes for the perc test
b. arrange to have the county board of health engineer at the site while the holes were being dug to do the test
c. send a detailed map to the excavator to make sure he digs the test holes in the right place
d. fly from Vermont to Washington to be there when the excavator re-digs the holes and the county board of health engineer re-does the perc test. (they'd read our detailed map wrong...upside down, I think....and the first test was 180 degrees off)
e. wait in the field with, while paying, the excavator. The county board of health engineer forgot about our confirmed appointment and never showed up.
f. fly back to Vermont without a perc test....

Anyway, the whole checklist had those kind of 'where do I start' line items.

In any case, we now have....
• footings
• a board formed foundation that is insulated and partly backfilled (our concrete guy looks like Ron Howard's brother)
• a driveway that is excavated and mostly graveled (Vince did the excavation in his free time)
• an approved septic system
• a pole and buried electric line
photos top to bottom...

See? In by September.