Trenchwork

I told Lois Moore recently that if I found that elusive genie, I was going to wish myself up a secretary or administrator to help me keep everything straight. Of course, I was in the middle of cleaning out the file cabinet and filing what was surely a year’s worth of accumulated notes and paperwork (where does that stuff come from?!?), so that might have had something to do with it. I’m convinced paper breeds when you’re not looking. In any event, since my list of things to do hasn’t exactly gotten any shorter, I’d thought I’d like to have a truly personal organizer. Especially if I could turn it into a go-fer now and then.

Lois said that she’d rather have a clone. And, given the insane pace at which she’s working and traveling for work, I think she needs more than one. But you know, this past week has convinced me that she was wisdom personified and I was wrong and I just need another me or two. You may not need another me, but hey . . . !

See, totally aside from work prepping for the coming term and working on course development for the next, this past week has been filled with all those jobs you’d really rather send your clone off to do. Like clearing out all some of those catch-all areas which seem to gather everything, including the kitchen sink. You know, the corner in the hall where you find the missing saw, a never-installed faucet you’d forgotten you had, a can of spray starch you’d given up on finding an entire size of shirts ago when you were still actually ironing shirts, and the Big Mouth Billy Bass singing fish which, if you drank, you could at least have a good excuse for having bought in the first place. (C’mon, ‘fess up; you’ve got one those silly things hanging around somewhere, and still giggle when you hear it singing “Take Me to the River.” If, however, you’ve led a sheltered life and have no clue what I’m talking about, you can find a dozen videos like this one on YouTube, and Gemmy Industries even has an iPod version. Really.)

But aside from excavating my office, putting sanity back into my files by actually filing things, and going through three major “miscellaneous” areas, I’ve been doing a few other things.

See all those glossy reflections? Dearie, that’s because the house has now been painted. Windows (the trim between the panes), doors, and the trim on one side are still to go, but the house is otherwise painted. Ok, that doesn’t sound so bad, does it? Except that the Norwegian tradition is to paint the doggoned thing with brushes. All of it. Every single board. With brushes. Seriously.

Sigh.

I can’t quite figure out whether it’s because Norway was historically a very poor country until fairly recently and people used what they had (brushes), or that the technology for commercial sprayers has just been terribly slow arriving, or that “this is the way we’ve always done it” is controlling the work, or if there’s truly a good reason to not use a sprayer. I’ve no clue, but DH has now spent his entire vacation period painting a house (with help from me and his dad), and it’s still not entirely finished. And bless his heart, he had to go back to work this morning. Frankly, I think that’s a pretty sucky vacation and I feel for the dude. Even if he did decide he was absolutely not going to use a sprayer and he really did want to use brushes. By hand. On every single board. By hand. Brushes. Every. Single. Board.

Did I mention it’s a two-story house?

Then there’s this.

Normally there’s a fabric-covered door covering that black hole behind my desk, but remember those catch-all areas which were cleared out? Well, this was one of them. Except that it was more of a “catch and forget” than anything else, and some of the stuff in there had been forgotten for at least 25 years. I won’t tell you what I found, and you should be grateful I didn’t show you a pic of the place before I emptied, swept, and vacuumed it out. Let’s just say that everything went out of the house, mostly into a burn bin, and I went straight into the shower. Sheesh.

But, there are a few details you should notice here. See how low the roof is? My office is right under the eaves, and it’s a pretty small space. But if you look in that closet, the roofline there is still nearly 90cm/35″ up off the floor, which is just enough for a bookcase and some storage shelves or boxes. The closet runs the length of the office (8.3′), plus an additional three feet (behind the camera) which runs behind a tiny closet inside the office. It’s not very deep . . .

It’s only about 70cm/27″. And yes, those are glimpses of light you see through the boards on that end wall, which is about 7 feet away.

So, what are we doing? Well, a layer of insulation is going on top of those walls and ceiling. Then the wall you saw in the first picture (surrounding the door) is coming out, and new paneling is going on top of the insulation in the closet. The floor will need some click-in-place flooring, and that beam on the ceiling will need to be painted. And that will extend the office space by almost exactly 2 feet. That may not sound like much, but when it’s only 8.3′ wide and is filled with a daybed that’s 2.5′ deep, a computer desk that’s 3.5′ wide, a legal-sized file cabinet that’s almost 2′ wide, the writing desk in the picture, a bookcase, a folding work table, a free-standing radiator, an office chair, and part of a fiber stash . . . Get the idea? Two feet is huge.

Just don’t ask me when that’s actually going to happen. One sort of needs to be sure that ripping out the wall isn’t going to bring down the roof. Minor detail, that.

I’m about to decide I don’t need a clone after all. I need a Home Makeover team of my own who’ll do what I need done while I go away for a few days. Now doesn’t that sound like a plan?

By the way, the Feather and Fan shawl? It’s here.

At row 125.

There are 189 rows plus the edging.

It takes me nearly an hour and a half to knit a pattern row. Have I mentioned I’m a slow knitter?

Don’t ask me how many stitches there are. I refuse to count them. No, wait, now I want to torture myself by knowing . . . There are 792 stitches. That’s not bad, right? But wait, there are 64 rows to go, and of those, what?—23?—are pattern rows, which will increase a stitch at 24 equal points across the row for every pattern row. So there are, assuming I’m counting correctly and let’s not push that assumption too far since there’s a reason I teach English, 552 stitches left to increase. I’m just over halfway in the stitch count. That’s not exactly much comfort since each round gets progressively longer, and takes increasingly more time. Have I mentioned I’m a slow knitter?

I figure it’ll take me a day to do a round by the time I’m finished. Doing nothing else. Maybe I’ll brush my teeth.