
Believe me. I’ll take dark and dreary and drenching here at Harstine any day over the dystopian alternate universe that is day jail, I mean work. It’s been a ghastly week that included one evening commute that took me over two hours to get home (a 20-car pile-up on a freeway some distance away completely clogged every other freeway, highway, arterial, and side-street within a 20-mile radius. Yes, f-bombs reverberated inside my car for those entire two+ hours. Plus, I had to pee!) Think about it: Two hours to drive 16 miles.
Also? Misogyny. I was in a meeting with three engineers to discuss strategy for an upcoming interview presentation for a project the company is pursuing. The alpha project manager (we have always butted heads) was being his typical alpha self, talking over everyone, interrupting, not allowing others to speak, and I finally increased the volume of my voice to ask an important question of the group and said alpha waved his hand dismissively at me and hissed:
“Shhhhhhhhh!”
(Yes, my eyes grew much bigger, and my neck grew much longer as it stretched across the conference table and threw major shade at this asshat).
Also? Idiocy. Breathtaking idiocy. And yes, we’re talking Chucklehead again (who else?) This would take too much industry-standard backstory that would be a snooze to people outside of A/E marketing (you know, all my bazillion readers), so I won’t elaborate. But if I were to explain this to my cohorts in A/E marketing I’ve know over the years, jaws would be dropping, eyes would be popping, and throats would be gasping. There were so many head—>desk moments this week that my forehead is flattened. Permanently.
With all the bad news lately, and so much friggin’ rain (“Wettest March Ever”), and combined with the godawfulness that makes up my work-week, I have been depressed. Everything angers me, frustrates me, irritates me. My sweet demeanor is in moth balls.
But again, being here is healing and calming (heh, despite being woken at the butt-crack of dawn this morning to the rain fire-hosing the “tin” trailer roof that went on for hours). While John continued to work his butt off ripping door/window wrapping and slicing more poles and installing them, I did some cleaning up in my glass studio. The floor was covered in taped-down paper and I pulled that up (aside from where stacks of the hardwood flooring packs sit for now). John had installed vinyl flooring in there (as well as in the pantry) and once the protective paper was pulled up, I vacuumed and mopped. I also cleaned the counter and sink, which were absolutely caked in construction dust. Everything in that house is. (It’s a hazard!) It’s hard to breathe, and you immediately “taste” the dust, it’s so thick in the air. So much sawing and sanding, ad infinitum. It coats the (painted!) walls, it coats EVERYTHING. That brand new refrigerator? Yeah. Coated.
I’ll post some pics of the glass studio’s progress later, but here are a couple of fun photos. Lee, the sider guy who is doing some extra work to help move things along, installed some of the Big Deck boards and it’s now possible to actually walk the length of that deck without panicking about falling 20 feet through the loose, random sheathing (OK, that panicking would be me – others apparently haven’t been quite so affected about noticing that one wrong step and you’re dead).

It’s going to be so awesome!
And then looky here! It’s the new BBQ all situated on the small back deck outside of the kitchen.

Pretty cute, huh? It looks small, but it’ll be perfectly adequate.
More to come on the glass studio. The intent is to get that room prepared so we can use it as a bedroom to camp in (and the pantry as the “kitchen”) so that we can finally demolish and remove the camping trailer—to make way for the driveway. We want to do this methodically, and there is no dire, imminent need (unless the trailer roof caves in from all this effing rain or something), but we are aiming for it. I would personally like for the construction dust issue to get under control before we do move our camping down there (sawing and sanding in the shop or garage instead of the living room) so that there is some measure of “quality” of camping life in there). But there are a few things that John needs to do first before that’s likely.
I’ll end this with a rare sunbreak.
