Concrete, Fried Pork Products, Bugs Ain't That Red, Slippery Plastic, Mama'n'em, and It's Hard to be a White Collar Redneck

Winston Churchill once remarked that "There is nothing more exhilarating than to be shot at without result." I would add "or surviving another weekend at the Oglesby house" to that. I sure am tired, and in the local jargon, "all stove up." Where to begin...

Well, Friday after work I decided that I needed to go get some concrete pavers. For the past week or two, the floor of the Beautiful Large Plastic Child's Playhouse Which Only Appears to be a Common Tool Shed has been sitting on a bed of finely crushed stone, which to the naked eye appeared relatively flat after it had been laboriously swept and moved and piled and raked just so. Well, naked eyes are pretty stupid, 'cause it sure wasn't flat. The plastic had deformed itself to conform closely to the undulations of the gravel, and had lost all semblence of flatitude. Obviously, this was bad, as the plastic sides and plastic roof of this Plastic Fantastic really needed the benefits of being level, true, plumb, and square. What I really needed was an actual flat concrete pad to put it on, but that would have taken time and effort that could be better wasted on doing something half-assed, like putting down the aforementioned concrete pavers. 36 of them, 16 inches square, 2 inches thick, and placed conveniently above head height on the shelf at Home Depot. Should anyone try to tell you any different, trying to carefully move big flat pieces of concrete from a location higher than your head while simultaneously avoiding crushing injuries to yourself or to your fool children who think it wise to keep hopping onto the stack of big concrete hunks you have already placed on the cart, is not easy. I love my children, but occasionally they do get in the way, especially when Daddy is trying to give himself a hernia and a heart attack. "Stay off the cart." "Move!" "Stay back away from the cart!" "GET OFF THE CART!" "Do you know where your mama is?! GOOD, GO FIND HER!" Which works for about five minutes, long enough for Mom to get tired of telling them to stop going and getting every single plant in the garden center and stacking them on her cart. At which point, they come back to tell me that "those things sure look heavy." And start back putting tiny little fingers exactly in the spot where I want to put another block.

Got them all, finally, and started pushing the cart to the checkout, this time trying to avoid little feet which kept darting in front of and beside the cart full of concrete. Reba had managed to only get five plants, thank goodness--three climbing hydrangeas and two barberry. All of this was checked out by the friendly stoner cashier, who said "Wow, man, you guys got a lot of stuff." If you only knew, junior. Push the carts out to the truck, and once more have to deliver the lecture about not deliberately trying to put one's tiny hand between the bumper of the truck and 1000 pounds of barely controlled rolling death. And got a blank look. ::sigh::

After having carefully loaded all of the concrete, it was now time to lift them off the cart and into the truck bed. This was getting to be a chore. After much inward cursing and outward sweating, they were all in. As were the kids. Even after all of the loud lectures by Angry Dad about unseen dangers, they were still willing to fight about who got to ride in the truck. Of course, that's more about the truck than about me, but I guess I'll take what I can get. Anywhere else, they all fight to see who can sit by Mom, or hold Mom's hand, or ride in Mom's shopping cart, the losers being the ones stuck with boring old Dad. Lucky for me that I have a truck (and that Mom can't drive a stick), or else they would have offed me long ago.

Got home, and since it was still daylight, I figured 'what the heck' and decided to go ahead and lay out the pavers. Which, if you've been keeping count, means that I am now moving them for the third time. Each move got progressively slower, too. I wonder why. In any event, they all went down pretty easily, and did a lot to even out the floor. Which only goes to show how uneven it was before, because it still looked a lot like a lumpy mattress after I got through. But at least that was one thing out of the way. Catherine came out to inspect and said "Are you gonna puts up the playhouse now?" "No, Daddy feels like he's been beat with a shovel, sweetheart, maybe he'll get to it tomorrow." "Oh-kaaaaaay. But you ARE gonna do it tomorrow, right?" ::sigh:: The rest of the evening was spent gathering up laundry and getting children in the bathtub and in the bed, and finally myself in the same places.

Saturday morning, we were supposed to have the kids up to the church building to help cook breakfast for the congregation. Being a gigantic idiot, I figured I would get up early and start getting ready, but when the clock went off at 5 a.m., I just couldn't get up. Reset it for 6, and was out like a light again. When it went off again, I could barely remember getting up at 5. I turned on the TV, and listened to Soledad for a while and sort of rolled around trying to work up the fortitude to actually get out of bed. But up we got, eventually, and even managed to make it to the building right on time (for once). We had a real good turnout of kids, and after we covered all the tables with paper tablecloths, the real fun began. At least for me. Our youth intern kid had gotten some crayons, and we got the kids to start decorating the tables. They all started out trying to do little flowers and stuff, but I grabbed me a big purple metallic crayon and started going to town. Huge "Welcome Y'all!" and "Let's Eat!" and "Where's The Food!" scrawled everywhere in big bubble letters; a giant pig with "Breakfast" written on his flank; a chicken; dogs; cats; trucks; then the kids figured out that they could basically go wild without being corrected. Even the older kids got in on it, which was kind of neat--especially my oldest, whose usual attitude is one of eye-rolling insufferability about such things.

My piece d'resistance (which I loudly claimed as my piece of resistance) occupied two whole tables. It started out as a rather pedestrian farmyard scene--big smiley sun, barn, horsey with his head out of the window, a silo, a farmer on a tractor--and then the medication kicked in and there appeared a giant satellite dish (with companion satellite up in the sky), then proceeded down the table to a henhouse with a fox sneaking in the back right in front of a sleeping dog, then to a ramshackle farmhouse with a huge new Ford Excursion parked outside which was bigger than the shack, then finally on down a dirt path to the mailbox with a Maxim magazine stuck inside. All done with the same big purple crayon. I'm telling you, it rivaled the monochromatic power of Picasso's Guernica, because I am just a stinkin' genius with a crayon.

The food was pretty good, and for the most part was sufficiently done enough to fend off trichonosis and salmonella poisoning, although as a rule, one should not indulge in a big breakfast knowing that one will be out working in the hot sun with a pick and shovel digging holes. But then some people are just too smart for their own good. Me being one of them, who greatly enjoyed his biscuit with two sausage patties covered in sausage gravy, along with several cups of milk, and a bit of scrambled egg and a couple of strips of bacon, and some strawberries.

After we got home, and I started using my pick and shovel, I remembered this breakfast, and told myself I should really not have been so stupid. But, I managed to not get sick, and got out all of the big plants set out and watered in. "You gonna puts the playhouse together NOW, Daddy?" "Let Daddy rest a minute, baby." Which meant that I started trying to figure out how many ways I could put off the inevitable. So, I filled the bird feeders. Which took five minutes. "Now, Daddy?" "Uhhh, well, Mom wanted some rocks to go around the flower bed, so we need to go over to Cedar Street." "Where?" "The butterfly shop." "Yea! I wants to ride in the twuck with you, Daddy!" It says something about how much I didn't want to start up with the Wonderful Large Plastic Playhouse that I actually suggested going and getting more hard, heavy, hand-damaging stuff. Actually, I just didn't want to give any nosey neighbors lots of time to come and start poking around--my plan was to do this quick and dirt and get it over with--after all, it says on the box that it can be assembled in only an hour. But, first things first. Rocks.

So we all pile in the truck and van and head over to the garden shop, which Tiny Terror calls the butterfly shop because of all the butterflies. Make perfect sense to me. And heading over, I figure out that old Franklin seemed to have lost all of the refrigerant out of his air conditioner, because the two kids I had with me seemed to be wilting from the heat. So, after getting a couple of hundred pound of rock (which ain't a lot), Reba took the kids back to the house, while I went to get the A/C recharged. I wound up having to go to two different places, because the first one's air conditioning mechanic had gone for the day. The guy who was left was nice enough to call the other location in Trussville, and so I went there, to be met by a kindly, but somewhat addled (and very goggle-eyed) older fellow.

"Hmm. This'n's R-12, ain't it."

"No, sir, I had it retrofitted to 134 two years ago; see?" I pointed to the huge yellow sticker right on top of the radiator shroud by the compressor.

"Oh. Okay. 134. Wellllll, let's see. She holds three point two pounds. You know that stuff's $55 a pound, then you got your $49 for machine time." I couldn't quite believe it cost that much for refrigerant, but I needed to get it done if I wanted to be able to drive without melting into a puddle of butter, so I told him to go ahead. He talked about how he had to have his car done and it cost him a bunch and on an on. I told him I was going to go wait in the waiting room. He kept on with his happy patter, and I never could really tell if he was talking to me or to himself, given the situation with his eyes and all. Just as I was going in the door, he said "Hey, you can use the cheaper stuff! This here's a 134 system, it's only $5 a pound, I was giving you the price for the R-12! You can use R-134!" I thanked him and went on in the waiting room and he had me fixed up in less time than it took to read the old Esquire magazine in the rack. Ahhhh, nothing like air conditioning. Now that I had my rolling meat locker working again, I headed back to the house, having steeled myself to the raising of the Super Plastic Playhouse.

I had tried to read the instructions as thoroughly as possible before starting, which helped a lot. The walls all went together just fine, even with the uneven pavers taken into account. One part I missed was the optional 2x6 roof rafters. Recommended for heavy snow areas or extreme heat. Well, let's see--100 degrees in the shade is pretty hot, and unless I wanted a saggy baggy roof, I figured that I was going to need to make yet another trip to the hardware store for some lumber. Drat! And other less complimentary words I dare not type. Into the truck--this time the kids decided they would stay and chase the frogs we had disturbed.

Got to the Marvin's down at the foot of the hill and told the attendant at the gate that I needed some lumber. "And I also need to know if you can cut those to size for me." Even though I have a handsaw, I would rather get them to cut it, just because it's quicker and there's no hassle.

"Well. They come 8 foot. What size you want 'em?"

"They need to be 82 inches long."

"Hm. sevntimestwev is 84, so you want 'em 82, which would be 6 foot and 10. Yep, I reckon I can whack those off for you."

I never did really know why he needed to know the dimension before he could tell me whether or not he could work the saw, but I asked no questions and told him I would go get them and bring them back around.

Number 2 pine. 2 x 6 x 8, and nearly every single board looked as if it had been gnawed from the tree by a beaver with ill-fitting dentures. You know, at one time they used formwork boards that were better than this stuff--boards that were used once then scrapped. The only way this stuff could have had more cups, checks, wane, splits, drift, curve, and bow was for it to have been tied into a pretzel and run over with a tractor. I found a couple of boards that were more or less straight and without too much bark and put them in the truck and drove back around to my buddy.

I parked the truck by the little carport where there was a shop of sorts set up--drill press, tool box, trash can, bench, cutoff saw. The attendant came around as I was getting out and propped up against the side of the truck on his elbows. "Well, did you find you some?"

I similarly propped up on my elbows and answered. "Yep, sure did." I was waiting for him to get the wood out and go cut it, but he kept right on propping. He looked up and down the boards. "Is that yonder blood or mud." He was looking at some dark spots on the face of one board. "Well, I sure hope it's mud!" I said.

"Yeah." Prop some more. Look at truck bed. Play with tie down inside bed. Tap fingers on boards. "You know, the other day, I was driving along, and I hit something with my windshield, and I don't know what it was, but it was just as red as blood on there!"

"Oh really," I said as I propped with him and began to wonder if he was waiting on someone else from inside the store to come do the cutting. "Do you think probably it was a bug?"

"Well, I don't rightly know. You know, bugs when you hit them ain't got that kind of color to them, they ain't red, they kind of green'r'yeller, but not blood red like that. I don't know if it was some other kind of bug, or maybe a bird that messed on there."

"I guess it was one or the other--maybe it was a bird that had been eating some red berries."

"Hmm. I don't know about that. Coulda been, I reckon. I told my wife, who was riding with me, I told her, I said 'look at that right there whatever that was left a pile of red stuff on there looks like blood,' and she didn't know what it was neither, and I said to her, 'you know, that coulda been some kind of bird that poo-pooed on there, or it coulda been a bug.' Whatever it was it sure left a big old mess on there."

By this time I was pretty sure that someone else in the store had the key to the saw. "Was there someone who was going to come cut this?" "Aw, hell, I forgot all about that! I was just standing here having a conversation and forgot ALL about that. I got to thinking about that bug or whatever and plumb forgot about whacking this off here! Bring 'em on in here and we'll get her done." ::sigh::

I bring the boards in and set them on the saw. "Now how long did you want them?" "82 inches." He pulled out a tape measure, "Eighhhhhty-two, lemme see, sevntmstwev is eighty-four, then less two is 82, righhhhht, THERE." No, I don't know why he didn't just read the number 82 on the tape measure. He marked it, cut it, and then I laid the next board up on the saw.

"What size you want this one?"

"Same size, 82 inches."

"Alrighhhht, lets see here, eighhhhhhty...Did you say 84 or 82?" "Two." "Eighty and two inchesssss, right THERE." He marked it and cut it, and I piled both boards back in the truck and thanked him profusely for helping me out. "No problem at all!"

Finally, back at the house, I put in the exactly 82 inch long rafters and got ready for the final part--the roof. I was not looking forward to this, as it required (at least according to the instructions) black-and-white line drawings of two slim, masculine men in coveralls who were friends. I only had me and Reba, neither one of us being slim masculine men in coveralls. Not a good omen. As was the fact that it was now edging toward dark, and I wasn't going to be able to see very well. The roof was designed to be lifted up and locked into the ridge beam, which would work well if it were not made of very slick plastic, and not being assembled by two people who had managed to become rather tired after a long day of yard work, one of whom takes great pride in being a real feminine, girlish sort. And no, that ain't me. SO, we shoved and poked and nearly fell several times, lifting the edge of the roof up and down, trying to get the high end to lock into place. I took it apart, I put it back together, I sweated and said bad words, and finally, it went in. I got a small hammer and gave everything a good whack and snapped the little tabs into the little slots. Success!

Now, time for the OTHER side. Which just happened to be next the the two air conditioner condensor units, meaning no room to maneuver. And meaning that they would be subjected to my dropping of the large, two-section piece of slick, ungrabbable, ungainly roof panels FIVE times. Five times, I lost my grip on these big, slippery bastards and watched helplessly as they crashed into the condensing units and their fragile coolant lines and into the new shrubbery and plants that we had spent all morning putting out around the units. On the sixth attempt, I was finally able to get the @%&#^ thing locked into place, then spent a several more cussworthy minutes getting the edges locked down. I was absolutely crapped out, and gee, look at the time--8:45 p.m.! I had some more stuff to finish off inside and was finally sitting down to eat supper about 9:30. What a pisser of a Wonderful Plastic Playhouse that was! Not to mention that I had a lovely sunburned neck. Which didn't really hurt too bad until it was time to get ready for chuch on Sunday and I had to put on a shirt and tie. But before all of that, I had to stay up late and get together a new list of teachers for church for the coming year, which meant that by the time I had showered and washed my hair and finished printing out the last page of the list, it was 1 a.m.

Sunday, 6 a.m. Time to get up. At least I was still breathing, but I was so stiff I could barely move. Lots of popping and creaking and groaning and moaning and other rude noises. I got shaved and dressed, then pretended I could walk and was rarin' to go as I got the kids up to eat breakfast. It sure is hard to be peppy and snappy when you feel like you've been hit by a truck, but I put on a good show and managed to get them all ready to go. Church was very nice, and my mom and sister came to visit. Of course, since I had announcements, all the kids got dibs on sitting next to them, and they wound up on opposite ends of the pew, so I didn't get to talk to them until after church when we went to eat. But, we did talk, and had a great time. Despite what I may write, I really do love my sister. (In small, properly managed doses) We had just enough time left to go home, sit down, read the comics, then head back for our Youth Day meeting at 2, after which we had just enough time to go home, sit down, read the front page, fold two baskets of clothes, then head back for evening service.

Thankfully, afterwards there were no stops to make, nothing to buy, nothing to do but go home, eat supper, and go to bed.

Which is what I did. Then it was time for WORK!
posted by Terry at 8:26:00 AM