Notes from Maine - 2024/07/14

Busy week here. 

When I sat down and turned on my laptop, I was reminded of what I was working on yesterday. It’s a play for some friends. They didn’t give me a specific deadline for the final draft, so I’m just working at my own pace. I hope I don’t delay their production with my endless tinkering. Lately I haven’t been talking about my writing in these weekly notes, so I thought it would be interesting to mention what I’m currently working on.

In the barn, Earl (big Shire horse) has been under the weather this week. Wednesday I noticed that he didn’t look right. Thursday morning the vet came out. Over the phone, the presumptive diagnosis was some kind of virus. With blood in hand, the vet narrowed it down to anaplasmosis or Lyme. Earl is now on a combination of antibiotics and probiotics. They’re delicious, by the way. The little nick in the foil packet of the antibiotics never works, so I always end up opening them with my teeth. Four times a day, I’m getting a little burst of green apple candy flavor. No wonder Earl likes it so much. 

There’s nothing at all wrong with Maybelle (little spotted draft horse). There’s never anything wrong with Maybelle—she’s a little gem.

In the house, Albert (German Shepherd) is mostly asleep and still breathing heavily. It’s hot, but that doesn’t slow him down when I throw the frisbee. We’ve been working on the kitchen. I took a break from the cabinets to do more plumbing and work on the transition to the living room. Today, I need to finish measurements for the last couple cabinets. One will support the stovetop and the other houses the double ovens. There are lots of dimensions to consider.

For the moment, I have a butcher block countertop around the sink and dishwasher. With that in place, I finally moved the last of the kitchen stuff out of the laundry room. Now I have to retrain myself again. When I stand up with an empty bowl, which direction should I turn? When I’m looking for a piece of fruit, where should my feet take me? Someday it will all come naturally. 

By the end of this year, I may decide to move back to the front part of the house. I haven’t been there in years. When Finn had knee surgery (fall of 22), we stopped living on the second floor. When I started the kitchen project last year, I put an inconvenient lock on the doors to the foyer. It’s hard to remember what it was like to be an upstairs person. It’s a cozier section of the house, I suppose. There are a couple of bedrooms in this house that I’ve never lived in. Maybe it’s time for me to give one of those a shot. I’m getting ahead of myself. There’s so much more to do this summer before I wander off to a new corner. 

I’m not going to build adjustable shelves for the upper cabinets in my kitchen. I think every kitchen I’ve lived in has had adjustable shelves and I’m almost certain that I’ve never taken the time to adjust them. I’m probably wrong, but I believe that adjustable kitchen shelves are unnecessary if one actually takes the time to figure out the right shelf heights in the first place. Here’s the problem—I’m probably not going to take the time. I’m probably just going to make some assumptions, guess at the shelf heights, and then live with the mistakes. I’ll be happy if they just manage to stay up on the wall. I’ve had no luck in finding anything solid to screw into. The exterior walls in the kitchen are drywall over  foil-backed rigid foam sheets over horizontal strapping tied to randomly-spaced 19th Century beams. Stud finders are useless. I can locate the nails with a magnet, but some of those are “air nails” that don’t do anything. I might have to drill through to the exterior of the clapboards and then bolt through the whole wall with nuts and washers on the outside of the house. Once I paint them, you’ll hardly be able to see them.

That’s my life right now—impossible kitchen tasks and emergency vet visits. It’s fun to see the vet. We always end up talking about something interesting. This time it was dissolution of the ego and seeing the id as an external presence. I reached that state accidentally while being put under for surgery about fifteen years ago. The horse vet had the same experience with no drugs at all about forty years ago. It was interesting to compare notes.